Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the cultural time-space of “indigenous” wrestlers (hindi/bengali: “pehalwaan”/ “kushtigir”) of central and north Kolkata of West Bengal. The data upon which this paper built is an ethnography, conducted through participant observation, semi-structured interviews and narrative interviews with the members of different wrestling pits and communities (akhara). I approach both my data collection and analysis by streamlining into a number of specialised areas, addressing key sociological concepts and issues both within the existing scholarship, as well as the specific concepts that govern my field. This paper, at its core, aims to ask how the wrestlers embody a culture intersected with and interplayed upon by class, religion and gender identity. This needs an inquiry into the history of the particular sport, the evolution of its ritualised practices, space within which it is conducted, and finally the attempts to disseminate of a culture that is continuously suspended within the opposing forces of memory and forgetting. Through this dissertation, I also intend to study how wrestlers organize and make sense of their “selves” and social worlds through shared cultural schemas, which are, to quite an extent informed by discourses of the colonial history of Bengal and masculinity, notwithstanding class identity and religious sentiments. , The paper shows how the sport and space where the wrestlers practice, become more than just an area of physical exercise and contestation, undertaking to a large extent the role of forging solidarities between identities that otherwise are historically ridden with conflict and tension.