Wrestling with Community and Social Change in Early Modern Western India: the Jyesthimallas and the Mallapurāṇa, c. 1674

Abstract This article studies a community text of a group of professional wrestlers hailing from the town of Modhera in western India. Titled the Mallapurāṇa (literally, The Purāṇa of the Wrestlers), the text was compiled in c. 1674 at the behest of a group of individuals known as the Jyesthimallas. The Mallapurāṇa narrativises the origin of these wrestlers and records the processes of their identity formation. Remarkably, it is through an idea of wrestling as a sacred science ( mallavidyā ) bestowed upon these wrestlers by lord Krishna that the Mallapurāṇa articulates the identity of the Jyesthimallas as brahmanas. The text brings together various schemes of classification and sub-categorization juxtaposing these with a complex set of inter-related themes of devotion, physiology, medicine, and non-human animals, to further connect these with the processes of the Jyesthimalla ‘ethnogenesis’. The article considers these discussions on wrestling within the text and historicises them vis-à-vis the processes of identity formation and claims to brahmana status in early modern western India.