Exercise

Nag Panchami is not only a public display of wrestling as a particular way of life, but also a general celebration of exercise, physical fitness, and strength. In Banaras on Nag Panchami akharas sometimes put on demonstrations of strength. Wrestlers lift heavy weights and swing large joris and gadas. In the context of this discussion of snakes, milk, and fertility, one may interpret the exercises which wrestlers do in terms of contained sexuality and displaced passion.

A gada is a large round rock fixed to the end of a meter-long bamboo staff which is lifted and swung for exercise. It may weigh as little as five or as much as fifty to sixty kilograms. In the Ramayana and Mahabharata the gada is often mentioned as a weapon. In popular religious art and iconography Hanuman is almost never depicted without one. It is not only the symbol of his strength but also of his countenance. The gada he carries is highly decorated and made of gold. At championship bouts wrestlers are awarded gadas made of silver. The gada is, then, clearly the mark of a wrestler’s prowess. Given the preponderance of phallic symbols in the akhara and the gada’s general shape it is evident that swinging a gada has clear symbolic overtones of sexual potency and virility. Each time the gada is swung it is brought to a balanced position, erect from the wrestler’s waist.

The phallic aspect of the gada is also evidenced by its association with snakes. In the Harivamsa(chap. 83) Akrura dives into the serpent world where he sees Ananta asleep on top of a mace (Vogel 1926: 92). As the manifestation of Baladev, “the mace carrier,” Shesha Nag is also often depicted carrying a mace in one of his four arms (ibid: 196).

In shape a gada resembles the churning stick used to make butter and buttermilk. A parallel between churning and sexual energy has been drawn above. By swinging the gada one might say that a wrestler is churning his body to increase his store of semen.

Joris are swung like gadas but they come in pairs weighing between ten and forty kilograms each. Joris are often decorated with colorful designs, and many akharas have special pairs which are brought out only on such occasions as Nag Panchami and Guru Puja. In contrast to gadas, joris are named—the “white pair,” the “shiny ones,” the “thorny ones,” the “flowery ones,” the “mountainous ones” (many are named after a particular person who either made them, commissioned them to be made or swung them the most number of times). While gadas have clear phallic qualities, joris symbolize breasts (recognizing, of course, that breast and phallic symbols are highly mutable and multivocal to the point of being almost interchangeable). Not only do joris come in pairs, they are also swung from an inverted position with the wrestler holding firmly onto the titlike handle-grip as though he were milking a cow or buffalo. If churning is the dominant metaphor of swinging a gada, milking is associated with swinging a pair of joris.

Most of the wrestlers in Banaras are dairy farmers, and so the motifs of milking and churning are particularly appropriate. In fact, milking itself is referred to as an exercise by many young wrestlers who brag that they can milk ten or fifteen buffalos without tiring. In this instance the motif clearly refers to milk as a female substance which contributes to the development of male semen.

One of the most important exercises in a wrestler’s regime involves digging the pit. The wrestling pit is dug with a pharsa (a short, heavy hoe) in much the same way that a field would be plowed. That is, a person digs the pit into furrows. A great deal of emphasis is placed on making the pit look like a well-cared-for field. I asked a number of wrestlers if there was not a contradiction in the fact that digging is prohibited on Nag Panchami while it is an integral part of pit preparation for the akhara festivities. I was told that there was no contradiction; the implication being, I think, that plowing is an overt act of planting or putting seed into the earth so as to take substance out. Digging the pit, on the other hand, enriches the soil by mixing things in. It is true that wrestlers draw strength from the soil but they are never seen as violating the earth. On a symbolic level they never pose a threat to the snake’s potency. The wrestler is to the earth as a child, while the snake—as cloud, rain, and lightning—is emblematic of the sky father. A wrestler never challenges the virility of the snake but turns instead as a child to his mother’s lap. All feelings of sexual attraction, either towards the mother or against the father, are sublimated beneath a symbolic cloak of non-sexual virility. It is not a question of who has sexual access to (or repressed desire for) whom, but of how sex itself can be held in check. The digging of the earth, as with many of the other symbols discussed here, represents the potential of sexual power turned into nurturing growth.

Once the earth of the akhara pit is dug it is smoothed out by harnessing a wrestler to a flat log which he drags around the pit behind him. In this exercise wrestlers are compared, through association with draft oxen, to bulls (see plate 15). Bulls are ubiquitous in Banaras and although they go on rampages and can be dangerous they are generally regarded as non-aggressive. They are, however, the very embodiment of strength and brute force.

While associated with Shiva, the bull in Hindu mythology is not a symbol of phallic aggression or erotic desire. As O’Flaherty points out, the bull represents controlled, passive sexuality: the inverse of Shiva’s potent sexuality. The bull is “virility held in check” on two fronts: by Shiva’s ascetic power on one hand and on the other by the mother (cow) who “overwhelms and blocks” the impulses of the bull (1980: 253). The bull is, then, the perfect image of the wrestler whose passion, like that of the snake, is cooled by mother milk, and whose seed is never spent.

One of the most common metaphors used to describe a wrestler’s strength is to compare him to the oxen who draw huge leather buckets of water out of rural irrigation wells. These wells are sunk deep into the ground. An incline is built for the oxen to walk up and down as they pull the water up on a cantilevered pulley. Again, the motif of the impregnating bull is reversed, as it were, and instead the bull-like wrestler harnesses himself to the rope and draws out the life-giving milk/water fluids of the earth. Not coincidentally, the ox, as a castrated bull, is here associated with fertility and strength but not sexuality.