Haryana’s wrestling monks: How one state won all 18 Asian Games berths

When 7’4″ San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama spent the offseason with a shaved head at a Shaolin temple in China’s Henan province, the sports world watched in something close to reverence. He practiced kung fu every day, ate vegan monastery food, meditated twice a day and hiked mountain trails in complete darkness.

The world’s sports media wrote heaps about it. Here was a multi-million dollar icon, a generational talent who willingly traded the shiny glamor of the NBA for the absolute silence and monotony of monastic discipline. “My goal when I went there,” Wembanyama told The Shop at Fanatics Fest in New York, “was to push my body beyond its usual limits and improve range of motion and strength.” The world considered it exotic, an oddity: a basketball star willing to find that extra gear in exile.

Across the dust-swept heart of Haryana, in villages you may have heard of but never visited, young girls and boys routinely do just that. They are wrestling monks. In the sweltering summer heat, in the lanes of Rohtak, Sonipat or Jhajjar, where ten minutes of direct exposure to the sun would fill you with enough vitamin D for a year, children are up at four in the morning doing the Shaolin routine like the daily beneficiaries. No cameras. No media. Nobody’s watching. Shaolin would do well to open a franchise in Haryana.

While the nation had its head engrossed in the IPL jamboree: on the TV in the dhaba, on the car driver’s distracted screen alive with sixes as he plowed through rush hour traffic, few noticed one state quietly picked up all 18 available slots in the wrestling team for the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya. No other state, infrastructure or anything else could claim a single qualifying position.

In Haryana, even the soil is fighting itself. He loves the churning bowl, the blowing of dust, the akhar mitti, slightly damp from the shower, that greet thick-thighed wrestlers as they knead the ground with their feet and knees. In these rural pockets, thousands of young men and women routinely strip themselves of the distractions of the modern world to enter a voluntary monastery. There are no autograph seekers, no digital verification required. It’s the sanctuary of a packed country where work on a stage far into the future is measured only by sweat, suffering and dates ticked off the calendar. All 18 places in wrestling at the Asian Games were won by athletes from Haryana (Credit: India Today)

Has it ever happened in Indian sports, all eighteen wrestlers from one state? The answer, with very few exceptions in any discipline at the big games, is no. Not in athletics. Not in the box. Not in shooting. In wrestling, many in the state didn’t even consider it news. They expected it. And that in itself is a true story.

Haryana Sports Minister Gaurav Gautam was elated when asked, “Why are you surprised? We expected it.” He paused and then added, “Wrestling in Haryana is spiritual. Every kid in the state, in the centers that support the sport, and even where wrestling may not be that popular, loves to feel the soil on their body. They live to play the sport. Basically, it’s part of the soul of Haryana.”

The women’s team reads like a new Haryana roster. Antim Panghal, 21, of Hisar district’s Bhagana village, a farmer’s daughter competing in local dangals at the age of ten, is now a two-time U-20 world champion, the first Indian woman to win the title and heir to the Vinesh Phogat weight class. She beat the very woman who just eliminated Olympian Phogat in the semi-finals. Antim’s father, Ram Niwas Panghal, once rented a house in Hisar so that his daughter could commute 20 kilometers each way for training. “He gets up at 4 in the morning,” he said. “She works out twice a day and never once complained.

It’s a story repeated in most families. It is also a paradox: Haryana has deep-rooted patriarchal norms and a skewed gender ratio. But government intervention and community initiatives have indirectly used sport to make a difference. There is immense pride when a girl wins a match. A medal can dismantle a generation of prejudice faster than politics ever will.

Alongside Antim are Rohtak’s Manisha Bhanwala, a gold medalist at the 2025 Asian Championships; Mansi Ahlawat, also Rohtak, 2024 World Championship bronze medalist; Panipat’s Nisha Dahiya, an Asian Championship silver medalist and Paris Olympian who overcame injuries that would have ended most careers; Jind’s Priya Malik, multiple Junior World and Asian medallist; and Dipanshi, who won the 50kg berth on the domestic form. Six weight categories. Six Haryana Girls.

On the men’s side, Haryana’s complete freestyle squad is spearheaded by Olympic bronze medalist Aman Sehrawat, world number one Sujeet Kalkal and Asian Games silver medalist Deepak Punia. The Sunil Kumar-led Greco-Roman team reflects the same geography. Aman will lead the men’s wrestling side (Courtesy: PTI)

To someone unfamiliar with the Indian sporting topography, the statistics seem contrived. Haryana accounts for 2 percent of India’s population. Historically, they have accounted for more than 30 percent of the country’s individual Olympic medals. At Tokyo 2020, 31 of the 126 Indian athletes, or almost a quarter of the entire contingent, were from one state. In Paris, 24 out of 117 athletes had Haryana address for accreditation. When the sports minister says: “What’s new, we just have to improve”, his confidence is not boisterous.

Why?

Ask Haryanvi and the answers come quickly: government incentives, the tradition of martial Jats, the protein-rich dairy diet. All fair points. But Maharashtra and Punjab also have fertile agricultural land, physical culture and government support. Neither will send eighteen wrestlers to the Asian Games.

“The real strength of Indian wrestling,” said Yogeshwar Dutt, the London 2012 Olympic bronze medalist and the sport’s most prominent ambassador at his Rohtak academy earlier this year, “lies on the soil of the villages and traditions of the akhadas. When young athletes are given the right guidance, training and opportunities, they become champions who bring glory.”

The word soil is not a metaphor here. It carries weight. Discipline here flows through the ground and not the stadium. In village Akharas, wrestlers still train on clay, even though the national circuit moved to synthetic mats decades ago. Clay teaches balance, aggression, body intuition. A Haryana wrestler competes in around 60 matches a year, with the mud dangals alone providing more competitive exposure than most national-level wrestlers from other states muster in their entire careers.

Looking at the akhara only as a training facility is looking at the wrong end of the story. Akhara is a village ecosystem. Social institute. At the Chandgi Ram Akhara in Sisai village, Hisar, named after the 1972 Olympic champion Chandgi Ram, who remains the presiding deity of the village, wrestlers eat together, sleep on mats in communal rooms, rise before dawn and are shaped by coaches who receive no salary from the state and charge no fees from families. Some akharas sit next to a tubewell pump with wheat fields stretching flat to the horizon. They produced wrestlers for three generations. The density of these informal, community-funded, zero-cost institutions is unparalleled in Indian sports.

“Other states don’t have the tradition of akhada. So they can’t produce at the speed that Haryana does. But we didn’t manipulate the process. We didn’t bring lofty ideas. Yes, modernization is always needed. But the passion is innate,” says Olympian-turned-coach Gian Singh Sehrawat.

This is a standing rebuke to the infrastructure-first argument that India’s sports administration has cherished for twenty years: that you build the stadium first and then the champion. Haryana wrestlers prove otherwise. The guru-shishya bond, both foamed in the same soil in which the guru once wrestled, is a data transfer that no biomechanical laboratory can replicate. At least not spiritually.

“Haryana needs good coaches to bring more medals not only in AG but also in World Cup and Olympics. We don’t have good coaches. Coaches keep saying ‘pakdo, pakdo, pakdo.’ I keep asking them ‘kya pakdo?'” said Gian Singh.

“It is said that good players often do not become good coaches. Some may not. But I believe that ‘good players can become good coaches because they understand the sport.'” Gian Singh feels that the tradition of akhada is embedded in Haryana Credit: Sundeep Misra

The state government, wise and clever, understood this and built around it rather than replacing it. Since early 2010, Haryana has offered the most comprehensive welfare architecture for sportspersons in India: Olympic gold medalists receive 6 million in bonuses, an A-class government post and a pension. Asian Games gold brings a Class B post. Medal winners at the Continental Championships qualify for Class C. The rules are simple. Life changing. For a family in a village where a government job is the perfect social safety net, the match turns from a passion into a plan. Parents sit around the akhars and watch their child’s train. If they’re working, it’s the grandfather who sits back, watches and dreams of Olympic glory for the grandchild he may not live to see on stage. “That’s exactly the culture,” as Yogeshwar Dutt says.

The competition within Haryana is fierce in a way that is unmatched domestically. State exams are actually part of the Olympic grade. Hype connects villages and towns; think of the Jamaican Schools Athletics Championships, that century-old institution that produced Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser and turned sprinting into a national religion; in vehicles of all sizes and makes, some arriving a day early. In the women’s trials last month, Meenakshi Goyat of Chabri village in Jindu had already beaten Vinesh Phogat, the most decorated Indian wrestler in history, before losing to Anti in the final. In men’s freestyle, a Haryana wrestler who fails to crack the state’s first-choice team regularly transfers to another state. Haryana’s third string, as one coach famously noted, routinely beats the best that Maharashtra, UP or Punjab have to offer.

When Victor Wembanyama emerged from the Shaolin Temple after ten days, head shaved, body slimmer, said to be somewhere between an NBA star and a Buddhist monk, the world stood up and applauded. He chose discipline over comfort. Grit over glamour. And the sports world, which was not used to such voluntary asceticism of its biggest stars, considered this gesture extraordinary.

Wembanyama went to the monastery to find something extra. Haryana’s wrestlers are born within one. Eighteen of them have just done it, claiming every available slot in the national team and heading to the Asian Games from a nation with no modern infrastructure, no major tournaments and no cricket team worth talking about. Only soil. And the passion to wrestle with it.

As they say, wrestling Mitti (ground) Ka Game Hai. Haryana loves it Mitti (soil). We were born from it. He dies in it. Somewhere in the middle they struggle with it too.

Shaolin should open that franchise. The waiting list would be long.

– The end

Published on:

03 Jun 2026 12:31 IST