A video showing a group of Sikh warriors performing extreme stunts on regional television has shot them to Internet fame over the last few days.
On Chinese video sites, where it was posted earlier this week, the video had collected more than 2.4 million views by Thursday afternoon (November 24, 2011). On YouTube, it now has close to 5.5 million views.
But the seven-minute video, edited from a televised talent show performance, is not for the faint of heart. (Warning: video contains graphic content)
While it’s loosely inspired by Gatka, the traditional Sikh martial art popular in the Sikh state of Punjab, the performers decided to do away with all the spiritual fluff and the ritual dancing. These guys are testosterone-fueled Sikh fighters; there is nothing subtle about their act. While the top-viewed YouTube video describes them as the “Warriors of Goja,” they actually call themselves the “Bir Khalsa Group,” Punjabi for brave warriors. They’re Gatka-fighter-meets-G.I.-Joe-meets-Jackass.
The performance, first aired on regional television over a month ago, starts innocently enough with spinning chakkars, wheel-like symbolic weapons. But the performers’ combat pants and spike-studded armbands suggest they’re up to something a little more hardcore.
Wooden sticks, typical of Gatka, still make an appearance, but instead of twirling them gracefully, the warriors bash them on each other.
They are shown chewing on what looks like glass, smashing bricks with a hammer on their faces and pulling a car with their teeth. And it gets worse: one guy gets simultaneously run over by a car and a motorbike while another plunges four or five meters, bare-chested, through tubelights. 
The grand finale shows three of them sandwiched between beds of nails while (just to make sure it really hurts) others hammer them down.
Throughout the act, a Punjabi tune plays in the background and a khanda, the sword-like symbol of the Sikh religion, glows on a screen in the background.
While parts of the stunts may have been faked, the blood at the end of the show looks real enough. After the performance, one of them proudly twirls his moustache and makes a victory sign with his blood-stained fingers.
The three judges look understandably horrified. But this doesn’t stop them from handing them a wad of cash - 300,000-rupees ($5,750) in total - and praising them for having won the contest as well as their hearts.
Too much for television? Not in India, where similar acts - though rarely of comparable violence - are often broadcast on reality shows.
But the performance appears to be a revelation for many in China, where Shaolin monks practicing “iron body” kung fu have long wowed crowds by bending metal rods with their bare hands and lying on beds of nails while other monks pound their stomachs with hammers.
“I’m guessing Shaolin iron body kungfu must have come from India,” one viewer, Snow Love in Summer, wrote on the video site Youku, noting that Bodhidharma, the monk who supposedly founded Shaolin kung fu in the 5th or 6th century, is said to have come to China from India. “No wonder India dares to be so arrogant in the face of the Celestial Kingdom,” wrote osis-chen, a user of the popular Sina Weibo microblogging service, employing a popular slang term for the Chinese government.
But the clip also stirred debate about whether such violence is appropriate for reality television, with some condemning the display as a craven ploy to drive ratings. Wrote one Weibo user going by the handle WW_005_SimpleLife: “There’s nothing at all to applaud about this - one of them is bleeding by the end. Do reality contest shows really need to be so bloody to attract eyeballs?”
Video here. [Warning: graphic content!]