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kushti wrestlers
Whendidyoubeginworkingon the kushti project?
I started well over six years ago. I went to every single
akhada
, which is where
kushti
(mud wrestling) takes place,
several times over many years. There are only about 10 or
15 of them left now. They’re closing at a frightening speed;
India is moving on. So the wrestlers are now fighting on
mats. Quite frankly, the young people today don’t have the
discipline to be wrestlers; they all want to go off to the big
cities and look for jobs, buy phones and find relationships…
The Indian wrestling committee really wants their best
wrestlers to be practising on mats so that they can represent
India in the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games.
Kushti has been going on for a thousand years and has
survived hundreds of kings and queens but now it’s just dying
in front of our eyes because there’s no appetite for this kind
of wrestling anymore.
What sort ofmenaspire tobe kushtiwrestlers?
They tend to be people with troubled pasts. They’re from
villages throughout India; mainly the kids of parents who
didn’t want them. A lot of them were kids who were kicked
out by the community and had nowhere else to go, so
someone must have suggested, “Why don’t you go into an
akhada; they’ll teach you how to fight, how to get back on
the straight and narrow, they’ll teach you discipline, you’ll
feel really good and you might get paid.” So a lot of these
kids are from that kind of background. What the akhadas do
is embrace them and take them in; there’s a real family unit
there. A lot of the kids are lost souls.
Howwouldyoudescribe thewrestlers’ living
conditions?
They all live together and there are lots and lots of rules. The
rules include that they don’t go out, don’t drink, don’t have
girlfriends and no sex – no thinking about sex. They’re also
very particular about diet, eating as much as they can. They
eat chapatis, a lot of yoghurt and a lot of cheese. They sleep a
lot and they train every day. It’s 100% effort. They don’t have
a social life. If you look at them all, they’re good looking, very
fit men, in the prime of their lives and they’re not allowed to
go out and have any fun. They sacrifice a lot, which is why this
type of wrestling is dying out. No 17- or 18-year-old wants to
do that now. They want to do what all of the other kids do,
especially in ever-changing India.
Howdid themen feel about posing for the camera?
They were all very comfortable with me taking their
photographs. One reason being that I’ve spent time there and
they’ve gotten to know me. The other relating back to the fact
that a lot of them come from terribly disadvantaged families
and they’re touched when they find out that someone has
come a very long way to take their photograph. They’re just
wonderful human beings. The only problem is that they’re
maybe so aware of you that sometimes they stop doing what
they would normally do because you’re there. My way around
that is to be around so much that they forget I’m there. I
operated with one lens and one camera, all available light, all
in an effort to blend in. So after a while they didn’t even notice
I was around.
