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18
Six Sisters

he distinction of being Indias first woman wrestler to qualify

for the Olympics belongs to Geeta Phogat, who competed at
the 2012 London Games, two years after Chandgi Rams death.
Geeta belongs to what is perhaps wrestlings 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 sixteen.
He has four daughterseach of them an international
wrestlerand 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.
Balali is deep country. It is still untouched by Haryanas
hurried pace of urbanization, and sits hidden in the middle of
wheat fields and guava and citrus groves. In the afternoon, you
can walk around Balalis slim tracery of cobbled streets and meet
not a single person.
Inside Mahavirs housean elongated rectangle of flat
whitethere 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. His wife Daya has
swung into action. The familys immense black buffaloes have
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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: Wheres your daughter? We
start in five minutes. Tell her to run.
He stands up and shuffles towards the house. Its not a house.
Its a large wrestling hall: a double-sized mat on one side, top-ofthe-line weight machines in another, thick ropes dangling from
the high ceiling, and a series of small windows overlooking lush
farmland.
Mahavirs six girls are the first on the matGeeta, Babita,
Ritu, Sangeeta, Vinesh and Priyankaall 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.94
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.

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Well, perhaps not all six. Lets say three, Geeta says. Now
thats not fantasythat can happen in Rio.95
Yes, and then papa will finally say Now Babita makes her
voice heavy and manly: Fine, not bad. Now you can rest a little.
The sisters laugh.
Despite Chandgi Rams efforts, no village in India has a
wrestling school where women are allowed, except here, in
Balali. Even in the cities, the number of private akhadas that
allow women can be counted on your fingersJabbars 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 Naths akhada
in Delhi; Deepikas school.96
Chandgi Rams 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 womens team.
His family, who have been in wrestling for generations, were
Chandgi Rams 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.
Womens 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. So keep doing it, dont be scared,
face your difficulties like you face opponents, and be deaf to the
criticism.

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Geeta remembers that morning when her father woke her

and Babita up at five one morning, and said, I want to see how
well you two run.
She was ten then, Babita eight, and they were both a bit
puzzled.
It was fun though, Geeta says. We ran laughing through the
fields when everyone else was asleep, it felt like a secret game.
A week of that, and Mahavir in the meantime had finished
making a level square of soft earth next to his house, and had
raised a tin roof over it. The akhada was ready.
People said, Mahavir has lost his mind, he says. They said,
he is destroying the village, he has no shame, and he is making
an exhibit out of his own girls.
But there was only so much the villagers could do to oppose
this unprecedented developmentMahavir was the sarpanch,
and the family had both influence and land.
So we were spared the worst of it, Daya says. They could not
come up to me and say these things to my face. But I was told many
times, Your daughters will become like boys, their faces will get
messed up, they wont be able to bear children, their ears will get
mangled, and who will marry them? I felt the stress of that. But
I felt angry that there was so much opposition to the girls doing
anything different, so I wanted to see the fight through the end.
Geeta and Babita were exposed to some of this harassment;
people in the village stopped talking to them. They would not
even make eye contact with the sisters.
After a few months, there were a couple of boys also at the
akhada, and papa started training us together. We would fight the
boys, and wrestlings such an intimate sport, Babita says. That was
a step too far for most people in the village. There was constant
trouble during that time.
Despite the social boycott, the Phogat girls loved the life of the
wrestlerthe pain, the euphoria, the fighting, sleeping exhausted
after a hard days training, the liberating experience of wearing
shorts and T-shirts, all the fuss over their diet.

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It was a great adventure, Babita says, And what made it

special was that we knew no other girls in our village or in any
nearby village who were doing this!
In 2010, when Geeta won Indias first Commonwealth gold
in womens wrestling, Balali went berserk. The celebrations lasted
ten days. The word spread to nearby villages. So many girls started
coming for training that Mahavir had to build a hostel for them.
Thirty-six girls live there now. The girls in Haryana, Rajasthan
and Punjab are big and strong, says Mahavir, and they will take
womens wrestling very far.
Just dont hide them at home, he says. When I was growing
up, girls did not go to school here. Now every single one in the
village is working for a college degree. So, things are changing.
Mahavir dreams of Olympic gold. He drills this into his girls.
Give it another ten years, Mahavir says. And people will
forget that they ever resisted women in wrestling. Look, already,
this year at the Commonwealth Games (2014), India won sixtyfive medals; forty-nine of those were won by women.
It is spreading, ever so slowly. Dangals in Haryana still dont
have official competitions for women, but nearly all of them hold
exhibition matches, sometimes allowing the girls to fight boys
as well.
I remember a slow Sunday morning at Mehr Singhs akhada.
Everyone had slept late. There was an easy lightness to the day,
and the mood was gently joyous, almost festive. The wrestling
halls with their mats were empty, but some of the pahalwans were
getting a light workout by digging, tilling and flattening out the
earthen wrestling pit.
A senior wrestler had brought his two young daughters to
the akhada. One was eight, the other a year younger, and the
two of them tumbled on the tilled earthen pit, with their father
yelling out instructions with a big smile on his face. Wrestlers
crowded around the pit, divided into neat little campseach side
had picked a girl to support and instruct. The young girls were

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already technically adept, and it was both amusing and thrilling

to see the two tiny figures so seriously engaged in combat, while
their father shouted out things like get your elbow on top of her
neck and push down hard or jam your knee into her stomach,
cmon, you can do it, bring your left leg in, no left, and jam the
knee into her stomach. Good, now push-up with the knee. Yes!
The girls showed no signs of tiring, their pretty pink and white
dresses covered in dirt.
Chandgi Ram would have thrilled at the sight.