The Great Gama, India’s Forgotten Wrestling Legend

Training and diet
The daily exercise routine for Gama at that age, besides the 500 bethaks, included 500 dands or ‘jack-knifing pushups’ and regular pit digging. The exercise involved the hard-pressed earth of the arena being dug up with the use of a heavy pharsa, which itself weighed 20 to 30 kilograms. He was also fed on a diet of milk, almond and fruits, with meat and butter being introduced only when he turned 15 years old. The win at Jodhpur had spread his fame far and wide, and Gama was now invited to wrestle India’s most accomplished wrestlers, but only started wrestling competitively when he was 15 years old.

The young wrestler quickly proved his mettle and showed himself to be unbeatable, owing to which he was inducted as a formal wrestler in the court of Datiya. Gama’s guides Ida Pahalwan, Madhu Singh and Mohammed Baksh now added meat and butter to his diet, along with a boiled down gelatinous extract of bones, joints and tendons called yakhni, regarded by many Muslim wrestlers as being a source of great strength. His training regiment included 3,000 bethaks, 1,500 dands and a one mile run everyday wearing a 120 pound stone ring around his neck while the daily diet now consisted of twenty litres of milk, half a litre of clarified butter, four kilograms of fruit and three-fourths of a kilogram of butter.

This training seems to have been so legendary that the city of Baroda has put a 1,200 kg stone on display, said to have been lifted by the wrestler on his chest when he had come to Baroda to attend a wrestling competition in 1902. Gama had defeated all the contemporaries of the age such as Ghulam Mohiuddin of Datia, Partab Singh of Baroda and Ali Baba Sain of Indore. The only Indian wrestler who remained undefeated at the hands of Gama at the time was Rahim Sultaniwalla. The rivals had met three times before 1910, with the close contest ending in a draw with no clear winner, with one match even going on for three hours.

Conquering the world before the country

A 1910 England tour for Indian wrestlers organised by a wrestling promoter called R.B.Benjamin caught the fascination of the local press, with one British tabloid labeling it ‘The Invasion of the Indian Wrestlers’. While initially disqualified from performing, the persistence of Gama’s managers saw him circumventing the rules of the competition, where he would issue an open challenge to all the leading wrestlers of the time — such as Frank Gotch, now considered the father of American Wrestling, Polish Legend Stanislaus Zbyszko, ‘Russian Lion’ Georges Hackenschmidt, and Japanese Judo great Taro Miyake.

Gama is said to have defeated an American Champion named Benjamin Roller in under three minutes as well as thirty Japanese wrestlers, which prompted the organisers of the competition to give him his match against the reigning world champion Stanislaus Zbyszko. The day of the match saw the shorter and lighter Gama shock Stanislaus with his strength, leaving Stanislaus to hold his ground on the mat for the rest of the match to avoid defeat. The match was called off at dusk with a rematch scheduled for the next day, and as luck would have it, Stanislaus never showed up for the rematch. Gama was declared the world champion by default, earning the prestigious title of Rustam-e-Zamana.

Curiously, Gama had been crowned the world champion without ever winning the national championship. Having been patronised by Bhupinder Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala, upon his arrival, Gama now sought a match with his old rival Rahim Sultaniwalla. In what is regarded as one of the most famous wrestling bouts in Indian history, Gama defeated Rahim in 1912 in Allahabad in the presence of a 50,000 spectators including India’s royal princes and overseas guests. Gama had now become Rustam-E-Hind.

This glorious wrestler, once again, encountered Stanislaus in 1928 at the behest of Bhupinder Singh in Patiala where a massive stadium was put in place for a crowd of 50,000, with some reports putting the finally tally of audience at a 1,00,000. The 50-year-old Gama faced Stanislaus in a very short contest, said to last only for 42 seconds, where Gama emerged triumphant yet again. His last professional bout came in 1929 against Swedish wrestler Jesse Peterson, where he ensured that his career ended with him undefeated.

Joseph Alter states that in all the accounts of the wrestler that he had studied, Gama was always presented as, “being not only strong and skillful, but also supremely honest, hard working, pious and forthright.” After his victory over Stanislaus in 1928, the world champion refused to board Bhupinder Singh’s car, opting to simply walk with a procession of his fans cheering behind him. When Gama and Iman were put in jail in the 1920s, he refused to provide names of his enemies to the warden stating ,”I have no enemies in this world. If you think that I would bring down someone else in order to save myself, you are wrong. I am your prisoner, do with me what you will.”

Thus lies the story of Gama — the undefeated wrestler, a model hero to an oppressed nation and one of India’s greatest forgotten sports icons.

The truly remarkable feat lies in the fact that Gama only retired in the early 40s, still ready for a match but having no opponents, though some believe that the only person who could have ever defeated Gama was his own brother Imam. The partition of India saw Gama opting to stay in Pakistan until his death in Lahore in 1963, after having lived a remarkable career that very few can recollect now.