From Sand to Stadium: Institutional Layering, Selective Adaptation, and the Political Economy of Pehlwani in Gujranwala, Pakistan

Abstract

The "City of Wrestlers" reputation is based on a folk story of pehlwani that existed in the past but was suppressed, destroyed by the colonialism, Partition, and modernism. This study pulls out and reframes a historical sociological argument that directly questioning the nature of what didn't work out, what did, and what changed. The aim of the study is to propose an institutional layering framework, in which the akhara (wrestling gymnasium), family, patronage, and public contest are analytically differentiated and appear to have changed at different rates and for different reasons, based on a qualitative historical design that triangulates local journalism, published ethnography, institutional and government evidence, and contemporary field level reporting on the akhara system. The findings indicate that the professional and occupational security of the pehlwan dabbish deteriorated significantly, the discipline of pehlwan body weakened later in the period, the attachment of the spectators to the professional body of pehlwan weakened, and the cultural identity, the state, departmental employment, and the symbolic authority of the ustad (master trainer) remained relatively strong. The study also reveals that not all akharas were proponents of the unmodernized training technologies: while in some places resources were limited and they were only able to use the former, in others they were able to use both and did so under the guidance of a ustad, thereby redefining ‘conservatism’ as an economic factor and not exclusively a cultural one. The core of the article is conceptual, since it is not about a mere decline or survival, but about the cohabiting of mitti and mat, ustad and coach, akhara and department, dangal and formal tournament, and also about a source criticism of the ongoing historiographical findings, with the recurring chronological contradictions of the best known biographical figures of the field. The article ends by identifying the main gaps in the evidence-base a systematic directory of the ‘akharas’, a register of the ‘dangals’ over time, and institutional records of employment that would need to be filled for the field to change from plausible synstudy to a complete ‘local history’; the article also highlights implications for heritage policy that distinguish supporting elite athletes from supporting the grass roots institutional base that produces them.

Keywords: pehlwani, akhara, Gujranwala, historical sociology of sport, institutional decline, masculinity and the body, source criticism, South Asian wrestling, cultural heritage, urbanization

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22531858