By Shruti Sharma
Having played professional sport between 2007-2012, in January 2023 when international-level women wrestlers made their experiences of sexual harassment public, I felt that finally Indian sport may have its MeToo moment. It is May 2023 now, and the wrestlers are fighting a lone battle. Have sportswomen who play at all levels in India not had similar experiences as the wrestlers? For those looking for an answer, you may find it in the deafening silence of the retired and currently playing international level sportswomen who have for reasons we know too well not come out to publicly support, share their own experiences, and demonstrate solidarity with the wrestlers.
While women as players/athletes have made substantial inroads into the male-dominated and masculine domain of sport, the on-field situation in terms of procedural equality in opportunity, numbers, recognition, and rewards continues to be imbalanced along multiple social axes of marginalization, of which gender is one. The richest cricket governing body in the world, the BCCI, only equalized pay for contracted international-level women and men players as late as October 2022, following which they celebrated the first edition of the Women’s IPL as the men were preparing for their sixteenth edition.
It is evident that it is not enough for women to merely breach the boundary and enter the sporting domain, for their experiences within the domain are structured and limited first along their identity as women, gendered stereotypes, and roles, and only second as athletes. Here, one can recall regulations for women’s sports such as shorter duration of play, smaller playing areas, lighter equipment, ban on body collisions which are all based on a Victorian myth of female frailty. Brij Bhushan’s claim to innocence in response to Vinesh Phogat’s complaint, “I told her that I hugged her as a father figure,” also shows how women must first identify themselves as daughters, mothers, or sisters, in relation to a self-appointed patriarch outside the home.
This innocence and familial care of a coach or head of federation is accompanied by a sheer disregard of a sportswoman’s agency and ability to take decisions and control over their own life. All mainstream Bollywood films on women in sport highlight this trope. Think Dangal, Shabhash Mithu, Chak de! India, a sportswoman is the medium through whom a father’s dream or a male coach’s unfulfilled desire to win laurels for the country is accomplished.
Protestors and political leaders too have invoked the helpless daughter trope to garner support – which some may call a strategy. Some have even taken on BJP through its own slogan of “Beti Bachao.” But we as a society must also remember that this strategy of familial reference is based on a defeated assumption that families are a safe haven for women. The National Family and Health Survey (2019-2021) shows that for women between the age 18-49, 82 percent of those ever-married reported their current husband as perpetrators of sexual violence; and among never-married women, the most common perpetrators were other relatives (39%), a current or former boyfriend (16%) and a family friend (12%). 4% women reported teachers, father/stepfather, and brother/step-brother as perpetrators each, and 5% experienced sexual violence by strangers. Such a survey to understand the prevalence of sexual harassment at the workplace has never been undertaken.
Given the trials and tribulations women have to undergo every day in revealing their experiences and names of known perpetrators of sexual violence to their families, one cannot even imagine what all it must have taken for the wrestlers to make their experiences public.
The sporting arena is inherently hierarchical in terms of social relations. Relations between players at different levels (senior-junior), and between players and the managerial staff which includes coaches, trainers, physiotherapists, amongst others, are not equal per se. This inequality is not just conditioned by knowledge, experience, and skill levels. In her book Out on the Field: Gender, Sport, and Sexualities (2003), Helen Lenskyj contends that other “power imbalances” such as gender, occupational status, class background, and ethnicity [and caste] also structure one’s experiences of play.
In particular, Jennifer Hargreaves argues in the Sporting Females (1994) that sportswomen often find themselves trapped in a gendered, autocratic, and instrumental relationship with their male coach as a result of the lack of active former female athletes within the sporting sphere, and the patriarchal assumption that men are better at managerial skills than women. Furthermore, it is the coach who holds the arbitrary power to decide who will be benched and who will play on the field. While this decision has a direct and serious impact on the outcome of the game, it is the last hurdle sportspersons have to cross before making it to the playing field.
I particularly remember the last match I played as a professional because it was the first match that I was benched out in my six years. Even the team’s captain was not aware of the unwarranted change until the coach handed her the team list just before the toss. Given the team’s spree of victories and a high chance to go to the next level of the tournament, my teammates, and my friends in the state team we were playing against were shocked at my exclusion. I am aware that for reasons unknown to me, I had fallen out of favour with the biased male coach, and today I do not sit with any proof that it led to my exclusion from the team. We eventually lost the match, and I cannot say with guarantee that had I been in the team we would have won. But what I do know for certain is that my privileged social location made it easier for me to decide to leave playing the game the moment I realized that factors other than my playing skills, performance and statistics can determine access. In any case, I had never thought of making a career out of playing and sooner or later I would have retired for a more stable career option. What happened was new for me but not uncommon in sport.
But a majority of women who play sport at the district and state levels come from marginalized social locations for whom sport is a source of livelihood and a means to contribute to their family’s income. These women do not have the luxury of leaving sport for greener pastures when non-sport factors begin to open and close doors of access and opportunities. I am wondering now, what message does Brij Bhushan’s impunity, the deafening silence of other sportswomen, and the establishment’s denial pass to sportswomen and managerial staff at lower levels of participation in sport?
Five years after I quit professional sport, I entered the domain again but donning the hat of an academic researcher. I decided to work on gender, the question of access and sport. Again, my privileged social location – a middle-class English-educated Brahmin with a five-year fellowship – made taking such a decision and the necessary mobility easy.
While conducting fieldwork I realised that in-depth formal interviews often only touched the surface of women’s experiences. It was in the informal, off-record conversations that sportswomen actually spoke of certain open secrets of play. One sportswoman shared that her local all-girls academy’s coach calls himself everyone’s elder brother, and goes an extra mile in procuring equipment, and training the girls which has helped a few of them secure positions in the state’s team. But at the same time, she said, he also touches them inappropriately, abuses them verbally, spies on their call logs, checks on their WhatsApp last seen updates, asks them to wear full sleeves and full-length track pants, and often makes them count their obligations to him. When one of her academy mates was made the captain of the state team, her teammates mocked her achievement which was seen to be a result of “being the coach’s favourite” rather than her exceptional playing abilities. The coach’s objectionable behaviour had cast a huge shadow upon the captain’s sporting talent.
Another state team probable from a low-income household in a rural locality, shared that her local training academy’s coach had sponsored her playing kit and equipment, and she was sincerely grateful to him for his kindness. Such acts of kindness were found to be commonplace; but they were more a matter of individual choice (and favour) that often bound the beneficiary (sportswoman) into an unequal obligatory relation with their benefactor (coach). Instead, institutionalized mechanisms to equalize access to material resources and opportunities essential for play and practise would make such transactions transparent, and unconditional. Women come from heterogenous social locations, and oftentimes axes of social privilege or marginalization overlap leading to differential access conditions.
On 11 May 2023, the NHRC noted that 15 of the 30 National Sports Federations do not meet the mandatory requirement of the constitution of an Internal Complaints Committee. While private training academies come within the purview of the Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace (PoSH) Act, 2013 (clause 2.o.iv) too, where should the “aggrieved woman” go with her complaints when only one or two men run an academy?
“Ab toh har cheez ke liye Sir ka permission chahiye” [Now I need to seek Sir’s permission for everything], said the player concerned when I asked her if I could interview her. In May 2022, I contacted an Arjuna Awardee to invite her as a panellist in a proposed seminar on Women in Sports sponsored by the National Commission for Women. She was happy to be invited but reiterated what the state team probable had said, “I cannot do anything without Sir’s permission.” While the NCW did not accept the proposal for the seminar, the phone conversation with an international-level sportswoman made me see the commonalities and inherence of the feudal set-up of sport that extended from the lowest to the highest levels of participation. A player is bound to obey the coach.
Another off-record conversation led a male coach to reveal his fear of being appointed to the women’s state team saying, “gadbad hone ke chances zyada hain” [there are more chances of things getting messy]. He was reiterating the problematic trope made infamous by the character of Bindiya Naik in Chak de! India who tries to seduce the morally righteous Kabir Khan (male coach) to win his favour.
Coming back to the first question: whether Indian sportswomen share similar experiences as the wrestlers, the answer in all probability is yes, they do. And so, what does the sheer silence, lack of solidarity from sportswomen, and the giving away of a ripe opportunity for a larger movement against sexual harassment in sport (which is a workplace) say about the institution of sport in India, and the precarious condition of women who play sport? The answer to this question need not be spelt out. It is obvious.
I am reminded here of CLR James oft-quoted statement from Beyond the Boundary, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” While James’ semi-autobiographical text is an indictment of colonialism and lays out the nuances of how sport is linked to broader socio-cultural processes, in the context of women in sport, it can be reframed thus: “What do they know of sport who even sport doesn’t know?”
One, the wrestlers’ plight is a proof that sport is not a level playing field; and two, a red herring that the understanding of sport must not be restricted to scores, medals, and victories. There is more to sport than what is visible as a televised spectacle; there is more to sport than it being a medium to brandish one’s indisputable love for an imagined nation.
Bio:
Shruti Sharma is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. She is working on the social history of sports goods manufacturing in colonial and post-colonial India.
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