Popular Literature

One reason I selected wrestling as a topic of study is that it is a self-conscious public activity that people choose to do. They articulate their reasons for wrestling and reflect on what wrestling as a chosen life path means to them in particular and to all wrestlers in general. Because of this there is a considerable popular literature on wrestling, often reflexive and analytical. I have termed this literature “popular” because it is stylistically neither journalistic nor scholarly. It is popular in the dual sense of being interesting and concerned with the public interest. Most journal articles and pamphlets are not simply descriptive but advocate a particular point of view directed at a specific audience. I also refer to this literature as popular because it is largely published by small local publishing houses for a restricted audience. In this regard it is distinguished from academic texts, which enjoy a much larger circulation and currency and appear, among other places, on the accessions list of the Library of Congress and the shelves of universities both in India and in the West.

The popular literature on Indian wrestling is not easy to find unless you know where to look or are directed there by those who know: the back galis of Chauri Bazaar in Old Delhi, the Rangmahal area of Indor, small printing establishments in Banaras, and other equally obscure places that have yet to be discovered. While I am most familiar with the Hindi-language publications of this genre (Ali 1984; Anonymous n.d.; Changani 1958; R. Gupta n.d.; M. Lal n.d.; G. Y. Manik 1964; K. Manik 1939; Mathur 1966; Patodi 1982; Sarma 1934; A. K. Singh 1983; H. Singh 1981, 1984a, 1984b; Sivnathrayji 1955), it should be noted that there are also a number of other regional-language publications by Soman (1963, 1974) and Suryavamshi (1966) in Marathi, and Basu (1934) and Bhadudi (1964) in Bengali.

The most significant literature of this type is published by the Bharatiya Kushti Prakashan (The Indian Wrestling Publishing House) under the editorship of Ratan Patodi. The publishing house was established in 1968 when the editor was forced to choose between his job as a journalist in Indor and his avocation of writing and publishing material on Indian wrestling. Since 1968 some forty-five editions of the quarterly journal Bharatiya Kushti (Indian Wrestling) have been published. This journal is a source of invaluable information. Consider some of the articles: “Physical Education in Rural Areas” by Atreya (1971); “At What Age to Begin Wrestling” by K. P. Singh (1975); “How to Stay Healthy During the Rainy Season” by N. Pathak (1980); “Poverty and Health” by Atreya (1986a); “Eat Greens, Stay Healthy” by M. R. Gupta (1973); and “A Vegetarian Diet to Increase Your Weight” by O. P. Kumawath (1987). In addition to numerous articles on diet, health care, exercise techniques, celibacy, morality, and religion, there are over a hundred articles that outline the life histories of as many famous wrestlers. There are also over a hundred accounts of wrestling tournaments in India. In short, Bharatiya Kushti is a remarkable source of information.

One of the most significant features of this journal is that it provides a cross section of views on various topics by authorities on the subject of Indian wrestling. Through a reading of the articles by Atreya, K. P. Singh, Pathak, Malhotra, Patodi, Guru Hanuman, and others, I am able to compare their views with those of the wrestlers I talked with and interviewed. I have treated popular texts on wrestling in the same way that I have treated interviews and observations. Although the voices which speak from the written texts are voices of authority, to the extent that they represent wrestling to a reading public, I have read these texts as simply other voices speaking in a common public arena. Written texts may speak more loudly and with clearer articulation, but they do not define some objective truth; they merely add authority to the discourse.

The existence of a self-reflexive, indigenous commentary on cultural life raises a number of interesting and problematic questions concerning the role of the anthropologist as foreign observer. For, in effect—to overstate the point slightly—the anthropologist is rendered impotent and somewhat redundant when the wrestlers write their own ethnography. Or, alternatively, would I classify myself as but another wrestler writing in a somewhat different context, to a different audience, in a different language, but with no more or less legitimacy than any other wrestler? Certainly I have more at stake as an academic scholar but less invested as a wrestler. In any case, what is somewhat blurred here is the relationship between observer and observed and this, as Clifford (1983) and Clifford and Marcus (1986) among others (Fabian 1983; Rabinow 1977; Tyler 1986) have pointed out, raises the problematic question of ethnographic authority.

Traditional anthropological exegesis is based on both eyewitness accounts and hearsay, an epistemology that almost by definition makes a sharp dichotomy between the written word and the heard word or seen event. This is simply no longer tenable, given the fact that anthropologists can no longer study isolated, illiterate groups. In an article published in Bharatiya Kushti entitled “Brahmacharya,” Atreya quotes Goethe and the Swedish theologian Swedenborg as well as the Bhagavad Gita and other classical Indian texts (1973b: 24). An early text entitled Jujitsu and Japanese Wrestling by a Banaras resident named Kalidas Manik (1932) compares wrestling in India with wrestling in Japan. Manik admonishes young Indian wrestlers to learn Japanese moves. Banarsi Pande, a well-known wrestler in the Banaras area, was trained as an international referee at the National Institute of Sport in Patiala. He is conversant on a range of topics that includes the Swedish gymnasium movement of the early twentieth century. When I asked him to talk about the history of Indian wrestling he spoke of classical Greece and ancient Rome and referred to notes he had taken on hand-to-hand combat described in the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics. Indrasan Rai, who comes from a family of famous wrestlers, has written a doctoral dissertation for the department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archeology, Banaras Hindu University, on the art of wrestling in ancient India (1984). About one-sixth of the references cited in his dissertation are of works in English about western philosophy and physical education. I was introduced to Indrasan Rai by an illiterate wrestler who directed me to textual sources—newspaper clippings and commemorative souvenir volumes—when I asked him to recount his life story.

As Marcus and Fischer have rightly pointed out, it is incumbent on anthropologists to make sense of this polyphony of voices and texts (1986: 37). The goal of such an endeavor would be to produce what Clifford refers to as dialogic texts which seek to evoke meaning in an ongoing process of creative praxis (1983). The anthropologist’s voice is introduced into the arena not as any sort of final authority on represented truth but as yet another redactor of partial knowledge. A number of anthropologists have experimented with various techniques to try to reorient the anthropologist’s voice in the larger discourse of ethnographic work (cf. Crapanzano 1980; Narayan 1989; M. Rosaldo 1980). The world of Indian wrestling affords a unique opportunity to examine the theoretical implications for anthropology of textual intersubjectivity. If Goethe and Swedenborg can be quoted as sources on Indian wrestling, and if wrestlers write about themselves in objective, self-reflexive intellectual terms, then where do we draw the line between text, context, and author? And who draws it?