champions in order to enhance the prestige of the event. The rationale for
organizing a dangal is nam kamana(making a name for oneself), thus mak-
ing the events inherently competitive rather than just formal contexts
within which athletes compete.
What is most significant about dangals is the pomp and circumstance
of the event as a whole, as it revolves around a series of progressively im-
portant bouts. Significantly, dangals are characterized by a degree of struc-
tured improvisation and ad hoc negotiation, in the sense that the questions
of who will compete with whom and what the length of a contest will be
are often worked out in public with a high degree of panache and affected
style. Similarly, the dangal is very much a stage where wrestlers perform,
and not simply an arena where moves are executed with athletic precision.
There is certainly no standardization with regard to how to structure dan-
gal competition—no stipulated panel of judges, no weight-class criteria, no
time limit as such, no sharply delineated boundary. All of this means that
dangals can be very volatile and contentious, for although there are clearly
delineated rules, and skill, strength, and stamina define, in some sense, the
aesthetics of competitive performance, a dangal always seems to verge on
the edge of chaos, and there is usually some degree of unstructured con-
frontation between competing groups. Thus in an important way dangal
competition strains against the rule-bound protocol of competitive freestyle
wrestling in India. Moreover, the pahalwan who is on stage at a dangal is
called on to embody an ideal of physical development (tremendous mass,
density, and radiance) that is somewhat at odds with the paired-down,
lean, flexible musculature of the international wrestler.
This, however, is a very recent development, as is most clearly illus-
trated by the case of Gama who, embodying the ideals of a pahalwan, beat
Stanley Zybyzko in what was, in effect, a World Championship “dangal”
staged in London by the John Bull Society in 1908. Subsequently, in 1928,
Gama defended his title as world champion in a dangal staged in India by
the maharaja of Patiala. When Gama was world champion from 1908 un-
til 1950 it was still possible to be a world champion, and to be that as an
Indian wrestler. Now, at best, one can be a heavyweight freestyle gold
medal winner, and only then as a wrestler from India competing in the
Olympics or the Asian Games.
Joseph S. Alter
See alsoIndia; Religion and Spiritual Development: India; Written Texts:
India
References
Alter, Joseph S. 1993. “The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the
Indian State and Utopian Somatics.” Cultural Anthropology8, no. 1:
49–72.
———. 1994. “The Celibate Wrestler: Sexual Chaos, Embodied Balance and726 Wrestling and Grappling: India