Nathdwara is in southern Rajasthan, about 40km north of Udaipur, a tourist destination famous for Lake Palace. What characterises Nathdwara is the Sri Nath Ji Temple, located in the heart of the city.
Hinduism is known as a polytheistic religion. Among these, the two most revered as supreme deities are Vishnu, who presides over the maintenance of the world, and Shiva, who presides over destruction and rebirth, with the addition of the creator god Brahma, the Trimurti, reigning at the top of the pantheon of gods.
However, it is also said that these three deities merely represent the various functions of God, and that essentially the supreme deity of the Trinity alone rules this world.
A distinctive feature of Lord Vishnu would be his various incarnations, called avatara. This Shrinath Ji temple has worshipped the most important incarnation of all, Krishna.
According to the scholarly hypothesis, It is said that Krishna was a Historical real-life figures of Yadava hero who lived in the Mathura region of northern India around 1000 BC and was eventually identified with Vishnu and rose to become the supreme deity.
Legend has it that the deity was originally worshipped at Mathura, but was evacuated to Nathdwara around the 10th century due to the invasion of Muslim forces. Since then, Srinath-Ji has long been a place of faith for the people as one of the most important Krishna temples in north-west India.
(Avatara, incidentally, is the origin of the word for the user’s alter ego used on the internet and for James Cameron’s film Avatar).
Nathdwara was a small town on a hillside, where I arrived at the end of November 2005, and immediately I started by looking for a man who was a master of traditional wrestling, kushti.
The only information I had was the name Rakesh and his occupation as a milk vendor.
However, I asked people on the street in Hindi and was able to reach him in no time at all. Apparently, he was quite famous in the locality.
It was on the same TV program “Ururun Stay Diary” as Kalaripayattu that I came to know his name. In the story a young actor, Kenji Urai, also home stayed with Rakesh family, and had training of Kushti akhara. I found that training methods and religious philosophy there were very interesting, so I eagerly wanted to stop by before going to Kerala.
Rakesh’s shop, which local boy showed me, was a tea stall like a traditional sweet shop in Japan. It serves chai and hot milk along with a variety of snacks, the highlight of which is a sweet called Jalebi. He sells milk and runs this shop with his brother.
When I told him I had come from Japan after seeing him on TV, he was overjoyed to welcome me. He was not very tall at 170cm height but weighs over 100kg. As one would expect, the former Rajasthan heavyweight champion had a certain Appearance. With his guidance, I entered the world of Indian martial arts for the first time.
Subsequent interviews revealed that Kushti is widespread throughout the country, particularly in northern India. It is a hybrid martial art born from the fusion of Malla Yuddha, the ancient warrior martial art of the Indian subcontinent, and wrestling brought by Muslim invasion dynasties since the Middle Ages. The wrestlers are called Pehlwan, which derived from the Persian language.
The kushuti schools are usually called akhara, but its official name is often Vyayam Shala. Practice takes place inside the arena, in a square pit dug into the ground covered with river sand, or outdoors on a square ring of river sand.
Most schools are deeply connected with the Hindu faith, and every akhara has a shrine where the main deity, the monkey god Hanuman Ji, is reverently worshipped.
The style of competition is basically similar to Western wrestling. If you put your opponent’s shoulders and buttocks on the ground at the same time, you win. But Technically, it was somewhat more like mixed martial arts than sporting wrestling, as it has judo-like footwork and joint techniques.
The traditional arena in Kushti is a square pit dug into the ground about a meter below ground level. Inside, there is a thick layer of river sand, which is mixed with buttermilk, oil and red ochre (mainly iron oxide), and is moist and wet during practice due to the added sweat of the players.
After practice, this sand gradually dries out and hardens in the process. In order to keep it smooth, the sand is ploughed with a heavy hoe before practice, which is an important part of the training too.
Pious prayers are offered to Hanuman-ji and other deities before and after practice, and every act performed in the akhara is meant as an offering to the gods.
Absolute loyalty and strict discipline are demanded of the disciples, and the precept of brahmachari, which calls for sexual abstinence, illustrates that the akhara is essentially a place of monasticism, and that training is also a religious practice.
Practice and matches are held naked with langot loincloths, similar to Japanese fundoshi, and the whole atmosphere is interestingly reminiscent of Japanese sumo wrestling. However, I have heard that young people nowadays are often embarrassed by this appearance and use trunks instead.
There were about 20 practitioners in the akhara that Rakesh guided me to. Most of them were boys in their late teens to mid-twenties, and basically no girls participated. There are some exceptions in urban club such as Delhi, but in India it is generally considered immodest for women to show their dynamic limbs in public, especially in the traditional martial art of kushti, where women could hardly be seen at the time.
Compared to the cultural settings, which were filled with the taste of local customs throughout, the actual competition match itself was not so different from modern Olympic wrestling. What caught my attention most after looking over the practice were its characteristic workout exercises.
Climbing up and down a rope suspended 10 metres from a high tree branch using only the strength of hands, called Rassa.
Mukdal (also known as jolly): gripping a heavy wooden bat that looks like the body of a long beer bottle and spinning it round and round.
The Gadar: a club made of a wooden or bamboo stick with a round stone or concrete ball 30 cm in diameter attached to the end, is turned over the shoulder on the back.
Dynamic push-up Danda that bend and stretch the entire body. The rhythmic Baytak, from which the hindu squat is derived from. They were quite alien to the training I know and recognise from my ordinary sense.
They said that there is another unique exercise using a 3-metre wooden pillar called malkhamb, but I couldn’t find anyone who can perform it well at the time, so I can’t figure it out in the details here.
Generally, American-style weight training concentrates on simple up-and-down movements with barbells or dumbbells held horizontally, eliminating any element of instability. It is literally a mechanical movement. However, most of the basic workouts done in Kushti look the exact opposite.
In rope-climbing rassa, the exercise is performed in an unstable state of random sway by holding a vertically hanging rope.
In mukdal and gadar, a club shaped with an unstable centre of gravity is turned round and round in a daringly unstable manner, and the exercise is performed by riding it through the great fluctuations of centrifugal force, inertia and gravity.
How to achieve stability in the middle of instability. The reflexive ability to react quickly and flexibly to constantly fluctuating balances. The fact that it is not just muscle training may be a common feature of all kushti workout.
On the other hand, danda and cudgel twirling have one thing in common: they incorporate the concept of stretching.
The American push-up is a simple mechanical repetition of a mere pistoning motion with the arms to pinpoint the pectoral and biceps muscles.
In contrast, the Indian push-up danda is similar to the Surya Namaskar exercise in yoga, which includes elements of push-ups as part of the overall dynamic movement, particularly in the flexion and extension of the back muscles.
In the case of cudgel spinning, too, the weight of the bats and its rotational movement naturally increases the range of motion of the shoulders, and the emphasis is on the skill of bodily control, overall balance and rhythm, rooted in flexibility as well as muscle strength.
Our modern training tends to divide power, aerobic and stretching systems rationally for each purpose in general, but the Indian style seemed to be a mixture of all three at once.
I wondered if there was something fundamentally different about the total view of the body or exercise science. I left Nathdwara with this first impression. In a word, it is always an organic movement in the context of the whole body.
This ‘heterogeneous view of the body’ became even clearer in the Kalaripayattu I experienced next.
INDIA~The Land of Holy Chakra 