What’s Wrong with a Little Swinging? Indian Clubs as a Tool of Suppression and Rebellion in Post-Rebellion India

Abstract

Though the practice of swinging weighted clubs for gymnastic exercise has a centuries long history in India, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the exercise practice grow in political significance. In the years following the 1857 Indian Rebellion, both Hindu nationalists and British army officials undertook the practice with differing intent. Within the martial context, a differentiated style of British club swinging was used to reform supposedly weak and effeminate Hindus, a practice the Hindu physical culture movement sought to render useless through the promotion of heavy club swinging. In first examining the clubs’ origins and British appropriation, the paper explores how two club swinging traditions existed in India in post-1857. Following this, the paper demonstrates how the British army sought to control Hindu bodies through club swinging and how the Hindu physical culture movement concurrently sought to rebuild Hindu bodies capable of defeating British athletes through heavy club swinging. Regarding the latter, focus is given to the wrestling tours of Buttan Singh and Ghulam Muhammad in early twentieth-century Britain. Such tours were used to prove Hindu manliness as constructed through the club exercise.