The Fieldwork

I was born in North India and lived there for twenty years. I speak and read Hindi. While in high school I became well acquainted with some wrestlers and began to wrestle in local tournaments. Although I was not a successful wrestler, I became interested in the rich culture associated with wrestling as a system of physical culture and health. In 1977 I affiliated with a wrestling gymnasium under the guruship of Dr. Shanti Prakash Atreya and was introduced to Indian wrestling as not only a sport but also a way of life, a complex system of physical fitness, exercise techniques, dietary prescriptions, personal character traits, devotion, discipline, and a host of ethical values. As a result of this experience I decided to return to India in 1987 and conduct a year of field research on the culture of Indian wrestling. My exposure to wrestling made it possible to affiliate with and quickly assimilate into a new akhara and to build rapport with a number of wrestlers.

I lived for seven months, from January to July 1987, in Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, where there are over 150 active wrestling gymnasia in the city and twenty or thirty in the surrounding villages. Because wrestling is not defined by a residential community and gymnasia are not usually residential institutions, I was not able to live with the wrestlers I studied. I was closely affiliated with one gymnasium, Akhara Ram Singh, but I did not restrict my research to this group because I did not want to become so involved with the activities of one community as to be precluded from others.

Pressure is brought to bear on all members to come to their akhara regularly. I therefore rented a room in a local hotel. This proved very satisfactory on a number of counts. The hotel was centrally located five minutes from Akhara Ram Singh and within thirty minutes of most akharas in the city. By living in the hotel I was able to maintain a necessary distance between myself and the life of the gymnasium. I was thus able to type notes and generally collect my thoughts in an isolated environment. The hotel provided food, security, mail and message service, laundry, and a regular supply of water and electricity. Rather than having to attend to these mundane concerns, I was able to spend all of my time concentrating on the research project. Moreover, I was able to entertain informants/guests on short notice and in comfort.

The term “hotel” needs to be qualified, for it may conjure up inappropriate images of luxury and leisure. I stayed at the Sandeep Hotel in Chaitganj, an “Indian Style” hotel as classified by the department of tourism, used primarily by traveling businessmen and families on pilgrimage. It was inexpensive and simply appointed to a degree unfamiliar in the West. The employees of the hotel were familiar with the wrestling scene so that wrestlers who came by to visit were not at all intimidated by the surroundings.

Banaras is not a typical Indian city (cf. Eck 1982; Freitag 1989; Lutgendorf 1991). It is one of the preeminent pilgrimage centers in India. Because of its pervasive and often intense religious atmosphere it is reputed to have a character all its own. Many people with whom I spoke—wrestlers and non-wrestlers, barbers, shopkeepers, young soldiers, policemen, students, music teachers, and others—would ask with a twinkle in their eye and a sense of pride and possessive secretiveness whether I had yet “taken in the pleasure of Banaras.” What they meant was, had I bathed in the Ganga River at dawn and then gone to one of the many temples for darshan (spiritual “viewing”); rowed across the Ganga to the sandy south shore and spent the day washing clothes, bathing, and fixing bhang (hashish); been to the Bari Gaivi temple and drunk the pure well water that improves digestion? Had I been to Sankat Mochan temple on a Saturday night and offered sweets prepared in pure ghi (clarified butter) to Lord Hanuman; been to Ramnagar across the river to witness an enactment of Tulasi Das’s Ramacaritamanasa? Had I been in Banaras for Holi? Had I enjoyed the unique pan (a betel leaf, spice, and lime-paste preparation) for which Banaras is famous (cf. Kumar 1986, 1988 for an excellent discussion of leisure and pleasure in Banaras)?

Banaras is known for many things and is unique in many ways. Wrestling in Banaras, however, is the same as wrestling in Delhi, Dehra Dun, Allahabad, and any other place in North India. Wrestling holds a special place in the Banarsi ethos (cf. Kumar 1988), but it is not defined in any unique way there. In this book I will describe what wrestling means in general in North India, using Banaras as an example, rather than what it means distinctively to people in Banaras, as Kumar has done.

After seven months in Banaras I shifted the research focus from the akhara to the competitions. For five months, from August to December 1987, I lived in Delhi and Mussoorie. Though akhara training goes on year round, the competitive season begins in July with the coming of the monsoon rains and continues through the temperate season until the Holi festival at the end of March, when the heat begins to intensify. I attended wrestling bouts in Delhi, Dehra Dun, Ramnagar, Vikasnagar, Saharanpur, Roorkee, Mangalore, and other small towns and villages to get a broader picture of this dimension of wrestling, and to insure that my interpretation was not overly specific to the Banaras experience.