How did Indian wrestling go from the best in the world to murder and sexual harassment allegations in ten years?

Mint

4 days ago

My enduring memory of Sushil Kumar, the wrestler who won two Olympic medals and became one of India's greatest sporting icons, comes from a time before his spectacular downfall as an accused in the murder of another wrestler (for which he spent four years in jail as an undertrial before being granted bail in March.
It comes from that magic hour in an akhada, when, between the long, frenzied mat sessions in the morning and the never-ending, arduous physical conditioning workout in the evening, there is a happy lull—a time for food that always tastes delicious because the body is craving it, for meaningless banter (my memory is from pre-social media days), and extremely well-earned sleep, or in the words of the wrestlers, 'ghoda bech ke so gaye" (sold his horses and went to sleep).
In Kumar's life, there were a couple of more things that happened during this four-hour rest and recovery period—as the 'saviour" of India's great tradition ofkushti, he had, for a controlled half-hour, a stream of visitors, and for another half hour, an interview with me for the book on Indian wrestling I was working on.
We kept to this routine for nearly three months, sitting in his rundown room under the rafters of Chattrasaal Stadium in Delhi, curtains drawn against the sun outside, a small refrigerator, balanced on a pair of bricks, humming away in one corner, the smell of muscle spray and sweat, and the two of us talking about wrestling till he couldn't keep his eyes open any more.
'I'm giving you everything I've got," Kumar once told me. 'This (interviews) is harder than fighting!"
Inevitably, just a few minutes before 4pm, a bunch of children would barge into the room—'Wake up, it's time. You said you'll train with us. Wake up!"
Kumar would open his eyes with difficulty, squinting at the gaggle of eight-and-ten-year-olds, and sigh deeply. Later, on the mat, he would teach them moves, then allow himself to be taken down by them, feigning amazement that a child could throw him, to the unfailing delight of the kids.
The year was 2012—an incredible time for Indian wrestling, when Kumar's two consecutive Olympic triumphs, and Yogeshwar Dutt's bronze, had lifted kushti from its rural roots to nationwide prominence. The four years (2012-16) that it took me to research and write Enter the Dangal, I was immersed in India's deep and varied culture of kushti at the precise moment when it was engaged in an epic tussle between tradition and modernity, between the akhada mitti and the sudden, if much needed introduction of Olympic mats across akhadas rural and urban.
I had a ringside view of the immense upheaval triggered by the brave women and their families who decided to smash the gender divide in a sport that had been a carefully guarded male bastion for all of its hundreds of years of recorded history, and saw girls taking their first steps on a wrestling mat in far-flung villages, first in ones and twos in the face of fierce opposition, and then in droves after Sakshi Malik became the first Indian woman wrestler to win an Olympic medal in 2016.
I stayed with the Phogats in their (then) idyllic village Balali, and watched a teenage Vinesh teaching her even younger sisters technique on the mat, including a little girl called Ritu, who loved climbing trees to pluck guavas, and who would later become India's first woman competitor in MMA. I was thrilled and awed by the speed, precision, and power that Vinesh generated—she looked small and thin off the mat, but turned into an unstoppable tornado on it—and I knew that she was going to do something big in the world of wrestling.
There were so many new experiences, so much to learn: about the life of the itinerant wrestler, fighting in dust-swirl dangals amidst fields of wheat, and washing off at the nearby pond, the same way they have been doing it for hundreds of years. About the life of Ghulam Mohammed, aka the Great Gama, who every wrestler in India knows as the 'greatest wrestler to ever come from India". Gama was a phenomenal mat artist who remained unbeaten in his life in the early 20th century and was celebrated by the maharajas as well as the British during his career, but who died in obscurity in Pakistan, all but forgotten in real life even as his legend lived on.
I learnt of the deep religious significance of wrestling in Hindu culture, of Hanuman as the patron god of the martial art, of akhada mitti in Varanasi where Tulsidas claimed Hanuman walked on himself, and the correct way to care for akhada mitti—cleared of all debris and tilled to fine loam, with mustard oil, rose petals, and turmeric water swirled in. Things that, along with wrestling techniques, can be found in courtly manuals written as far back as the 9th or 10th century (evidence of wrestling's cultural significance in the subcontinent is far older than that, dating back to at least the 5th century BCE)—techniques that are all very much still in use in modern freestyle wrestling.
Almost a decade later, where does Indian wrestling stand now?
This is a difficult, complex question to answer. On the one hand, the access to modern training facilities has gone up exponentially. Indian wrestlers don't really struggle on the international stage any more, and unlike before, the great tradition of kushti finds success on the global stage. India won its first medal in wrestling at the 1952 Olympics, before disappearing from the global stage.
Then Sushil Kumar won a bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games, and India has won at least one medal in wrestling (mostly two) at every Olympics since, as well as medals at every world championship across gender and age groups. The gap between mitti and mat has closed. A young boy or girl interested in wrestling, especially in Haryana, which completely dominates the sport in India, will find plenty of quality schools to join. There is also far more financial help from corporate and non-profit sponsors available to them, along with foreign coaches and training stints, than ever before.
Yet, Kumar's fall from grace from being India's greatest Olympian to a murder accused with clear connections to gangsters took away some of the aura and claims to spirituality that kushti once had.
If women entering the world of kushti was a remarkable act of defying and fighting patriarchal opposition, the women who made it happen took their fight to a whole new level when theyaccusedthe powerful strongman politician and then head of Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, of sexual abuse. When they found that the federation, the sports ministry and the police intractable, Vinesh, Sakshi and others took to the streets, spending months protesting, braving police action and a system which, at first, tried its best to suppress them, got taken down in a stranglehold, and forced to conduct a police investigation that revealed the extent of Singh's sexual offences.
Some things never change of course—like the corruption and political chokehold that sucks the air out of our sporting federations—the wrestling federation is run now by Singh's closest business partner.
Other changes are inevitable and their effects unpredictable. The sports journalist Jonathan Selvaraj, who co-authored Sakshi Malik's incisive memoir Witness, points out that the rural setting in which kushti was preserved and where it thrived, is rapidly changing. For example, Sonepat, which was, as recently as a decade ago, a distinctly agrarian Haryana town surrounded by small villages, and an area which has produced more international wrestlers than any other in India, is now a major city with glass-fronted skyscrapers and multi-level elevated roadways.
'One of the results of this urbanisation, is that there are now many more options for kids who want to pick up a sport," Selvaraj says. 'Where previously there was only wrestling, now there are tennis courts, golf courses, cricket academies, shooting academies…one of the brightest shooters we have right now, Shuruchi Phogat (no relation to Vinesh) switched to shooting from wrestling, and her father was a wrestler. The way every kid in Haryana went into wrestling during Sushil's time, that just won't happen now."
This access to more sports facilities, as well as money and comfortable lifestyles, Selvaraj says, will make it harder for the wrestling culture to hold on to its pre-eminence in places like Haryana.
'Because, face it, wrestling is an insane sport," Selvaraj says. 'No other sport demands as much time and sacrifice. It is physically and mentally harder than any other sport. It requires a tremendous amount of input—of years and years of intense training that leaves time for nothing else, starting from a very young age—for very little and very unpredictable outcomes. So, you can't just create wrestlers with programmes and money, you need that intense, deeply entrenched culture. And that culture in India is probably eroding."
It reminded me of a dangal I attended with a wrestler called Satbir, who I followed for an entire dangal season for my book. The tournament was being held in a village called Tungaheri in Punjab. Satbir and I sat in the shade of a peepul tree next to a pond as he waited for his bout. Children were frolicking in one corner of the pond. In another corner, a few women were scrubbing down their buffaloes.
'Better to sit here than watch the kushti," Satbir said, taking me by surprise. All I knew of him, all I had seen, was him training and fighting. 'I do it for the money, and nothing else. If I could make the same money some other way, I would do it and leave this. I have started asking around with former pahalwans in Delhi who run real estate businesses." This is just a polite way of saying 'gangsters".
'But what about becoming an international wrestler?" I ask.
'I don't care about it," Satbir said, and then pointed to the children in the water. 'I'd rather swim here than fight."
Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi and Enter The Dangal: Travels Through India's Wrestling Landscape