Lathi Khela
লাঠি খেলাBengali fighting with a bamboo staff. Its practitioners were not sportsmen but the landowners'' guards — and with the end of the zamindari system they lost their employers.
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About Lathi Khela
Lathi khela is Bengali stick fighting, at home in present-day Bangladesh and in Indian West Bengal. The weapon is the lathi, a bamboo staff about two to two and a half metres long, sometimes shod with metal at the ends; the practitioner is called a lathial. The technique rests on sweeping circular strikes carried through the whole length of the staff, on rapid switching from hand to hand, and on covering the head and the shins, the places most often aimed at in stick fighting. Shorter forms of the staff are used alongside the long one. In this case the history is more interesting than the technique. The lathials were not sportsmen but employees: the Bengali landowners called zamindars kept them as guards, as collectors and, in disputes, as the force that made a claim stick. The art thus had a firm social standing and fed those who carried it. That ended with the abolition of the zamindari system after 1950, when the lathials lost their employers. Today lathi khela survives above all as festive performance at weddings and Bengali holidays, chiefly the new-year Pohela Boishakh, and as cultural heritage. The date of origin in the twelfth century is not documented.
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