Government Patronage: The State as King of Kings

At least in part the government is held responsible for the weak moral and physical character of Indian youth. It has failed in its paternal, moralistic duty. As such, many wrestlers feel that the state must take a leadership role in championing the cause of civic reform. “What can the government do?” asks K. P. Singh.

For its own sake it can do much. It can be the leader. It can organize and provide encouragement. The government has shakti; it has resources. What can it do? It can do anything and everything (1972c: 40).

The government was quick to uproot the rajas and landlords who were the guardians and sponsors of wrestling. It should be as quick to take over responsibility for this art and do as well, if not better, than did the patrons of the past. If the government demands school diplomas from its youth—the same youth who look to public service for status, money and respect—then it stands to reason that along with these high standards the government must also require strength and physical fitness (1986: 27–28).

In many ways wrestlers see in the government the possibility of quintessential royal patronage: the government as king of kings, with unlimited resources and unbounded stature. The utopian government imagined by such writers as K. P. Singh, S. P. Atreya, and R. Patodi is not the bureaucratic and impersonal leviathan of the modern state; it is a paternalistic institution of almost divine proportions, an enlightened body of good works and moral purpose. In Banaras I would often hear wrestlers talking of how they wished the government would provide them with food, clothes, and akhara facilities, thus enabling them to concentrate single-mindedly on the immediate task at hand. If the government would only take care of mundane concerns, the citizen wrestler would be that much less encumbered by obligations, responsibilities and temptations of the material world. If the government were to give each village a “fitness account” of 100 rupees, writes K. P. Singh, then “[H]earts which have been still will burst with life, and the villages will revive. The rural masses will be reinstated as the real citizens of the nation. A fresh breeze will animate the country. . . . The youth of India will be flooded with pride in their bodies. They will be united with the government and the government’s popularity will grow” (1972c: 41).

The utopian government of which the wrestler speaks is dramatically different from the government that sets “sports quotas” but does not otherwise take an interest in the wrestler’s way of life. The line between government responsibility toward wrestlers becomes blurred with the wrestler’s responsibility toward the nation. As the wrestling ideal expands, national leaders will be drawn into the ranks of the wrestling citizenry. National concerns are wrestling concerns, and the perfect leader is the perfect everyman who is the perfect wrestler. There is a sense here in which the perspective on polity and responsibility changes as wrestlers move from a minority position to a majority status. Paternalism shades into communal self-help. As such the need for patronage is preempted; or rather, the citizen wrestler is his own patron. Patronage and governance dissolve into civic responsibility, a kind of romantic, bucolic anarchy of the collectively fit.