Imam Bakhsh Pehlwan

Imam Bakhsh was born in the early 1880s in Punjab, then part of British India, into a family of professional wrestlers of Kashmiri origin that had served princely courts for generations ^[1]. His father, Muhammad Aziz Bakhsh, was a court wrestler attached to the ruler of Datia, a small princely state in central India, and the family's standing depended on the strength and skill its men could display in the pit ^[2]. Anyone asking who was Imam Bakhsh Pehlwan must begin here, with a household in which wrestling was not a pastime but a hereditary occupation, a source of income, honour, and identity.

His elder brother Ghulam Muhammad Bakhsh, later known to the world as the Great Gama, was only a few years his senior, and the two boys trained together from childhood ^[1]. Their father died while they were still young, and the brothers were brought up within the extended family of wrestlers, passing into the care of relatives who continued their instruction in the akhara, the traditional training ground ^[2]. The regimen was severe by any standard: thousands of daily repetitions of the bethak (deep squat) and dand (jackknife push-up), long hours of digging and grappling in the soft earth of the pit, and a heavy diet built around milk, ghee, and almonds ^[3].

The Maharaja of Datia took the orphaned brothers under his patronage, as Indian princes commonly did with promising wrestlers, providing food, lodging, and the leisure to train full time ^[2]. By his late teens Imam Bakhsh had grown into a powerful heavyweight, and he began appearing at the great dangals, the open wrestling tournaments held at fairs and princely celebrations across northern India, where reputations were made and lost in a single afternoon ^[1].

Through the first decade of the twentieth century the two brothers rose together, and contemporaries often described them as the strongest pair of siblings the Indian pit had produced ^[2]. Gama attracted the greater fame after his celebrated 1895 encounter with the reigning champion Raheem Bakhsh Sultani Wala, but Imam Bakhsh built his own record against the leading pehlwans of Punjab, the United Provinces, and the princely states ^[1]. Chroniclers of Indian physical culture writing in the 1940s ranked him among the very best men of his generation, some judging his technique to be sharper and more varied than his brother's, even if Gama possessed the greater raw power ^[2].

The wrestling world the brothers inhabited was organised around princely patronage. Rulers of states such as Datia, Patiala, and Indore maintained stables of wrestlers and staged matches against rival courts, and a champion's victories reflected directly on his patron's prestige ^[3]. Imam Bakhsh wrestled under these arrangements for most of his career, moving between courts as patronage shifted, and his bouts at major dangals drew crowds in the tens of thousands ^[1].

Among the Imam Bakhsh Pehlwan facts most often repeated by later writers is his reputation as a master of daav-pech, the named holds and counters of kushti. Where many heavyweights relied on bulk and stamina, he was known for speed off the mark and for finishing matches quickly, a style that made him a favourite of connoisseurs of the art ^[2].

In 1910 a Bengali promoter arranged for a small party of Indian wrestlers to travel to London and challenge the professional champions of Europe and America. Gama headed the group, and Imam Bakhsh accompanied him, along with the wrestlers Ahmed Bakhsh and Gamu ^[4]. The tour was conceived as a demonstration that Indian kushti could stand against Western catch-as-catch-can wrestling, then enjoying a boom in the music halls of Britain.

The Indians initially struggled to secure matches. Gama issued an open challenge from the stage of the Alhambra Theatre, offering to throw any three wrestlers in thirty minutes, and the British sporting press treated the visitors first with curiosity and then, as results came in, with respect ^[4]. Gama's victories over the American Benjamin Roller and his famous draw and later engagements with the world champion Stanislaus Zbyszko made headlines, and Imam Bakhsh appeared on the same bills, taking on and defeating Western professionals in the supporting matches ^[4].

Accounts of the tour in the physical culture press of the day recorded that the younger brother handled his opponents with the same ease that Gama showed, and some observers who watched both men train reckoned that Imam Bakhsh was scarcely inferior to the champion himself ^[4]. The London expedition became a landmark in the history of South Asian sport, and for the rest of his life Imam Bakhsh carried the prestige of having beaten European professionals on their own ground ^[1].

After the return from England, the brothers stood at the head of Indian wrestling for more than two decades. Gama held the title Rustam-e-Zaman, champion of the world, following his defeat of Zbyszko, while Imam Bakhsh earned the title Rustam-e-Hind, champion of India, the highest honour available within the subcontinent's wrestling hierarchy ^[2]. The titles were not awarded by any single governing body but were conferred through victory at recognised championship dangals and confirmed by public acclaim and princely endorsement ^[3].

Any fair accounting of Imam Bakhsh Pehlwan achievements must note the depth of the field he dominated. The early twentieth century is remembered as the golden age of kushti, when the pits of Amritsar, Lahore, and the princely capitals produced an extraordinary concentration of talent, and holding the Indian championship in that era meant turning back challenge after challenge from formidable rivals ^[1]. Writers on Indian physical culture recorded that he remained effectively unbeaten in serious competition through his prime years ^[2].

Within the wrestling community his standing rested on more than titles. He served as a trainer and elder of the family stable, drilling the next generation in the exercises and holds he had mastered, and his judgement on technical questions carried the weight of final authority in the akharas connected to the family ^[3]. In the oral tradition of pehlwani, where lineages of teachers matter as much as lists of victories, his name became a fixed point of reference ^[1].

Imam Bakhsh married within the community of hereditary wrestling families, as was customary, and raised his sons from infancy for the pit ^[3]. Five of them became champions in their own right: Bholu, Azam, Aslam, Akram, and Muhammad (known as Goga), collectively famous in Pakistan as the Bholu brothers ^[5]. Bholu Pehlwan, the eldest, held the title Rustam-e-Pakistan for decades and was widely regarded as the finest wrestler the new country produced, while Akram, called Acchu, later fought the celebrated 1976 Karachi bout against the Japanese star Antonio Inoki ^[5].

The household ran on the discipline of the akhara. Contemporary and later accounts describe Imam Bakhsh as an exacting teacher who supervised his sons' diet, sleep, and training personally, applying to them the same regimen he and Gama had endured as boys ^[3]. The family observed the traditional code of the pehlwan: simple living, devotion to practice, and abstention from anything thought to sap strength or concentration ^[3].

He remained close to Gama throughout their lives. The brothers trained together, seconded one another at matches, and after 1947 lived near one another in Lahore, where visitors described the ageing champions receiving guests and reminiscing about the great dangals of their youth ^[1]. The bond between them is a recurring theme in every Imam Bakhsh Pehlwan biography, since neither career can be told apart from the other.

The Partition of India in 1947 divided the world of Punjabi wrestling along with everything else. Imam Bakhsh, like Gama, left Amritsar for Pakistan and settled in Lahore, the city that became the centre of Pakistani pehlwani ^[5]. The move cost the family its old princely patronage, which had already been weakening as the princely states declined, and the wrestlers of the new country came to depend on public gate money and government recognition instead ^[3].

In Lahore he withdrew from competition and devoted himself to managing his sons' careers, which flourished spectacularly. Through the 1950s and 1960s the Bholu brothers held every major Pakistani title, and their matches filled stadiums in Lahore and Karachi ^[5]. Imam Bakhsh presided over the family akhara as its patriarch, and journalists who covered Pakistani wrestling in those years treated his presence at ringside as a link to the sport's heroic past ^[5].

His final years were quiet. Gama died in Lahore in 1960 after a long illness, leaving Imam Bakhsh as the last survivor of the generation that had gone to England in 1910 ^[4]. Published accounts differ on the precise date of his own death, a common problem with wrestlers of his era whose births and deaths were never formally registered, but he died in Lahore, most accounts placing his death in the 1970s ^[1].

Imam Bakhsh occupies an unusual place in the memory of South Asian sport: a champion of the first rank whose fame was partly absorbed by the still greater fame of his brother. Historians of Indian physical culture have worked to correct the balance, pointing out that his record in the pit and his reputation among fellow professionals placed him at the very top of his profession ^[2]. In the akharas of Lahore and Amritsar his name is still invoked alongside Gama's as a standard of what the old training could produce ^[3].

His most durable achievement was dynastic. Through his sons, and later his grandsons, the family line dominated Pakistani wrestling into the 1980s, and the fame of the Bholu brothers rested openly on the foundation their father had built ^[5]. When Pakistani commentators mourn the decline of kushti today, the era they look back to is the one his household created ^[5].

For students of sports history, the answer to what Imam Bakhsh Pehlwan is famous for reaches beyond titles. He belonged to the last generation of court wrestlers of princely India, he carried Indian wrestling onto the London stage at the height of the British Empire, and he transmitted the complete technical inheritance of pehlwani to a new nation after 1947 ^[1]. Few athletes have bridged so many worlds in a single career ^[4].