WWE star of Indian descent turns up the heat
“YPROVIDENCE, R.I. ou people have nothing to celebrate,” Jinder Mahal shouted into a microphone Tuesday night at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center. The current World Wrestling Entertainment champion was dressed in a black turban and a gray suit with his giant belt slung over his shoulder. He twisted his face into a deep, angry grimace, and continued, “But for my people, today marks Independence Day of the greatest nation on earth: the great nation of India!”
Thousands of fans leapt out of their seats, stuck their thumbs down and roared their disapproval. SmackDown Live — one of WWE’s weekly livetelevised events had just begun, and Jinder Mahal (real name Yuvraj Singh Dhesi) was using an elaborate celebration of his culture to fire up the crowd. The wrestling ring was decorated with a lush rug; a Bhangra dance team made its way down the entrance ramp; a woman in a purple salwar kameez sang the Indian national anthem.
Dhesi, the first WWE champion of Indian descent, is a heel (wrestling speak for a villain), so it is his job to turn crowds into booing, angry mobs. As part of his persona, he exhorts the crowd with statements of cultural confrontation: that Americans are too clueless to realize that greatness comes from immigrants (and therefore, himself ). The heated rhetoric often sounds like it would be at home on a cable news panel rather than a wrestling ring. And on Sunday, it will arrive on one of WWE’s biggest stages: SummerSlam, one of the sports-entertainment company’s core pay-per-view events, where Jinder Mahal will fight a rising star named Shinsuke Nakamura.
Both Dhesi and WWE executives deny that his storyline was politically motivated or designed to send subtle messages, even as the company has made a large investment in becoming a global product. The WWE is looking to expand into India, a country where sports entertainment is already popular, with a potential audience of 1.3 billion people. Its programming is available now in 180 countries and in 650 million homes, according to a spokesman. It is a publicly traded company and has attracted many big name sponsors, including Snickers and Mattel.
The night before “SmackDown Live,” Dhesi was out of character and standing backstage at the MassMutual Center in Springfield, Mass. Shirtless and wearing purple and black spandex tights with a lotus flower on them (a sacred symbol in India), he was using an elastic band to “pump up” — solo exercises to make his many protruding muscles look more muscular. While he was relaxed, friendly and exceedingly polite, he was also intently focused.
“Early on, I would actually tell Vince McMahon, ‘Hey, I’m going to have the keys to the kingdom,’” Dhesi said hours earlier at the Tower Square Hotel, referring to the chairman of the WWE. “‘One day, this place is going to be mine.’”
The journey started in Calgary, Alberta. Dhesi’s parents immigrated to the United States from Punjab, a northern state of India, then settled in Canada. Dhesi, now 31, wasn’t the first in his family to take up wrestling. His uncle, Gama Singh, performed in the 1980s in Calgary’s Stampede Wrestling. Dhesi grew up idolizing the characters of Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) and Dwayne Johnson (The Rock). After attending the University of Calgary to study business, he started training, with his parents’ blessing.
Dhesi arrived at the WWE in 2011 and spent three years as mostly enhancement talent or more impolitely: a professional loser. In wrestling parlance, he was a jobber: a performer who exists almost entirely to make other performers look better. “I just had lost focus,” Dhesi said. “I had kind of become complacent, which is the kiss of death in the WWE.”
He was released in 2014, and started dabbling in real estate. He considered buying a Subway franchise, but decided to rededicate himself to wrestling. The first step was getting into shape. He stopped drinking alcohol, which he blamed for limiting his drive, eliminated junk food, and embraced an extreme training regimen. In summer 2016, he got an unexpected call from the WWE. Would he like to come back?
When he returned, Jinder Mahal was still losing often, but in April, his story saw a creative shift: He became a winner. At the time, Dhesi’s gimmick was about practicing peace. But McMahon wanted Jinder Mahal to talk about his immigrant roots. Dhesi, who first visited India when he was 10, was uncomfortable at first but dutifully carried out his boss’s wishes.
In the backdrop of Jinder Mahal’s rise is the WWE’s push into India, where Dhesi’s star is quickly rising. According to Michelle Wilson, the company’s chief revenue officer, about 60 million viewers from India watch WWE programming every week.
The company launched a new weekly television show, WWE Sunday Dhamaal, that rounds up the best action in Hindi. In April, the company held an audition in Dubai, where more than a quarter of those trying out were from India.