Mallakhamb, the Pole and Rope Sport Linked to a 12th-Century Sanskrit Text, Held Its First World Championship in Mumbai in February 2019 and Is Now a Competition Event at the Khelo India Games

Mallakhamb is a gymnastic discipline performed on a vertical wooden pole, a rope or a pole hung from a hook, and India held the first world championship in it at Shivaji Park in Mumbai on 16 and 17 February 2019. India won the team title with 244.73 points, ahead of Singapore on 44.45 and Malaysia on 30.22, according to the organisers’ release carried by Business Standard on 17 February 2019. The name joins the Sanskrit-derived words for wrestler (malla) and pole (khamb), as AFP and ThePrint both explain.

Three apparatuses and a 90-second routine

The sport has three forms: pole, rope and hanging pole, a shorter pole tied to a rope with a hook, says the Tribune’s 2019 feature. Men traditionally performed on the pole and women on the rope. ThePrint reports that the first women’s pole tournament was held in 2016.

AFP describes the pole as about 2.6 metres (8.5 feet) tall, tapered at the top and coated in castor oil to prevent friction burns. The Tribune gives teak or sheesham as the wood and a circumference of 55 cm at the base, 45 cm in the middle and 30 cm at the top. The rope is 5.5 metres long and 2 cm thick, and athletes grip it with their toes.

In competition an athlete must finish a set of exercises in 60 to 90 seconds without coming down, the Tribune says. Scores are given per apparatus. When Deepak Shinde of the University of Mumbai won the boys’ all-around event at the Khelo India University Games in Bengaluru in April 2022, the Press Information Bureau (PIB) recorded his 27.30 total as 9.6 on the pole, 8.7 on the rope and 9 on the hanging pole.

What the Manasollasa says

The text most often cited is the Manasollasa, also known as the Abhilashitartha Chintamani, an encyclopaedia attributed to the Western Chalukya king Someshvara III. AFP and the Tribune date its first mention of the sport to 1135. The Oriental Institute at Baroda published the Sanskrit text in volumes. The second, edited by G. K. Shrigondekar and issued in 1939, opens with an English introduction. It summarises the fourth section of the work, which treats twenty kinds of royal sports (vinodas).

In that summary, the Mallavinoda (the chapter on wrestling) sorts wrestlers into three grades, called Jyesthika, Antarjyesthika and Govala. A wrestler up to twenty years old is a Bhavisnu and up to thirty a Praudha, and the king is to keep them on allowances and special food. Their training includes weight-lifting, walking and swimming, then a clasping of hands with a firm grip, and then Stambhasrama. Shrigondekar glosses that last item as “a game similar to modern Mallakhamba.” The word is his reading in 1939. The summary does not describe what the exercise involved.

That caution applies to the whole question of origins. Patrick McCartney, writing in the Journal of Yoga Studies in 2023, says the history of mallakhamb “is confusing to trace” and records that some people think pole yoga comes from neither the Marathi mallakhamb nor the Sanskrit mallastambha (pole exercise). Jon Burtt, in a 2010 paper, calls the modern sport a hybrid of North Indian wrestling, yoga and British colonial gymnastics, and says it began as a training method for wrestlers. For the wrestling side of the story, see Khashaba Jadhav’s 1952 Olympic bronze and the Phogat sisters.

Balambhatta Deodhar and the nineteenth century

The revival is credited to Balambhatta Dada Deodhar. A PIB release from Mumbai on 27 April 2022 describes him as the fitness and sports instructor of Peshwa Bajirao II, who “revived the art form in the 1800s” as a training method for the Peshwa’s army. A second PIB release, issued a day earlier, says historical texts and artefacts suggest, and that there is historical evidence, that figures of the Maratha period such as Rani Lakshmibai, Nana Saheb and Tantia Tope practised mallakhamb too. ThePrint adds that akhadas (wrestling and exercise halls) founded by Deodhar are reported to survive from Maharashtra to Uttar Pradesh.

Shinde told PIB that Shivaji Park became the hub of the sport in Mumbai and that the city had 30 to 40 mallakhamb clubs in 2022. He gave the earlier number as 3 to 4 in one release and 5 to 6 in the other, so the comparison is his own estimate and not a census.

From the akhada to a national championship

The Tribune traces competition to 1962, when the first national championship was held at Gwalior as part of the National Gymnastics Championships. Mallakhamb was added to the All India Inter-University gymnastics championship in 1968 to 1969. The Gymnastics Federation of India ended its link with the mallakhamb body in 1976, and the Mallakhamb Federation of India was formed in 1981, the paper says. PIB’s May 2025 release describes K. S. Shrivastava, a Vikram Award winner (the Madhya Pradesh sports honour), as a founding member of the federation in 1980. Uday Deshpande, who coaches at Shree Samarth Vyayam Mandir at Shivaji Park, became the federation’s secretary in 1987, according to ThePrint.

Mallakhamb also travelled early. The Hanuman Vyayam Prasarak Mandal of Amravati sent a team to Berlin in 1936. Business Standard, summarising Vivek Chaudhary’s book on kabaddi, says nearly 30 Indians went, gave demonstrations of kabaddi, mallakhamb and other traditional sports, and were not part of the official Olympic contingent. The Free Press Journal quotes the Mandal’s secretary as saying a 25-member team presented mallakhamb and yoga. The two accounts differ on the size of the party.

Madhya Pradesh made mallakhamb its state sport at a cabinet meeting chaired by the Chief Minister on 9 April 2013, Press Trust of India reported that day. In 2024 the sports ministry listed Ujjain, in that state, among five identified training centres, alongside Bharatpur, Hyderabad, Delhi and Goa.

The 2019 world championship

The Mumbai event ran for two days. AFP counted about 100 competitors from 15 countries. The organisers’ release named them as Spain, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, the United States, Iran, Norway, England, France, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Bahrain and the hosts. The Tribune and ThePrint also say 15. PIB’s 2022 releases say 17 nations took part, and no source I opened explains the gap.

Uday Deshpande, then 65, organised the championship, AFP reported. AFP reported that he hopes mallakhamb will one day be part of the Asian Games and the Olympics. During the event the German team’s coach, Ruth Anzenberger, gave a presentation on workshops held in Germany, and the team demonstrated on rope and pole, the release said.

Khelo India and the national games

The sports ministry’s Khelo India scheme has a component for rural and indigenous games. A Lok Sabha reply of 29 March 2022 names mallakhamb first among the games identified for it, with grants for infrastructure, equipment, coaches, coach training and scholarships. The same reply says 283 medal winners in mallakhamb, kalaripayattu, gatka and thang-ta received scholarships of Rs 10,000 a month, and that 104 of them were mallakhamb athletes, 31 from Madhya Pradesh. A Rajya Sabha reply of 25 July 2024 counts 2,417 mallakhamb athletes under the scheme, 1,301 boys and 1,116 girls. The scheme lists yogasana, the competitive form of the practice the United Nations recognised in 2014, beside mallakhamb.

Competitions followed. At the Khelo India University Games in Bengaluru, PIB reported on 27 April 2022 that the University of Mumbai won the women’s team title with 86.45, ahead of Savitribai Phule Pune University on 82.95, with Vikram University of Ujjain third. In the men’s event Mumbai took gold, Pune silver and Bundelkhand University of Jhansi bronze. The 2024 reply says mallakhamb was a competitive sport at the Youth Games of 2021 in Haryana and 2022 in Madhya Pradesh.

At the 36th National Games in Gujarat, PIB’s round-up for 10 October 2022 says Maharashtra’s mallakhamb athletes won three of the five golds at stake that day. Rupali Gangwane took her third gold of the Games in the women’s rope event with 9.25. Shauryajit Khaire, aged 10, became the youngest medallist of the Games with a pole bronze. Separately, a PIB release of 8 February 2021 added mallakhamb to the 21 disciplines whose athletes qualify for Group C posts in central government ministries under the sports quota.

Paris, Diu and the Padma Shri

Seven mallakhamb performers, four of them visually impaired, appeared daily at India House in Paris from 29 July 2024 during the Olympic Games, under Deshpande’s supervision, ThePrint reported. The article adds that mallakhamb had last been shown on the sidelines of an Olympics in Berlin in 1936. The Padma Shri list that PIB published on 25 January 2024 includes Uday Vishwanath Deshpande, in sports, from Maharashtra.

At the first Khelo India Beach Games, held at Ghoghla beach in Diu from 19 to 24 May 2025, mallakhamb was listed as a demonstration sport. Its organisers then made the event competitive, though without medals. PIB’s report on the opening says it was the only native sport on display there.