Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

the rhetoric associated with wrestling, the gymnasium is said to reproduce
the natural and authentic qualities of village life. Curiously, however, gymnasiums
are the product of a history that is rooted not so much in the
world of peasants as in the palaces of princes and in the urban imagination
of middle-class nationalists.
In the medieval period wrestlers were, in some instances, peasants.
But to the extent they came to embody the identity of a pahalwan they were
wards of the royal state. They were kept in stables by rajas and maharajas
who paid their expenses and built gymnasiums for practice and arenas for
tournament competition. These gymnasiums and arenas were designed to
represent the aesthetics of aristocratic taste, and thus manifest pomp and
pageantry rather than peasant parochialism. Among other things, rose water,
buttermilk, ghee, and in some instances crushed pearls, gold, and silver
were mixed into the earth of the royal pit. Moreover, the ritual features of
the gymnasium as a sacred space were not as significant as its secular configuration
in relation to the authority of the king and the degree of his prestige,
political power, and attendant status in the domain of changing imperial
hierarchies. By most accounts, the place of the gymnasium in the
broader political culture of the princely states took on heightened significance
in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries when,
as scholars have recently pointed out, the status of rajas and maharajas was
being defined in terms of British imperial authority and the pageantry of
colonial rule.
During this same period of time, gymnasiums were redefined and developed
in the context of various kinds of Indian nationalism. Both militant
Hindu nationalists as well as the more secular nationalists of the Indian
National Congress were concerned with the problem of Indian
masculinity and sought to reform Indian men—in particular middle-class
men, who were regarded as corrupt, weak, and effeminate—by instituting
various forms of physical culture. Thus, after the revolt of 1857, and increasingly
around the turn of the century, wrestling gymnasiums were built
in the newly urbanized areas of north and central India to try to reproduce
the “natural” masculinity of peasants by transplanting the “natural” environment
of rural India into the modern space of rapidly expanding cities.
The Birla Mill Vyayamshala in the heart of Old Delhi, where, until recently,
Guru Hanuman trained almost all of India’s international freestyle
wrestlers, is the best example of this manufactured tradition of modern Indian
wrestling that is also, significantly, wrestling in India.
Up until his death in 1999, Guru Hanuman epitomized the ideal of an
enlightened master teacher and the role of a master teacher in defining the
structure of training in the gymnasium. A guru, or ustad, is, in essence, a
senior wrestler who imparts to his disciples the knowledge of wrestling. He
Wrestling and Grappling: India 723