MALKHAMB - SHIVAJI PARK

This article appeared originally in Mumbai Mirror, of the Times Of India group.

MALKHAMB MANIA

Shivaji Park plays homage to this ancient art and sport... everyday...

A ten year old girl darts dashingly up a hanging cotton rope, gripping it with tiny hands and toes. Tying it around her knees in a flash, she checks her ponytail. And then swings up side down to celebrate her victory over gravity with a air-borne split against a sapphire sky... and an extended grin at the photographer's lens. A ten year old boy ascends a wooden pole to raise himself above it with just his hands, as he elegantly places one leg behind his head, extending the other before him. Malkhamb, the legend goes, came to Maharashtrian wrestler Balambhatt Dada Deodhar some centuries ago in a dream where Lord Hanuman told him to use a pole to invent and perfect wrestling technique, enabling him to defeat two of India's most feared contestants. Today a gymnastic sport in itself, it seems to continue revelling divine benefaction as small children from middleclass households perform Vanar like feats.

For middle class, is what Shivaji Park commemorates every evening, with a vast verdant expanse of land, spread over with people from varying age-groups, but similar income brackets. The sincere citizens (tiny, young and old) seek their daily contentment doses from football, cricket, judo, karate or just the evening walk. The Shree Samarth Vyayam Mandir imparting Malkhamb on one corner of the park, sometimes takes that contentment a threshold further, into ecstasy. Now Uday Deshpande, befittingly bespectacled and bearded secretary of the Vyayamshala, climbs the rope himself to demonstrate a posture to the students. Scaling it easily amid dialogue, he twirls the rope around him to let it pass over a thigh and be held between his toes. Then reclining mid-air as if on an invisible floating drawing room couch, he continues to tete-a-tete from where he'd left off. "Malkhamb evolves from Malla meaning wrestler and Khamb meaning pole," the man, who's also Secretary of the Malkham Federation Of India, tells us: "The idea initially being to wrestle against a pole as an opponent who was taller and stronger." Even as he says this, two boys place one foot under the vertical pole and another on it, to extend themselves horizontally, forming body As parallel to the ground. The Malkhamb they perform on stands on 4 fragile looking glass bottles, each placed on a stool supported even more precariously by four other glass bottles. And this is supposed to be everybody's sport? "I teach at three blind schools and have had among my pupils a 75 year old man, army personnel, the overweight, the emaciated, theatre and film artists, British circus performers and handicapped and mentally challenged children," smiles Deshpande self-assuredly. But self-assurance trails into modest embarrassment as he remembers being christened "the real Debraj Sahai (the 'teacher' in Black)" by film legend Amitabh Bachchan at a Malkhamb performance by blind children. So what makes Bajrang Bali's boon so user-friendly? Newcomers are initiated gradually by first ridding them of their fear, then teaching them to grip the pole or rope with their palms, toes and thighs. "These muscles have to be toned to work laterally and not vertically like in an average sport," informs the instructor who's instructed many a student to winning the national championship. A teenage beginner's grunt as he scrambles up the wooden Malkhamb confirms this. "Then comes bending forward and backward… and the gymnastic yoga," Deshpande murmurs on, correcting the boy's posture. Three girls climb up the rope in synchrony, entwining it around their thighs, mocking superman with yogic Padmasanas seven feet above ground as Deshpande lists the most intricate elements: "There's somersaulting and releasing the rope or Malkhamb to catch it again, and the Gal-Faas – tying a knot around your neck and holding the noose under your chin rather than the neck." Barring these advanced maneuvers, "Malkhamb distinguishes itself from gymnastics by the minimum risk involved as a result of no 'free' aerial movement".

It's also a great deal cheaper: "Where western gymnastics needs 6 apparatuses and mattresses which themselves cost Rs 3,00,000, we only need a stand to hang a rope from and two malkhambs of different heights." And hence the meagre Rs *** per month fee which bequeaths the Ramayana hero's legacy to all classes. Deshpande calmly denounces the fact that the sport eludes the recognition availed of by games of foreign origin – think from cricket to tae kwon do – "due to no grants from the Central Government and the absence of any able marketing". Perhaps. But perhaps such able marketers would pursue precedent to breed game with commerce, spawning so many good centres which are ridiculously expensive, and cheap centres which are incompetent. As the Guru's Shishyas wrap up with Surya Namaskars, Deshpande introduces Manju Bardhan, a Bengali who's children have "practically grown up at the Vyayam Mandir". "My children have found more than sport here," Bardhan beams echoing Deshpande's calm confidence. "They've found a culture. People call it a Maharashtrian culture. But now it's ours."