Punjabi wrestling is done on prepared earth, not on a mat: a pit dug and refilled with loosened soil worked over with oil, buttermilk and turmeric, raked before every session. That pit is the akhara.
A pahalwan's training was diet, mud, and the mugdar, the heavy wooden club, and the discipline was as much moral as physical. The akhara was run by an ustad and it had rules about conduct, celibacy and drink.
Gama, born at Jabbowal in Amritsar district in 1878, went undefeated across a career of some fifty-two years. His first bout with the world champion Stanislaus Zbyszko in September 1910 was drawn, and Zbyszko did not appear for the rematch, so the title came by forfeit rather than by a fall.
Kila Raipur's rural games, kabaddi tournaments and the akhara circuit kept village wrestling alive into the 1980s.
It has declined with the same things that took the rest of it: emigration, drugs, the shift of ambition to sport with a career attached. Mat wrestling in Haryana absorbed the funding and the medals.
The akhara is the wrestling ground: a pit of worked earth, oiled and turned, with a guru and a set of pupils, and a regime of exercise, diet and abstinence around it.
Punjabi kushti produced Gama, who was undefeated across a fifty year career, and a long line of wrestlers after him on both sides of the border.
The word is also used for a religious establishment and for a performance stage, and the three senses share the idea of a defined ground where something is practised.