DARA SINGH: THE UNDISPUTED CHAMPION

Vir Sanghvi

Solidly built, affable, uncomplicated—and, above all, a disciplined wrestler of the pre-six-pack era—Dara Singh made the perfect Hanuman. He is best known for his roles in several mythological films and TV serials as Rama’s devotee and friend who could fly across oceans holding up a mountain on his palm. But Dara Singh had a life—and a fan following— before he was Hanuman, as you will read in Vir Sanghvi’s tribute to his hero.

My favourite Dara Singh story—at least my favourite anecdote about the late-period Dara Singh—comes from his colleague in the Rajya Sabha, the journalist Rajiv Shukla. According to Rajiv, when Dara Singh was told that the President had nominated him to the Rajya Sabha, he concluded (perhaps correctly) that he had been rewarded for his support of the BJP.

So, says Rajiv, each time Singh is asked about his Rajya Sabha nomination, he looks humble and says, ‘I’ve been nominated by my President, Venkaiah Naiduji.’

In fact, Rajiv adds, he even wanted to attend meetings of the BJP parliamentary party till somebody took him aside and explained that as a nominated member he was supposed to be above politics. (This was before Hema Malini, another nominated member, fluttered across to the BJP.) Besides, he was not to tell people that President Venkaiahji had nominated him. In fact, another South Indian who was also a President, some chap called Kalam, had done the nominating.

I have no idea whether this story is accurate or not, but even if it isn’t true, it should be.

It seems to me to so completely sum up the essence of Dara Singh: grateful, straightforward, simple-minded and a holdover from an era when things were not always so complicated.

Nobody I know can quite understand my fascination with Dara Singh. We met twice during his wrestling heyday (well, at the end of it, certainly) and both times I was there to interview him. I had gone into the interviews armed with the ‘tough questions’ with which young journalists kid themselves into believing that they will embarrass interviewees. Wasn’t wrestling all a fake? What right did we have to call himself World Champion when his title was not recognized anywhere outside of India? If he was really in his forties, as his manager claimed, then had he begun wrestling professionally when he was twelve years old? And so on.

In the event, I was simply too pleased to meet him to bother with any of the so-called tough questions. As for the obviously fake nature of wrestling or the made-in-Worli world title, it all meant so much to him that it seemed small and impossibly petty to embarrass him by raising the subjects.

We met again four years ago on a flight. I said hello. He clearly had no recollection of those early interviews but struggled to find a reference point. ‘Aap ke programme dekhta rehta hoon,’ he smiled. At which point, of course, I embarrassed him by asking for his autograph. He gave it to me but then stared hard as I walked back to my seat, clearly surprised by the turn this conversation had taken.

Three months ago, I persuaded my bemused producers at Star TV to invite him on Cover Story, the show I anchor on Star World. ‘But he doesn’t speak any English,’ they protested. But such was my insistence that they decided to humour their anchor.

As it turned out, Dara Singh spoke much better English than I did Hindi and we shot what I thought was a wonderful interview discussing his wrestling days and his stunt films. When it aired, everybody looked at me as though this was a previously unsuspected eccentricity on my part. And from the next week, I went back to interviewing politicians, matinee idols and captains of industry.

Why am I so fascinated by Dara Singh?

Well, here are some answers: find me a kid who isn’t fascinated by superheroes. Show me a small boy who never wanted to be Superman or Batman. Tell me about a child who didn’t dream of reigning supreme in a simple, well-ordered world where good always triumphed over evil and where, if you played by the rules and had the love of your countrymen behind you, nothing could stop you from getting ahead.

That, in essence, was how I viewed wrestling when I grew up in Mumbai in the 1960s.

Mention wrestling these days and you’ll think of over-muscled, over-made-up, streroid-fuelled actors going through their routines on some sports channel (or even on Star World).

In those days, however, wrestling was a live entertainment. For around three months a year, the promoters would set up their ring at the Vallabbhai Patel Stadium on Bombay’s Worli Sea Face. Every Wednesday and Saturday, they would stage six bouts. The first two would be boring affairs during which supporting-event stand-bys with names like Harbajan and Mehr-Din would go at it for six rounds.

But the excitement would begin with the third bout of the day. Some evil masked wrestler whose identity was a secret would kick some minor pehalwan around the ring before demolishing him in the second round. ‘My God!’ we would exclaim. ‘This man is unstoppable!’

Then second-rung wrestlers with such names as Ajit, Tarlok, Kashmira, Tiger Azad or Majid Accra would fight dastardly foreign villains. The fifth bout usually starred Randhawa (or Shere-e-Hind Randhawa as he was always called), who would wear white trunks, fly through the air to deliver drop kicks and usually vanquish some Moderately Bad Man.

Then, as the crowd readied for the main event, some Seriously Bad Man (usually white, usually Brit) would enter the ring. He would spit at the audience. He would make angry gestures. He would push the referee around. And, if he was More Than Seriously Bad, he would grab a microphone. ‘You bloody Indians …’ he would begin. The rest would be drowned out by the boos and the catcalls.

After about five minutes of this Very Bad Behaviour, a cheer would rise up from the back of the crowd where those in the cheap seats had seen a tall (6 foot 2 inches) figure striding purposely towards the arena. As Dara Singh made his way to the ring, the crowd would be on its feet.

‘Dara! Dara! Dara! Dara!’ we would chant.

But Dara Singh would not be able to enter the ring. The Not Just Bad But Really Dirty foreigner would ambush him near the ropes. He would fist him when he wasn’t looking. He would kick him in the groin. He would pick up a folded chair and bring it down on his back.

A hush would fall over the crowd as Dara lay prone on the mat. For three rounds, the Really Horrible Villain would break every rule in the book to hurt and humiliate India’s champion.

‘My God!’ we would think. ‘How much punishment can poor Dara take?’

Then, in the fourth round, our hero would struggle painfully to his feet. The villain would give him his best ‘but you can’t still be alive’ look. Dara Singh would nod grimly. And then, as we stood on our seats and cheered, he would make keema out of Very Frightened Bad Man.

In the fifth round, by which stage the White Coward was begging for mercy, Dara would go in for the kill. Sometimes he would raise him above his shoulders, spin him around and then dash him to the mat. Or—and this was reserved for Especially Naughty Goras—he would apply the most dreaded of all wrestling holds: the fearsome Indian Deathlock.

Within seconds, the big fellow would be whimpering. ‘Sahiban,’ the announcer would say, ‘yeh bada khatarnak hold hai’. If Screaming White Villian did not admit defeat and submit, he could lose the use of his leg for ever!

But, of course, he would submit. The bell would ring. The referee would raise Dara Singh’s hand. And then a posse of policemen would protect Dara from the embraces of the crowd as he ran back to his dressing room.

Superman? Batman?

Forget it.

They were great but this guy was here and live!

Hell, yes, I wanted to be Dara Singh.

Did I ever wonder if it was fixed? Yes, of course, I did. By the time I was eleven, it was all beginning to get a bit blatant. Dara Singh would fight in Mumbai on Wednesday and Saturdays but on Thursdays, he would be in Ahmedabad, on Mondays in Hyderabad and so on. Because they couldn’t write new scripts for each location, he usually performed the same show in each city.

So, on Saturday he would unmask the dreaded Red Scorpion in Mumbai. On Monday, Scorpion would put his mask back on and Dara Singh would unmask him in Hyderabad. On Wednesday, the unmasked Scorpion would wrestle Randhawa in Mumbai. On Thursday, he’d put the mask on again and let Dara Singh unmask him in Ahmedabad. And so it went.

If you went to boarding school as I did and you sat and compared notes with friends from other cities, you would learn that each of you had seen the Scorpion being unmasked, Klondike Bill being thrown out of the ring and Sky Hi Lee being felled with a drop kick—only you all saw the same matches in different cities on different days.

How could any kid not wonder if the bouts were rigged?

But here’s the thing: it didn’t matter.

Of course wrestling is a fake.

But that’s the whole point, stupid!

All right, I’d better explain. People always look startled when I say that unscripted wrestling is a dreadful bore (ever watched an amateur bout?); the fun comes from the rigging.

For as long as anybody can remember, all professional wrestling everywhere in the world has been rigged. These days, the WWE and the big American federations do it with rehearsals (when Hulk Hogan ‘lost’ his world title to the Ultimate Warrior, for instance, they had to script and rehearse each detail of the match because neither of the two bozos is a natural wrestler) but the wrestlers have always been told what the outcome of the match should be (‘fourth-round knockout’ or ‘third-round pin fall’) before they get into the ring.

That’s the whole point of wrestling. It is not meant to be a sport like boxing in which two gorillas do brain damage to each other or eat each other’s ears. In the old days, wrestling was supposed to be a morality play, a sort of Ram Leela in swimming trunks. These days, the US networks have turned it into a soap opera with sex, love, betrayal and other story angles. But the bottomline is: it is not a sport; it is entertainment.

For years and years, wrestlers (like magicians) were bound by a code of silence (called kayfabe by insiders) which threatened them with instant excommunication from the profession (and therefore, unemployment) if they ever talked about the rigging. The idea was: keep the dream alive.

Then, in the 1980s, when Vince McMahon Jr look over his father’s World Wide Wrestling Federation, he decided that the fiction had worn thin. He began to call wrestling ‘sports entertainment’ and publicly declared that the bouts were fixed. Far from damaging wrestling’s appeal, it actually increased it. Under the younger McMahon (whose Federation is now called WWE), American wrestling became a big-money, global TV phenomenon.

In India, our wrestlers are still bound by our desi version of kayfabe—they will insist that it is all genuine even if you pull their toenails out, one by one. They have yet to realize what McMahon guessed: the crowd doesn’t care whether it is real or faked. They just love the fun.

So it was with me and my friends when we went to see Dara Singh wrestle. We guessed it was rigged: is it at all plausible that Dara Singh did not lose a single bout for forty years? Why were we never surprised when he always won in the end?

Because it didn’t matter.

When Batman battled the Joker did we seriously expect the Joker to win? When Superman was exposed to Kryptonite did we really think he was going to die?

Of course not.

Dara Singh Randhawa (his brother Sher Singh used the surname as his wrestling name) was a sardar from the Punjab who went off to Singapore in search of better prospects. He was picked up by local wrestling promoters who put him on the bottom of the card at international tournaments.

Unlike many of the West’s more famous wrestlers who are technically second-rate (Hulk Hogan, HHH or the Big Show), Dara Singh had a natural aptitude for wrestling. But he also had something more: an indefinable star quality. Something about his personality made you care about him. Audiences cried when he was hurt. They cheered when he won. And they identified with his every move.

In the old days (and to some extent now) the wrestling cast was divided into heels (bad guys) and baby-faces (good guys). For a wrestling promotion to succeed it must have a good heel (a man the fans love to hate). But it must always have a star baby-face.

When the wrestling tournament shifted from Singapore to India in the ’50s, the obvious heel was a fat Hungarian called Emile Czaya who wrestled as King Kong. But to get the crowd on its feet, the promoters needed a great Indian baby-face. The existing Indian champion, Tiger Joginder was deeply uncharismatic and the so-called Commonwealth Champion Harbans Singh was technically sound but a dull performer.

So a deliberate decision was taken to cast the young Dara Singh as the top baby-face, as the man who would take on King Kong.

It could have gone wrong. All casting decisions are gambles: but the good ones pay off. Would Zanjeer have worked without Amitabh playing the Bollywood baby-face? Would Sholay have been Sholay if Amjad hadn’t played the heel? There have been many Batmen but only Jack Nicholson is remembered as the Joker. There have been two new TV Clark Kents over the last decade but only Christopher Reeve remains Superman.

So it was with Dara Singh.

King Kong went off to other countries. The heels came and went. But rather like Amitabh Bachchan, Dara Singh remained— the ultimate wrestling legend.

Wrestlers are like actors. They shine briefly and then, twenty years later, you find them trying hard to eke out a living. (King Kong died of a heart attack in his sixties, on his way to a match; he needed the money.)

Dara Singh was the first to buck the trend. (And the last, actually.) Partly it was the movies. In the old days they made what were called stunt movies: cheapo flicks with no acting, no plot but lots of action. Because of his status as a wrestling icon, Dara Singh was the obvious choice to star in stunt pictures. In the early ’60s, he starred in the bizarre Tarzan Comes to Delhi.

More pictures followed and he dragged his brother Randhawa into the business. From the movies came a production company, a famous pairing with Mumtaz (they were the Amitabh-Rekha of the stunt flicks—but few people recall that Dara Singh launched her) and some money.

It is true that Dilip Kumar never spent a sleepless night worrying about the competition from Dara Singh but contrary to early expectations, he did learn to act—he is still a popular character actor on TV shows.

But even the wrestling made him money. By the ’70s when his kind of cinema was dead (I remember Randhawa complaining. ‘When we made them they were called stunt pictures, now Amitabh and Dharmendra make them and they are called multistarrers) Dara Singh was big enough to command a percentage of the gate money at each tournament. The promoters accepted that the crowds only came to see him. (Wrestling died in India when Dara Singh retired, so they were right.)

After about two decades of being Rustom-e-Hind, he got slightly tired of just being Indian champion. So, the promoters brought Lou Thesz, the most famous wrestler of the twentieth century (he had been World Champion six times) to Mumbai and Thesz obligingly submitted to the Indian Deathlock. After that, Dara Singh took to calling himself World Champion.

Pedants will point out that Thesz, who was nearly seventy by the time he came to Mumbai, was not actually World Champion when Dara Singh beat him. But what the hell? Titles in wrestling are all make-believe anyway. Basically, promoters create new world champions every time the gate money flags.

And there are at least four champions (one per federation) in the US at any given time, so why couldn’t India have its own champion? Besides, compared to most steroid-pumped American wrestlers, Dara Singh was always in a superior league.

Dara Singh and me in the TV studio.

I’m still excited, can’t stop smiling. He is pleased but vaguely bemused by all the wrestling questions. Don’t I want to hear about Venkaiahji? About how he sees his new role in the Rajya Sabha?

No, I don’t. I want to talk about the ring.

Tell me, I say, you are out of it now. It was all fake, wasn’t it? An invisible veil descends over Dara Singh’s eyes. He leans forward, ‘Nahin ji,’ he says. ‘Not fixed. Why would anyone agree to lose? All genuine.’

Good old Dara Singh. Never tell him he’s not a champion.

And never tell me he’s not an accomplished actor.