From groundbreaking victories to systemic hurdles, Indian women athletes defy barriers. Their resilience and success spotlight a broader struggle for recognition and respect in the world of sports. Shoma A. Chatterji enumerates the triumphs and trials of women in sports.
Vinesh Phogat is an Indian professional freestyle wrestler. She is a multiple Commonwealth Games gold medalist, having won golds at the 2014, 2018, and 2022 Games. She became the first Indian woman wrestler to win a gold medal at the Commonwealth and Asian Games after she won the gold medal in the 2018 Asian Games. She just won two bronze medals at the Paris Olympics, the first Indian woman to do so. But she is a woman and an Indian woman at that. This automatically places her in a discriminatory position in the eyes of the Indian “fathers” of the Olympics. She is not the only woman in sports to be chosen for discrimination. And she is not the first and certainly not the last. She was on the forefront of the women wrestlers’ and weightlifters’ collective protest against the sexual harassment of women and girls by the “immune” Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh who escaped by virtue of his political immunity.
Sports and women do not quite go together in the sense that sports and men do. Even when women enter sports in a big way, they run an obstacle race right from the beginning. This is a global phenomenon and differences in attitudes if any, are more of degree than of kind.
There is the old belief that women’s participation in sports is restricted by their roles as women – they menstruate, they conceive and they reproduce. But this belief is belied by fact. At the 1976 Olympics, an American swimmer won three gold medals and broke a world record while at the height of her period. After the 1964 Games, the Russians revealed that ten out of their 26 female participants were pregnant when they won their medals. Blankers-Koen, Irena Swezinska and Shirley Strickland competed both before and after they became mothers. Pat McCormick, an American swimmer, won the diving double for the second time when her son was eight months old! The genetic gap between men and women is said to be muscle power. But this gap, say scientists, can be reduced if girls understand the need for physical exercise from an early age. The same discrimination applies to the system of appointing sports coaches. Here too, male dominance is obvious.
The Busan Asian Games, Korea, 2002, framed Indian women athletes in gold, silver and bronze in diverse field events, archiving their competitive performance forever in India’s sporting history. This ‘gold’ has nothing to do with the mangal sutra. But many of these women also wear the mangal sutra, the sign that they are married. But they are women for who, the mangal sutra has proved to be more of a performance booster than an obstacle, as is commonly believed.
K.M. Beenamol, Anju George, Neelam Jaswant Singh, Saraswati Saha and Madhuri Singh made India proud with their excellence at the Asian Games. The now Famous Five made Indian track and field look fabulous for the first time after the memorable era defined by P.T. Usha, M.D. Valsamma, Shiny Abraham Wilson, Vandana Shanbag and Vandana Rao. (Of these women, Beenamol, Jaswant and Saraswati are married.) Add to this the feathers in Sunita Rani’s cap. Beenamol (27), won the gold in the 800m and 4x400m relay (Soma Biswas, Manjeet Kaur and Jincy Phillips were the others in the quartet) and silver in the 400m. She was bestowed the Samsung Most Valuable Performance by an Indian Award upon her return. Anju George, who emerged victorious in the long jump, had prepared for the Asiad with a bronze in the Commonwealth Games at Manchester.
The other gold medal winners were Saraswati Saha of West Bengal in the 200m and Neelam Jaswant Singh of Punjab in the discus throw. Till then, Saraswati was the first Indian woman to go below the 23-second mark in the 200m, setting a national record of 22.82 seconds in the National Athletic circuit in August 2002. Singh (31) set a new Asian Games record by hurling the discus to a distance of 64.55 meters. None of these triumphs have come without hard struggle, facing family opposition, heavy practice, overcoming physical strain, lots of tears and often, a few heartbreaks. For women who have chosen sports as a way of life, life in Indian tracks and fields has never been a cakewalk.
In the last week of December 2002, a letter from the Olympic Association acknowledged that there were “discrepancies” in the dope tests done during the Busan Asian Games on Sunita Rani, adding that there was no need for the Olympic Council of Asia to press the matter further. Sunita Rani was tested positive for a banned drug, Nandrolone, found in her urine samples taken after winning the gold medal in the women’s 1500m and the bronze in the 5000m at Busan. True that Rani’s getting her medals back avenges her. But does this erase the memories of public humiliation and insult, transcending borders of information through the international media? It is poor consolation for the mental torture she had to undergo, knowing all the time that the charges levelled against her for testing positive for dope were false.
No one remembers Saroj Bala. She was a member of the National team for women’s hockey when they went to play at Moscow in 1981. She went on to bring glory at the World Hockey Championships at Argentina in 1985 and at the 1986 Asian Games. This woman, who now works as sports officer at the Punjab Electricity Board at a salary that would put a corporate peon to shame, brought back some of the best honours in women’s hockey for the country. She is virtually without work because few people are even aware that there is a sports officer at the Punjab Electricity Board. She was not promoted even once during the first 15 years of service.
Kamaljeet Sandhu, the first Indian woman athlete to bag gold at the Bangkok Asian Games many years ago, laments, “giving birth is the natural function of a woman. Then why must she be ignored and cast aside from sports like a bad coin – even as a coach – after she got married and became a mother? Haven’t P.T. Usha and Shiney Wilson returned to the track after marriage and motherhood?” Sandhu has experienced this humiliation at first hand. Only once did she get a promotion in the first 18 years of her service at the NSNIS and got recognition as coach. But P.T. Usha did not support the women wrestlers and weight lifters in their recent rebellion and nor did Mary Kom, who maintained a stoic silence.
Certain attitudes in Asian countries like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are so steeped in tradition and in outdated mores that these prove to be a barrier for women who step into sports. Our notions about how a woman should dress, be it at home, at work, in the field or at the swimming pool, are strict and imposing. Girls in badminton and tennis courts still prefer to wear short skirts rather than the more practical shorts. The same applies to athletics and team sports like hockey. Many small-town girls in West Bengal who excel in swimming because there are many ponds there, are expressly prohibited from taking up swimming seriously because they will have to wear a swimsuit! A world of talent remains untapped forever, just on grounds of dress!
But the show goes on. Lack of sponsorship, lack of opportunity, lack of official encouragement, lack of media coverage, lack of sports fields exclusively allotted to women, lack of exclusive pools for girls and women, lack of encouragement from the family are absences structured into women who aspire for a career in sports within the larger framework. Within sports, there are presences like – politics, sexual harassment, needless dope tests taken after medals have been won, etc. Yet, the sportswomen in our country have the spirit of survival. They have the courage of their convictions and their determination to face challenges – within the field and out of it.
Shoma A. Chatterji is a freelance journalist, film scholar and author. She has authored 17 published titles and won the National Award for Best Writing on Cinema, twice. She won the UNFPA-Laadli Media Award, 2010 for ‘commitment to addressing and analysing gender issues’ among many awards.