The incredible courage of Sakshi Malik

Growing up, Sakshi recalls in her book, Witness, co-written with Jonathan Selvaraj, dangals—or mud-packed arenas where men grappled—were hugely popular in Haryana. But, “When I first started wrestling, I don’t think women were even allowed there as spectators, let alone as competitors.”

Nobody could have foreseen that the daughter of an anganwadi supervisor and bus conductor would go on to achieving such stunning sporting success. But the seeds had been sown early by her paternal grandparents at whose home in Mokhra village, district Rohtak, Sakshi spent her early years. Her grandfather took her everywhere, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt instead of the salwar-kameez that the other girls wore. I was, Sakshi recalls, “never given the impression that I was a girl so I had to behave a certain way.”

When she began training at the Sir Chhotu Ram stadium at the age of 12, there were just four girls. No woman had even qualified for an Olympics. “These days, if you go to any akhara where women train, you will see at least forty or fifty girls training,” Sakshi writes. “There was no option for us but to practise with the younger boys… where you were expected to put your hands on each other, grab and pull at what you could, and no one thought anything of it.”

Relatives raised their eyes at the sight of Sakshi in shorts and a loose singlet with a t-shirt worn underneath for modesty, her hair cut short like a boy to prevent long hair from coming in the way during a bout but also as a deterrence to all things forbidden, such as fashion and boys.

The story of Sakshi’s romance with Satyawrat Kadian, also a wrestler, has a wholesomeness to it, with a uniquely Haryanvi flavour. The two were Facebook friends messaging each other for four years before their first ‘date’ over chocolate ice-cream at a 7-11 store in Colorado Springs, USA (he paid), where the two were participating in an international tournament. On the way back to the hotel, Satyawrat asked if he could hold her hand but, “I wasn’t that bold as to allow him to. I rushed back to my room, thrilled and scandalised in equal measure,”recalls Sakshi.

Her hesitation about getting into a relationship was not just her conditioning by a society where marrying for love remains taboo. “I’d seen enough examples of girls whose lives were absolutely ruined by their [possessive and controlling] boyfriends,” she writes. So when she made it clear that she wasn’t looking for something casual, Satyawrat responded in the most Haryanvi manner—by asking for her mother’s and grandmother’s gotra (roughly, clan). In a culture where marrying somebody from the same gotra is seen as incest, this was crucial. Once he realised their gotras were different, he was able to tell her: “I’ve given you my word. I will never leave you.”

Showing the way

To see Sakshi Malik or Vinesh Phogat solely through the prism of their sensational protest against sexual harassment charges levelled against Wrestling Federation of India boss Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh is a disservice.

A state that does poorly on many gender indices, including sex ratio at birth, where the ghoongat or veil is still in place and where women are controlled by rigid social norms on who they can or cannot marry, has emerged as a crucible for women in sports.

Partly it’s because of the huge incentives the state offers to players, both by way of cash and also through government jobs. Partly it’s to do with infrastructure built at the district and even village level. And partly it’s because the state has a tradition of producing athletes. “Our natural physique is tagda,” coach Kuldeep Malik told me in an earlier interview. In the just concluded Paris Olympics, Haryana had the largest representation with 24, or 20% of the participating athletes.

But mainly the credit goes to an earlier generation of women athletes who became role models for girls in villages and mohalla. The early pioneers broke glass ceilings and created the space for a new generation of aspirational girls.

They dealt with challenges in the best way they knew. Everyone knew the reputation of Brij Bhushan, BJP’s six-time member of Parliament who wielded enormous influence and was known to make or break fledging careers. “He would get obsessed with certain girls and want to know everything about them…. He wanted to know if they were in training, whether they would travel out of the camp, and whether they were dating anyone,” writes Sakshi.

It was inevitable that he would eventually notice the rising star called Sakshi Malik. At the 2012 Asian Junior Championships at Almaty, Kazakhstan where Sakshi won a gold, he called her to his room on the pretext of calling up her parents. He made his move right after the call. “He tried to molest me while I was seated on his bed. I pushed him off and started to cry.”

Back in her room, Sakshi recalls how she was in a state of shock: “I didn’t just feel violated, I also feared that because I had refused to give into his demands it would mean the end of my wrestling career.”

For the next four years, Sakshi competed in fear, often taking a family member along for domestic tournaments. Slowly she came to realise that “probably 90 per cent of us from those times have faced something similar. [But] There was just no knowledge back then that this was a very serious offence.”

The unprecedented public protest by India’s leading wrestlers to oust Brij Bhushan led to perhaps the most dramatic image of Sakshi grappling with policewomen sent to disrupt an intended march to the new Parliament building on June 24, 2023.

The images of the wrestlers being manhandled created shock waves through the world. These were India’s leading athletes who had put wrestling firmly on the global map. They had dared to take on the state and now the state was showing them their place.

Vernacular feminism

Through her protest and career, Sakshi and the others, took on the patriarchy, battled prejudice, broke gender stereotypes and shattered the silence around sexual abuse. They did all this in the context of their social milieus, rather than an imported rallying cry for feminist rights.

For instance, Sakshi’s decision to marry Satyawrat after opposition from her parents who were reluctant to lose out on the cash benefits their daughter was reaping was through the understanding that there were lines she was not prepared to cross: Running away, for instance. She chose the expedient, practical and face-saving route of leaking the news to the press.

Though the protests, the women would talk of the izzat of India’s daughters, using words that are anathema to the women’s movement. There is awareness of course of how monumental the stakes are, but, writes Sakshi: “I sleep peacefully every night because I know I am fighting for the daughters of my country and for a cause that I know is righteous.”

She wades through body shaming and body image; the need for women to control and understand their finances; the hypocrisy of festivals where the wife fasts for the long life of her husband; her own mental health issues. She does all of this minus jargon and hashtags, using what legal scholar Anupriya Dhonchak calls the “unique vernacularisation of feminism in Haryana”—a process by which universal human rights and global ideas of feminist justice are converted into local understanding of what those ideas might look like.

What Sakshi and the other women wrestlers achieve is the “advantage of fashioning change in communities from within.”

Uniquely, Witness is an insider’s account of one of modern India’s most remarkable stories: The growth and success of women athletes in a society that remains patriarchal and bound by tradition. “I’m not done just yet. I’ve won before from this position. I’m going to win again.” She already has.

Witness by Sakshi Malik with Jonathan Selvaraj, Juggernaut, ₹799

The following article is an excerpt from this week’s HT Mind the Gap. Subscribe here.