It is difficult, if not impossible, to know whether there have been var-
ious alternatives to, or distinct stages between, the medieval and the mod-
ern traditions of wrestling. There is no doubt, however, that the emphasis
on celibacy is a fairly modern phenomenon, a phenomenon that articulates
the high anxiety of masculinity in late colonial and postcolonial India.
Wrestlers claim that celibacy is an imperative part of the training regimen
because sex in general and the loss of semen in particular are thought to be
debilitating. Brahmacharya, as abstinence and asensuality, has a long ge-
nealogy in South Asia, which can be most clearly traced in the practices of
asceticism and yogic self-discipline on the one hand and the disciplinary
practices of brahmanical ritual pedagogy on the other. Wrestlers explain
their advocacy for absolute asexuality using these idioms, pointing out that
abstinence promotes focused concentration and the development of skill, as
well as the embodiment of shakti(superhuman, subtle strength) manifest in
the aura of pervasive ojas(divine energy).
However, it is clear that celibacy became a very problematic concept
in twentieth-century India, invoking, on the one hand—in the context of
Victorian colonialism—a kind of effete masculinity and, on the other, a
kind of power that was displaced, disarticulated, and ambiguously marked
on the male physique by virtue of its structural androgyny. In this light it is
possible to understand how wrestlers in colonial India sought to articulate,
with nervous bravado, an ideology of hypercelibacy—absolute detachment
from sensual arousal—that was located, bombastically through hyper-self-
discipline, in a massively masculine physique. The point of reference was
not so much an idealized, intrinsically athletic physique as the threat of
colonial masculinity defined by aggressive sexuality and the attendant fem-
inization of the colonial subject.
The akhara (wrestling gymnasium)—replete with the symbolic signif-
icance of the earthen pit, its microcosmic relationship to the elemental
structure of the cosmos, and the ritualized structure of religious meanings
associated with Lord Hanuman (a patron deity of wrestling), as well as its
spatial and architectural form as an integrated whole—might be considered
the most quintessentially Indian feature of Indian wrestling. Clearly the
earth of the pit has come to symbolize elemental purity, fertility, and the
power of nature. Hanuman’s embodiment of shakti through absolute
celibacy substantiates this symbolism, and links the gymnasium to the sa-
cred realm, defining it as a locus of physically expressed spiritual devotion.
The integrated balance of earth, water, trees, and air is regarded as a kind
of elemental matrix, both marking the gymnasium off as a world apart and
yet redefining the world as whole by way of microcosmic instantiation. In
most respects the gymnasium is conceptualized as a natural environment
minimally transformed to evoke the ideal of a rural, agrarian landscape. In722 Wrestling and Grappling: India