54 HERITAGEIt’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
Some wrestlers reportedly
do around 3,000 push-ups
everyday to build muscleTop In the evening,
wrestlers begin to train
at an akhara
boTTom A kushti
wrestler takes a break
during a morning
training season in Delhi