The Ancestor Of All Fights

Indian kushti is considered the predecessor of all wrestling. It is undergoing a revival despite the tug-of-war between tradition and modernity

- Zigor Aldama

It’s 4:30 in the afternoon. The merciless sun above Haryana starts to sink towards the mirage-like blur of the horizon. The unbearable heat begins to give in, and life slowly crawls back out of its lethargy into the chaotic streets of this state in northwest India.

This is the time that a group of local wrestlers have been eagerly waiting for. They travel by motorcycle or auto rickshaw – the three-wheeler used as a taxi – to an isolated building in the middle of a road about 70 kilometres from the national capital, Delhi.

They enter the simple Akhara – the fighting arena where they will wrestle one another in the same way that their ancestors had done before them.

“Nobody can precisely trace the origins of kushti”, Mohit Saroha, lawyer for the Kushti Association of India, claims. “Some say it dates back three thousand years, while most will settle the origins at around the 5th century BC. It was called malla-yuddha before, and it spread rapidly across South Asia after the establishment of the Mughal Empire” (between the 16th and 18th centuries). Despite this debate on the origins of the sport, nobody in India disputes that kushti is the predecessor of all wrestling styles practiced today. “It has evolved to become Greco-Roman and modern free-style wrestling, but these are still kushti at heart”, adds Deepak Ansuia Prasad, a former wrestler and one of the most knowledgeable journalists covering the sport.

Forged in tradition