A year after his last WWE fight, life of ‘The Great Khali’ has turned a full circle
Even if you know what to expect, your jaw drops when you meet Dalip Singh Rana. When he walks through a door, he has to twist his 7’ 2, nearly 200 kg frame a little. When he reaches for a handshake, you notice that his arm is the size of your waist. And when the man who wrestled as The Great Khali in the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) arena for nearly a decade grasps your hand in his dinner-plate-sized one, you feel like a child.
Rana hasn’t been The Great Khali for more than a year, since his contract with the WWE ended. He doesn’t have rights to the name either. It isn’t even his only ring name. In Japan, he wrestled as Giant Singh. In Mexico, he was Gigante Singh. If you were, however, an Indian with an iota of interest in pro wrestling, there is no other name you would know him by. Khali had fought with the best of the big guys — Triple H, Kane, The Undertaker and The Big Show — in the biggest of the shows. He was the first Indian pro wrestling superstar.
WWE or not, his popularity seems undiminished. When his Ford Fortuner stops at a police barricade in Jalandhar, the constable doesn’t ask Dalip Singh Rana for his licence. He grins and asks Khali for a photograph. “It’s only my family members who call me Dalip now. For everyone else I am Khali,” says the 42-year-old in a voice as guttural as his TV persona’s.
On screen, Khali was billed as one who could walk unafraid amid tigers and pythons “in the jungles of Punjab”. These days, he’s found amid mustard fields, in a building where he runs his pro wrestling academy — the Continental Wrestling Entertainment (CWE) academy — about 20 minutes from Jalandhar. Set up six months ago, it is a work in progress. Unkempt grass surrounds the unfinished building. Labourers march in and out. The noise of machines is punctuated by the sound of bodies crashing at a boxing ring in the centre of the building.
A class is underway. Students form a line and practise body slams supervised by an American trainer, while Khali observes from a corner. The students are a mix of ages, shapes and backgrounds. There is a 6’2 bouncer from Goa. A strapping 6’10 ex-accountant rubs shoulders with a portly Delhi woman in her mid-thirties who goes by the name of Bibi Bulbul. An 11-year-old stands alongside a balding 26-year old who shut his kirana store in Jalgaon, Maharashtra. It wasn’t a cheap decision. The academy lets in anyone willing to have a go, but it charges Rs 15,000 a month. But there’s no shortage of applicants. Some 70 people are squeezed in two four-hour shifts. Every one of them hopes it’s just a few years before they wrestle in the WWE.
No one has made it yet. With such varying athleticism, results are mixed. It doesn’t help that the red-haired American, Rex Andrews, who wrestles for an independent promotion, doesn’t speak Hindi and the trainees mostly don’t understand English. His students have a long way to go before they can perform without injuring themselves. But he knows why they persist. “You have to be a dreamer to want to be a pro wrestler,” says Andrews.
In 1998, Khali, one of seven children from an impoverished home in Dhiraina village in Himachal Pradesh, did not share that dream but he had nevertheless come a long way. As a teenager, he broke stones as a road worker to earn money. He had never been to school. His unusual height caught the attention of a police official, who got him a sports quota job with Punjab Police. There he found his niche in bodybuilding and competed successfully as a guest poser, who is paid simply to show up. But one day, the 26-year-old Dalip saw a telecast of the WWF. “I became a fan,” he says.
He did not know then that pro wrestling was a modern hybrid of pantomime — with good and bad guys. He did not know what it was to be the “heel”, the one who tried to get “heat” from the crowd with his villainy, or the babyface who played the hero. He was unaware of the fact that the match inside the ring or even the walk up to it could be used to tell a story, to entertain. “I thought the fighting was real. I felt I could beat everyone up. I knew this was what I should be doing with my life,” he says.
Even if you know what to expect, your jaw drops when you meet Dalip Singh Rana. When he walks through a door, he has to twist his 7’ 2, nearly 200 kg frame a little. When he reaches for a handshake, you notice that his arm is the size of your waist. And when the man who wrestled as The Great Khali in the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) arena for nearly a decade grasps your hand in his dinner-plate-sized one, you feel like a child.
Rana hasn’t been The Great Khali for more than a year, since his contract with the WWE ended. He doesn’t have rights to the name either. It isn’t even his only ring name. In Japan, he wrestled as Giant Singh. In Mexico, he was Gigante Singh. If you were, however, an Indian with an iota of interest in pro wrestling, there is no other name you would know him by. Khali had fought with the best of the big guys — Triple H, Kane, The Undertaker and The Big Show — in the biggest of the shows. He was the first Indian pro wrestling superstar.
WWE or not, his popularity seems undiminished. When his Ford Fortuner stops at a police barricade in Jalandhar, the constable doesn’t ask Dalip Singh Rana for his licence. He grins and asks Khali for a photograph. “It’s only my family members who call me Dalip now. For everyone else I am Khali,” says the 42-year-old in a voice as guttural as his TV persona’s.
On screen, Khali was billed as one who could walk unafraid amid tigers and pythons “in the jungles of Punjab”. These days, he’s found amid mustard fields, in a building where he runs his pro wrestling academy — the Continental Wrestling Entertainment (CWE) academy — about 20 minutes from Jalandhar. Set up six months ago, it is a work in progress. Unkempt grass surrounds the unfinished building. Labourers march in and out. The noise of machines is punctuated by the sound of bodies crashing at a boxing ring in the centre of the building.
A class is underway. Students form a line and practise body slams supervised by an American trainer, while Khali observes from a corner. The students are a mix of ages, shapes and backgrounds. There is a 6’2 bouncer from Goa. A strapping 6’10 ex-accountant rubs shoulders with a portly Delhi woman in her mid-thirties who goes by the name of Bibi Bulbul. An 11-year-old stands alongside a balding 26-year old who shut his kirana store in Jalgaon, Maharashtra. It wasn’t a cheap decision. The academy lets in anyone willing to have a go, but it charges Rs 15,000 a month. But there’s no shortage of applicants. Some 70 people are squeezed in two four-hour shifts. Every one of them hopes it’s just a few years before they wrestle in the WWE.
No one has made it yet. With such varying athleticism, results are mixed. It doesn’t help that the red-haired American, Rex Andrews, who wrestles for an independent promotion, doesn’t speak Hindi and the trainees mostly don’t understand English. His students have a long way to go before they can perform without injuring themselves. But he knows why they persist. “You have to be a dreamer to want to be a pro wrestler,” says Andrews.
In 1998, Khali, one of seven children from an impoverished home in Dhiraina village in Himachal Pradesh, did not share that dream but he had nevertheless come a long way. As a teenager, he broke stones as a road worker to earn money. He had never been to school. His unusual height caught the attention of a police official, who got him a sports quota job with Punjab Police. There he found his niche in bodybuilding and competed successfully as a guest poser, who is paid simply to show up. But one day, the 26-year-old Dalip saw a telecast of the WWF. “I became a fan,” he says.
He did not know then that pro wrestling was a modern hybrid of pantomime — with good and bad guys. He did not know what it was to be the “heel”, the one who tried to get “heat” from the crowd with his villainy, or the babyface who played the hero. He was unaware of the fact that the match inside the ring or even the walk up to it could be used to tell a story, to entertain. “I thought the fighting was real. I felt I could beat everyone up. I knew this was what I should be doing with my life,” he says.
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