The Pahalwans Who Stayed

At Guru Hanuman Akhada in Delhi, wrestlers train in mitti, the prepared soil used for the traditional practice of kushti. It sticks to oiled skin, gathering in the lines of hands, backs and shoulders until the body begins to resemble the ground beneath it. In Monica Dhaka’s photographs, the two are difficult to separate.

The Pahalwans Who Stayed (The Wrestlers who Stayed) began with Dhaka’s uncle, who had been a pahalwan (wrestler). After he was killed in a car accident, her thoughts returned to the life that had formed him. She remembered the early mornings and the repeated training, but also the pain he carried without complaint. Following his death, photography became a way of approaching a world she had known through him before more of it disappeared.

Most of the project was made at Guru Hanuman Akhada, one of Delhi’s oldest traditional wrestling schools. Boys arrive young and train under teachers who once learned on the same earth. The akhada is both a place of physical instruction and a community organised around the daily practice of wrestling. Its knowledge is passed on through the body. A movement is shown, repeated and corrected. Experience accumulates slowly, becoming visible in the way a wrestler stands or responds to another person’s weight.

It is also visible in the ears.

Cauliflower ears are produced by repeated pressure and impact. Outside the akhada, they may be read as damage. Among wrestlers, the same marks can carry status. They show the length and intensity of training without the need for explanation.

Dhaka’s wider practice begins with this disconnect between what a body shows and what another person may assume it means. She has worked with people whose appearance is often treated as a complete account of their lives, including acid attack survivors in India and members of London’s leather and kink community. Her portraits may stay close to skin, scars and other physical marks, but they resist the idea that the surface of a body provides an immediate truth about the person within it.

The close studies of ears in The Pahalwans who Stayed, for example, do not deny injury. They place it within a culture where pain, discipline and recognition have become entangled. The altered ear belongs to a body shaped through action, but also to a person seeking standing within a particular community.

Documentary photography has repeatedly turned working bodies into evidence. The hands of a miner or factory worker come to represent an entire industry. Muscle signifies strength; damage signifies sacrifice. The image can appear sympathetic while reducing a life to the physical signs of what it has endured.

Dhaka avoids the isolated, heroic body through her use of diptychs. Photographs are placed beside another that changes its meaning. The physical control of the wrestler is brought into contact with the modest conditions in which he lives and trains. The body cannot be separated from the shared rooms, worn equipment and limited resources that support it.

These pairings give the work renewed social weight. Kushti may be an inherited practice, but the men photographed are not training to preserve tradition for its own sake. Many come from farming families and are working towards a future in which success as a wrestler might bring a medal, employment and greater security. A government job gained through sporting achievement can alter the prospects of a whole family.

The wrestler’s body is therefore both personal and economic. It carries the hope that physical discipline can be converted into social mobility. Training becomes an investment made without any guarantee of return.

Sport maintains a powerful belief in individual effort. The person who trains hardest is supposed to rise, allowing success to appear separate from money, family background or access to opportunity. For some of the wrestlers, kushti may create a route unavailable elsewhere. It does not follow that everyone who commits the same years of work will reach it.

Dhaka photographs the pride attached to wrestling without using it to soften the material conditions around the men. Their commitment is not presented as tragic, and their limited resources are not used to make the images more affecting. The diptychs keep ambition and circumstance within the same field of vision.

The soil carries a similar tension. Mitti is central to traditional kushti, but modern competitive wrestling increasingly takes place on mats. Wrestlers hoping to compete at national or international level must prepare for a different surface and the methods that come with it. The shift reflects changing professional demands rather than a straightforward abandonment of the past.

Yet soil and mat do not produce the same form of wrestling. Mitti is maintained as part of the collective work of the akhada. It cushions the body and influences how wrestlers move against one another. Its texture, temperature and resistance have been absorbed through years of practice. Replacing the ground changes more than the appearance of the sport.

The visual contrast makes nostalgia tempting. The earth appears physical, communal and old; the mat appears clean, regulated and modern. One can quickly be made to stand for authenticity and the other for loss. Dhaka’s photographs are more complicated than that. The wrestlers may value the culture of the akhada while adapting to the conditions under which contemporary success is measured. They do not have the luxury of treating change as a purely aesthetic question.

Documentary photographers often arrive when a working culture is described as disappearing. Photography can create a record, but it can also transform living practices into heritage too early. Once framed as remnants, people are viewed through what they represent from the past rather than what they are doing in the present. Yet, the akhada photographed by Dhaka is not frozen in time. It is already negotiating new surfaces and new ambitions. Its traditions continue because people find use and meaning in them, not because they have remained unchanged.

The title of the series places its emphasis on those who stayed, but staying here is not a passive act. It involves maintaining a culture while responding to a sporting system moving in another direction. The wrestlers continue to train in the soil while pursuing futures that may require them to leave it behind.

Dhaka’s photographs hold that contradiction without trying to settle it. The body records what has been inherited, while being trained for what comes next. The ground is changing beneath the wrestlers, but they still practice their sport.

About Monica Dhaka

Monica Dhaka is an Indian-born visual artist working between Mumbai and London. She completed her Master’s degree in Television at the University of the Arts London in 2023, where she developed a research-led practice based on real stories and lived experiences.

While photography remains a central medium in her practice, her work extends into mixed media, exploring moving image, fabric printing, juxtaposition, and a variety of digital image manipulation techniques.

Her work looks at identity, belonging, community, and gender-based discrimination. She is interested in how people are seen, judged, and understood, especially those whose lives sit outside what is considered normal or acceptable.

She works closely with the people and communities involved in her projects and focuses on subjects that are often difficult to talk about or are shaped by stigma and misunderstanding. She uses techniques such as mirroring, repetition, and digital image alteration to question first impressions and encourage a closer look at the stories behind them.

At the centre of her practice is an interest in how people create belonging, care, and connection in spaces where they are often overlooked or excluded.