This article does not assess the advantages or disadvantages of any martial arts system. Instead, it seeks to understand the historical position of Indian martial arts in relation to two more widely documented traditions: European fencing and the traditional Eastern martial arts of China and Japan. The aim is not to contrast in order to elevate, but to differentiate in order to identify. Consequently, the emphasis is on the distinctive features of Indian martial arts. If the focus were on a different tradition, its unique characteristics would be highlighted against the generalized features of others.
Indian martial arts are distinguished by two features that have never been explicitly promoted. They were implicit in historical reality and required no articulation much like the arts themselves, which had no special name and were simply referred to in everyday speech as “exercises” or “warriors’ games.” The first feature pertains to the martial aspect; the second concerns internal meaning.
Unlike European fencing or traditional Eastern martial arts, Indian martial arts were not marginalized or pushed to society’s periphery after the second half of the 19th century due to the rise of firearms and mass battle tactics that diminished the value of individual skill. The techniques taught in akhara schools remained directly connected to the battlefield. They continued to be relevant for infantry and cavalry combat, even against some of Europe’s finest armies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Archaic weapons such as the double-pointed antelope-horn dagger still practiced today were used effectively in hand-to-hand combat, as were straight, broad-tipped swords known since the early 1st millennium AD.
In contrast, European fencing schools arose and evolved outside the context of battlefield warfare. They were intended to cultivate specific skills for one-on-one duels. Traditional Eastern martial arts, with few exceptions, were also systematized away from the battlefield, finding expression at best in duels between masters, street fights, village militias, or bandit and pirate groups. The weapons used in both traditions eventually became specialized and unsuitable for military use.
The second feature concerns how practices detached from the battlefield being artificially created or marginalized phenomena require a forced ideological framework to avoid remaining on the social periphery and to elevate their status. Without such meaning, they are confined to small social circles or devolve into village entertainment.
The European duel, for instance, began as a brutal, rule-less fight, more akin to a clash between wild animals. In its original form, it was an uncivilized method of settling disputes among mercenaries or soldiers and was unacceptable to broader society. To integrate it into civil life, rules, restrictions, and cultural meaning were necessary. The valor of medieval knights, demonstrated on the battlefield or at tournaments, was replaced by the abstract concept of honor a concept that required strange conditions for its fulfillment: deserted streets, suburban wastelands, and minimal witnesses. Knightly courage gave way to dexterity, cultivated not on open battlefields but in secluded fencing halls, through secret techniques and feints. The abstract notion of honor became a quasi-religion for the nobility. Over centuries, treatises and literary efforts redefined the duel as an act of honor, decency, and strict adherence to rules. The wild fight acquired gloss and courtesy but ultimately lost all connection to contemporary combat skills.
Similarly, to frame traditional Eastern martial arts within a cultural context for duelists, mercenaries, village brawlers, and even robbers a theoretical foundation was developed. This was often based on concepts of duty, self-improvement, and “the Way,” adapted from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. As with the European duel, the imposition of these ideas was dogmatic and reinforced by literary genres, highlighting the artificiality of the semantic framework.
Today, martial arts that have undergone such domestication are often more defined by theoretical, geometric, psychophysical, or philosophical concepts than by any historical link to practical combat.
In Indian martial arts, the trajectory was reversed. Their inherent meaning was gradually eroded and lost over time. In the ancient Indian tradition, the ascetic and the warrior were seen as identical. Both, through the feat of their life or death, pierced the orbit of the sun and transcended this world. The tradition of memorial stones (virakal)—erected for warriors who died in battle or fighting wild animals, for shepherds defending their flocks, and for acts of self-sacrifice dates back to at least the second half of the 2nd millennium BC and continued into the Middle Ages. These stones typically feature a tripartite structure: the lower part depicts the feat, the middle shows the hero’s ascension to heaven, and the upper represents the apotheosis. The warrior and the ascetic achieved the same goal through different paths. Later beliefs held that warriors who died in battle were also freed from the cycle of rebirth.
Indian martial practices were a form of prayer, worship, and communion with the divine. It is no coincidence that they inherited traditions of military and shamanic dance. Even wrestling was not merely about determining the strongest competitor but about discovering through whom divine power could manifest most fully. Wrestlers viewed their strength and physical perfection not as personal achievements but as a reflection of divine beauty, an image or temple of God. Maintaining their bodies was an act of service. For warriors, the equivalent was practice with weapons.
Wrestlers and champion warriors were present at royal courts not simply for entertainment. They filled the court with power, demonstrating the ruler’s might and the legitimacy of his authority as an instrument of divine will. They served as elements of dharma, maintaining order and the proper course of events. The same function was fulfilled by heroes defending their homes and herds, and by armed ascetics who, since ancient times, guarded roads, pilgrimage centers, trade routes, and caravans.
This internal meaning never became a fetish, a class marker, or a codified “Way of the Warrior.” It was not reduced to self-improvement, self-knowledge, longevity, esoteric mastery, or superpowers as ultimate goals. Such a framework, where martial practices are inseparable from religious ideas, was once common across Indo-European and other cultures. Over time, however, this connection was lost, replaced by mythology or substituted by ideology.
In European fencing, the tradition of 16th-century military camp duels using actual weapons and battlefield-relevant skills was transformed through efforts to make it noble. It eventually became a practice centered on abstract honor and dueling skills with little applicability to contemporary combat.
In Eastern martial arts, literary and theatrical genres from the 17th through the 20th centuries reframed bandits, pirates, village fighters, wandering fencers, hired killers, and other armed individuals as followers of duty, spiritual self-improvement, or a warrior’s path often attributing to them unusual weapons and histories never mentioned in earlier records.
In Indian martial arts, the original internal content was gradually eroded through modernization and the destruction of traditional culture. Weapon practices as a form of religious worship became confined to festivals and celebrations. Even the most conservative and religious segment of the martial environment — the armed ascetics — had, by the 17th century, sometimes come to resemble bandits wielding archaic weapons more than adepts pursuing spiritual goals. Yet, whereas European fencing and Eastern martial arts saw their cultural and semantic content largely replace their practical, battlefield-relevant skills, Indian martial practices remained in demand and relevant until the second half of the 19th century.