Reconfiguring colonial hierarchies: Examining the ‘European versus native wrestling’ debate in the late nineteenth-century India

Abstract

The ‘empire’ as a project has always been fraught with tensions across several dimensions. And that tension is evident in the relationship between the ‘coloniser’ and the ‘colonised’ throughout the social, political and economic spectrum. At times, many of these tensions spill over in interesting ways at the most unexpected moments revealing lesser-known dimensions of the colonial relations. The 1891 wrestling match between the English Champion wrestler Tom Cannon and the Maharajah of Jodhpur’s court wrestler, Karim Bux in Calcutta, the British Indian capital, was one such moment. This article is an attempt to demonstrate how wrestling matches between a European and a native could become a flash point that it became, among other things, an occasion for the natives to question the ‘superiority’ of Europeans.