In 2017, the Rising Student Club of Cuttack in Odisha had become runners up in the country’s first attempt at a football league for women. At the Odisha desk of the English daily where I worked, my boss asked me to interview the players for a ‘Women’s Day’-special feature. I spoke to the coach and four of the players – an AIFF player of the year among them – and wrote a story very similar to the many stories written on women athletes in India: in celebration of their grit and in awe of their tenacity in a landscape that offers them very little support.
The players spoke with passion on their plans for fine tuning their game in the coming season.
But the story did not cut it with my boss, who felt that it should focus on their daily struggles, and how they juggle ‘roles’. It is true that all of them had government jobs and many were married. But none of the players spoke to me about those things. Sasmita Malik spoke about the necessity of national training camps, Pyari Xaxa spoke on how running with a friend gave her a competitive edge, and Lochona Munda who had one of her BA exams right after we talked, said there is a dire need for exercises to build team spirit. They saw themselves as I saw them – as sportspersons, with things to say about their sport.
“But you should have asked them how they manage as many as 200 days of practice despite responsibilities,” my boss, a man, told me. Except I had, and all of them told me they wished they could practice more.
In the next season, the team won the league.
The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India through the Lens of Sport, Sohini Chattopadhyay, Fourth Estate India, 2023.
There is a comfort with which we, including otherwise canny news editors, can slip into assigning women their place in the sorrowful litany that is non-cricket sports in India. Because not much is right in this world, stories of women players are robbed of complexities and couched in the defining emotion – deprivation.
Sohini Chattopadhyay’s The Day I Became a Runner dusts away this tradition and tells us not only the stories of some extraordinary women runners in India, but also – uniquely – how their stories have hitherto been told in Indian media.
In the last decade, some of the most compelling and multi-dimensional stories on India have come from Chattopadhyay’s pen. Her mettle encompasses cinema, sport, health, technology and that bricolage term – society. That so consummate a journalist will write a book so perceptive of its subjects is not a surprise. But what is a surprise is the gemlike structuring of the book, which, indeed, opens with the day Chattopadhyay became a runner. We learn what she ran from, what she runs to and what the women she profiles deeply once ran from and to.
The book’s subhead says that it is a ‘A Women’s History of India Through the Lens of Sport’. True to promise, Chattopadhyay sets out speaking of India’s pioneering runners Mary D’Souza and Kamaljit Sandhu. Their stories are grim – thanks largely to what India was when they were athletes – but presented with wholesome regard for them as human beings with human hopes and dreams. Both end in personal stories on women key to Chattopadhyay’s life.
But just as the reader wonders if this is to be the form of the book – a famous runner coupled with her counterpart in the author’s life – the chapter on P.T. Usha sweeps you whole. Usha’s is a complex story to tell. Many struggle to reconcile her current politics with her undeniable status as a curtain raiser for Indian women’s sporting achievements on the global stage. This book handles it expertly, delivering some home truths behind the way we treat success in sporting events.
There is a portion in Chattopadhyay’s essay on Usha – narrating how she felt just after her historic fourth place Olympics finish:
“More than anything else, she noticed the body language of the Indian official who had come to summon her for the phone call from the Prime Minister – the alertness, the eye contact, the slight bending towards her while speaking…Until that moment, the officials accompanying the Indian Olympic contingent had not spoken to anyone other than the hockey team members.”
It is noteworthy that this book on sportswomen comes in the same year on which the protests of India’s wrestlers against the alleged sexual harassment they faced by their federation president – a Bharatiya Janata Party MP and bigwig – became one of the marquee news events in women’s sport. Usha, now one of the country’s top sports administrators, had initially said that this protest amounts to indiscipline. Later, she backtracked. The essay offers some idea as to why a person on whom an official’s behaviour in 1984 had left a big enough impression so as to warrant recounting to an interviewer would turn into a similar figure herself.
Also read: Backstory: Had the Media Done its Job, Wrestlers Wouldn’t Have Had to Go Through This Ordeal
When it comes to three key chapters on Santhi Soundarajan, Pinki Pramanik and Dutee Chand, Chattopadhyay’s sensitivity sets the standard for how women should be written in Indian media. All three dealt – very differently – with challenges to their womanhood. All three were diced and made mincemeat of by society and a system of writing headlines that titillates and reduces a subject to uninformed understandings of human bodies. Chattopadhyay rains blows at such bloodthirsty journalistic practices – highlighting the cruelty of seemingly minor aspects like image choices for athletes accused of ‘pretending to be men’.
No incident or athlete is painted with a single brushstroke and complexities are presented simply, with Chattopadhyay making her emotional stake clear wherever she offers opinion.
While Chattopadhyay observes the role of society and politics – perhaps most poignantly for Ila Mitra – with due attention, it is remarkable how every detail essaying the injustice of it all falls secondary to the philosophy of sport that the women – including the author – carry in themselves. The book is a gigantic insistence of the fact that patriarchy is an anecdote at best, and not the whole story for sportswomen.
