Two Wrestling Traditions Joined Under the Mughals

Pehlwani, also called kushti, is the wrestling tradition of India and Pakistan, formed historically from the fusion of an older indigenous Indian wrestling practice, malla yuddha, attested in Sanskrit sources and Hindu religious literature well before the medieval period, with Persian wrestling technique and training methodology brought into South Asia under Mughal rule, a synthesis reflected in the sport's very name, kushti deriving from the Persian word for wrestling, layered directly on top of an older Indian martial and religious inheritance rather than replacing it. The akhara, the earthen wrestling pit and training compound at the heart of pehlwani, functions as far more than a gymnasium, governed by codes of discipline covering diet, celibacy or marital restraint, and daily devotional practice that wrestlers, pehlwans, are expected to observe as integral to serious training, a total way of life the tradition treats as inseparable from technical wrestling skill, echoing the same pattern of physical training bound tightly to moral and religious discipline found across several of the martial traditions catalogued alongside it.