Club Class for Fitness

IT WAS AT A house party in Mum­bai, late in the night, when a group of guests gathered around the host Tarun Durga as he reached for a spot behind a table. Most would have assumed Durga was reaching out for his latest party trick, but what he showed instead led to little gasps of wonder.

“What is this?” an astonished guest asked, a query she might as well have asked for everyone present.

The items seemed completely in variance to the genteel living room of a suburban house in Mumbai, and more appropriate to the sandy pits of a North Indian akhara. Durga had pulled up four different types of the ancient Indian club known as mudgar. One of them, made of wood, weighed around 4.5kg; another was lighter and made of steel; and the last two were part of a pair, meant to be used together in both hands, each weighing around 3.5kg.

As the night wore on, much to the glee of the guests, Durga gave a slight demonstration and swung the items in his living room.

Durga, who works with a climate sustainability firm in Mumbai, is part of a growing community of individuals whose interest in the ancient Indian ex­ercise of swinging mudgars is leading to a resurgence in this traditional equipment. The mudgar, traditionally developed for warriors and later as a form of exercise, may have all but disappeared in modern times, but it is now being embraced by a cross-section of fitness enthusiasts across the country and beyond. There are now fitness influencers promoting it online, individuals like Durga who work out with it on his terrace and nearby parks, and, increasingly, people lugging this an­cient tool to gyms, parks and yoga studios, and sometimes, just in front of a computer to do a Zoom workout around it.

Durga took to the instrument about nine months ago, when a friend who works out with mudgars gifted one to him. Although he had tried different workouts in the past, many resulted in injuries, especially to his shoulders. No such injuries have how­ever occurred since he began using the mudgar. He also finds himself stronger and more agile and has lost over 10kg. “The last time I felt this fit and strong was probably 20 years ago when I was in my early 20s,” he says.

He now logs in once a week from the terrace of his house for an online mudgar session with a friend, where his only wor­ry, he jokes, is he doesn’t shatter one of his wife’s flowerpots. And twice every week, he heads out to a nearby park, where he swings the mudgars fearlessly.

The use of the mudgar, it is said, origi­nated in ancient India. Its use is men­tioned in several ancient texts, and many often point to references in epics such as the Mahabharata, where Bhima and Duryodhana fought each other using ga­das, a type of mudgar, to emphasise just how old and integral this equipment once was to ancient Indians. Clubs of such nature, it is believed, were used as a martial tool, and later got adopted by wrestlers for their train­ing regimes. Similar clubs are however also found in Iran, where it is called meel and used in the zurkhanehs, the regional coun­terpart of Indian akharas. Some claim that the Persian emperor, Cyrus the Great, even had has army train with the meel, since these clubs, much heavier than swords, could help strengthen his soldiers’ arms for actual combat. The British adopted this practice of swinging Indian clubs as a form of exercise too, when it encountered them in India, and later carried this to Europe and the US, but their popularity waned by the early 1900s.

The story of the mudgar wasn’t very different in the country of its origin either, where its use got mostly relegated to the training regimen of wrestlers in akharas.

“In Western forms of training, say the dumbbells and barbells, there is an equal weight on either side and there is a balance in the middle,” says Bengaluru-based Rishabh Malhotra, explaining what makes the mudgar different from Western workout equipment. “But in the Indian system, when you look at the mudgar, the entire weight is packed only on one side. So it becomes like a lever action. It completely changes everything.”

Malhotra’s fitness startup, Tagda Raho—which has redesigned the mud­gar and other variants like the gada and samtola, and sells these apart from running centres where the mudgar is incorporated into workouts—is trying to bring back what it calls the OG workout. His startup has found many admirers, which include MS Dhoni, who has invested in it, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who men­tioned Malhotra in his radio programme.

Malhotra himself first turned to the equipment when he developed an inju­ry. An ultra-endurance athlete, who has cycled across Europe and India, he devel­oped a condition known as bacteria neu­ritis in one of these expeditions that led to about 75 per cent paralysis in his left hand. He was offered the option of undergoing reconstructive surgery, but the odds of re­gaining full strength and mobility were only around 20 per cent.

After unsuccessfully trying out vari­ous forms of exercise and physiotherapy, Malhotra turned to the mudgar. Within about three to four months, he says, his left arm regained over 60 per cent of its strength and mobility. “I got back like over 90 per cent within a year’s time,” he says.

As he began to understand its capac­ity as a tool for physical improvement, Malhotra expanded the workouts he had been developing for himself, and the mudgars he had been designing, to offer them through his new startup venture. An early validation came in the form of Rahul Dravid, the then head of the National Cricket Academy who had Malhotra introduce mudgar workouts to the training staff within the academy.

To Malhotra, what had impeded the mudgar’s rise in modern times was its lack of access. Most people knew what it was, but apart from those, say, training in akharas, there was no way to access it. This is now changing, he says, with the arrival of startups like his that make the mudgar cool and accessible.

As useful as it is, when Malhotra first began to visit akharas to learn to work out with it, he realised that its range of move­ments was limited. “Because they were all focused on wrestling. So that’s when I started designing my own movements,” he says. His centres have developed around 120 movements with the mud­gar, but the equipment, Malhotra says, is dynamic, and an individual, as he under­goes more training, can develop many more forms of movement and workouts.

WHAT IS ALSO making the mudgar more popular is its visibility online. From Harbert Harte Egberts’ Instagram handle, The Flowing Dutchman (an Amsterdam-based coach who trains people on using Indian clubs), and the Kerala-based fit­ness coach Nithin Jayaraj’s Instagram handle, Shredded Farmer (who con­ducts workouts using traditional equip­ment), to the online mudgar workouts of Milind Soman, it is now anywhere and everywhere, both exotic and cool.

What has also changed as the mudgar becomes popular beyond the akharas, is its adoption by women. Mudgars were rarely, if ever used, by women since most akharas did not traditionally permit women to participate in wrestling. As the access to these tools has now become wider, and more centres emerge, both online and offline, incorporating them in workouts, the number of women taking to the mudgar is as high, and sometimes higher than men.

Pune-based Trusha Dethe is one such individual. Someone who has pursued different forms of martial arts for years, she first turned to the mudgar—known as karlakattai in South India—as a way to deal with the symptoms she was expe­riencing after being diagnosed with the auto-immune degenerative condition, multiple sclerosis. After other forms of therapy failed to help, Dethe travelled to Kerala to learn the use of the mudgar— something she credits for helping her reverse her symptoms—and soon began training others in its use.

She estimates to have trained around 15,000 individuals over the last five years, through online and offline classes and workshops. “I think of a lot of people want to go back to traditional ways because they understand that the way people lived in the past was more holistic and peace­ful. Also, since it’s indigenous, people feel closer to it,” she says.

Although the mudgar was rarely used outside the akhara in North India, Dethe points out that in South India, the kar­lakattai by comparison appeared to be a larger part of daily life. “Like you will still find karlakattais at some homes. Or, you will meet people showing or talking to you about the karlakattai their grandpar­ents owned,” she says.

What Dethe worries about as this equipment finds new audiences is people taking to it without any training and supervision. “There is a way to train in this art, and you just can’t take it and start swinging,” she says. Dethe refers to a system called meipadam, which consists of 1,500 dynamic movements that need to be synchronised using just body weight, which is what she trains her students under, before transitioning to the use of karlakattai. “karlakattai and gada are very intense in character. If your shoulders or back or knees aren’t ready, you will just end up causing injuries to yourself,” she says.

Anjit Suhag, who along with his brother Sanjit, founded Mudgar Club, a startup that manufactures mudgars, points out that what makes it truly dy­namic is that it offers something most other workouts lag. “People who work out in gyms don’t quite have the mobil­ity, their bodies are always stiff. Get a guy who has been working out in a gym for five years to learn surfing. He will always struggle,” says Anjit. “Now in yoga, a prac­titioner will have flexibility, but not much strength at all.”

Anjit and his brother, originally from Haryana, moved to Dehradun, where they source the mahogany wood from which their mudgars are made. The two were featured, earlier this year, in an episode of Shark Tank India, the popu­lar reality TV show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their business mod­els to a panel of investors, which has led to even more interest, the brothers say, in this form of exercise.

The brothers’ interest in this equip­ment started when Anjit, who used to teach yoga, began to use the mudgar. “When I was into yoga, I was very flex­ible, but I did not have much strength. So I was always looking for something which would give me that. That’s how it began for me,” he says. But as he be­gan to upload content around the use of the mudgar online, he realised the vast untapped interest in it. He also began to learn how poorly made most mudgars were in India. “Nobody makes good mudgars in India,” Anjit says while re­ferring to a high-quality mudgar he once purchased from someone who manufac­tures them in the UK. “In India, they just take any wooden block, make it round and call it a mudgar,” he says.

The way Anjit looks at it, if startups such as his around the mudgar take off, they will not just have brought back a piece of ancient India, but also one that will bring immense benefit to people.

“I keep telling people, the mudgar is not just for a few, it is for everyone,” he says. “People are getting it now.

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