Modernity in ancient martial art class

One evening...

The hush of twilight was startled by the “thwack!” of silambam fighters practising at the Indira Nagar Women Association club. The trainees spar with their silambam (sticks) while the trainer, Suresh Kumar, showed a three-year-old girl how to hold the stick right.

“Deflect my attack,” he said and pantomimed a strike. Maya’s blue frock swished as she copied him.

THWACK!

She laughed. at the lopsided “X” between them. “That was blocking,” Suresh smiled, “but okay.”

He turned back to the rest of his students.

October 3, 2019 was my first time observing a silambam class.

For those unfamiliar with this word, silambam is a form of martial art that originated in Tamil Nadu. The name refers to the primary weapon - a wooden stick, made pliant with repeated beating on water.

Born in Maharashtra, I had never heard about silambam before then. However, about a dozen classes popped up around my area in Chennai when I looked up the term on Google Maps.

My local guardian said that the art form even had a fanbase among the younger kids.

One of Suresh’s students had an explanation for this – or a conspiracy theory at the least.

Babin Daniel suspected that the sudden rise in popularity was sparked by to the 2017 Occupy Marina protests in Chennai wherein many locals were inspired to go back to their roots.

“Nowadays, be it chickens or dogs, everything we have is imported. What Master (Suresh) teaches us here, it comes from our culture,” Babin told me.

I spent the better part of my Thursday with Suresh wanting to know more about silambam. As it turned out, I couldn’t have asked for a better guide.

Suresh’s father and paternal uncle were both professional martial artists who made sure that they passed on everything they knew to the next generation.

“I think I was in third standard when my father started teaching me martial arts.” said Suresh dusting off the dirt on his orange jersey that sported the words “Master of Silambam Academy at the back, “He used to yell at me a lot when I didn’t listen to him but eventually, I decided I want to pass this piece of my heritage to my own students.”

His guardians had clearly done right by him. His students seemed to love his classes and their parents appreciated his efforts to keep Tamil culture alive.

It still seemed funny to me though that people wanted to learn the art of wielding a stick. I asked Suresh what drove people to learn this art as compared to something more romanticised like karate.

In response, he listed down three reasons – defence, stamina and tradition.

They seemed like standard clichés to me until I watched the classes carefully. Silambam may be an ancient martial art but the discipline required a lot of movement as well as total control over them. For a long time, the students were only twirling their silambams in front of them. I wondered about this until I saw one of the older students whirl the weapon into a blur as she walked.

“She’s called Tornado Nrithya,” a kid passing by whispered to me.

Momentarily, I wished I had cool juniors like those. But I got the point. Silambam seems like a non-aggressive art form that is concerned with personal fitness rather than physical prowess.

Of course, it has contemporary issues of its own namely gender disparity.

“Silambam is an art form where boys and girls can spar against each other. I try to add in a bit of martial arts to make silambam more appealing but for some reason this disparity is still there.” His smile shrank somewhat when he told me this.

But he was optimistic about the future (another thing I wanted to learn from him) and encouraged all his students to bring along friends regardless of gender.

I was very impressed by what I had seen that day.

Suresh created a special environment in his classes. Much like Occupy Marina where children were allowed to view the adult world, the children in his class were treated like adults and were expected, rather than told, to do their work.

The beauty of silambam is not in its roots but in the feeling of camaraderie that it inspires.