The Suns Of This Soil

As Haryana’s 23-year-old Ri­­o bronze winner Sakshi Malik battled her Kyrgyz opponent, her close friend and fellow wrestler Suman Kundu watched the telecast, her heart pounding. Occasionally, Kundu let out inv­oluntary cries of anguish and yelled in Sakshi’s support, much to her family’s amusement. “Sakshi won, but I feel I have won,” says Kundu, a 2010 Commonwealth Games bronze medallist.

Kundu’s solidarity with the new star in India’s sporting firmament isn’t just a marker of their personal ties. There’s a more structural reason why Malik’s victory feels no less than her own. The intense odds Haryana’s sportswomen face in this doggedly male-ordered society are one and the same. Should one woman player beat those odds—high rate of crimes against women, male-child preference and dowry—it shines a beacon of hope for all other girls waiting in the wings. “Whenever we go for sports camps or competitions, the first thing we do is keep the phones in our hotel rooms off the hook. Otherwise we are besieged with crank calls from male players and their friends,” says Kundu. Such harassment can continue into the wee hours of the night, with phone calls disrupting the women’s team’s sleep and marring on-field performance.

It is in this deeply patriarchal, khap-ridden Haryana that young women like Sakshi Malik are making their mark. Female players—some barely ten years old—admit that technical skill aside, they also work hard to develop thick skins. This becomes their only protection against the routine opposition they face in villages and towns—jeering spectators and their cheesy remarks, mostly about their appearance—where many are still averse to seeing women in sports. “We have learned to ignore what people say. If we listen, they will block our progress,” says Gurnail Kaur, a 10-year-old hockey player from Maddipur near Kurukshetra, who trains at Shahabad’s hockey arena, the state’s only astroturf field. Gurnail holds the 2015 state gold in the sub-junior category and has Olympic dreams too. “My parents support me and provide what they can—good food and time to practise. I only want to play,” says Gurnail.

Gurnail’s father delivers milk door-to-door for a living. He drops her off at 6 am at the stadium, takes her to school at nine, brings her to Shahabad at five for another two hours of training and then takes her home. While Gurnail’s story is still unfolding, it is hardly different from Sakshi’s, which started a decade ago, when Sakshi was 13. Sakshi’s father Sukhbir Singh is a DTC bus conductor in Delhi and her mother Sudesh Malik an anganwadi sup­ervisor. The family lives in Rohtak and has roots in a large Jat-dominated village named Mokhra, a half-hour drive from their current residence.

“Mokhra, where Sakshi hails from, is a typical village of these parts. In fact, it is perhaps more aggressively feudal and pat­riarchal as it is part of the Chaubisi khap, a dominant grouping of Haryana’s Jats,” says Jagmati Sangwan, a political and social activist in Rohtak (see interview).

Tales of khap terror routinely emerge from the state which has the worst gender ratio among states. At the same time, there are inspiring stories of sportswomen from Haryana, a complete foil to the narrative of oppression. Khaps have regularly fomented social backwardness in the state. However, Santosh Dahiya, an Indian National Lok Dal activist and national president of the Mahila Sarvkhap Jatiya Mahasangh, is def­ensive of the khaps. “Khaps don’t oppose women in sports—can you show me one such statement? It is the girl’s families that go to the extent of killing them at times,” she asks. Dahiya also denies that statements by khap leaders influence attitudes towards women. The fact, of course, is that khaps encourage the most conservative tendencies­­: child marriage, controlling women’s attire et al—with female foeticide and honour killings for transgressing strict marriage codes, the dark end of the spectrum, emerging from the same mindset.  

But Haryana’s sportswomen have found a way around the dreaded khaps—to win medals at national and international events. Even the khaps know that everybody cheers a winner and it makes the districts they come from proud. A huge churn is under way in Haryana, apparent in the four districts visited—Bhiwani, Jhajjhar, Rohtak and Kurukshetra—where scores of families are keen to send girls into sports. It is this churn that the khaps have noticed, and they are afraid, or wary, of going against the trend, lest they lose hold. Where there is less awareness among people—in education, the purdah system—the khaps leave no stone unturned in exercising control.

Often, parents will not, for instance, send girls to train unless there is a female coach, which has stopped short the car­eers of young girls like Jhajjhar’s Tanu Lamba, who is only 14. Earlier this year, the local female coach quit in the small village of Muhammadpur Majra, so Tanu’s parents pulled her out of coaching despite her obvious talent. “There’s no game Tanu can’t win, she’s very good,” says Nirmal Beniwal, the principal of Tanu’s school. “But I did not interfere beyond a point.” Tanu herself says, “I don’t care if the coach is male or female. I just wanted to play. They make some girls run around within the village or the girls watch boys and try to copy their practice, but I have completely stopped,” she says.

Things may be changing with respect to women players but the overall situation is grim. “Women are seen as items of consumption, not humans. Only I know how much they struggle, the taunts they face. Some families are only interested in sending their girls into sports because it brings fame and money. To be fair, I have seen about 40 girls drop out of sports the moment they got a job—maybe that’s what they really need,” says Baldev Singh, who coached women hockey players in Haryana for over two decades. The story remains the same today. To raise money for Sakshi’s wrestling career, even her family relied on every personal resource they could muster. There was no government help until she had established herself as a nat­ional wrestler. Sakshi, Suman, her friend from Jind, and many other sportswomen such as Bahadurgarh’s Sakshi Kumari and Jhajjhar’s Pinki, both athletes, throw themselves into ‘dangals’, or local mud-pit wrestling matches, at a very young age. Or they participate in local athletic competitions so as to start supporting their families financially, right from childhood, with their tiny incomes from these matches.

“I always told myself, I have to do this game. My relatives told my mother, a widow, that she shouldn’t waste money on a girl, but my mother didn’t listen,” says Pinki. “I played without shoes sometimes, but I just didn’t stop.” When she scored a gold at a championship some years ago, the Haryana government gave her a job in the Railways. That was the first time, she says, that she was no longer insecure about surviving. In Gurnail’s case too, a few wealthy village folk, the occasional good samaritan and a few corporate sponsors donate small amounts; just enough to keep her going. “I even got Gurnail’s shoes sponsored,” says her coach, Gurbaj Singh, as he points towards his star student’s green shoes. All the 70-odd girls who train at Shahabad are from villages. Rich or upper class families don’t send their children to play, as they prefer to make their children doctors or engineers.

One motivating factor behind the sports phenomenon is the quest for social mobility among the deprived sections. “Their odds of succeeding thr­ough education are low. Private schools and colleges are mushrooming but they are too expensive for poor families,” says B.S. Rathee, head of department, physical edu­cation, Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak. “Middle and wealthy classes control education, but have no interest in wrestling or athletics. This is where the poorer girls are excelling.”

For Haryana’s girls, sports is the new route to emancipation, something similar to how it was for African Americans in boxing and athletics. That sports, as a qualified exception to the usual social proscriptions, offers a refuge and source of mobility for Haryana’s women is a positive kind of paradox—but it has its limits. It is largely dominant caste women, especially Jats, who are coming up, not just any girl from Haryana. Dalit girls, who face a double layer of discrimination, remain beyond the pale of this liberating force. And who’s to say their sporting potential is any less?

In June 2016, PriceWaterhouseCoopers conducted a study which predicts a correlation between medal tally in Rio and the GDP of a country. Here, India is the only exc­eption because although it is a high-GDP nation, its medal tally is extremely low. This suggests inequality is very high in India. Perhaps, no state better reflects this inequality, at least in terms of gender, than Haryana. The practice among politicians behaving like feudal benefactors of old by gifting large sums of money to victorious players­—like the Rs 2.5 crore Sakshi Malik will get from the state government—is particularly reviled in Hary­ana’s sporting community. “The vict­or­ious deserve accolades, yes, but struggling girls need much more support. We keep asking for new stadiums, female coaches and better diets, but these requests fall on deaf ears,” says Mahavir Singh Phogat, who coaches female wres­tlers at Balali village, Bhiwani. Now, Sakshi’s tremendous performance at Rio may loosen some purse-strings. Her win is also a tight slap on the stranglehold of the khaps, and the general attitude towards women in sports. Sakshi may have won bronze, but for the other girls of Haryana, it’s no less than pure gold.

By Pragya Singh in Rohtak, Jhajjar, Kurukshetra and Bhiwani