India is a nation that takes its sport very seriously. Now, thanks to homegrown star The Great Khali, they have become hooked on the melodrama and gladiatorial antics of American pro-wrestling.

Khali is a monster of a man: 7ft3in (2.2m) and 30st (190kg), he is the first Indian to be signed up by World Wrestling Entertainment. “This enormous monster has walked the jungles of India, unafraid of pythons, and wrestled white Bengal tigers,” says the WWE website, possibly giving in to hyperbole. Now, eight years after his debut, Khali has had a spell as world number one and has returned to India for a holiday, and to shoot a documentary about his remarkable life. Thousands have turned out to greet him, and the President has told him that he is the pride of the nation.

It is a very long way from the village in Himachal Pradesh where Khali was born in 1972. Named Dalip Singh Rana, he had little education and worked as a stone-breaker and labourer. Neighbours found him useful when they needed to move cattle from one barn to another.

His break came at 15, when he was offered a job in the Punjabi police under a sports quota scheme (he is theoretically still on leave from his job, and still collects his salary). He discovered body-building and wrestling, and won the Mr India title in 1997 and 1998. He then made his way to Japan to try his hand at professional wrestling, and hit America in 1999.

There, he changed his professional name from Giant Singh to The Great Khali, after Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. In the past eight years he has taken on, and trounced, wrestlers with names such as Undertaker and Hornswoggle, using signature manoeuvres such as the Khali Bomb, which involves picking up an opponent by the neck and throwing him on the ground.

There have been a couple of Hollywood films (including The Longest Yard), and rumours of Bollywood ones, but Khali is so far keeping his enormous feet on the ground. Married since 2002 to Harminder Kaur, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he eats four meals a day and works out for two hours. “I have no fancy villa or cars,” he says. “I live in a simple home and do not have the money to order a customised car that would fit my size.”

“You shake his hand and you are shaking the inner part of his palm,” says one awed actor who worked with him. “He could put his hand over your entire head and crush you.” Meanwhile, back in Himachal Pradesh, his parents have celebrated the imminent return of their son by making their front door 8ft high. “We want to give him good facilities here,” his proud mother told the local paper. To the world he is a terrifying giant. To Indians he is a wrestling god. To his mother he is probably still, to quote Monty Python, a very naughty boy.

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