How Mahavir Singh Phogat's Haryana wrestles for its women
The distinction of being India's first woman wrestler to qualify for the Olympics belongs to Geeta Phogat, who competed at the 2012 London Games, two years after Chandgi Ram's death.
Geeta belongs to what is perhaps wrestling's most remarkable family. Her father, Mahavir Singh Phogat, came to Delhi from the village of Balali in Haryana to train under Chandgi Ram when he was just 16.
He has four daughters - each of them an international wrestler - and two adopted daughters after his brother was killed in a land dispute.
They too are international wrestlers. And he managed all this not from a city, but from his own village.
Inside Mahavir's house - an elongated rectangle of flat white - there is a stirring of post-siesta activity.
There is a gathering of village elders, all in white kurtas, who have lit the communal hookah and broken out the cards. Mahavir himself is on his charpoy, eyes still resolutely closed.
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| Mahavir Singh Phogat with his daughters. (Photo credit: Twitter) |
His wife Daya has swung into action. The family's immense black buffaloes have been led out of the shed, their troughs filled with feed. Daya is laying out the buckets she will use for milking.
Mahavir opens his eyes abruptly, pulls out his phone and scolds someone at the other end: "Where's your daughter? We start in five minutes. Tell her to run."
Mahavir's six girls are the first on the mat - Geeta, Babita, Ritu, Sangeeta, Vinesh and Priyanka - all dressed in dry-fit tees and training tights.
Two more girls come running in. Then three boys. "Warm up," Mahavir barks, pointing to the mat. That there are girls wrestling at all, in these rural settings, is in itself a miracle, let alone the quality of international success they have managed.
Geeta is a gentle, soft-spoken woman with an aquiline nose and an easy smile.
She is the only one of the six sisters with long hair, which she ties in a high ponytail during her bouts.
The rest have identical short crops that barely cross the nape.
As the eldest sister, Geeta has forged a remarkable path for the rest to follow - Commonwealth Games (CWG) gold in 2010 was followed by a bronze at the 2012 World Championship, a first for Indian women; then she qualified for the Olympics.
The sisters are not far behind. Babita won silver at the 2010 CWG, and gold at the 2014 version, where Vinesh also won gold.
Ritu has every major international medal at the junior level (including multiple World Championships), and is about to make her leap to the senior team. Sangeeta and Priyanka have medals from junior Asian Championships.
What if all six of them land up in the same competition one day, and all of them finish with medals? "Let that be the Olympics!" Babita is thrilled with the idea. It has occurred to her before.
Despite Chandgi Ram's efforts, no village in India has a wrestling school where women are allowed, except here, in Balali.
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| Enter the Dangal: Travels through India's Wrestling Landscape; HarperCollinsPublishers India; Rs 275 (Paperback). |
Even in the cities, the number of private akhadas that allow women can be counted on your fingers - Jabbar's centre in Meerut; Indore, where former Olympian Kripa Shankar Patel campaigns for akhadas to open their doors to women, and runs his own centre; Rohtak, where the University of Rohtak runs a popular training centre; former Olympian Prem Nath's akhada in Delhi; Deepika's school.
Chandgi Ram's campaign has spread, more than a decade later, and consolidated in these little pockets of resistance. "The general atmosphere is still strongly against women in wrestling," says Kripa Shankar, who was a former coach with the national women's team.
His family, who have been in wrestling for generations, were Chandgi Ram's chief patron when he opened his vyayamshala.
"We have a very small talent pool to pick from," Kripa Shankar says. "Maharashtra, which produces hundreds of male wrestlers, has nothing for women. Madhya Pradesh has very little, Jabbar Singh is alone in Uttar Pradesh. Only Haryana is really trying. Women's wrestling is still new to the world, and we could have stepped ahead, taken the lead and dominated it for years. But no, we are stuck being backwards, judgemental and idiotic." Not Mahavir, not in Balali.
"Masterji opened my eyes," Mahavir says. "He used to tell me, 'What you are doing for your girls, you will see one day that it will bring you great happiness.'"
(Reprinted with publisher's permission. Courtesy of Mail Today.)