How a Maulvi in Kashmir came to the rescue of martial arts sport Thang-Ta

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Mohammed Iqbal faced a huge challenge when he tried to draw youngsters to the fascinating Indian martial arts sport of thang-ta in Jammu & Kashmir.</p>
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“Twenty years ago, I was a private trainer and was offering free classes to boys and girls,” Iqbal, now a revered coach in the state, said as his team competed in the Khelo India Youth Games .</p>
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“The locals objected to girls joining my classes. Many of them responded very aggressively and kept disrupting our sessions,” he disclosed.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://www.indianarrative.com/upload/news/image001YOHJ.jpg" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" /></p>
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<em>Mohammed Iqbal, coach for the Jammu and Kashmir Thang-Ta team at KIGY-2021 (left) and Ayjaz Ahmad Bhat, coach and general secretary of the J&K Thang-Ta Association</em></p>
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But then, the head of a local mosque, where Iqbal lived, came to his rescue. “The maulvi and several school principals vouched for my character and assured the agitators that I would take good care of the children, and here I am,” he said.</p>
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It helped that the girls loved the sport and each was determined to stick on despite the opposition.</p>
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Over the years, under the shadow of militancy, Mohammed Iqbal has drawn thousands of children to thang-ta, desperately hoping to keep them in the mainstream.</p>
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“Today, several of those young men and women are local coaches. But back then, quite a few got to travel to different parts of the country, even the world, from Korea to Dubai to Iran, to participate in Championships which motivated others,” Iqbal proudly declared.</p>
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“Now that girls want to learn martial arts for self-defence, many join our classes,” Iqbal said, with a sense of pride.</p>
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It’s difficult to fathom how Thang-Ta, with its origins in the North-Eastern state of Manipur, traversed the plains, hills and valleys to reach J&K, the northern-most tip of India.</p>
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“It’s a homegrown sport, an Indian martial arts form and we just took to the game,” Iqbal said. “I was just a schoolboy then and was immediately drawn towards it.”</p>
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Many believe that a local tournament around that time was the trigger for the spread of thang-ta. “It was organised to help a few of us understand the technicalities and I soon found myself in Manipur for the National Games in 1999.”</p>
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A few years later, wiser and older, when he became a coach, he would get an invitation from the Manipuri Thang-Ta Federation to learn, both, basic and advanced training.</p>
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Today, more than 20 thang-ta clubs have sprung up in downtown Srinagar. Many of his former disciples are training youngsters there.</p>
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“It has become something of a sports tradition now and families are happy to send their children to us for training,” says Ayjaz Ahmad Bhat, the general secretary of the J&K Thang-Ta Association.</p>