If you want to figure out where the athlete stands with reference to India’s sporting establishment, you would have heard it in the deafening silence. Of the sports ministry, the Indian Olympic Association and its Athletes Commission to the news that elite India women wrestlers were going to immerse their medals into the Ganga – because “is desh main hamaara kuch bacha nahin hai” (there is nothing left for us in this country.)”
#WATCH | Protesting Wrestlers in Haridwar to immerse their medals in river Ganga as a mark of protest against WFI chief and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh over sexual harassment allegations. #WrestlersProtest pic.twitter.com/4kL7VKDLkB
— ANI (@ANI) May 30, 2023
If you want to understand the macro and micro of Indian wrestling, the month-long protest by some of its most successful athletes against the Wrestlers Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh and how it has been responded to, this photograph from May 28 becomes metaphor and reality in lockstep. Shot by AFP photographer Arun Thakur, the earthy greyness of the frame is dissected by the Indian Tricolour, jammed between two bodies on the ground. The other colour is the red flash of a T-shirt and a contorted face. It is Sangeeta Phogat’s, the youngest of the six wrestling sisters from Haryana.
दरिया अब तेरी ख़ैर नहीं,
बूँदो ने बग़ावत कर ली है
नादां ना समझ रे बुज़दिल,
लहरों ने बग़ावत कर ली है,
हम परवाने हैं मौत समाँ,
मरने का किसको ख़ौफ़ यहाँ
रे तलवार तुझे झुकना होगा,
गर्दन ने बग़ावत कर ली है॥ pic.twitter.com/a5AYDkjCBu— Vinesh Phogat (@Phogat_Vinesh) May 29, 2023
In wrestling, to be on your back, shoulders hitting the ground is to be “pinned”, defeated. This is where every bout ends. In the photo, as unknown hands try to yank Sangeeta upwards onto her feet and into the police van, she is being held down by her cousin Vinesh. What looks like defeat is actually a snapshot of resistance.
Vinesh, Sakshi Malik and Sangeeta’s husband Bajrang Punia have become the faces of the wrestlers’ protest. Sangeeta was mostly in the background until yesterday, May 30. On the day, as India’s new Parliament building was being inaugurated less than two kilometres away, with the word ‘democracy’ thrown around like confetti, these wrestlers were being roughed up and carried away, their protest site taken apart.
Also read: Had the Media Done its Job, Wrestlers Wouldn’t Have Had to Go Through This Ordeal
For millions of Indians, athletes who make it to the Olympics become magic-makers. These non-religious deities are sources of national celebration, we consider them the best physical representatives of ourselves; they are piggybacked on by market forces, crowned celebrity, feted by politicians. Who have now ejected the protesting wrestlers from this charmed circle because they have raised their voices against a powerful Member of Parliament and head of the wrestlers’ parent body. Accused of predatory behaviour, sexual abuse, harassment and bullying, the WFI chief has been seen around the new Parliament.
FIRs have now been filed against the wrestlers under seven legal sections including ‘rioting’ ‘assault or criminal force’ ‘unlawful assembly’ ‘disobedience.’ Given the wrestler’s physical restraint during the weeks of their protest, this is laughable.
Holding positions
What do you remember the wrestlers doing until last Sunday? Walking, some light training in the mornings. Mostly, we have heard them speak, hands folded, sometimes in tears, voices calm, angry, pleading, determined. There has been a deliberate absence of any display of the aggressive. On Sunday, there is an image of Vinesh having scaled a 4.5ft barricade as if she had taken a single step into her courtyard. It is just a glimpse of what lies within.
They are not by any means big women – Vinesh is a 48kg fighter, Sangeeta in the 55kg, Malik in 64kg – but as elite athletes, they have a far better knowledge of human anatomy and physiology than any one pushing them around. They know how to exert pressure and use weight, maintain balance, use force, inflict and absorb pain. During their protest, the wrestlers have absorbed pain in many forms but chose not to inflict any.
In Enter the Dangal, a terrific 2016 book about Indian wrestling, writer Rudraneil Sengupta is told what it means to fight a high-quality wrestler. “If you reach for him, he is fast and nimble, but when he reaches for you to make contact, it is like he has put on 100kg more.” When the police came for the women wrestlers, they knew they were outnumbered, so for these girls, being fast and nimble was not an option. When they made contact with the police, they tried to hunker down, hold their position and aim to be immovable.
In Thakur’s photo, Vinesh is buffer and shield for Sangeeta, their combined body weights difficult for cops to shift them or peel them off each other, a manoeuver requiring time and sweat. At one point there were close to 10 police personnel trying to carry Sangeeta to the bus. To a trained wrestler, an untrained opponent – no matter bigger or heavier or even armed with a stick, is a piece of cake. In this most uneven dangal, the fastest, angriest and easiest response by the women would have been able to snap a cop’s finger or throw one of them over their shoulder. Even under severe physical pressure, the wrestlers stayed true to their personal rules of engagement.
देखिए कैसे #Wrestlers विनेश, संगीता और सत्यव्रत और अन्य साथियों को बसों और गाड़ियों में ठूँसा गया। pic.twitter.com/9CTlz5igD5
— Sakshee Malikkh (@SakshiMalik) May 28, 2023
Body of proof
Wrestling is the most elemental of one-on-one combat sports, with no equipment or gear. It is singlets, bare hands, human muscle and a quicksilver mind, the ability to make many incremental movements within the small operating radius of the crouched stance that count. A grip around the rival’s torso, a shifting of body weight, a lean-to in one direction or the other meant to restrict the opponent’s fluidity of movement, gathering points or even pinning them to the mat.
For Indian women wrestlers, taking up the sport has meant shedding from the very start, not just social convention but intrinsic, physical inhibition. To walk out onto the akhara or competition ring and fight, yes, other women, but also before the eyes of mostly men. In those singlets with nothing but their bare hands and bodies. During the protest, the women wresters had to unpeel another layer of themselves one buried in the past—of fear, guilt and shame. The oversight committee appointed to look into the complaints in January first asked them to provide ‘proof’ of having been harassed. Whether they were slightly confused and unable to distinguish a paternal hug from a creepy fondle.
This, only because crying is not an alternative, is again laughable. There are not too many sports like wrestling where the athlete is trained in being almost preternaturally aware of the touch of another. Of what it means and where it could well lead to.
India’s protesting women wrestlers have lived and worked with complex contradictions: their sport requires physical hyper-awareness, response and aggression from bodies policed through unyielding boundaries of honour and shame from a young age. At the very least, it should be through sport that these boundaries are crushed into the ground. Not by the police or by political policing.
Sharda Ugra spent three decades reporting sport for tabloid, broadsheet, news magazine and website. She now lives in Bengaluru and writes whatsoever she pleases.
This article was originally published on The Voice of Fashion and is republished here with permission.
