Rope Trick

Within the cool interiors of the Vyayam Mandir building, Deshpande is leafing through an album of his foreign students—over a dozen of them, from Brazil, Korea and Europe.

‘‘Possibly mallakhamb’s route back to India,’’ he calls them. It’s a path Deshpande himself has travelled—having just returned from a 21-day tour of Germany, where he conducted three mallakhamb workshops, teaching children, yoga teachers and even a few 60-year-olds.

The branding was clear—a new, exciting flavour from India. In fact, the Nauperlache workshop was titled ‘Let’s Go To India’ and the lessons were peppered with lunch breaks featuring jeera rice, naan, chana masala, and mehndi sessions.

The gravity-defying art is a punishing sport, but the Germans were up to it. ‘‘A 52-year-old Ayurveda expert, a 63-year-old retiree, a mountaineer, teachers, kids, they were all so willing to push themselves,’’ says Nita Tatke, a lecturer in psychology at Ruparel College and mallakhamb instructor.

A former gymnastics champion, Tatke—like Deshpande, who remembers being force-driven to the rudimentary gymnasium in a dinky Morris—is a product of the 80-year-old Vyayam Mandir.

Mallakhamb’s cross-continental hop actually started in the late 1980s when Reinhard Boegle, president of the Munich-based Yoga Forum, penned a book on yoga. He devoted one page to mallakhamb, the ‘yoga on a rope’ that had fascinated him .

Inspired by two photographs on that page, Boegle’s assistant Jutta Schneider visited Mumbai a few years ago. ‘‘At age 45, she learnt the sport, interacted with the country’s best exponents at the 2002 National Mallakhamb Championships in Satara, then conceived this workshop project,” says Deshpande.

But then age doesn’t really factor into this ancient game. Case in point is Deshpande’s daughter Aditi, who accompanied her father to Germany. This 18-year-old doesn’t ever need to tell friends the good mallakhamb does—she’s the current national gymnastics champ in the open category.