Sixteen-year-old Farida Khan is in the dressing room. She has just gotten into a pair of baggy, shiny boxer shorts. It's the first time in her life that she's wearing anything that doesn't reach till her ankle, like a gown or a voluminous salwar-kameez.... Given a choice her aunt, with whom she lives in Calcutta's cramped Khidderpore slum, would cover her up in a burqa. And now here she is, prancing around in an outfit that "would give Chachi a heart attack".
Under her breath, Farida mutters a mantra her coach has taught her: "If you fear, you can never be a boxer." And there is nothing she wants more than to be a boxer. She picks up her boxing mittens, dashes out the door and charges into the boxing ring where an opponent waits—another girl her age, called Zugra Fatima. Also from one of the city's squalid slums. Also from an orthodox Muslim family.
Farida and Zugra are among a group of Calcutta girls, all of them from poor Muslim families, determined to bust stereotypes and conventions, and show the world they too can pack a mean power punch. The grandly titled Khidderpore School of Physical Culture, in Ekbalpore's Nawab Ali Park, is actually little more than a makeshift boxing ring in a crumbling, cemented courtyard. There are a couple of rooms on the side, one of which is marked 'dressing room'. The club, comprising mostly local youngsters, presently has 13 girls. Get there around 5 any evening, from Monday to Saturday, and catch them arriving one by one in their demure salwar kameezes, heads covered in dupattas, and then emerging from the changing room, transformed, in their shorts or track suits.
"My family doesn't know I come here," says Farida. "I tried to tell Chachi, but she wouldn't hear of it. She says, 'Is this any sport for a girl to play?' She thinks I will break my nose and become so ugly no one will marry me. Besides, she thinks no Muslim boy would want a bride who might punch him in the nose on the wedding night! But who wants to marry anyway?" She waves dismissively, then throws a shadow upper cut in the general direction of her home.
Farida, who lost both her parents in an accident when she was a toddler, says her dearest wish is to be independent. She cannot afford to go to school, but she has learnt to sew, and now works in a tailoring shop to support herself and her aunt, who brought her up. And not only does she religiously pay the 10-rupee club membership fee every month, she also makes sure she never misses practice.
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Zainab (left), sister Bushra with their mother
Like 15-year-old Zainab Fatima, for whom the two hours in the evening—from 5 to 7—is her "favourite time of the day". Zainab is from a large family, and the boxing practice provides a welcome break from the domestic chores that clog the rest of her day—cooking, cleaning, washing dishes and clothes, fetching water. Fortunately for Zainab, her father has been very supportive of her iconoclastic passion for boxing—so much so that he allowed his other daughters to take up boxing too. The only problem with that, of course, laughs Zainab, was that in the boxing arena your sister was fighting you and you had to hit her. "At first it was tough, but Sir told us, here you have no family. Everyone is your enemy."
'Sir' is Mehrajuddin Ahmed, coach to the girls and secretary of the Bengal Amateur Boxing Federation. He explains, "There are some families like Zainab's, which are extremely poor, who cannot even afford to send their children to school. They have overcome their reluctance to allow their girls to go out and even join a sport like boxing, because many of them see this as a way for the girls to find new opportunities in life, as a sport that can also be a source of income later in life."
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Her lot: Zainab’s day at her Khidderpore home is filled with domestic chores
But why boxing? There are several reasons, says Ahmed. "This is one sport where there's hardly any competition, as far as girls are concerned—much less than in sports like tennis, table tennis, badminton and hockey." So when the opportunity first presented itself to these Muslim girls, they grabbed it. That was in 1998.
"Women's boxing had started much earlier in many other states in India," says Ahmed. "I was already teaching the boys, and I thought, why not start women's boxing in Bengal too?" He and Ashit Banerjee, president of the Bengal Amateur Boxing Federation, began to explore possibilities. "Many of the girls were excited," he recalls. They had a readymade role model in boxer Muhammad Ali's daughter Laila, also a boxer. "It was easier to approach unwilling parents with her example. She was, after all, Muslim."
Of the three girls to join initiaslly, it was Razia Shabnam, then 17, who really made a mark, and after winning medals in several national championships, coached the girls before she got married and started a family. Now she is a referee. If today the girls claim that "the neighbourhood boys have got used to us and don't tease us anymore," they all agree it's because of Razia and the others who paved the way for them. Because when it all began, Ahmed remembers, there was stiff resistance from families and neighbours for "going against tradition".
For the girls themselves, more than the pull of opportunity or the hope for future success, boxing stands for a heady feeling of liberation and empowerment.
"I feel in total control when I get into a boxing ring for a bout. I feel like I can do anything," exults 14-year-old Shamin Mallick. "And let's see if anyone tries to stop me!"
