“People thought I was crazy when I began training,” Ms. Kom said at a news conference after she won her fifth consecutive championship title in September in Bridgetown, Barbados. “But I never let their criticism affect me.
“It was a real struggle,” she said, “but the love of boxing saw me through the difficult years.”
In Bhiwani district, embedded in the rural heart of Haryana State in northern India, the villagers can’t stop talking about the success of “their girls” — Gita and Babita Singh, who were showered with praise at a special reception thrown by the villagers after the two sisters won silver and gold medals last month at the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi.
The Games seem to have given the country a new set of heroines: Kavita Raut, athletics star; Gagandeep Kaur and Jhano Hansdah, archers; Saina Nehwal, badminton player. Women athletes won 13 of India’s 38 gold medals, and contributed 56 total gold, silver and bronze medals to the final tally of 101, their success setting off a chain of celebrations.
It was the first time that women had won the majority of medals awarded to India at the Commonwealth Games.
One aspect that has caught the attention of the news media is the social background of many of the top athletes. Theirs is the world of small-town India, rural India, urban middle-class India. Few of the women are from socially privileged or wealthy families.
Ms. Kom’s family in Manipur worried when she insisted several years ago that she wanted to be a boxer. Her father has said that he thought the training would cost more than they could afford.
Gita and Babita Singh owe much of their success to the efforts of their father, Mahavir Singh Phoghat, a former wrestler who trained his daughters and nieces in his own training camp. In the absence of expensive equipment, he used a blend of traditional techniques — making the girls sprint across the fields and perform old-fashioned sit-ups, while insisting that a diet of fresh buffalo milk and ghee-smeared chappatis was exactly what they needed.
Many of the stories these women tell could have been lifted from “Chak De India!,” a 2007 hit movie about the travails and ultimate triumph of a women’s field hockey team, whose members were drawn from across the country. In the film, as in the real world, most of the women are from relatively modest backgrounds.
Sharda Ugra, a veteran sports journalist who now writes for the Web site Cricinfo, said: “That hockey film is very, very accurate. One of the reasons why women have taken to sport in low-income families is that it’s an access line to a job.”
She was referring to government and corporate arrangements that often guarantee athletes, especially women, a position and financial security in the workplace.
“The upper class and the middle class still look at Olympic sport — especially sports like weightlifting or wrestling or till recently, track-and-field events — as sports for the rustic,” Ms. Ugra said. “It’s patronizing, but the old humility and deference is beginning to go, as today’s sportswomen become more confident.”
Much of that confidence, though, still comes from the family’s support and encouragement, as with Mr. Singh’s efforts to give his daughters the same chances he had as a young wrestler.
“Until recently, women’s sports and sportswomen were treated like second-class citizens,” Ms. Ugra said. “So the Commonwealth Games’ success — and the success of women, especially from states like Haryana, Manipur and Kerala, in the annual National Games, might help change that attitude.”
Some of the first signs of changing attitudes have been documented by the television and film industries. If “Chak De India!” followed the ups and downs of a fictional but true-to-life hockey team, the 2009 TV series “Palampur Express” followed another familiar story — the dreams of a young girl from a rural background who wants to be a runner and win an Olympic medal.
Anju Dubey Pandey, director of the Gender Training Institute at the Center for Social Research, a research organization in New Delhi that focuses on women’s issues, cautions against interpreting the recent achievements of women athletes as a measure of the progress Indian women have made over all. Because several of the athletes are from Haryana, a traditionally patriarchal state, there’s a temptation to turn this event into a larger success story for women, she said.
Although the Haryana State government has invested in programs intended to advance women, she said, “we have to bear in mind that it’s a gender-critical state, in terms of the sex ratio, in terms of female literacy. There are very patriarchal structures and mind-sets at work.”
Ms. Nehwal, the badminton star, echoes this view, contrasting the support she received from her parents with the discrimination she faced elsewhere. She spoke recently of how her uncles and other relatives strongly opposed women stepping out of the home, a common problem faced by women in Haryana, her home state. In this environment, her parents’ support was crucial.
“I’m hoping that the recent successes of women from Haryana aren’t an aberration, that this could be an opportunity to break out of stereotypes,” Ms. Dubey Pandey said. “But it might be too optimistic to say that this is a sign of deep social change.
“What we’re seeing is the stories of individual women who have overcome all kinds of difficulties to be where they are,” she said. “My worry is that we might read too much into this, and ignore the very real challenges — the repressive mind-sets of the khap panchayats,” or community elders, “the wave of honor killings, the high rate of female feticide — that women in these states continue to face.”
Her caveat is a useful one. But in the wake of Indian women athletes’ successes, the real victory may lie beyond simple medal tallies. The achievements of a Saina Nehwal or a Mary Kom have already inspired many young women to believe that they, too, can move past the many societal barriers and gender prejudices that surround them, and perhaps some day bring home their own gold medals.
via The New York Times
