In the summer of 1910 a small man walked into a London music hall and issued a challenge that the British sporting press found either magnificent or insufferable, depending on the paper. He was five foot seven, he spoke no English, he had come from Punjab at his own expense, and he announced that he would throw any three wrestlers in Britain within an hour. If he failed, he would pay them and go home. What followed made him the most famous Indian athlete of the pre-independence era and left him, at the end of a career spanning more than five decades, with a record almost nobody in any combat sport has matched.
The Akhara
He was born Ghulam Mohammad Baksh Butt on 22 May 1878, at Jabbowal, a village in the Amritsar district, into a family of Kashmiri origin with wrestling in it for generations. His father was a wrestler; so were his uncles and, later, his younger brother Imam Bakhsh. The Punjab of that period sustained a serious professional wrestling culture, the world of the akhara and the pehlwan, patronised by princely courts and followed with the intensity a modern country gives to football.
He came to notice young. Accounts describe him competing at a strongman event at Jodhpur in 1888, when he was about ten, in a field of several hundred, and impressing the Maharaja enough to be singled out. He trained thereafter under princely patronage, most closely associated with the courts of Datia and later Patiala.
The training regime became folklore, and it is worth noting that the numbers usually quoted come from contemporary reporting and from the accounts of those around him rather than from any verified record. He is said to have performed thousands of bethaks, the deep Hindu squat, and thousands of dands, the sweeping press-up, every day; to have trained with a stone ring weighing well over a hundred kilos worn around his neck; to have wrestled dozens of partners in succession; and to have eaten a diet built on milk, almonds and clarified butter in quantities that read now as implausible. The general shape of it is not in doubt. He trained more than anyone.
Rustam-e-Hind
By his twenties he was among the leading wrestlers in India, and the obstacle in his path was Rahim Bakhsh Sultani Wala, a much taller man from the Gujranwala area and the reigning champion. They met more than once. The early bouts are variously recorded as drawn or inconclusive, and Gama himself regarded Rahim Bakhsh as the hardest opponent he ever faced. He eventually took the title, becoming Rustam-e-Hind, champion of India.
London, 1910
In 1910 Gama travelled to England with Imam Bakhsh, backed by the promoter and patron R. B. Benjamin. The trip began badly: organisers refused him entry to the John Bull world championship tournament, partly on the grounds of his size. So he took to the stage and issued the open challenge instead, later naming the world's leading wrestlers directly.
The American Benjamin Roller accepted. Gama pinned him twice in a matter of minutes, and the following day threw a long succession of opponents in a single session. The tournament organisers relented.
The defining contest came against Stanislaus Zbyszko, the Polish strongman then regarded as among the best in the world and a considerably heavier man. In their meeting in September 1910, Zbyszko, taken down almost immediately, adopted a defensive strategy of lying flat and refusing to be turned. The bout ground on for hours before being declared a draw. A rematch was scheduled. Zbyszko did not appear for it, and the championship belt went to Gama.
He returned to India with the John Bull belt and a reputation that had crossed continents. The European press, which had arrived sceptical, wrote about him with a respect that was rare for an Indian sportsman in 1910.
The Rematch, Seventeen Years Later
The story acquired its perfect ending in 1927, at Patiala, where Gama and Zbyszko met again. Gama was by then in his late forties. Reports of the bout agree that it was over in well under a minute.
He was given the title Rustam-e-Zamana, champion of the age. Over a career that stretched from the 1890s into the 1940s he was never defeated in a decided contest; the only blemishes on the record are drawn bouts. Estimates of his total number of matches vary and no complete register exists, but the undefeated span of roughly fifty years is not seriously disputed.
Partition, and After
When Partition came in 1947, Gama was living in Lahore. Accounts from the period, including those recorded by his family and by Pakistani journalists afterwards, credit him with sheltering Hindu neighbours during the violence and escorting people to safety, on the strength of a name that both communities revered. The specifics differ between tellings, but the tradition is consistent and it was reported in his lifetime.
He remained in Lahore as a citizen of Pakistan. His later years were not comfortable. The princely patronage that had sustained professional wrestling had dissolved along with the states themselves, and he suffered from long illness and financial hardship, and was helped in his last years by admirers on both sides of the border, including a stipend reported to have come from the Indian industrialist family of the Birlas as well as support raised in Pakistan. He died in Lahore on 23 May 1960, the day after his eighty-second birthday.
The Long Shadow
His influence outlived the sport that made him. Bruce Lee is documented as having studied Gama's conditioning methods and incorporated versions of them into his own training, which is how a wrestler from a village near Amritsar ended up in the strength-training literature of the late twentieth century. Wrestlers in Punjab on both sides of the border still train in akharas that hold his name, and the stone ring associated with him is preserved as a relic.
What makes him endure is not only the record. It is the shape of the thing: a man from a village culture that the colonial world considered provincial walked into the centre of that world, on his own terms, without a common language, and beat everyone it could put in front of him. Half a century, and nobody put him down.