WWE: No, Jinder Mahal Didn’t Get Buried By Triple H In India

Jinder Mahal lost his marquee matchup to Triple H when the WWE went on tour to India, but that doesn’t mean the “Modern Day Maharaja” was buried.

The WWE shocked its fans when they put the WWE Championship, one of the company’s two most prized titles (or at least that’s what they want you to believe), around Jinder Mahal’s waist. Mahal defeated Randy Orton to capture the title at Backlash, beat him twice more, and then proceeded to win two big pay per view matches against former NJPW world-beater Shinsuke Nakamura thereafter.

Clearly, the WWE had something invested in Mahal, but they quickly took the title off of him before Survivor Series, avoiding an unwanted clash between him and Brock Lesnar.

Since he lost the WWE Championship to AJ Styles on an episode of SmackDown Live in Manchester, England, many assumed that Mahal would get his momentum back with a win over Triple H in New Delhi. After all, the WWE ostensibly built Mahal up for this Indian tour, and the prevailing belief among fans and journalists was that the WWE made him champion in order to increase their fanbase in India.

Whether or not that actually happened is a different topic, but Mahal ended up losing to Triple H in India. This caused many to chime in with “lol bring out the shovel” comments on social media directed at Triple H, who is still disliked by some fans due to his “Reign of Terror” run.

I can see why people are puzzled. Triple H is 48, he already has plenty of big wins under his belt, his legend won’t increase with a win, and he already looked strong as one of the sole survivors at Survivor Series.

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The issue is that Triple H actually does need to win, because if he loses too frequently, defeating Triple H at big pay per views like, say, WrestleMania won’t mean anything. His loss to Seth Rollins at WrestleMania 33 fell a bit flat, partially because everyone fully expected Rollins to win.

Triple H has more losses than wins at WrestleMania now, and the belief that he will always push talent has made some fans less likely to believe that he will actually win. If he faces Braun Strowman and loses, don’t you want that to mean something?

While Mahal obviously would have benefited greatly from defeating Triple H, it doesn’t exactly fit the narrative of the two competitors. Triple H is a 14-time world champion and one of the most decorated wrestlers in history.

He’s known as “The Game” and “The Cerebral Assassin” for his prowess in between the ropes, so why would a seasoned competitor with 14 world titles lose to a guy who only rose to prominence because of his henchmen? And oh by the way, the Singh Brothers didn’t interfere to help Mahal in this match.

The WWE has a clear hierarchy established of which wrestlers are portrayed as being more successful competitors than others. Mahal isn’t on the same level as Triple H in the ring, nor is he on the same level as Styles, Nakamura, and Orton. That’s why he couldn’t defeat Styles, and that’s why he needed help to defeat Nakamura and Orton.

That said, Mahal’s loss wasn’t a burial, because it was a competitive match. Although the loss tells the story that Mahal isn’t as good of a wrestler as Triple H, it did tell the story that he is good enough to hang with “The Game”.

Mahal kicked out of a “Pedigree”, which is basically the universal symbol of, “Oh hey, this guy is legit.” More importantly, he and Triple H worked for about 30 minutes, and Mahal got the crowd more and more on his side by the end of it. So even though Triple H scored the pinfall victory via a second Pedigree, Jinder got the rub of proving competency in the ring and was, in some sense, “put over” by Triple H as a wrestler.

The term “burial” gets thrown around a little too often. Getting pinned by just one “Attitude Adjustment” in a quick match at SummerSlam just weeks after losing his Money in the Bank briefcase, Baron Corbin was seemingly “buried” by John Cena. Yet months later, he stands as the United States Champion.

So if Mahal lost a highly competitive, non-televised match to a 14-time world champion, how does that constitute a burial?

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If anything, this match helped build Mahal’s credibility to those who saw it. He hung in there with Triple H, he turned the crowd in his favor, he kicked out of the Pedigree, he gave the fans their money’s worth, and he received verbal praise from the WWE’s COO afterwards. That sounds like a pretty decent deal to me.