Rope Trick

FIFTY-YEAR-OLD Uday Deshpande has charted a deft route for his discipline. Deshpande is the chief exponent of mallakhamb, an ancient form of...

FIFTY-YEAR-OLD Uday Deshpande has charted a deft route for his discipline. Deshpande is the chief exponent of mallakhamb, an ancient form of yoga being taught at the Shree Samartha Vyayam Mandir at Shivaji Park, Mumbai. And, as with yoga a couple of decades ago, the road to modern sensibilities had many overseas stopovers.

Mallakhamb, senior by centuries to the park8217;s current ruling sport, cricket, is among India8217;s youngest exports. Simply put, mallakhamb is yoga on a pole or with a rope; as a sport it has the same health benefits as acrobatics.

Within the cool interiors of the Vyayam Mandir building, Deshpande is leafing through an album of his foreign students8212;over a dozen of them, from Brazil, Korea and Europe.

8216;8216;Possibly mallakhamb8217;s route back to India,8217;8217; he calls them. It8217;s a path Deshpande himself has travelled8212;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 clear8212;a new, exciting flavour from India. In fact, the Nauperlache workshop was titled 8216;Let8217;s Go To India8217; 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. 8216;8216;A 52-year-old Ayurveda expert, a 63-year-old retiree, a mountaineer, teachers, kids, they were all so willing to push themselves,8217;8217; says Nita Tatke, a lecturer in psychology at Ruparel College and mallakhamb instructor.

A former gymnastics champion, Tatke8212;like Deshpande, who remembers being force-driven to the rudimentary gymnasium in a dinky Morris8212;is a product of the 80-year-old Vyayam Mandir.

Mallakhamb8217;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 8216;yoga on a rope8217; that had fascinated him .

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Inspired by two photographs on that page, Boegle8217;s assistant Jutta Schneider visited Mumbai a few years ago. 8216;8216;At age 45, she learnt the sport, interacted with the country8217;s best exponents at the 2002 National Mallakhamb Championships in Satara, then conceived this workshop project,8221; says Deshpande.

But then age doesn8217;t really factor into this ancient game. Case in point is Deshpande8217;s daughter Aditi, who accompanied her father to Germany. This 18-year-old doesn8217;t ever need to tell friends the good mallakhamb does8212;she8217;s the current national gymnastics champ in the open category.