Before anyone wrestles, the ground is prepared. An akhara, ਅਖਾੜਾ, the traditional wrestling ground of north India and Punjab, is a pit of earth rather than a mat, and the earth is worked like a field. In the descriptions of those who have studied it, the soil is dug over with a short heavy hoe, furrow by furrow, raked clear of pebbles and stones, and mixed with buttermilk, oil and red ochre, which give it its colour; water is added every few days to keep it at the right consistency, soft enough to break a fall and firm enough not to drag at the feet. Wrestlers entering the pit throw a handful of its earth over themselves and their opponent as a blessing. After the morning’s exercise they rub the same earth into their skin to dry the sweat, and when it has dried other wrestlers scrape it off. The place is, before it is anything else, a piece of ground made ready for bodies, by bodies, every day.
I begin there because the idea this essay is about is already present in the soil. The akhara takes it for granted that the body deserves attention: that it should be given ground of the right softness, partners of the right strength, food, rest, correction and respect, and that these should be provided patiently and repeatedly, not only on the day of a contest. This is not an account of a particular morning at a particular akhara. It is an attempt to understand what the place carries, and to test that idea against a physician’s knowledge of what bodies are like, how unequally they begin, and how easily admiration for strength turns into judgement of weakness.
Sikh tradition associates Khadur Sahib, the town in which my family has its roots, not only with the script of the hymns and the langar of Mata Khivi but also with the wrestling ground. I have sometimes summarised the three in single words: fidelity, equality, embodiment. The first two have essays of their own on this site. This one is about the third, and about why it is harder to praise well than the other two.
What Khadur Remembers #
Sikh tradition remembers Guru Angad as a patron of wrestling and bodily discipline. In modern Sikh accounts he is credited with encouraging wrestling grounds, mall akhāṛe, where physical exercise and wrestling followed the daily prayers, and where the young were taught to keep the body strong and to keep away from intoxicants. At Khadur a gurdwara called Mal Akhara Sahib marks a site associated with him. A story in the hagiographic literature, which historians note was written down more than a century after the events it describes, says that when the Mughal emperor Humayun, newly defeated and in flight, came to Khadur around 1540, he found the Guru at this place sitting with children, teaching them.
I want to be careful about the quality of this evidence, because the subject invites exaggeration. The association of Guru Angad with the akhara is tradition. The accounts of it available to me are modern summaries, which do not name an early written source, and I state it as what Sikh memory holds, not as documented biography. The gurdwara’s name records the memory. It does not date it.
There is, however, a witness of a different kind, and it is in the Guru Granth Sahib. In a long hymn of Guru Arjan, the fifth Guru, in Sri Raag, on Ang 74, the speaker describes himself in the language of the village wrestling fair, the ਛਿੰਝ, chhinj. In two of its stanzas he is the Lord’s wrestler at such a fair: turbaned for the bout after meeting the Guru, watched by a gathered crowd and by the Lord, entering to music with the other wrestlers, overcoming five opponents, and receiving the Guru’s approval at the end. Sikh commentators read the five opponents as the inner adversaries the tradition names elsewhere, lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride, and the hymn as a whole is devotional, not athletic. But its images are exact. The circling entrance, the music, the thrown opponent, the teacher’s slap of approval on the wrestler’s back, the ਥਾਪੀ, thāpī: these are the details of a spectacle the poet’s listeners knew well enough to need no explanation. Whatever one makes of the tradition about Guru Angad, the scripture shows that by Guru Arjan’s time, around 1600, the wrestling ground was a familiar Punjabi scene, and familiar enough to carry the weight of a spiritual struggle.
That is worth noticing for its own sake. A tradition that used the akhara as a figure for inner discipline did not treat the body as something to be escaped. It treated bodily practice as a fit image for the most serious work a person could do. It also, as I will come back to at the end, looked past the wrestling ground. The same hymn closes with the hope of never having to dance in that arena again.
A Shared Ground #
Punjab’s wrestling culture belonged to no single community, and its twentieth-century history is a small history of the province. One former wrestler’s recollection, cited in reference accounts, puts the number of skilled wrestlers in Punjab in the 1930s at around five hundred, most of them Sikhs or Muslims. The two most famous wrestlers of the Majha were born fifty years apart in villages of the same region. Ghulam Mohammed Baksh, the Great Gama, came from a Kashmiri Muslim family of wrestlers in Amritsar district. Deedar Singh Randhawa, later known as Dara Singh, was born in 1928 to a Jat Sikh family in Dharmuchak, in the Majha, and began his serious training abroad, in Singapore, under a teacher named Harnam Singh. Gama left for Lahore at Partition and died there. Dara Singh won the Rustam-e-Hind title in 1954, became a film actor, and for a generation of Indian television viewers was the face of Hanuman, the god honoured in a great many Hindu akharas, in the serial Ramayan of 1987 and 1988.
There is something instructive in that crossing of lines. The pit trained a Muslim from one village and a Sikh from another in the same holds. A Sikh wrestler became, for millions, the image of the wrestlers’ god. The line drawn through Punjab in 1947 divided the akharas of Lahore from those of Amritsar as it divided everything else. Whatever devotions were offered over the earth of a particular pit, the craft itself was shared, and in that the wrestling ground and the langar of Khadur belonged to the same idea.
Knowledge in the Body #
The anthropologist Joseph S. Alter spent long periods in the wrestling grounds of Banaras in the 1980s, and his book The Wrestler’s Body, published in 1992, remains the most careful account in English of how they work. His wrestlers were in a Hindu city a long way from the Majha, devoted to Hanuman, and I borrow from him only what concerns the practice of the akhara itself, which is broadly shared across north India. One distinction he records seems to me essential. There are two words for wrestling. Kushti is the competitive bout, fought at tournaments, the dangal, before a crowd. Jor is wrestling done for practice, and the two are not the same activity.
In a tournament, Alter writes, every move is met by an opposing move, and the bout produces sudden moments of brilliance and a clear result. In jor the two wrestlers tend to work together, so that each move is executed smoothly; the emphasis is on precision and economy of effort, and he compares it to some forms of dance. The wrestler must hold in his mind both the detail of the present move and the whole sequence it belongs to. He must not gasp; breathing is to be regular and deliberate, and a wrestler who opens his mouth to gulp air has, in the eyes of his seniors, lost his concentration. Unlike the thousands of repetitions of the daṇḍ and the baiṭhak, the dips and squats that make up much of the training, jor is almost wholly improvised. It cannot be learned from a description. It can only be learned with another body.
Homer understood this kind of knowledge exactly, and recorded it in the first great wrestling match of European literature. In the twenty-third book of the Iliad, at the funeral games for Patroclus, Ajax and Odysseus come forward for the wrestling. In Samuel Butler’s prose translation they grip each other “like the rafters which some master-builder frames for the roof of a high house to keep the wind out.” Neither can throw the other. Ajax, the bigger man, proposes that one should lift the other, and lifts Odysseus off the ground; but Odysseus, Homer says, does not forget his cunning, and strikes Ajax in the hollow at the back of the knee, so that Ajax goes down on his back with Odysseus on top of him. The crowd marvels. What has just been displayed is a kind of knowledge, more than strength: where a body gives way, how a lifted man can still act, when to strike and where. That knowledge does not live in a rule. Odysseus has it because he has spent his life handling bodies, his own and others’.
The point matters beyond sport. Much of what a body knows about itself and about other bodies is learned this way, by repeated contact under conditions safe enough to permit error: balance discovered by losing it, timing by being too late, the limits of a joint by approaching them carefully with someone who will stop. Fatigue is information. A correction from a teacher who can feel, through his own hands, that your weight is wrong teaches something no diagram can. The akhara is a school for that kind of knowledge, and its pedagogy is old, slow and physical. Medicine depends on the same kind of learning, though it seldom says so. A student can read that an enlarged liver may be felt below the ribs and still be unable to feel one; the fingers learn what an edge is like only by meeting many abdomens, beside a teacher whose own hand, on the same place, can confirm what the student’s hand has found. The textbook describes the finding. The hands acquire it. That is one reason clinical skills are taught at the bedside and not only in lecture halls, and why time taken away from touching patients is a loss of knowledge, not only of warmth.
Practice Without Spectacle #
The tournament is what outsiders see, and the tournament is where the stories come from. The akhara’s own ethic, as Alter records it, is weighted toward the other thing.
He reproduces a set of guidelines, published by a writer on wrestling named Shanti Prakash Atreya, on how and with whom to practise jor, and they read like a moral education disguised as a training manual. A senior wrestler should begin the morning by wrestling with a child or a clearly weaker partner, so that the younger one can exert his full strength, and he should never beat a younger wrestler simply to prove his superiority; his task is to draw the younger one out. With an equal, he should match move for move and not try to win. With a stronger and more senior wrestler, he should use all his strength while showing deference to rank. With an old wrestler, he must never wrestle as though he were the stronger, and should always seek to make the older man feel good and strong. With the best wrestler of the akhara he should come forward confidently, but never pin him, even if he is able, because then practice becomes a contest, and, in Alter’s rendering of Atreya, “no one comes out of the session having gained any knowledge.”
I find that last sentence one of the wisest things I have read about teaching. It names a failure every teacher and every student will recognise: the moment when the effort to learn turns into the effort to win, and learning stops. It also describes a discipline that values improvement without making dominance its measure. The guidelines include a rule for dealing with the braggart, who is to be cut down to size at once, so that he learns that strength lies not in conceit but in the regulated practice of move and counter-move. Even that harshness is in the service of learning. The ethic is not gentle. It is aimed.
Gama’s life shows the same division between the visible and the invisible. Born in 1878, he was first noticed at about ten, at a strongman contest in Jodhpur, and the reference accounts add a detail I find more telling than any victory: afterwards he was confined to bed for a week. He trained under princely patronage, with a regimen that included thousands of dands and baithaks a day. In 1910 he went to London and became, after a long wait for opponents willing to face him, a celebrated figure. In his bout with the Polish champion Stanislaus Zbyszko, Zbyszko went to the ground within a minute and stayed there, defending, for more than two and a half hours, and the match ended without a result; when Zbyszko failed to appear for the rematch, Gama was declared the winner. Those are the facts that became legend. The decades of unseen mornings that made them possible became nothing in particular. They were simply what he did.
A physician recognises the pattern. The parts of health that matter most are rarely spectacular: the daily walk, the sleep protected, the medicine taken on the ordinary Tuesday when nothing seems to depend on it. Medicine also has its tournaments, the dramatic rescue and the brilliant diagnosis, and they are real. But a culture that honours only the bout will misunderstand where bodies are actually made and kept.
The Hours Between #
Attention to the body, in the akhara, does not mean only exertion. Alter’s account of a wrestler’s day in Banaras is, to a surprising degree, an account of rest. Practice begins early, with an hour or two of jor. Then the wrestler eats, rests and bathes, and returns at about four in the afternoon for some three hours of exercises that do not include wrestling, before a second bath, more food and sleep at about sunset. Among the articles Alter cites from the wrestling monthly Bharatiya Kushti is one by Atreya on the place of sleep and rest in wrestling. The regimen is a rhythm, and the pauses belong to it. The wrestler’s body is attended to in the pit and also at the table, on the cot, in the bath and under the hands of whoever massages him after exercise. The whole day is arranged around it.
That is a more demanding idea of attention than the one usually carried by the word discipline. Discipline, in its popular sense, means pushing: more repetitions, longer hours, the refusal to stop. The akhara’s discipline includes an obligation to stop. A body that is only pushed is not being attended to. It is being used. The same is true, uncomfortably, of the bodies of people who work in medicine, a profession that has long admired the capacity to go without sleep, food or rest and has been slow to see that admiration as a failure of attention to the one body every clinician brings to work. I mean that as an observation about a professional culture and an old habit of praising endurance, not as a report about anyone in particular. Rest is often the hardest instruction to accept, because it looks like doing nothing. The akhara treats it as part of the training, not an interruption of it.
No One Wrestles Alone #
The image of the wrestler is an image of individual strength, and the akhara itself contradicts it at every turn.
Nobody wrestles alone. Jor requires a partner who will lend his body to your learning, and who trusts you not to injure him while he does. The pit is dug by many hands, often as part of the exercise itself; in Banaras, Alter observed, the earth is turned with a hoe as a field is ploughed, and then smoothed by a wrestler harnessed to a log, dragging it round the pit like a draught ox. Wrestlers massage one another, and scrape the drying earth from one another’s skin. One traditional exercise, sawārī, uses another person’s weight, the rider, as resistance: a man grows strong by carrying someone. The wrestler’s diet of milk, ghee and almonds has to be paid for, historically by families and patrons, and Alter gives a whole chapter to the patron’s role. And over all of this stands the teacher, the ustād or guru, whose correction is the medium of learning and whose approval is its reward. In Guru Arjan’s hymn, the bout ends not with the crowd’s cheer but with the Guru’s hand on the wrestler’s back.
Even the contest depends on others for its limits. In the Iliad, after the first two falls, Ajax and Odysseus spring up to wrestle a third time, and Achilles rises and stops them: “Put not each other further,” he says in Butler’s version, “to such cruel suffering; the victory is with both alike, take each of you an equal prize.” The two men obey, wipe the dust from their bodies and put their shirts back on. It is a small scene and a remarkable one. The greatest warrior of the poem, a man not otherwise known for moderation, intervenes to protect two bodies from each other, and he does it by declaring that the purpose of the contest has been met. Rules, referees, a third party who can say enough: these are not limits on bodily excellence. They are the conditions that make it safe to pursue.
I take from this a conclusion I hold as a physician as well. Bodily competence is not achieved by will alone, and it is not owned by the person who displays it. It is produced inside relationships, with partners, teachers, patrons, rules and rest, and it depends on others to stop us when we would go too far. A person who has none of those has not failed a test of character. He has been denied the conditions in which strength is made.
Nestor’s Prize #
Homer has one more scene in the same book, and it seems to me more important than the wrestling itself. Before the wrestlers come forward, after the chariot race, one prize is left over, a two-handled urn. Achilles carries it across to Nestor, the oldest of the Greek leaders, and gives it to him as a keepsake of the funeral. “I give you this prize though you cannot win one,” he says in Butler’s translation; “you can now neither wrestle nor fight,” because “the hand of age has been laid heavily upon you.” Nestor accepts it gladly and agrees: there is no strength now in his legs. Then, being Nestor, he tells everyone at length about the funeral games long ago at which he beat all comers, in boxing, in running, and in wrestling.
The scene is affectionate and slightly comic, and it holds something an admiring account of the akhara must not leave out. Bodies do not stay strong, and they do not begin equally. The games of the Iliad honour the strong, and they also find a way to honour the man who can no longer compete, without pretending that he can. Atreya’s rule for the akhara does the same in its own idiom: with an old wrestler, make him feel good and strong. Both are forms of attention to a body whose value is not measured by what it can still do.
Homer is also honest, perhaps without meaning to be, about the limits of his own culture’s regard for the body. The prizes for the wrestling are a tripod for the winner, valued at twelve oxen, and for the loser a woman skilled in many arts, valued at four. In the economy of the funeral games, some bodies compete and others are prizes. Cultures of physical discipline have often been cultures of some bodies only, and the akhara Alter studied was a world of men, organised around ideals of celibacy and masculine strength. Admiration for the wrestling ground has to keep its eyes open about who was allowed into the pit.
The poem carries its own rebuke to that economy, in the figure of the smith of the gods. Hephaestus is lame. At the end of the first book he goes round Olympus pouring nectar, and the gods break into laughter as they watch him bustling about. In the eighteenth book we learn more. His mother, he says, would have got rid of him because he was lame; two goddesses, Thetis and Eurynome, took him in and cared for him, and for nine years he made them brooches, armlets, cups and chains in their cave by the sea. When Thetis comes to ask him for armour for her son, he puts away his bellows, washes, takes his strong staff and limps to the door, attended by golden handmaids he has made, figures like living young women with sense and voice and strength. Then he forges the shield of Achilles, on which the poem sets its fullest picture of ordinary human life: a city at peace with a wedding and a lawsuit, ploughing and harvest, a dancing floor. The greatest artist in the Iliad is a disabled body that survived because others took care of it, and the gods laugh at him. Homer does not resolve that contradiction. He records it, and the record is enough to show that a culture which prized the strong body also knew, somewhere, that the strong body was not the only kind that mattered.
Gama’s later life completes the picture. The reference accounts record that all his sons died young, that the death of the youngest, at thirteen, left him unable to speak for days, that after Partition he moved to Lahore and tried ventures that failed, and that he suffered from high blood pressure from 1952 onward and died in 1960 after a period of illness, with the government supporting his medical expenses. The strongest man of his age ended as a patient. There is nothing ironic about that, and nothing shameful. It is the ordinary course of a human body, and it happened to him as it happens to everyone, including those who have done every dand and every baithak.
Character Is Not a Muscle #
Here admiration for the akhara meets a charge that I think is partly right.
A celebration of bodily discipline can very easily become a theory of moral worth. If the disciplined body is admirable, the undisciplined body is blameworthy; if strength is earned, weakness is deserved; if health is the reward of virtue, illness is the evidence of vice. Alter saw this logic at work in the wrestling grounds he studied, and he described it without sentimentality. A wrestler, he wrote, is always on stage, whether in the street, at a wedding or in the pit, and in the manner of a morality play his character is his virtue. The wrestlers he knew offered unprompted criticism of the modern world in bodily terms: fashionable haircuts, scented talc, street snacks and, above all, tea, which some called sarcastically the elixir of the dark age. The ideology is coherent, often admirable in its seriousness, and it carries a quiet cruelty. Once the body is taken to display character, the sick body displays a fault.
The habit is very old. Homer’s most despised character, Thersites, is introduced in the second book of the Iliad as the ugliest man who came to Troy, and the description is wholly bodily: bandy-legged, lame of one foot, his shoulders rounded and hunched over his chest, his head running up to a point. His speech is presented as of a piece with his body, unbridled and unseemly, meant to raise a laugh. Then he says what he says: that Agamemnon has taken more than his share of the spoils, that Achilles has been wronged, that the army should go home. It is very nearly what Achilles himself said in the first book. Odysseus beats him with the sceptre until he weeps, and the soldiers, Homer says, were sorry for him and laughed heartily all the same. A body was made to stand for a character, and the character for an argument, so that the argument could be dismissed without being answered.
Alter follows the same logic outward. In the ideology he describes, the wrestler is cast as the perfect citizen, his disciplined body a model for a reformed nation. That move from the individual body to the body politic is not peculiar to Banaras. Physical-culture movements in many countries in the early twentieth century joined fitness to national strength, and some of that thinking ended in programmes that sorted citizens by the bodies they had been born with. The akhara Alter knew was far from that. But the road from admiration to classification is short, and it begins with the same sentence: that the body shows what a person is worth.
The same ethnography records another claim that a physician has to handle with care. Wrestlers and visitors regarded the earth of the pit and the akhara’s well water as tonics, and many told Alter they had recovered from serious illnesses, rheumatism, consumption, heart weakness, high blood pressure, kidney stones, through the regimen of the akhara. Those testimonies are sincere and they are not evidence. Recovery has many causes, illness has many courses, and the people who did not recover are not usually the ones telling the story. The akhara’s most celebrated wrestler had high blood pressure in his last years.
Susan Sontag wrote the necessary rebuttal in Illness as Metaphor, in 1978, after her own treatment for cancer. She described illness as “the night-side of life,” a citizenship every person eventually holds, and she argued against the habit of reading diseases as expressions of personality, repression or weakness of will. Such theories, in her account, tell us mainly how little is understood about the disease in question; they shift onto the patient a burden of explanation that belongs to medicine. Her targets were the romantic myths around tuberculosis and the psychological myths around cancer, but the argument applies with equal force to the athletic myth: the belief that a body which fails has failed because its owner did not try.
A physician sees the evidence against that belief every day. Bodies begin unequally, with differences no regimen erases. They are shaped by poverty, by the work they have had to do, by injuries no one chose, by disabilities present from birth or acquired in an instant, and by the plain arithmetic of age. The World Health Organization’s guidelines on physical activity, notably, are written to include people living with chronic conditions and disabilities, count wheeling alongside walking and cycling, and say plainly that how active people are depends on social, cultural, environmental and economic conditions that shape their access and opportunities, not only on individual choice; worldwide, the organisation notes, women have been less active than men by an average of five percentage points, a gap unchanged since 2000. That is a structural fact, not a moral one. Nobody’s character explains it.
So I reject the inference that weakness is a failure of virtue, and I reject it without abandoning the akhara’s central idea. The body deserves attention. It does not deliver verdicts. A tradition can honour discipline and still refuse to make discipline the measure of a person’s worth, and the akhara’s own best rules point that way: the senior who draws out the weaker partner, the wrestler who makes the old man feel strong, the referee who stops the bout. Those rules are not about who has earned his strength. They are about how to treat a body, whatever its strength happens to be.
The Examining Room Is Not an Akhara #
It would be easy to draw a neat analogy between the wrestling ground and the clinic, and I want to draw only part of it.
The differences come first. A wrestler and his partner meet as near equals who have both chosen the contest; a patient comes to a physician because something is wrong, often frightened, seldom by choice. The wrestler’s goal is strength and skill; the patient’s is usually relief, understanding or simply to be told what is happening. The wrestler’s teacher shapes his body over years; a physician is not a trainer of bodies, and most of the time should not behave like one. And the authority behind medical advice is supposed to be evidence, not tradition, however venerable. The akhara’s regimen of milk, ghee and almonds, its prohibitions and its tonics, belong to a body of practice that has its own coherence and its own meanings. It is not a source of clinical recommendations, and nothing in this essay should be read as one.
What survives the comparison is smaller, and to my mind it matters more. The akhara teaches that a body is known by attention given over time, in contact governed by rules and by trust. A physical examination is also contact under rules, with consent, by someone who has learned through many bodies where things give way. Its quality depends on things the akhara would recognise: patience, the refusal to turn the encounter into a display, attention to the whole even while examining a part, and the willingness to stop. And one of Atreya’s rules seems to me to translate almost directly. With an old wrestler, make him feel good and strong. An examination can find everything it was looking for and still leave a person diminished, handled as a set of failing parts. Or it can find the same things and leave him feeling that his body, whatever its condition, was treated as worth the care. The findings are the same. The encounter is not.
What Attention Requires #
I come back to the earth of the pit. It has to be dug every day, raked of stones, watered every few days, and kept at a consistency that is a compromise between two goods: soft enough to protect a body that falls, firm enough to support a body that stands. Nobody watches this work. It is the condition of everything that is watched.
That seems to me a fair description of what attention to the body requires, in an akhara or anywhere else. It is daily and unglamorous. It is done by many hands, for others as much as for oneself. It holds two goods in tension, protection and challenge, and leans toward one or the other according to the body in question. It knows when to stop. And it does not grade the body it attends to. The pit receives the champion and the child, the braggart and the old man, on the same terms, and the same earth is rubbed into every skin.
Guru Arjan’s hymn, which borrowed the wrestling fair for its imagery of struggle, ends by looking beyond it, toward a release from the arena altogether. I read that ending, outside its spiritual meaning, as a quiet correction to any cult of the body, including the admiring one I have been writing. The body deserves attention because it is where a life is lived, not because it is the measure of the life. Strength is a gift to be trained and shared, and in time it will be withdrawn, as it was from Nestor and from Gama, and as it will be from every reader of this page. What remains, when the bouts are over, is the question the akhara at its best already answers: whether the body was treated, in its strength and in its weakness, as deserving of care.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography: family roots in Khadur Sahib; Sikh; family physician practising in California since 2010. Akhara earth raked, mixed with buttermilk, oil and red ochre and watered every few days; the throwing of earth as a blessing; kushti, dangal and sawārī; the diet of milk, ghee and almonds; ustād and guru: Wikipedia, “Pehlwani,” and the sources it cites. Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (University of California Press, 1992; UC Press E-Books Collection): the wrestler’s daily schedule, Atreya’s 1978 article on sleep and rest in Bharatiya Kushti (from Alter’s bibliography), the wrestler cast as the perfect citizen in nationalist discourse, the digging of the pit with a short hoe and smoothing with a log, earth rubbed on and scraped off after exercise, jor contrasted with kushti, breath control, improvisation versus repetition, Shanti Prakash Atreya’s guidelines for practising jor (the quoted sentence is Alter’s rendering), the wrestler as always on stage and character as virtue, criticism of tea and other modern habits, earth and well water regarded as tonics and reported cures, the patron’s role, and the Banaras setting. Guru Angad as patron of wrestling and the mall akhāṛā system: Wikipedia, “Guru Angad,” citing The Sikh Review (2004); Gurdwara Mal Akhara Sahib and the Humayun story written down more than a century later: the same article. Guru Arjan’s hymn in Sri Raag, Ang 74 (the Lord’s wrestler, the tall turban, the gathered crowd, drums and bugles, five challengers thrown, the Guru’s pat on the back, and the closing wish not to dance in the arena again): SriGranth.org with Sant Singh Khalsa’s translation, described and not quoted or translated; the reading of the five as inner adversaries: standard Sikh commentary. Homer, Iliad XXIII (Nestor’s prize; the wrestling of Ajax and Odysseus; the prizes valued at twelve and four oxen; Achilles stopping the bout): Samuel Butler’s translation, Project Gutenberg text. Skilled wrestlers in 1930s Punjab mostly Sikhs or Muslims (a former wrestler’s recollection): Wikipedia, “Pehlwani.” Dara Singh (born 1928 at Dharmuchak in the Majha; training in Singapore under Harnam Singh; Rustam-e-Hind 1954; Hanuman in Ramayan, 1987–88): Wikipedia, “Dara Singh.” Homer, Iliad I and XVIII (Hephaestus pouring nectar amid the gods’ laughter; his lameness, rescue by Thetis and Eurynome, staff and golden handmaids) and II (Thersites, his beating and the soldiers’ laughter): Butler’s translation, Project Gutenberg text; the scenes on the shield: standard literary reference knowledge. Early twentieth-century physical-culture movements and their links to national-strength and eugenic programmes: standard reference knowledge, stated generally. The Great Gama (born 1878 in Amritsar district; the Jodhpur contest and week in bed; training regimen; London, 1910, and the bout with Zbyszko (more than two and a half hours, no result) and his failure to appear for the rematch; sons’ deaths; move to Lahore; high blood pressure from 1952; death in 1960 after illness; government support for medical expenses): Wikipedia, “The Great Gama.” Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978): standard reference knowledge; one short quotation. World Health Organization fact sheet on physical activity: guidelines covering people with chronic conditions and disabilities, wheeling, social and economic determinants, and the five-point gender gap unchanged since 2000. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. The author’s family roots in Khadur Sahib are his published biography. The association of Guru Angad with wrestling and the akhara at Khadur is Sikh tradition as summarised in modern sources, stated as such; no claim is made about what all Sikhs believe. The author does not claim to have trained in or visited a particular akhara; no remembered scene, teacher, partner or patient is described.
Analysis and forecast. The reading of the akhara as attention to the body, the distinction between practice and spectacle, the readings of Homer (wrestlers, Nestor, Hephaestus, Thersites) and of Guru Arjan’s imagery, the remarks on rest and on medical culture’s praise of endurance, the general remark on how palpation is learned, (kept distinct from the hymn’s spiritual meaning), the argument against treating strength as virtue, and the bounded comparison with clinical examination are the author’s interpretation as of November 7, 2026. Nothing here is a recommendation about exercise, diet or treatment. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer. It is personal reflection, not medical advice; readers seeking care should contact their own physician’s office.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.