How long has it been since you spent a few days in the close company of young female athletes and experienced their easy camaraderie? In my generation at least, that kind of intimacy was strictly limited to male locker rooms.
I come from a generation of women who were brought up “traditionally” and did not “do sports”. For me, the high school annual athletics-cum-cultural meets in UP for girls (Uttarakhand was then a part of the state) was the only time I spent time with athletes from our school and other girls’ schools. Most of the athletes in our team were tall, muscular Jat girls from the Terai region sent to school in Nainital. A few came from local Thakur families and had shoulders powerful enough to throw javelins and discuses and I applauded when they won trophies and certificates. I was a nerd, a perennial part of the “cultural” team, who competed in music and dance.
In the shared bathing and changing rooms, we nerds were horribly conscious of our adolescent bodies — unlike the athletes, whose acceptance of their physical prowess and fitness I envied. I ensured that all the doors and windows were shut and curtained so snooping male eyes would not see us. We were raised to believe that the most important thing was not knowledge of how a female body functions but rather, how it looks. And no one should look at it in the nude. In our families, sports that made women sweat out fear and weakness and build bodies like their brothers were considered “unfeminine”. Women wrestlers were unheard of.
I watched Dangal (2018) with great delight. And when the Phogat sisters, on whose lives the story was based, began winning gold, silver and bronze medals in the Commonwealth Games, the Asiad and even the Olympics, many greying women like me, I am sure, wondered why the experience of sport was denied to us. This realisation and later, the sight of young female wrestlers draped in the tricolour, holding their medals aloft, brought both anger (why were we convinced that our bodies were items to be presented, not our personal terrain?) and also a vicarious thrill (India proudly accepting muscular sweaty bodies of female wrestlers as normal).
As I have aged, the mysterious changes I saw transforming women who dared to break the glass ceiling in Indian politics — Indira Gandhi, Mayawati, Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Vasundhara Raje and Jaya Bachchan — have also transformed my thinking about the transformative power of women from various backgrounds storming the bastions of electoral politics. First came the panchayats and now women must dream big — of entering Parliament in larger numbers and changing power structures from within.
The story of 30-year-old Vinesh Phogat entering the political arena in Haryana is an indication of the gradual acceptance of women power in two of the most conservative arenas — athletics and politics. “It feels good,” Phogat said, riding in an open jeep after getting the ticket, “I am a winner in their eyes and nothing can be bigger than this.” Meanwhile, former BJP MP and ousted Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief, accused of multiple sexual assaults by half a dozen female wrestlers is foaming at the mouth. The female wrestlers who first blew the whistle on his long record of molestation were called liars and laughed at by the powers that be. Then came anger as their dharna in Delhi drew the media. When they were seen on TV being dragged mercilessly off the streets where they spent weeks asking for justice, cracks began to appear even in his party that had made many electoral promises to empower women. After being denied a Lok Sabha ticket, the accused is now accusing the Congress and the Hoodas in particular, of “conspiracy”.
Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh recently said that the Hoodas had used the six female wrestlers like the Pandavas had once used Draupadi and, in doing so, the Congress had put the honour of “daughters and sisters” at stake. That, he said, was not a wrestlers’ protest in Delhi. It was merely a family protest. Phogat had cheated her way into the Paris Olympics he said, and lost because she put on too much weight, he sneered. He has reportedly been asked by the Party since to keep his mouth shut. There is vast support among the Jats and the athletic fraternity for Phogat, who after so much suffering still brought the country honour by defeating a wrestling champ like Sarah Hildebrandt of the US in the Paris Olympics.
Singh is not the country, Phogat says nonchalantly. “My country and my loved ones stand by me.” The former WFI chief now faces the High Court later this month after charges have already been framed against him.
Phogat was asked about Singh whining that if the wrestler’s charges of repeated molestation were true, why didn’t she slap him when he made advances? She was no weakling. Vinesh’s cryptic reply — the slap too shall follow in time — reminded me of an apocryphal story about Judy Holliday. When she went for an interview, the head of the studio started chasing her around the desk. After a while, Judy reached inside her dress, pulled out her falsies and handed them to him. “Here,” she said, “I think this is what you want.”
Haryanvi society has clearly accepted this wrestler, who has worked hard to be where she is. This support for Vinesh Phogat as an emblem of physical fortitude, fearlessness and unbending pride as a woman and an athlete, marks a historic moment. It is a palpable example of India changing before our eyes.
As for the acceptance of the strength of ordinary women of various ages and income groups, the jury is still out. But no matter how friendly or frightening the new political territory will feel to our young wrestler, she and her party can take pride in the fact that she will be the first face of a new chapter in our democratic politics.
The writer is former chairperson, Prasar Bharati
