Engaging Women Into Sports In India
The life-blood of any sport, as everyone knows, is the fans. In this era of television-centric sports coverage, eyeballs (read: TRPs) are everything. It is viewership that brings in money, whether via tickets or telecast rights or sponsorship or merchandise, and it is money that is needed not only to keep the sport’s reigning champions incentivised, but also to keep the sport itself relevant, and attract new and exciting recruits. Cricket viewership had, of course, never been a problem in India, but with sporting success also coming on other fronts, and with the media’s full support, other sports also gradually began to benefit.
The one big challenge left was this – how to bring women, traditionally never big watchers of sport, into the fold? Fortunately for all of us, Bollywood – specifically scriptwriter Jaideep Sahni – had seen the cinematic potential in the underdog story of the Indian women’s hockey team, and their coach, way back in 2002. He wasted no time turning life into art, taking all the poetic licence required to adapt it for the screen. When it released in 2007, Chak De India!, based on a fictitious ragtag Indian women’s hockey team that wins the ‘World Championships’, became a watershed in the annals of Bollywood. Riding the country’s optimistic mood, it used the attention that superstar Shah Rukh Khan ensured for it not only to hold up a mirror to the deep-seated rot and sexism that plagued sports bodies, but also to dispense messages about courage, sportsmanship, teamwork, girl power, the reprehensibility of stereotyping, and the urban-rural and class divides. To keep things interesting, it also threw in snarky asides at the unofficial national sport, cricket. With Chak De’s success, the joy and grief of sport, its heady triumphs and its gutting defeats, and all the sacrifices it demanded of its practitioners, became part of popular culture. The Indian sportswoman had been humanised, her peculiar trials – being a good daughter-in-law while trying to follow her dream, defying her parents and social expectations to travel to tournaments, being expected to let her achievements take a back seat to those of her fiance’s – showcased with a rare empathy. Across India, mothers and daughters – and fathers and sons – took the country’s first contemporary sports film to their hearts.
The year after Chak De brought women and girls out into the movie halls and into the sporting goods stores (there was a serious spike in the sales of hockey sticks nationwide, and most of the buyers were girls), cricket itself, willy-nilly, helped the cause along, with the introduction of the 45-day annual family carnival called the Indian Premier League (IPL). Social media, which had recently exploded on the scene, helped things along. Going to a sports stadium was no longer something that only the serious sports fans and stats nerds did, it had become a selfie-worthy social occasion, a community celebration. Single-handedly, IPL changed the demographic of the sports-watcher – he was now your wife.
