Flexing and filmmaking

Being a favoured form of entertainment before cinema, physical culture became a ready subject for some of the earliest films globally

The hairspray-caked, spandex-skinned world of women’s wrestling in 1980s America is the home of GLOW, a fictionalised history of the low-budget show Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling which once ran on cable TV there. Since the series debuted on Netflix in 2017, its creators Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive have used a high-octane sport often accused of being “fake” to bring up very real stereotypes including of race, gender and sexuality. The ringside view is of exaggerated rivalries and make-up, while backstage there are subtler conflicts and the debris of fatigued bodies. 

“(It’s) hot and family-friendly, Glen,” reasons the fictional wrestling programme’s director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) in a pitch to a network official. “Porn you can watch with your kids.” But far more substantial motivations drive the 15 entertainers — washed-up actresses, dancers, stunt girls — to perform death-defying “forward rolls”, “sleeper holds” and “Samoan drops”. They are funny and ambitious but have to fight to get the oft-ridiculed concept of women’s pro-wrestling off the ground and keep it afloat. Most resilient is the protagonist Ruth (Alison Brie), who lands the wrestling gig after countless failed auditions for movies. “Finally I’m getting to do something, and it feels different, you know? I feel different. Strong. In control.”

The show’s third season concluded recently with no word on whether another will follow. For those unafraid to go down the YouTube rabbit hole however, generous people of the internet have earnestly uploaded the original bouts, commercials and all, from their VHS tapes. The old show is nowhere as nuanced as its modern retelling but it is still radical and fun. Susan Sontag’s “ultimate camp statement: It’s good because it’s awful” applies in spades here.

The trick of merging acting and athletics predates the eighties though, with examples available in the eras of silent and early talking pictures. Even back then, physical culture was sometimes fortified with subtext, and at other times presented as pure spectacle. It seems fair to say the dogged enthusiasm of GLOW’s Ruth rhymes with the real-life willingness Mary Ann Evans or “Miss Nadia”, the fearless 1930s star of Indian stunt movies, once showed. “Could you ride or drive?” the Parsi filmmaking duo JBH Wadia and Homi Wadia asked her in their first meeting. “I can do anything once,” she said. 

Her apprenticeship in Madame Astrova’s dance troupe and the Zarco Circus likely helped in leaping on and off horses and cars in such sepia-hued films as Hunterwali (1935) and Miss Frontier Mail (1936). Director Homi Wadia, whom she would later marry, often had her jauntily carry men and dash them to the ground like ceremonial coconuts. She was at once pin-up girl and feminist heroine. In the years before Independence, her self-righteous combats came with embedded messages of democracy, nation-building and caste removal too. The filmmakers never explained her whiteness, she always played Indian characters. A white woman speaking Hindustani and appearing in saris now and again must have felt like a win for Indian nationalism.

For early studio runners, who were churning out fantasy films and mythologicals spiked with action scenes, it made sense to invest in strength training. “It was when we were not shooting that we worked the hardest — in the gymnasium. We exercised all the time, tried new tricks, falls, et cetera,” remarked Nadia in an interview. Prabhat Films had a gymnasium, too, writes author Nilu Gavankar, where one Mane Pehelwan would nourish the crew with exercise and glasses of milk.

Being a favoured form of entertainment before cinema, physical culture — wrestling and bodybuilding in particular — became a ready subject for some of the earliest films globally. In 1899, a portrait photographer from Grant Road, H S Bhatavdekar or “Save Dada” as he was later called, propped up his London-sourced movie camera in the Hanging Gardens to shoot a wrestling match there. His The Wrestlers is the first ever Indian actuality film. 

Film making

A clip shot in United States in 1894, some seconds of which are widely accessible online, has the German strongman Eugen Sandow stretching like someone who has just risen from sleep. The poses arrange his brawn into elegant Rorschach patterns. Given his celebrity as “the modern Hercules”, this was used as a souvenir strip to promote the Edison Kinetoscope. 

That was the precedent for a period when some feature film talent would be drawn from among muscle builders. There was P K Nagalingam, whose entry into Tamil cinema from that universe earned him the screen name Raja “Sandow”. John Cawas, best remembered for swinging from trees as Tarzan in Toofani Tarzan (1937), had been All-India bodybuilding champion of 1930.

Perhaps the most famous instance is of Master Vithal — a wrestler from Kolhapur — a star of silent-era stunt productions of Sharda Films. Producer-director Ardeshir Irani of Imperial Films had to perform legal gymnastics of his own to poach the actor and cast him as the lead in what would be India’s first talkie Alam Ara (1931). Mohammad Ali Jinnah was brought in to win a lawsuit. In the end, the win was bittersweet. Vithal’s agility did not extend to the spoken word so nearly all his Hindi lines were crossed out and he remained silent in the film.