I travelled to India with the idea of filming the tradition of Kushti
– wrestling – also called Pehelwani. This led me to Jabalpur, a
provinicial town in Central India, where a Kushti tournament was to take
place. Even before the tournament actually began, I was drawn to the environment
around – especially to the neat geometrically laid roads and the pastel coloured
PWD (Public Works Department) buildings. These are typical elements of government
compounds in India and exude an aura of bureaucratic action – its regularised,
repetitive and often hierarchical ways. It was within such a government compound
that the Kushti tournament was to take place and in a traditional way. The
film follows the progress of the tournament, shows the arrangements, the rituals
and some of the quaint occurings taking place. Thereby it also focusses on
a young Pehelwan (wrestler) Basant Ahirwar fighting his way through
the tournament. Additionally, a visit to an old Akhada (wrestling
gym) in Jabalpur run by an office bearer of the tournament, helps to highlight
the body practices of the Pehelwans and draw links between the happenings
in the tournament and their traditional ways.
During the course of filming, I met a number of young men who were moving
away from Pehelwani. For these men Body Building was cooler and more in!
Following this up, I encountered a well entrenched scene of Body Building
in Bhopal, a larger city not far from Jabalpur. The body builders I met here
were categoric in distinguishing their bodies from that of the Pehelwans.
It was soon apparent that here was a historically much younger tradition operating
which set itself apart from Pehelwani. In this context I was able
to follow up a Body Building Championship being organised in Bhopal. It
was then that I decided to juxtapose sequences from the two body practices
in the film thus bringing forth the varying approaches
and the differing habitus of the protagonists involved. In this way, the film becomes
a rather novel expression of the paradigm – tradition and modernity – in
terms of sports and the male body in India.
