Book review: From kushti to wrestling, one bout at a time

When you pick up a sports book and don’t get itchy bored within the first couple of chapters, you realise it isn’t about cricket and its statistics.

Rudraneil Sengupta’s book, Enter the Dangal, is on wrestling in India and it is refreshingly descriptive. His preface gives a quick caveat: “Not a book of wrestling’s history, but written to ‘tease out the lived experience of Indian wrestlers’....”

He needn’t have said that. He has given us enough history to generate even more curiosity. That’s what a good book does.

It’s a new book on an old — very old — sport. So, expectedly, he starts with the Great Gama Pehlwan (Ghulam Mohammed).

He starts with Mehr Singh, an aged wrestler, lumbering back to his past in his own akhada where he watches tomorrow’s aspirants train. A nice take-off point, having rightly chosen the Haryana of today, where the sport was popular way before Aamir Khan.

The smell of the earth and sweat make for a good warm-up as he dives straight into the interesting life of a travelling wrestler, a tradition hundreds of years old. Not a faraway comeuppance for local sin, but a search for identity and respect that the wrestler returns with, sometimes money too. That’s the bar mitzvah of the young pehlwan. He talks about these great walks of life; journeys of discovery, mostly within. As Mehr tells the writer, his grandfather could walk all the way to Pakistan and into Afghanistan those days, and fight in dangals, challenge locals and earn pride of place in faraway lands. Today you are restricted to India. Mehr points to his best student, Satbir, and says, “The difference between me and him — he doesn’t really have to walk anywhere.”

Quickly, the author lets you drive with him and Satbir to a dangal in a not too faraway village. The scramble is well depicted; more than the wrestling, it’s the spirit that Sengupta captures. He puts it well, when he says, in those villages, nearabouts of Rohtak, “it is a matter of great honour to be a good wrestler...” and Satbir, not from a family of wrestlers, was doing his parents proud. The sport takes over your life and becomes it.

If there is one passage that could have been avoided in the book it is the 2008 scene in a television newsroom where people asked who Sushil Kumar was, and what was repêchage? Being a sports journalist and not then knowing who Sushil Kumar was isn’t exactly a creditable thing to admit. But all in good humour; Sengupta surely makes up for it throughout the book.

Back to the akhada, he describes the spartan atmosphere and explains the tradition of sharing in an akhada. There is a bit about the purse-strings. How much does it cost just for a pehlwan to eat his way into strength? '20,000 a month. How much did the middle-level travelling wrestler earn in two months of non-stop dangals? '21 lakh. Satbir donated '1 lakh to his akhada, but he earned what his family would have made in five years on the farm.

These are the small pearls that make for an interesting read. The akhada life is well depicted; a book on these lines has likely not been written before. It talks about wrestling at the grassroots, how they catch them young....

Then he transports us to the London Olympics, where Sushil is preparing for the fight of his life in the 66kg. Cut back to Sushil’s house where his mother is handing out sweets to all the gathered journalists as the first bout begins. He switches back and forth till the final, and it is gripping, with the locker room thrown in as well. Smells like a potboiler here.

Back home with the silver, the writer careens into the system in India, or the absence of it. Sengupta has pinpointed how the system is designed to snuff out talent, aspirations while promoting the babus and politicians.

He cuts to Sushil’s childhood, possibly a little jerky in continuity here. While the sequence had to be included, it could maybe have been blended in through another portal.

The chapter titled “Revival” gets into the technicalities. There’s plenty to learn here. He has done his research well. He talks about the speed of reaction of elite athletes and he teaches us how wrestling is deceptively fast.

The dangal was a tradition, now art, a business, a show of political will and a human unifier. The dangal is a fulcrum on which society in those parts revolves. That’s how he presents Billu, the organiser, a hustler who used his marketing skills to spread the power of the dangal and gain a fortune. It’s a business.

The history part has been depicted well, through the early 19th century, and how the British in India discovered the kushti culture. Then he goes back further, into the Mughal period, to a pehlwan called Shir Ali and talks about how wrestling could make or break the reputations of kings.

The happy discovery is that Mallapurana finds a place in this book and how wrestling predates the medieval period by far finds detailed mention. Krishna and Balaram’s ventures into the art of kushti were known and have been scripted in detail. It is good to remind us of how old our tradition is. The research here and the minute assertion of details are impressive.

The assertion of the author, when he quotes a wrestler as saying, “Wrestling is old. Wrestling is as old as India, it came out of India’s soil,” makes this book special. There is also a lament that wrestling is dying in modern-day India. That is not overstated. The quick satisfactions of modern-day life, the pressures of jobs and livelihoods do not allow people to engage in hours and years of practise to hone a skill that might not even fetch returns commensurate with the investment made.

The soft ending is expectedly with Gobor Goho, one of Bengal’s and the country’s finest wrestlers. No, I don’t attribute this to Sengupta’s home state, but to his real love for wrestling in India.

The writer is a Kolkata-based businesswoman who has been writing on sports since the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games