Cultures of the Body in Colonial Bengal: The Career of Gobor Guha.

In recent years, the history of modern Indian wrestling – or kushti – has begun to receive scholarly attention. Most accounts agree that the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the coming of the modern form of this ancient Indian sport, with Indian wrestlers emerging from the confines of their akharas and fighting with their Western counterparts. But while there are some scholarly accounts of north Indian wrestling, and Gama in particular, the rest of the country has not fared well. What has also been lacking is a perspective that considers wrestling as one of the many cultures of the body which characterised the nationalist phase in Indian history, dating from roughly the end of the nineteenth century till the third decade of the twentieth. During this time, a kind of muscular nationalism was beginning to gain ground in Bengal. Fed up of being stigmatised as a ‘frail and effeminate’ race, Bengalis – both men and women – began to participate in various kinds of physical cultures, ranging from martial arts to gymnastics, trapeze acts to hot-air ballooning. With the rise of the swadeshi movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, akharas or gymnasiums mushroomed all over north Calcutta. In this paper, I will survey the history of such cultures in colonial Bengal, with particular reference to the figure of the wrestler Gobor Guha, who still remains the only Indian to win a world heavyweight title in wrestling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]