The wrestling done in an Indian akhara today has a paper trail that runs back at least three thousand years and through three different ruling powers, picking up a Persian vocabulary and a golden age along the way. It starts as mallayuddha, combat-wrestling named in the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, putting Indian wrestling in at least the first millennium BCE.1 It survives the medieval courts, absorbs Persian pahlavāni under the Mughals, and explodes into its classical form under the Marathas in the 17th century. The continuity is the point: the pahalwān today "practices the same physical exercise program that he has for centuries."2
This page is the lineage — not the myth, the history — of how a martial tradition stayed unbroken across millennia and three empires, and what each layer added to it.
The history runs in four layers.
The ancient root: mallayuddha. The earliest written sources concern mallayuddha (or mallavidyā), the combat-wrestling ancestor of kushtī, named in both the 7th-c-BCE Rāmāyaṇa and the 3rd-c-BCE Mahābhārata.3 The word Malla — which became synonymous with "wrestler" — was the name of a 7th-c-BCE tribe renowned for fighting skill.4 The 12th-c Mānasollāsa of King Someśvara contains a "Mallavinoda" chapter on training court wrestlers, describing submission-grappling in a pit before a shrine to Kṛṣṇa.5 The most complete manuscript is the 16th-c Mallapurāṇa, a justification of the wrestling lifestyle of the Jyesthimallas ("great fighters"), a 13th-c sub-caste of brahmins who practiced Vajramuṣṭi (thunderbolt-fist, a style with strikes from a knuckle-duster) until the 1980s.6
The court layer. Every medieval Indian court kept wrestlers; champions were "a symbol of the health of the king and the kingdom."7 As Sengupta puts it, "wrestling could make or break the reputation of kings... in its training for both mind and body lay a whole moral and ethical universe."8
The Mughal/Persian layer. Under Muslim rule the native tradition mixed with Persian pahlavāni/koshti wrestling and took on Iranian terminology — pahalwān (hero/champion) became synonymous with the native kushtī-gīr (belt-seizer).9 The Mughals gathered wrestlers from Mongolia to Persia, and the Iranian epic hero Rostam remains a culture-hero in Indian Muslim akharas.10 They also used the military labour market, employing wrestling peasantry for their armies and lifting enlisted peasant wrestlers above their station.11
The Maratha golden age. The golden era began at the end of Mughal rule in the 17th century, set in motion by the Hindu saint Śrī Samarth Ramdas Svāmī, spiritual tone-setter for the Maratha Empire (1674–1818).12
The mechanism that makes this history more than a list is the braiding of two streams — and it happens because of where each one survived.
Under Mughal rule in North India, Hinduism was suppressed, and the traditional mallayuddha style survived "in the south (outside of Mughal rule)."13 Meanwhile the North developed the Persian-influenced pahlavāni. Then, with the Maratha reinvigoration, the two met: "the traditional mallayudda style, which had survived in the south... blended with Persian pahlavāni to become the kushtī that is known today."14 Modern kushtī is literally a weld of the indigenous southern survival and the northern Persian import — two streams that ran separately under empire and braided together in the reclamation.
The braid was held together by religion and ethics. The Persian layer brought jawānmardī ("young manliness"): physical perfection as a sign of inner beauty, a disciplined regime, service to community, humility, courage — "while ethics were already part of wrestling, jawānmardī codified it."15 And Ramdas, considered an incarnation of Hanumān, installed Hanumān in the Maharashtran akharas, popularized the Sūrya Namaskār (performing 1200 daily), and made Maharashtra "the heartland of kushtī to this day."16 The akhara routine of his period — "running, dāṇḍs, bēṭhaks, mallakambh, wrestling, and heavy club swinging" — is "almost unchanged" now.17 So the history's deep logic is: a martial practice survives by becoming a spiritual-ethical practice. The thing that carried wrestling across three thousand years and three empires wasn't its combat utility — armies came and went — but its fusion with devotion and morality, which gave it a reason to persist that outlasted any patron.
This page is the historical spine the whole genealogical cluster hangs on. It supplies the wrestling-is-yoga thesis its documented continuity (the "unbroken thousand-year" claim, here grounded in datable texts). It feeds the akhara-genealogy page its chain of custody — Ramdas's Sūrya Namaskār is the link to the Raja of Aundh. It gives the Akhara its founding moment (Ramdas and the Maharashtran heartland). And it grounds the Yadav wrestling heritage in concrete dynastic history.
The most historically illuminating detail in the chapter is the military labour market, and it's worth deconstructing because it explains how a peasant sport became a path of social mobility — and why it eventually declined.
Under the Mughals, wrestling wasn't just entertainment; it fed the army. The Mughals "utilised the military labour market, employing the wrestling countryside peasantry for their armies," and "through this, the enlisted peasant wrestlers were lifted above their station as rural labourers."18 A village wrestler could become a soldier and rise above the station he was born to. Wrestling was, in effect, a credential — a demonstrable physical capability that could be cashed in for military employment and upward mobility. This is why "a born wrestler was a born king," and why Emma Flatt records that "wrestling, rather than skill in weaponry, was the test of superior strength."19 The pit was a meritocratic ladder in a rigidly hierarchical society.
And then the ladder broke. "The military labour market thrived until late in British rule when the standing army was established."20 Once the British built a professional standing army, the freelance peasant-wrestler-soldier had nowhere to sell his capability. The economic engine that had sustained wrestling as a path of mobility was switched off. Wrestling was still encouraged among soldiers, but its function as a career ladder was gone — and this is the quiet beginning of the decline the book's Afterword later mourns.
The case study reveals something the romance obscures: wrestling persisted for two millennia partly because it paid — it was an economic institution, a labour market, a route up, not only a spiritual discipline. The vault notes the boundary: this economic history is solid and Sengupta/Flatt-grounded, while Billinge's framing tends to spiritualize the whole tradition and underplay the market logic that actually carried it. Both are true — the pit was a temple and a hiring hall.
You want to understand how any practice survives across centuries and regime-changes — and the kushtī history is a model you can apply. Here's the reading, in three moves.
First, find where it survived the lean years. Kushtī's southern survival under Mughal suppression is the key fact — traditions don't die uniformly; they retreat to a refuge where the hostile power doesn't reach, and wait.21 So when you're tracing any endangered practice, the question isn't "did it survive?" but "where did it survive, in what protected pocket, while the center was hostile?" The refuge is where the authentic strand is kept.
Then watch what it absorbed from its conqueror. Kushtī didn't survive pure — it took on Persian vocabulary, the jawānmardī ethic, Rostam as a hero.22 Living traditions don't resist absorption; they digest it, taking the conqueror's contributions into themselves. So the second move is to see what foreign material got braided in during the occupation — and to stop treating that material as contamination. The Persian layer is now indistinguishable from the "native" tradition because the tradition ate it and made it its own.
And third, find the economic engine. Kushtī survived because it paid — the military labour market made it a ladder, not just a love.23 Every long-surviving practice has an engine that makes its continuation worthwhile to enough people, and when that engine switches off (the standing army), the practice starts to die even if nothing about its spirit changed. So the third move is to ask: what actually pays the people who keep this alive — and is that engine still running? The romance of a tradition will never tell you; you have to find the labour market underneath it.
The tradition's continuity fails in two recognizable ways.
Losing the refuge — uniform exposure. A tradition dies when it has no protected pocket to retreat to under pressure — when the hostile power reaches everywhere and there's no "south" outside its rule. The sign is a practice with no refuge, fully exposed to the dominant culture, with nowhere the authentic strand can be kept while the center is hostile. Kushtī survived precisely because the Mughals didn't reach the south; a tradition with no such refuge has nowhere to wait out the lean years.
Losing the labour market — the spiritualized husk. The mirror failure, and the one the Afterword grieves: the economic engine that made the practice a viable path switches off (the standing army replaces the wrestler-soldier), and the practice becomes "pure" spirituality with no material reason for the young to enter it. The sign is exactly the Afterword's diagnosis — "young men less interested in the life of the pahalwān," the tradition dying not from spiritual failure but because it no longer leads anywhere a young man can live on.24 A practice sustained only by its romance, with no ladder underneath, is already dying; it just hasn't finished yet.
The historical material is well-sourced and among the more verifiable in the book — the mallayuddha textual attestations (Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata, Mānasollāsa, Mallapurāṇa), the Mughal/Persian braiding, the Maratha golden age, and the military labour market are drawn from real history and real scholarship (Sengupta's Enter the Dangal, Flatt's Young Manliness).25 Dates and dynasties are concrete and checkable.
The tensions are interpretive rather than factual. Billinge's framing spiritualizes a history that was also deeply economic and political — the military labour market and court-patronage logic show that kushtī survived as much by paying as by devotion, which the spiritual framing underplays. And the "unbroken since the first millennium BCE" claim, while genuinely supported by the textual record for wrestling, slides (as elsewhere) toward implying an unbroken metaphysical system, which is the perennialist reach.
Open question: the military labour market sustained kushtī for centuries and its loss began the decline. Is the modern revival of "traditional" physical culture (the global interest in mace-swinging, the akhara aesthetic) building a new economic engine — content, coaching, the wellness market — that could sustain the practice the way the labour market once did? Or is a tradition without a real ladder underneath it always just being curated toward death?
Sengupta and Flatt both document wrestling as more than sport, but Sengupta sees a moral universe and Flatt sees a credential, and the difference matters. Sengupta's line — "in its training for both mind and body lay a whole moral and ethical universe" — frames kushtī as a total way of life, a self-contained cosmos of value.26 Flatt's — "wrestling, rather than skill in weaponry, was the test of superior strength," the basis on which "a born wrestler was a born king" — frames it as a qualifying examination, the medieval Deccan's measure of who deserved to rule.27 Sengupta's wrestling is an end in itself; Flatt's is an instrument of social sorting. The convergence is that both see wrestling carrying weight far beyond athletics. The tension is whether that weight is intrinsic (a moral universe, valuable in itself) or instrumental (a credential, valuable for what it qualifies you for) — and the answer is both, which is exactly why the tradition survived: it was simultaneously a path to God (Sengupta's universe) and a path to a job and a throne (Flatt's credential). Billinge wants Sengupta's intrinsic reading and tends to mute Flatt's instrumental one, but the page keeps both, because a tradition that was only a moral universe wouldn't have needed the military labour market to sustain it — and the loss of the instrumental engine is precisely what's killing the moral universe now.
Plainly: this is a case study in how a discipline survives across hostile regimes — by finding a refuge, digesting its conquerors, and riding an economic engine — which connects to how strategic institutions persist and how a craft sustains itself across generations.
History: colonial counter-formation (if absent, Warrior Practice Template) — Kushtī's survival-by-southern-refuge under Mughal suppression, then its braiding with the conqueror's pahlavāni, is a textbook case of how a subjugated tradition both resists and absorbs its occupier. The insight the wrestling history adds: the "native" tradition that emerges from occupation is already a hybrid — modern kushtī is indigenous-south plus Persian-north, welded in the reclamation — so the search for a pure pre-colonial original is a mistake; the living tradition is the digestion of its conquerors. Authenticity, in a tradition that survived empire, means the successful absorption, not the impossible purity.
Behavioral Mechanics: Authority and Composure — "A born wrestler was a born king" — wrestling as the credential that qualified a man to rule (Flatt) — is a study in how demonstrable physical capability converts into legitimate authority. The military labour market shows the conversion mechanism: visible, testable strength lifts a peasant above his station because it can't be faked and the society agreed to read it as merit. The insight: the most durable authority-credentials are the ones that are publicly testable and hard to fake — wrestling worked as a ladder precisely because anyone could watch you win in the pit, and the moment the standing army made that capability uncashable, the ladder collapsed. Authority built on a testable credential lasts exactly as long as there's a market that will still cash the credential in.
The Sharpest Implication
The thing keeping your tradition alive probably isn't its spirit — it's its ladder, and you've stopped looking at the ladder. Kushtī survived three thousand years and three empires not mainly because it was holy but because it paid: it was a military labour market, a route up, a credential a peasant could cash for a soldier's place above his station. The moment the British built a standing army and the ladder broke, the decline began — even though nothing about the wrestling's spirit had changed. The destabilizing implication is that every practice you love and want to see survive has an economic engine underneath the romance, and the romance is structurally incapable of telling you when that engine has switched off. You'll keep feeling the spirit, keep believing the tradition is healthy, while the actual reason young people entered it quietly disappears — and by the time the decline is visible in the Afterword, the labour market has been dead for a generation. So the real question about anything you want to preserve isn't "is its spirit intact?" It's "what's the ladder, and is it still standing?"
Generative Questions
The Iranian košti is not merely like kushti — it is the same word, the same belt-wrestling, the culmination the zurxāne's exercises feed. Billinge's Book 2 adds three things this history's Persian-braiding anticipates: (1) košti (the wrestling) is the same word as the Zoroastrian kustī, the sacred waist-thread — the fighting-belt is the religious girdle; (2) the Šahnāme's Bahrām Gur wrestles in an ezār "much like a langot... still worn by Indian wrestlers today," a bout "reminiscent of the ancient Indian style of mallayuddha"; (3) the title "Rustam-i Hind" ("Rostam of India") named the Indian national wrestling champion until 1947 — the Iranian hero naming the Indian champion. Both sit in the wider Indo-European belt-wrestling family (glíma, schwingen, sumo, ssireum, the Greek belt-pālē Thucydides records). (Book 2 — Zurxāne; košti=kustī and the IE cognates documented.)