The Women To Be Proud For In Indian Sport

Who were these girls with the winning ways? Where had they come from? What inspired them to keep going? In sport, as in everything else in life, the truth is to be found not on the podium, but in the back stories. The fascinating thing is that each back story is quite unlike any other – the nudge that first pitches a girl into a particular sport; the insanely difficult journey to the top, as much a test of her mental and emotional strengths as it is of the physical; the kind of social, economic, and cultural background she comes from, which helps or hinders her progress in particular ways – are specific to each person; they can never be whittled down to four or five neat categories. Even more fascinating, however, are the unexpected fallouts of such success, especially in terms of its social and cultural impact.

Mary Kom moved from athletics to boxing at the age of 17 because she was inspired by the medal-winning success of her fellow Manipuri Dingko Singh at the Bangkok Asiad in 1998. She didn’t tell her dad about it because she knew he would not allow it – he worried too much, as dads of daughters did, about the damage boxing could do to her face and how that might affect her chances in the marriage market. Her stupendous success has not only brought a slew of exceptional me-toos from the region onto the national stage, it has led to an increased awareness about, and respect for, her state in the national consciousness. In its turn, the eponymous Bollywood movie made on her life has hopefully inspired a generation of young women – and more importantly, young men – to rethink their notions of what a supportive husband really means. Geeta and Babita Phogat took to wrestling not because of any love for the sport, but because their wrestler dad insisted they did. After waiting several years in vain for a son, Mahavir Singh Phogat decided he would coach his daughters to be wrestlers instead, and brave the social backlash that would undoubtedly accompany such an act in his conservative town. Today, the success of his audacious experiment – which, it must be said, could have gone very badly for him and his girls – has not only propelled many more girls from Haryana into wrestling and other sports, but has also brought about a sea change in the mindset of a patriarchal state that had the worst sex ratio at birth among all states in India as per the 2011 census – 834 girls to every 1000 boys.

In early 2018, the ratio had gone up a remarkable 80 points to 914, and one cannot help wondering how much of the credit for this should go to an iconoclast called Mahavir Phogat - whose experiment is captured in the blockbuster movie, Dangal. Saina Nehwal (like the Phogat sisters, she was another Haryana girl who was responsible for altering perspectives about women in her home state) and PV Sindhu owe their success, in large part, to their extraordinary coach, Pullela Gopichand, who mortgaged his own home in 2008 to pull together the final tranche of funds needed to complete his state-of-the-art facility in Hyderabad, the Gopichand Badminton Academy, where the two girls train. Today, the academy counts among its students the current and former World No 1’s in both the men’s and the women’s game. More importantly, Gopichand has set the standard for other centres of sporting excellence around the country, and proved that ‘world-class’ is an adjective that can legitimately be attached to an Indian sporting academy. Star forward of the women’s hockey team Rani Rampal (also from Haryana) was only 15 when she smashed home four goals against Belgium in the Champions Challenge Hockey Tournament in 2009, helping India to a 6-3 win and winning herself the Best Young Player title. When I interviewed her for a story on teen achievers for a children’s magazine the same year, she sounded very excited about life, particularly because of a monthly grant of Rs. 4000 that she had begun to receive from a young Bangalore-based non-profit called GoSports Foundation. “I can now buy better shoes and kit to improve my game,” she told me, grinning all over her face. “My father is a cart-puller, so there has never been money to spare for such luxuries. ” Four thousand rupees may not seem like a lot of money at all, but that small infusion, made at the appropriate time, had made all the difference to a budding hockey superstar and her family – it had allowed her to chase her dream without guilt.

Across India, other organisations like GoSports, although they were few and far between -were making that happen for other young and hungry sportspeople. From sprawling metropolises and remote villages, from straitened circumstances and comfortable ones, from families with no background in sport and families that had fine sporting pedigrees – by 2014, the sporting valiants who were busting society’s notions of what a girl wanted, and giving the Indian public a masterclass in single-minded determination, were coming from everywhere. The incentives were different – success, respect in society, financial independence, a means to negotiate life on their own terms – but the goal was the same: to win. The support system was falling in place too. The idea of women in sport – whether as sportspeople, journalists, supportive mums, or fans – had truly begun to go mass.