The loneliness of the female athlete

Sohini Chattopadhyay's book brings India's top women athletes to the forefront, providing them with a shared space in history, so that future female athletes won't have to struggle for recognition

The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India Through the Lens of Sport

Author: Sohini Chattopadhyay  

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 364

Price: Rs 599

In the world of sports, thousands of women live under the glare of constant publicity, sometimes even after their playing days are over. Thousands of others remain unknown. Of those once known but “left unremembered”, Sohini Chattopadhyay in The Day I Became a Runner handpicks the story of seven Indian women athletes who competed on the international stage and pays posthumous tribute to another. Fuelled by curiosity and the innate rage of her gender, she questions: “What does sport offer women in a viciously gendered society such as India? Does it make us more equal citizens? How equal?” With each biographical account, she closes in on an answer.

Arranged chronologically, perhaps to set a geopolitical, historical and cultural climate context, the unsung heroes are seen in Ms Chattopadhyay’s book. The hockey player and athlete who represented India in its first and second year of Asian Games, Mary D’Souza received the coveted Dhyan Chand Award in 2013 at the age of 82 — 61 years after she went to the Summer Olympics at Helsinki, 1952! The success of Kamaljit Sandhu, the first Indian woman to win a solo gold at an international event, was overshadowed by her privilege and the political unrest of 1970s India; although she made notable dents in the athletic history as an NIS coach. P T Usha — a household name  —“captured the imagination of the nation” after missing the bronze in 1984 Olympics by a fraction of second. Her legacy, however, will outlive her. Each sports person embodies the spirit of sportsmanship.

Speaking of the public eye, the book records the unfair, biased, and rushed trials that run in the media. In a study of how these trials can and do turn, Ms Chattopadhyay writes of the three female athletes at the receiving end of these judgements. The daughter of a Dalit, Sri Lankan Tamil refugee, Santhi Soundarajan, “the athlete who won twelve international medals for India”, fades in the background, as she is (literally) outcaste and disappears from athletic circles. Pinki Pramanik, the athlete who won India 37 golds, challenged and won the same “gender-test” in international court, is barely remembered. Dutee Chand, the “first Indian sportsperson to come out as gay” in 2019, also challenged the World Athletics after being “dropped” for the Commonwealth Games. With hyperandrogenism testing, a courtesy extended only to female athletes, an invisible sword always hung in the air: “Are they female enough?” Ms Pramanik and Ms Chand chose to fight the patriarchal world’s prudence.

In Ms Chattopadhyay’s Bengali heritage, Rabindranath Tagore plays a pivotal role in redefining the “threshold” of modernity and domestic life that women cross and return to on a daily basis. It is this threshold that our women athletes cross too, one that questions their return after motherhood, or sweeps issues such as menstrual cramps under the carpet. It is this threshold that drove the sportswoman-revolutionary Ila Mitra to stand up for peasants in the 1940s and later attest to the torture she suffered in police custody. This threshold many Hindu women didn’t cross between 1940 and 1970 and many Muslim women still haven’t, not in sports at least.

In 2008, running became a “mourning ritual” for the author, the only way out of the deadweight of personal loss and grief. Agility, self-awareness and a strange sense of control — bodily, emotional and mental — came with it. As she ran through the bylanes of Delhi, Kolkata, Amman and Hamburg the impelling question of occupying the public space as a woman — and doing so with grace and ownership — occupied her. Athletes and non-athletes both do it. In the “private” (read: confined) lives of women, sport offers them the licence to go out and “perform their patriotism”. But for most, this enabling choice is secondary to the security a career in sports provides —  government schemes and jobs welcome them, although often underfunded and inadequate in their own ways. The success of training programmes such as the Sagroli Sunrise Project to rehabilitate young potential athletes stand as an example of the prospects of a sports quota.

In a vitalising book like this, it is easy to overlook the writer, an award-winning critic-journalist; yet, amidst these awe-inspiring stories, she emerges as a radiant writer. She remains present in the book as she travels through and chronicles the small, often impoverished, landscapes of the athletes’ childhood — in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Chandigarh, Odisha and so on; illustrates the personality of her interviewees; and places women from her own family in their context. Her enlivening text serves as a reminder that this is a human story and not some lifeless report — worth the eight years it took to write. She has brought some of India’s best women athletes back to the forefront, giving them a shared space in history, so that future female athletes may not have to struggle for recognition in their own right, a critical need when set against the echoes of the recent women wrestlers’ protest against sexual exploitation.

The reviewer is a freelance feature writer @read.dream.repeat