BBC Radio opens New Year with programme on life of ‘Great Gama’

IN a rare honour on New Year’s day, the famous BBC Radio Four programme ‘Great Lives’ featured the story of the great unbeaten wrestler Gama Pehlwan. It was a 30-minute programme at peak hour, going over his life and his very sad end, and how he has been forgotten.

The programme was initiated by the British writer Nikesh Shukla, who is in the process of writing a film script about the great wrestler, and was hosted by the well-known broadcaster Matthew Parris. The guest speak was the Cambridge University researcher Majid Sheikh.

The programme ‘Great Lives’ is famous for having the largest listening base in the United Kingdom. The contents came as a surprise to most who had never heard of this “unbeaten strongest man in the world”.

Nikesh described how he came across a book at Mumbai Airport about wrestling, and how as he researched this major wrestler to discover that he had not only remained unbeaten in his long career but he alone managed to lift a heavy block of stone which later required 25 people to pick that up. That stone remains in a museum in India, a tribute to the great wrestler.

Nikesh was of the opinion that Gama’s exploits in England, especially his three bouts with the Polish world champion, Stanislaus Zbyszko, for the first time showed the “white people” of Europe that the Asians, if given a chance, could be far stronger than any other.

The guest speaker Majid Sheikh dwelt on his life in Pakistan after 1947. He recalled how as a young schoolboy he went with his father to see Gama Pehlwan in Misri Shah. There he was lying in bed, a sick man with virtually no money to pay the doctors. He described the great wrestling traditions of Lahore and the Punjab, and how the ‘akharas’ in the country still produced some excellent wrestlers.

Once the patronage of ‘rajas’ and ‘nawabs’ ended, the State did step in but the funding was not enough to keep these ‘akharas’ going. It was much later that the corporate sector did provide some funding to them.

Nikesh and Majid discussed the sad end of the Great Gama, and Matthew Parris hoped that the least the city of Lahore can do is to build a small ‘akhara’ in his name with a statue or a bust of the great man in the center. “Surely, some memorial must come up in Lahore after Gama,” they opined.

At one stage of the programme, the daily diet of Gama was described, which an expert estimated to be about 16,000 calories a day. But then Matthew Parris pointed out that photographs of the ‘Great Gama’ show him as trim and muscular.