Reconfiguring colonial hierarchies: Examining the ‘European versus native wrestling’ debate in the late nineteenth-century India

Introduction

This provocative excerpt from a 1916 article titled ‘The Place of Indians in the World’s Athletics’ by Sachindranath Mazumdar, a physical culture enthusiast, aptly captured a common sentiment shared by several sports lovers in colonial India in the early twentieth century. The sentiment that Indian wrestlers were ‘the best in the world’ was no doubt fuelled by the fact that a few years before Mazumdar declared so, native wrestlers, especially those serving at the courts of the semi-autonomous princes, had indeed roundly defeated their peers elsewhere.

Over the years, a number of works have emerged on the culture of wrestling in South Asia, and five main strands of scholarship are conspicuous. Most general accounts of sports in India discuss the culture of Indian wrestling in a peripheral way as just one among the many games and amusements of the past. ² Others discuss it in the context of either the revolutionary terrorist groups or religious fundamentalist and communal organisations that mushroomed in different parts of India in the colonial period. ³ In both contexts, the wrestling gymnasiums often acted as places to physically prepare its cadres to serve the organisation’s larger ideologies and goals. A third trend has been to mention the culture of wrestling as one of the activities that were promoted as part of the physical culture movement in India that began in the nineteenth century and extended into the first half of the twentieth century, partly in response to the charge of effeminacy of natives and debates over racial degeneration in the era of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. ⁴

By far, anthropologists and ethnographers such as Nita Kumar and Joseph S. Alter have done the most in-depth study of wrestling practices on the Indian subcontinent. ⁵ In particular, Alter’s book The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India, published in 1992, gives detailed ethnographic analysis of the life of north Indian wrestlers. The picture Alter presents of the north Indian wrestler or pehelwan, especially a Hindu one is that of someone dedicated to doing thousands of dands (push-ups) and bethaks (sit-ups); consuming a strictly vegetarian diet consisting of large quantities of milk, ghi (clarified butter) and almonds; leading a hyper celibate life during training; devoted to the patron deity Hanuman and maintaining a strong guru–chela (teacher–disciple) relationship. He also noted that the culture of wrestling in colonial India was closely associated with nationalist and princely politics in the early twentieth century, especially symbolised by the wrestler Gama. ⁶ Building on his insights, scholars such as Graham Noble, Rosalind O’Hanlon and Abhijit Gupta have made more serious attempts to historicise wrestling. Noble’s article on the wrestling victories of Gama and other native wrestlers in London in 1910 and 1911 built on Alter’s readings by highlighting in a more detailed and nuanced way the racial and nationalist tensions involved in interracial wrestling matches. ⁷ O’Hanlon’s pioneering work, ‘Military Sports and the History of the Martial Body in India’ was one of the first academic attempts to discuss in longue-durée how the sport of Indian wrestling evolved from being an important component of military preparation, recreation and bodily practice in early modern South Asia to its gradual loss of patronage and confinement within a certain strata of Indian society by the early decades of the twentieth century. ⁸ Following in O’Hanlon’s footsteps, more recently, Gupta has attempted to show the evolution of wrestling culture in colonial Bengal by focusing on wrestling heroes of the region like Gobor Guha. ⁹

These works are useful for their insights, and this article builds on them to explore the colonial and anti-colonial politics involved in interracial or mixed-race wrestling matches between European and native Indian wrestlers in the late nineteenth century. The attempt is to locate a late nineteenth-century precedent for the racial, gendered and nationalist tensions involved in interracial wrestling matches of the early twentieth century and to show how these matches could become a flash point that occasioned an interesting way of challenging the alleged superiority of Europeans over the natives. It also attempts to show how a phenomenon like nationalism found its early political echoes in the ‘purely cultural’ arena of sports. Though not all fissures and tensions of the colonial society are to be found in interracial wrestling, some vital ones are articulated in novel ways.

British Army and Native Wrestlers: Some Precedents of Interracial Wrestling Matches

During the nineteenth century, as colonial racial prejudices began to rigidify, close physical contact of British soldiers with the natives was discouraged by the British army. Yet sometimes, interracial wrestling matches did take place, both within the army with the native sepoys themselves and even with local native wrestlers. ¹⁰ Subedar Sita Ram Pande’s autobiography of 1861 mentions how his first British commanding officer was also an expert wrestler and would challenge the native sepoys to a match. An excerpt from Sita Ram Pande's memoir is worth quoting here:

There were eight English officers in my regiment, and the Captain of my company was a real sahib—just as I had imagined all sahibs to be. His name was ‘Burrumpeel’. He was six feet three inches tall, his chest as broad as the monkey god’s, and he was tremendously strong. He often used to wrestle with the sepoys and won universal admiration when he was in the wrestling arena. He had learnt all the throws and no sepoy could defeat him. This officer was always known among ourselves as the ‘Wrestler’. ¹¹

However, not all matches between British soldiers and native wrestlers ended up pleasantly. It is said that during Governor-General of India Lord Ellenborough’s time (1842–44), one such match between a British soldier and an Indian wrestler of the Maharaja of Bharatpur brought to the surface the underlying tensions. The Indian wrestler easily put the Irishman on his back. Unsatisfied, the soldier wanted another round. No sooner had the round started that the soldier rushed at the wrestler and punched him in the face, knocking down half a dozen of his teeth. The native wrestler fainted and had to be carried to the hospital. While the soldier’s comrades cheered, the Indians hissed and declared the match unfair. So great was the discontent that the Governor-General who had joined in the mirth had to apologise to the Maharaja and pay the native wrestler some money as compensation for the mischief done to him. ¹²

It is interesting to see how the contemporary newspapers reported occasions like these, especially in the last three decades of the nineteenth century when the frequency of such events appears to have increased. In 1874, a wrestling match between a British soldier and a native wrestler at Jutog in Shimla led to a huge furore and a kind of prohibition of interracial wrestling matches. ¹³ A letter from Shimla in the Delhi Gazette described this match as follows:

A trial of strength and skill in the art of wrestling came off the day before yesterday between a native pahlwan and an European soldier … for ₹500 a side; in which the former came off victorious. In almost all encounters of this sort, the European, although he may possess greater strength, comes off ‘second best,’ the native possessing a knowledge of superior twists, knacks, dodges, & c., which are not to be compared to ‘Lancashire grips,’ ‘Yorkshire turns,’ & c. ¹⁴

The Indian Public Opinion and Panjab Times deplored how the natives showed ‘their satisfaction most insolently’ and opined that such matches ‘should not be allowed’. ¹⁵ The Times of India called this wrestling bout a ‘stupid affair’ and a ‘mistake’ and called for a prohibition of wrestling matches between European soldiers in service and native wrestlers, as it tends to ‘bad blood and ill-feeling’. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, these matches could not be fully stopped. Even in other British colonies, local wrestling champions at times challenged British soldiers to a match. But not all natives had the pleasure of watching a British soldier being thrown down flat on his back in front of a native crowd. For instance, in 1888 in colonial Burma, a local professional wrestling champion of Mandalay, the capital of Upper Burma, faced an ignominious defeat, when he challenged the white soldiers of the British camp to a wrestling match. Initially, many soldiers tried wrestling with him, ‘but were all without exception ingloriously vanquished’ by the local Burmese champion. These wrestling matches went on for about a week before it was reported to the commanding officer. Since it was ‘considered impolitic to allow this state of things to continue’, a Cornish sergeant of artillery, Sergeant Polwarth, a man of Herculean proportions, who was mentioned to be a famous wrestler, was called forth. During the bout, the sergeant ‘hurled the Burman over his left arm’ and ‘the native fell heavily to the ground on his head, stunned and motionless’. The assembled whites wildly cheered the victory of their man, while ‘[t]he vanquished champion, still unconscious, was carried off the ground by his friends’. The next day, the general of the camp ‘had a proclamation issued, written in Burmese and English, forbidding natives and soldiers to wrestle with each other, lest an ill-feeling should be generated between the people and Europeans’. The prestige and pride of the British troops was restored and Sergeant Polwarth was the hero of the day. ¹⁷

Tom Cannon Versus Karim Bux Wrestling Controversy of 1891

As the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed a rise in the physical culture movement, wrestling saw a global revival. ¹⁸ Coinciding with this was rise of the modern entertainment industry, which included the circus, vaudeville shows and music halls. Strongmen, bodybuilders and wrestlers often used these occasions to hold exhibitions and entertain audiences. At times, they even moved across continents and colonies in search of lucrative prospects. Prashant Kidambi has pointed out that ‘[t]hree factors were responsible for the rapid growth in the late nineteenth century of an “imperial touring network” that encompassed different political units within the British world system’. ‘First, there was enormous popular demand for sporting exchanges with Britain’ in the colonies. Second, there was commercial potential in such tours for ‘enterprising sporting entrepreneurs’. Third, there was a ‘revolution in transport heralded by the steamship and the railway’, which ‘made it possible for international tours to become a regular occurrence’. This was accompanied by ‘the expansion of the telegraph network’ and the ‘imperial press system’. All these gave an immediacy and popularity to such sporting exchanges, which came to be regarded in Britain ‘as an important means of affirming the bonds of empire’. ¹⁹

In 1891, European wrestling champions, Tom Cannon ²⁰ and Antonio Pierri, arrived in Bombay to showcase their skills and even challenged other European and native wrestlers for R1,000 to ‘down’ either of them. ²¹ Soon both the wrestlers moved to Calcutta, the British Indian capital, for further exhibitions. On 8 December 1891, Tom Cannon, the British wrestling champion put forth a wrestling challenge as shown in Figure 1, in the local Indian newspapers, to meet any man in India for a purse of R500 or R1,000. ²² As the Indian Daily News reported, Cannon’s visit was indeed expected to ‘cause somewhat of a flutter in sporting circles’. ²³ A Letter to the Editor in The Indian Daily News welcomed the move by Tom Cannon to challenge the native wrestlers, as the writer felt that if the men were well matched, ‘it would give the public a fair idea of the respective merits of the English and Indian methods of wrestling’. ²⁴ On 21 December 1891, The Englishman announced that a native wrestler had at last been found to take on the famous Tom Cannon’s challenge. A score of wrestlers from the Maharajah of Jodhpur Sir Jaswant Singh II’s court had reportedly arrived in Calcutta and were consigned to the care of the Maharajah of Cooch Behar Nripendra Narayan, a major sports aficionado himself, who would select a wrestler to fight Cannon. The report stated the following:

[S]ome idea may be formed both of the interest aroused by this event throughout the land and of the certainty there is that in this, the great national sport, the honour of India will be maintained. It would not be easy to imagine a contest of more genuine sporting interest than this, or one that should appeal more strongly to all lovers of manly pastime. By its result the much vexed question of the relative superiority of European and Native wrestlers bids fair to be at last determined …. ²⁵

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: The Indian Daily News, 8 December 1891, p. 2.

The Indian Daily News too reported the event as ‘an opportunity that will probably never recur for settling the vexed question of the superiority of Indian and English methods’. ²⁶ By 22 December 1891, all the arrangements for the match between the English champion Tom Cannon and Maharaja of Jodhpur’s wrestler had been completed. The event was under the general directions of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, and a committee of referees was also formed. Boota, the Indian champion had been chosen from the contingent of Rajput wrestlers that had been sent forth by the Maharaja of Jodhpur. ²⁷ However, Boota subsequently declined and instead put forth one of his best men, Karim Bux to take on Cannon. ²⁸ The contest was to be decided by a single fall as was the usual Indian custom, rather than ‘the English practice of extending the struggle into several rounds’ as this was not appreciated by Indian wrestlers. ²⁹

On Christmas eve, the much-awaited match took place at Fillis’s Circus. The Bengal Times later called this match the ‘Wrestling Championship for India’. ³⁰ As The Englishman described it, the circus ‘was crowded from floor to ceiling’, with the majority of the crowd consisting of natives ‘who evinced the keenest interest in the proceedings’. Both Tom Cannon and Karim Bux, cheered by the crowd, entered the ring a few minutes after 6 o’clock. The rules of the match were as follows: ‘Gouging of eyes or nose and tearing the ears not allowed; hitting with closed hand not allowed; hitting with open hand allowed; catch any way you like; a throw is—the shoulders of the man thrown must both touch the ground’. ³¹

The Maharaja of Cooch Behar acted as referee, and the Maharaja of Darbhanga Lakshmishwar Singh was made the consulting referee. ‘The decision of the former was, however, binding and it was optional for him to consult the Maharaja of Darbhunga [sic], if he desired.’ ³² The Englishman reported the match as follows:

On receiving the signal, the opponents came immediately to close quarters, and the Native by a dexterous movement succeeded in throwing Cannon on to his knees, a position from which he never recovered himself. The latter appeared indeed, to be unable to obtain a grip of his opponent and the match although protracted to nearly ten minutes, by Cannon’s defence, was practically decided during the first few seconds. Having his opponent virtually at his mercy, Karim Bux appeared in no haste to end the contest. After a considerable interval, during which no effort was made on either side, the Native, gathering himself together, attempted by sheer muscular strength to throw his opponent on to his back. In this first attempt he failed, and Cannon with a determined effort succeeded in engaging his opponent’s neck, but the latter practically slipped through his hands and thus the only chance of retrieving the position was lost. Another attempt on the part of Karim Bux was defeated through the stubborn resistance of his adversary, who, however, secured the throw a minute afterwards with a movement which exhibited not only his great physical strength but bore testimony to his science and skill as a wrestler. ³³

Unsatisfied with the outcome, Cannon offered to wrestle Bux naked, ‘as he would then be on equal terms’. However, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar refused to allow this. ³⁴ At this point, one Captain Duncan Ross, a Scotch wrestler who claimed to hold the World Champion medals for mixed wrestling, and a couple of weeks ago had challenged any man in India for a purse of R1,000 to R5,000 a side, stepped forward into the ring and challenged to wrestle any native champion, either publicly or privately, for R1,000 a side. ³⁵ But his challenge went unaccepted. Many among the spectators pointed out that

Rule 6, stating that the shoulders of the man thrown must both touch the ground, had not been observed. But the Reference Committee were satisfied that it had, and their verdict was confirmed by several native gentlemen, among them the Maharaja of Durbhanga [sic], who said that according to the understood rules of native wrestling it was not necessary that both shoulders should touch the ground to constitute a fall, but that it would be quite sufficient if one shoulder after the other were brought into contact with mother earth.

When a reporter, present there, questioned Tom Cannon on this issue, he said that,

I do not object to the ruling of the referee, but what I say is that I have been unfairly treated. The Indian took hold of me beneath my trunk, thus depriving me of all power and I could do nothing. This was a bit of trickery I was not prepared for; this is not native wrestling; it is artificial, and no European would go for it.

Cannon even showed the reporter ‘the marks on the part of his body in question and how his trunk had been used for the purpose of throwing him over on his back’. ³⁶

The reporter of The Englishman observed that, the ‘general feeling seems to be that Cannon’s match was rather a hollow affair’. ³⁷ The Indian Daily News reporter was also visibly upset with the ‘fiasco’ and was of the opinion that the ‘vexed question of the relative merits of English and Native wrestlers still remains open’. ³⁸ But the native newspapers were condescending. The Indian Mirror, in particular, in its report on the match titled ‘Indian and European Wrestlers’, stated the following:

In the report of the match, published in the Englishman, the event has been described as ‘rather a hollow affair’. That was doubtless so, not because Cannon was no match for Karim Bux, but because no European is a match for a first-class Indian wrestler. Wrestling has been cultivated as a fine art in this country from time immemorial, and it has been rendered into exact science by its professors.… The Maharaja of Cuch Behar [sic], … and the Maharaja of Durbhunga [sic], … can tell Tom Cannon or Captain Duncan Ross and other Europeans that it will be in vain for them to try conclusions with Indian wrestlers, unless and until they sit at the latter’s feet, and become their pupils. As it is, these matches between European and Indian wrestlers will continue to be hollow affairs, and a Karim Bux will always be pinning a Cannon flat on his back. ³⁹

Seemingly miffed by the report, Ross wrote a Letter to the Editor in The Englishman reiterating the challenge he had thrown to the native wrestlers. He argued that ‘Cannon, a first class wrestler in European style, foolishly agreed to meet the Native in his own style and got defeated’. Instead, he put forth three propositions. First, on one week’s notice, he was prepared ‘to throw Karim Bux for a stake of Rs.1,000 ten times within one hour, according to International rules, Scotch, Irish, or American styles’. Or he was willing ‘to throw any six Natives that can be produced on the same conditions within one hour’. Third, he was willing to ‘wrestle any Native in his own style one fall, and one fall European style, the man winning his fall in the shortest time to be declared the winner’. ‘Failing acceptance of any of the above very liberal propositions’, he was prepared ‘to wrestle any Native in his own style, provided’ he was ‘allowed one European representative who thoroughly’ understood ‘the rules of Native wrestling’. ⁴⁰

As the Calcutta public waited for responses to Captain Duncan Ross’s challenge, a verbal duel raged between the native and the pro-European newspapers. Like The Indian Mirror, The Amrita Bazar Patrika was equally moralising in its write-up on the controversial match.

Spurred by the debates raging in the intellectual circles on the nature of, and the difference between, European and Native wrestlers, The Englishman came out with quite a comprehensive write-up on the art of native wrestling and elaborated on the training regimens of the native wrestlers, particularly those serving at princely courts like the Maharajah of Jodhpur. ⁴² Barbara Ramusack has pointed out that ‘participation in certain sports had long been part of kingly dharma in both the indigenous Hindu and the incoming Turkic and Persian traditions’. ⁴³ In the colonial period too, many native princes continued this tradition, and wrestling as a sport was patronised by states such as Aundh, Baroda, Datia, Indore, Jodhpur, Kolhapur and Patiala. ⁴⁴ Alter has argued that ‘[k]ings have kept wrestlers because the physical strength of the wrestler symbolises the political might of the king’. ⁴⁵ ‘The dedication to his calling, the valour, the diet and the exercise regime of a wrestler reflected the political power and the moral virtue of his royal patron. In turn, the status of a prince enhanced the esteem of his wrestlers.’ ⁴⁶

While it is possible to question an instrumental relationship between the symbol of the royal body (or a sponsored wrestler’s physique) and the political might of the ruler, it is not difficult to see that the political symbolism of the wrestler’s body continued to hold popular traction at least among those watching live and among the newspaper reading public. One Indian wrestler who exemplified this relationship and is much talked about in the historiography on wrestling is Gama who won the John Bull World Championship title in 1910 in London and defeated world champions Stanislaus Zbyszko and Jess Petersen in 1928 and 1929, respectively. These matches were organised by Bhupinder Singh, the Maharajah of Patiala in his state. After the 1928 victory, Bhupinder Singh ‘placed his own pearl necklace on the champion, had him ride the prince’s elephant, and awarded a village and an annual stipend to him’. Alter has emphasised that this victory had political implications since ‘Gama and his patron, the maharaja, came to symbolize the possibility of self-determination and independence’. ⁴⁷ As will be seen, Bux’s victory over Cannon in 1891 had similar connotations of a nascent cultural nationalism.

The Bengal Times, a pro-European newspaper, reported that many considered Bux to have bent the rules to secure his victory and suggested that if Cannon’s charge of foul play is correct, ‘Karim Bux should be hissed out of Calcutta’. ⁴⁸ It argued that Europeans ‘insist that Indian systems of wrestling are based upon chicane and brutality; that no Native would have a chance with our champions if scientific rules were adhered to in their integrity’ and that ‘a grip below one’s belt after Karim Bux’s style is savage and unmanly’. ⁴⁹ The European community of Calcutta also supported the cause of Ross. One D. Coats Niven, addressing the native princes of India as shown in Figure 2, reiterated the challenge of Ross, putting forth further propositions on how the challenge match should take place. ⁵⁰ Subsequently, Ross wrote another letter to The Englishman, reiterating the need to settle the issue of ‘European versus Native wrestling’. He even wrote to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, ‘asking His Highness if he proposes to furnish a wrestler to meet’ him ‘in accordance with the challenge of Mr. D. Coates [sic] Niven’. ⁵¹ However, Ross’s challenge went unaccepted, and he left Calcutta on 20 January 1892. ⁵²

Why the native princes or the native wrestlers refused to accept the challenge remains a mystery. But the victory of Karim Bux over Tom Cannon had sparked off multiple debates. As the Morning Post commented,

So much has been written and spoken recently about English champion wrestlers visiting India and trying conclusions with native wrestlers, and so many and varied are the opinions expressed by experts as to the possibility of blending the English and Indian styles in order to form an international code of rules. ⁵³

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Source: The Indian Daily News, 9 January 1892, p. 6.

It is difficult to miss the gender undertones in the way opinions were formulated on either side. The question of what constituted true manhood and fair play was raised on several occasions. Visibly incensed by the praise Bux got from the native dailies, The Bengal Times questioned the native conception of manhood. It called Bux ‘a dastardly cur’ who had committed ‘an act so cowardly, so despicable’ that one would expect ‘every Native of spirit’ to hang their head in shame and ‘feel disposed to hiss Karim Bux as an impostor, a wretch too despicable to be counted as a man’. It argued that ‘[i]n European countries, where manly courage is appreciated, so shameless a poltroon would be driven from men’s society, as a reproach and a disgrace to his sex. Here; in India he is belauded as a hero!’ The newspaper even suggested that most likely the match was fixed, and Cannon had accepted a bribe to lose the match. ⁵⁴

The tremors of the controversy were not restricted to Calcutta and were felt even at the metropole in London. Aziz Ahmad, the editor of Asia (a newspaper published from Britain) wrote a letter to Dadabhai Naoroji, the ‘Grand Old Man’ of Indian nationalism, in which he stated: ‘I am right glad that Kureem Buxsh [sic] the puhluwan [sic] overthrew Tom Cannon. Many overthrows like that are required to take the conceit out of the European’. ⁵⁵ In colonies like Australia, the news of this wrestling match was reported only in March 1892. But like the game of Chinese whispers, the story that was floated had several inaccuracies and the choice of words used in these reports reflect typical stereotyping of Indians. For instance, the Australian Town and Country Journal, in a report titled, ‘“The Champion English Wrestler.”—A Hindoo Conquers Tom Cannon’, referred to Karim Bux as a ‘wily’ and ‘supple Hindoo’ and a ‘Rajput’ from the court of the ‘Maharaja of Jedpore’. ⁵⁶ Another Australian newspaper, the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, later in the same year, even published prophecies by an Indian named Tarini that ‘Karim Bux, the Jodhpur athelete [athlete], will come out victorious in all wrestling matches’. ⁵⁷ Indeed, the Cannon versus Bux match had grabbed its own share of international attention.

The Trials of Duncan Ross

With Cannon having left India and Ross also having left Calcutta, one might have expected the controversy of European versus native wrestling to fade away from public memory. Yet a new twist was added at Cawnpore [Kanpur], where Ross had arrived in February 1892 to take on a local wrestler for ₹500. It was at Cawnpore that Ross, who had been throwing bombastic challenges to the native wrestlers, probably realised that he might have bitten more than he could chew. Despite the grand image building of Ross as the champion of the ‘European cause’, a local amateur native wrestler Ram Doobay from Cawnpore (a Sepoy in the native regiment) caused considerable embarrassment to him in the match, and the champion wrestler was forced to lie prostrate on the ground for an hour and a half. This happened despite the fact that as a concession to Ross, the rules were modified to allow a fall as both shoulder blades touching the ground simultaneously. The Morning Post described Ross’s failings during the match as follows:

Ross merely, stretched himself out on the ground crab-fashion, in which position he laid for an hour and a-half, and being much heavier than his opponent, it was difficult for the latter to turn him over without resort to the perfectly legitimate grip of the langote or waist-cord. This Ross would not permit, for every time the cord was touched, he lost his temper and threatened to break his opponent’s jaw …. On this, Captain Astley, the champion’s umpire, … warned him that if he (Captain Astley) reported Ross’s threats of violence to the referee, the latter would at once decide the contest in favour of the sepoy. After another short period of the monotony which crowned the proceedings throughout, and the patience of the audience being thoroughly exhausted, a hasty conference took place between the referee and the umpires, the result of which was that Ross and the sepoy were asked to leave the arena. Many were the remarks of congratulations by the by-standers which greeted the sepoy for his pluck, endurance, patience, and exceedingly good nature …. ⁵⁸

Immediately after this failed wrestling bout of Ross, a native banker offered to lay him a R1,000 to R500 for fighting a wrestler, who upon hearing of Ross had come to Cawnpore and issued a challenge in the Morning Post. Ross was even offered half the ‘gate’ whether he lost or won and was assured that he would not have to lie on the ground for more than a quarter of an hour at a time. If his opponent failed to turn him over, he would be allowed to get up and begin the match again. Ross agreed to meet the banker at 7 pm at his hotel to settle the deal. However, as reported by the banker, Ross refused to meet that evening and instead asked the banker to call him the following day early morning. When the banker went to Ross’s hotel at 8 am the next day, he found out that Ross had left by the mail to Allahabad and had thus broken the engagement. Indeed, the Morning Post minced no words in its criticism of Ross:

Professional opinion on the subject leans to the belief that Ross is not the wrestler he claims to be, for it should have been the easiest thing in the world for him to dislodge his opponent and rise, if he cared to do so …. It is idle to argue that the English and Indian rules conflict. Here was a powerful, exceedingly muscular man on the ground, face downwards, with a small man on his back. Surely Ross could have pinioned his opponent’s hands and, gathering himself together, thrown him and rose by an catch-as-catch-can movement; but from all accounts, he failed to do either. ⁵⁹

A Calcutta weekly Hope was equally blunt in its criticism of the whole affair. In an article titled, ‘What is Truth?’ the Hope reporter lambasted not just Cannon and Ross for their pompous claims, but even the European community for fussing over such small issues.

The Bengal Times responded to this article of Hope, questioning its journalistic ethics in publishing such articles. Its article titled ‘Truth-Loving Journalism’ advised the native editors to ask themselves ‘if they are self-deceived and blinded by puerile passion, against a race to which they owe their all, past, present and future?’ The reporter went on to state: ‘We have no sympathy either with Cannon or Ross. They are both adventurers, seeking to feather their nests, by means noble or ignoble, as chance might influence, and finding chicanery pay better than honesty, they have adopted it’. It also called the victory of Bux over Cannon as a ‘pitiful falsehood’ and that they could testify that ‘such tall writing as used to appear in Native journals, was never regarded as anything more serious than silly vapouring by men, who, in comparison with true Britons, are as mice to lions’. ⁶¹

While Ross faced defeat and humiliation in north India, his south Indian and Ceylon tour turned out to be his triumphal march back to glory as a champion wrestler or so it seemed. His first stop was at Bangalore, ⁶² followed by Madras ⁶³ and Ceylon. ⁶⁴ He gave successful exhibitions of his skills at each of these places and even managed to defeat the native challengers. So, while in Ceylon, The Bengal Times proudly went on to comment: ‘It is satisfactory to know Duncan Ross is proving himself a man, after his disgraceful exhibition at Cawnpore’. ⁶⁵

Interracial Wrestling Matches and Colonial Politics in the Late Nineteenth-Century India

Way back in 1989, Ann Stoler noted that colonial authority was constructed on a powerful, but false, premise that categories of the coloniser and the colonised were self-evident and easily drawn. ⁶⁶ In reality, she argued, both were historically constructed categories, and hence there was a need to define and redefine the coloniser and the colonised according to changing economic and political imperatives of colonial rule. Indeed, the tensions that prevailed in interracial wrestling matches between British soldiers and native wrestlers and the heated commentary that emerged in the European and native press after the victory of Bux over Cannon was tied to the history of British imperialism in India and its inherent contradictions. In other words, the contours of the diverse reactions to interracial wrestling matches in the late nineteenth-century India were shaped in the context of, what Mrinalini Sinha has referred to as, the ‘imperial social formation’, a category that is inclusive of the British and the Indian. ⁶⁷

It goes without saying that the British empire and its ideology in India was a product of multiple intellectual and political cross-currents, both at the metropole as well as in the subcontinent. ⁶⁸ The context and the content of that ideology, however, were dynamic. The initial period of British rule was characterised by what Gauri Viswanathan would call ‘reverse acculturation’, as the British tried to legitimise themselves in Indian terms. ⁶⁹ Fort William College at Calcutta was established in 1800 in keeping with the political vision of training the East India Company civil servants in Indian languages and traditions. At the same time, the college was meant to prevent the spread of ideas such as freedom and equality held aloft by the French Revolution. Thus, on the one hand, the company studied and glorified the ancient past of India and its people and, on the other hand, they remained upholders of authoritarianism in the colony. Direct political participation by Indians in the governance of their land was rejected by this authoritative paternalism. ⁷⁰ As Thomas Metcalf pointed out, ‘the ideals sustaining the imperial enterprise in India were always shot through with contradiction and inconsistency’ and throughout the Raj, the fundamental idea that informed British conceptions of India and its people, was that of ‘difference’. ⁷¹ This difference was conceptualised not just in terms of history, race and religion but also gender transposed onto the perceived civilisational divide. India and its people were seen in ‘feminine’ terms, as opposed to the ‘masculine’ British.

Charges of effeminacy on the natives by the Europeans had been part of a long stock of ideas since the eighteenth century, when theories of climatic determinism considered heat and humidity to have an enervating and emasculating effect on the human constitution. Robert Orme in his work Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, of the Morattoes and of the English Concerns in Indostan, from the Year 1659, published in 1782, devoted an entire section on the effeminacy of the Indians, calling them ‘the most effeminate inhabitant of the globe’. ⁷² In particular, the Bengalis were often singled out as the most effeminate among the natives, as the charge continued through the nineteenth century. Writing in the early nineteenth century, Thomas Babington Macaulay described the physical organisation of the Bengali as ‘feeble even to effeminacy’, who lived in a constant vapour bath, with sedentary pursuits and whose limbs were delicate and movements languid. ⁷³ Overtime, this charge of effeminacy began to be associated very specifically with Western-educated Indians, a large majority of whom happened to be Bengali Hindus. ⁷⁴ Although these babus, as they came to be called, mimicked English mannerisms, they were considered no more than a poor imitation of the Englishman. ⁷⁵

As the Industrial Revolution progressed in Britain, the Indian markets were linked more closely with the metropole as a consumer of manufactured goods and supplier of raw materials. Ideological currents of Evangelicalism, Utilitarianism and Liberalism required the British to remain permanently in the subcontinent with ‘the noble mission’ to reform India off its barbarism and create brown sahibs. However, the revolt of 1857, which nearly swept off the British rule in India, acted as an important watershed which put brakes on the reformist zeal. The respect for Indian culture and customs was now overshadowed by a more brazenly articulated feeling of superiority of the colonising race in the post-1857 period. Racial sciences in Victorian England too began to privilege physical features and racial purity, over language and other intangible cultural markers. Hence the previous belief that Indian subjecthood was akin to childhood and effeminacy that required tutoring and protection was now replaced by the charge of primitivism. This, as Sekhar Bandhopadhyay noted, in turn, ‘justified imperialism on the arrogant assumption of the superiority of culture’. ⁷⁶ If the emerging Indian middle class of the late nineteenth century aspired to enter the coveted Civil Service, efforts were made to scuttle any attempts at power-sharing with the educated Indians. This included using racial and gender stereotypes such as the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ to exclude the natives. When the Ilbert Bill of 1883, proposed by the liberal Viceroy Lord Ripon, aimed to give jurisdiction to Indian judges over European subjects, it met with vehement protest by the Anglo-Indian and European community on grounds of race and effeminacy of natives. ⁷⁷ Again in 1885, in response to the Russian war scare, when Viceroy Lord Dufferin proposed to increase the strength of the Volunteer force, strong objections were made to the recruitment of ‘effeminate natives’. ⁷⁸ Subsequently, in 1887, the Report of the Public Service Commission to consider the requests of natives for higher and more extensive employment in public service gave very few concessions to native employment in the higher echelons of public administration on the grounds of perceived effeminacy of the natives. ⁷⁹ Even the Indian National Congress (INC) formed in 1885 was looked upon by the British administration as a group of disgruntled babus. Hence, by the late nineteenth century, Indians were amply aware of their subordinated position in the colonial hierarchy.

Tanika Sarkar has argued that ‘manhood’ in a colonial society was also defined through financial solvency and by the nature of relationship to property. ⁸⁰ In that sense, the Bengali middle-class ‘manhood’ was eroded on both these counts in the second half of the nineteenth century when they found themselves restricted to chakri or humble clerical work under British control. ⁸¹ John Rosselli has shown how from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s, gender stereotypes of effeminacy was internalised by the Bengali Hindu elite, who strove to overcome their supposed degeneration and humiliation through the pursuit of physical culture, both Indic and Western. ⁸² There was a deliberate revival of traditional sports such as Indian wrestling and lathi-play, and even taking up of English sports. ⁸³ It was a kind of ‘“purifying” response to the complex situation the English-educated native elite found itself in’. ⁸⁴ Thus, sports became the arena wherein a ‘heavily politicised’, yet ‘veiled strategising’ took place by the Bengali middle class to counter the charge of effeminacy. ⁸⁵ By ‘the 1880s and 1890s … sports rooted in physical culture, which was earlier deemed insignificant, became an integral part of the Indian identity’. ⁸⁶ Interestingly, this coincided with the physical culture movement in Europe and north America though the accompanying social and political significations in the two instances were different. Britain began to be influenced by the athletic and gymnastic movements of the continental nations in the 1830s and 1840s. The 1860s was the era of ‘New Athleticism’ that saw a ‘society-wide organization and codification of games and sports’. ⁸⁷ Bruce Haley in The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture has remarked that ‘the athlete was the new hero’ of the Victorian age. ⁸⁸ ‘Darwinian discourse’ of the period pushed ‘the idea of bodily perfection through physical training and imagined White, Anglo-Saxon males as supreme in the survival of the fittest’. ⁸⁹ In fact, ‘[e]ven the popular imagery of a perfect male body changed’, by the turn of the century. ‘In the 1860s, the middle class had seen the ideal male body as lean and wiry. By the 1890s, however, an ideal male body required physical bulk and well-defined muscles.’ ⁹⁰ Soon ‘the technology of bodybuilding was imagined as a means of reconfiguring masculinity through scientific methods’. ⁹¹ Wrestling too became tremendously popular in the decades prior to the First World War in Europe and north America. Each country could boast of its own top strongman or wrestler. ⁹²

The historiographical ground covered above helps us locate the complex and dynamic ideological context within which the interracial bouts of the late nineteenth century, such as those between Karim Bux and Tom Cannon, took place. Cannon and Ross were products of this era as much as Bux and Doobay. It is noteworthy that Maharajahs Sir Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur, Nripendra Narayan of Cooch Behar and Lakshmishwar Singh of Darbhanga were considered progressive princely rulers within their respective states. During Jaswant Singh II’s reign, the state of Jodhpur attained a degree of prosperity hitherto unknown. It was marked by infrastructural development works in Jodhpur state such as introduction of telegraph, Jodhpur State Railway and roads, and establishment of Courts of Justice and reorganisation of state departments. He was also made a Knight Grand Commander of the Most Eminent Order of the Star of India. ⁹³ On the other hand, Nripendra Narayan established the Brahmo Samaj in his state in 1888, built educational institutions such as Victoria College, established India Club at Calcutta in 1882, founded Nripendra Narayan Hall at Jalpaiguri in 1883 and Anandamayi Dharmasala at Cooch Behar in 1889. ⁹⁴ He also built the botanical garden Narendra Narayan Park at Cooch Behar in 1892. Lakshmishwar Singh, on the other hand, was known for his philanthropic and development works. He was a member of the Legislative Council of the Viceroy and took a leading part in its debates. He provided relief worth £300,000 during the Bihar famine of 1873–74 and invested in infrastructural works in Darbhanga state constructing hundreds of miles of roads, planting thousands of trees for the comfort of travellers and building an elaborate system of irrigation works and dispensaries. Besides this, he built a number of schools of different grades and subsidised a large number of educational institutions. ⁹⁵ Moreover, he was among the princes who made regular and generous contributions to the coffers of the INC. ⁹⁶ In 1888, for the Allahabad Congress session, when the British denied permission for a venue, the Maharaja purchased Lowther Castle to let the INC hold its session. ⁹⁷

All three princely rulers were also sports enthusiasts. Jaswant Singh II is said to have organised a physical exercise competition around 1890 for doing the maximum number of bethaks or free squats, one of the basic exercises in Indian wrestling. It was in this endurance competition that the young Gama, who was only aged 10, emerged victorious and his prodigy was first noticed. ⁹⁸ Nripendra Narayan had interests in multiple sports. He was the foremost patron of cricket in the Bengal province in the 1890s. ⁹⁹ At his own expense, he had maintained no less than three cricket teams. ¹⁰⁰ He also established the Cooch Behar Cup in football for Indian teams in 1893. ¹⁰¹ His wife Sunity Devee noted in her autobiography,

I am sure there can have been few sportsmen to equal my husband. He was a fine polo-player, good at tennis and rackets, and a wonderful shot; while riding, driving, wrestling, and dancing seemed to come naturally to him …. My husband had a great desire to make Indian boys keen about sport, and started football for them at Cooch Behar. ¹⁰²

Lakshmishwar Singh was also fond of sports and horse racing. He maintained a stud for several years, and his triumphs on the turf were remembered even after his death. ¹⁰³ It was against this backdrop that when a British champion challenged the native wrestlers to a match, the three princes came together to take up the challenge.

Nicholas Dirks had argued that princely states under colonialism had been hollowed out and functioned as theatre states. ¹⁰⁴ More recently, several scholars such as Pamela Price, Manu Bhagavan, Ramusack, Aya Ikegame and Janaki Nair have revised this contention and pointed out that princely rulers were not always a puppet of the colonial administration. ¹⁰⁵ The colonial government did restrain princely sovereignty, ‘especially in defence, external affairs and communications’, but the Indian princes ‘taxed their subjects, allocated state revenues, had full criminal and civil judicial powers, maintained internal law and order to varying degrees, patronised traditional and modern cultural activities and institutions, and synthesised elements of rajadharma or indigenous kingly behaviour with those of British models’. ¹⁰⁶ Many of them enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy and resisted colonial control in diverse ways. As Ikegame points out in the case of Mysore, ‘these royal strategies of assertion and empowerment were … inevitably more cultural and social rather than political and economical [sic]’. ¹⁰⁷ In case of the Bux and Cannon match as well, the role of the three princely states of Jodhpur, Darbhanga and Cooch Behar can be interpreted as a form of cultural nationalism which took pride in a native sport with a strong heritage and refused to cow down to a colonial challenger like Cannon. According to Partha Chatterjee, as Indian men found their horizons severely restricted in the colonial public sphere, they turned to other avenues such as the domestic sphere, to express their agency and power. ¹⁰⁸ For Indian princes, sports proved to be one such analogous space that remained relatively free of direct colonial interference. ¹⁰⁹ The Bux versus Cannon wrestling match became an arena of martial, yet non-violent resistance by native princes, who were amply supported by the nationalist press. It was akin to ‘asserting indigenous strength against the might of the colonial state’. ¹¹⁰ This would be seen again in 1928, when the Maharajah of Patiala arranged a match between Gama and the Polish champion Stanislaus Zbyszko and in 1929 between Gama and Jess Petersen. Gama emerged victorious in both the matches, and after the 1929 match, the native spectators erupted shouting, ‘“Victory to Gama,” “Victory to India” and “Victory to the East”’. ¹¹¹ Thus, the native princes provided the ways and means for nationalists to take pride in an indigenous sport, and Indian wrestling became one of the fulcrums of an evolving cultural nationalist identity that was increasingly talking about Swadeshi. ¹¹²

Interestingly, scholars with sharply different vantage points have noted the significance of the ‘cultural’ domain where early assertions of a nationalist identity were concerned. John Plamenatz argued that nationalism was essentially a cultural phenomenon. He defined it as ‘the desire to preserve or enhance a people’s national or cultural identity when that identity is threatened, or the desire to transform or even create it where it is felt to be inadequate or lacking’. ¹¹³ Chatterjee, on the other hand, made a case ‘that the process of the nation’s imagining its own cultural domain of autonomy started long before its political movement began in 1885’. ¹¹⁴ It is significant that the 1891 wrestling controversy in Calcutta happened in the background of the Bengal Renaissance when ‘nationalist consciousness acquired a measure of clarity’ and included taking ‘great pride in the Indian past, especially the high traditions of Hinduism’. ¹¹⁵ Tapan Raychaudhuri has argued that ‘Hindu “revivalism” in the late nineteenth-century Bengal was an extreme example of the psychological need felt by a colonial elite to assert its superiority in relation to the ruling race’. ¹¹⁶ He also noted ‘a new tone of racial bitterness in the nationalist propaganda from 1860s onwards’. In 1864, ‘the vernacular monthly Siksha-darpan o sambad-sar’ edited by Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, even ‘coined the phrase jati-vairita, or racial animosity’. ¹¹⁷ Ashis Nandy, in his work on political cultures in India, argues that the politics from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth can be described as the politics of self-affirmation. ¹¹⁸ ‘In other words’, this was a period of seeking parity with the West, ‘without breaking away from their own historical roots and without accepting the Utilitarian theory of progress’. ¹¹⁹ The suggestion by native publications like The Indian Mirror that the European wrestlers should sit at their native counterparts’ feet and become their pupils reflected a new confidence with which sections of the native media and their readers could identify, appreciate and celebrate components of apparently superior ‘Indian culture’.

Scholars have argued for long that the body was at the heart of the British colonial experience. ¹²⁰ Indeed, ‘the British grounded their authority in the bodily difference between ruler and ruled, thereby ensuring that the body became the central site where racial difference was understood and reaffirmed in British India’. ¹²¹ In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sense of ‘otherness’ was grounded in place and related to differences of climate and disease. ¹²² Even medical science ‘found’ Indian bodies to be constitutionally weaker than the ‘heroic’ Europeans. ¹²³ But the emphasis shifted gradually from ‘place’ to the perceived physical characteristics of ‘race’, which in turn was presumed to be biologically given. ¹²⁴ This was the basis on which the ‘Europeans presented themselves as an ideal physical and racial type which no Indian could match’. ¹²⁵ It was this claim to physical superiority that interracial sporting events brought under stress. Interracial wrestling, in particular, occupied a unique position among sports, as it involved direct bodily contact and contest between the coloniser and the colonised. It entailed a transgression of colonial social boundaries, especially in colonial India where the touching of bodies across race and caste was largely considered taboo and polluting. It was also a test of muscular strength, agility and deftness of the body and mind of the European versus the native. Thus, when the purportedly weak, effeminate and primitive body of the colonised roundly defeated the supposedly stronger, masculine and modern body of the coloniser, it could potentially rattle a few cogs of the colonial regime. Patrick McDevitt has pointed out that hegemony ‘characterised the relationship between British games philosophy and the athletic world of the British Empire’. ‘At the root of this hegemonic resistance were competing senses of what was meant by the cultural construction of manhood prevalent in distinct groups within the Empire.’ ¹²⁶ Thus, when a native wrestler defeated a European champion, what occurred was a disturbance of supposedly ‘natural’ colonial, racial and gender hierarchies. The response of the British press was marked by both disbelief and dismissiveness. Allegations of unfair means, foul play, chicanery and brutality were made. They even went on to attribute Bux’s victory over Cannon to the ‘unscientific’ native rules and savagery that were ‘inimical to true manhood’. Pro-European newspapers called out Cannon and Ross as self-seeking adventurers, ostensibly in an attempt to distance themselves from the ignominy of their defeat at the hands of a native wrestler. In effect, the power of the British or European body had been eroded by the native body. This continued well into the twentieth century in the victories of Ghulam at the Paris Exposition in 1900, Gama in London in 1910, Mohun Bagan team over East Yorkshire Regiment in Calcutta in 1911, Gobor Guha’s victories in America in the 1920s and Gama’s triumphs in 1928 and 1929 in Patiala. It ran parallel with the rise of the Indian nationalist movement in the twentieth century, when under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘reinvented and proudly Indian body’ reasserted itself. ¹²⁷

Conclusion

As William H. Sewell Jr. noted in the context of the fall of Bastille, ‘[a] single, isolated rupture rarely has the effect of transforming structures’. They become ‘transformative historical events’ only ‘when a sequence of interrelated ruptures disarticulates the previous structural network, makes repair difficult, and makes a novel rearticulation possible’. ¹²⁸ In that sense, the interracial wrestling controversies of the late nineteenth century were not transformative historical events by themselves but were part of a sequence of ruptures that challenged the British body and colonial hierarchies. My case study of interracial wrestling matches in the late nineteenth-century colonial India provides a precedent to the early twentieth-century victories of Indian wrestlers like Gama, who became legendary in the annals of Indian wrestling by defeating European and American champions in 1910, 1928 and 1929. It points to the possibility that several such histories of interracial wrestling matches are yet to be recovered from the archives, especially from vernacular sources, as pointed out by Majumdar. ¹²⁹ It also provides a nineteenth-century precedent to well researched and much talked about interracial sporting events like Jack Johnson’s victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910 and the Mohun Bagan football victory of 1911 over East Yorkshire Regiment.

The wrestling controversy of 1891 is yet another instance of how colonialism and its hierarchies were highly contested terrains not just in the political but also in the sporting arena from the late nineteenth century itself. The match was preceded by controversies over the Ilbert Bill in 1883, the Native Volunteer Movement in 1885, recruitment to the Public Service Commission in 1886 and the Age of Consent debate of 1891. The simmering anti-colonial tensions found an outlet in the challenge offered to Cannon. The match also showed how native princes used sports to leverage their limited political and economic sovereignty and how the princely initiatives at anti-colonial resistance could be manifested in cultural and social realms. Furthermore, it revealed that sports provided a common ground where anti-colonial and nationalist feelings of both native princes and native elite could converge. An interracial wrestling match was not just about two wrestlers duking it out in the ring. Rather it became akin to two nationalities clashing for supremacy and a question of race and gender pride for the coloniser and the colonised, making the wrestling arena a kind of microcosm of colonial politics. Yet it is difficult to miss the overlap of cultural signifiers between the colonial articulation of superior strength and the nationalist counter-claims: both used symbols of muscular power and masculinity as a touchstone of their respective strength.