Women wrestlers have fought battles to break their silence, challenge the male order — and our national character

Wrestlers are prescribed a careful diet, rich in fat and calories. Ghee, nuts and milk are crucial components of the diet and there are complex theories about how these convert into blood and semen, each sustaining and furthering wrestlers’ strength and masculine identity. Within regimes of exercise common to wrestling, there is also a strong discourse regarding men learning to control their bodies. The ways in which they breathe and their capacity to turn energies towards desirable rather than “wasteful” ends form a strong aspect of the idea of masculine control and, in turn, male identity.

And, of course, wrestling cannot be understood without coming to grips with the role of the guru — the male head of an akhara who oversees multiple aspects of the lives of his chelas or disciples. The gurus represent the inviolability of the chain of male command, an aspect that both builds upon broader social norms and also contributes to it. In very real ways, the guru enjoys a similar status as that of the most popular deity of wrestling: Hanuman.

Diet, ideas of control and the fraternity that is produced through interactions with each other and unquestioning respect for the guru have characterised wrestling as a site of masculine cultures par excellence. In resource poor environments, a diet rich in fat and calories is reserved for men’s leisure activities; men are seen to possess the capacity for exercising control and “balance” that women are said to lack; the guru’s authority stands in for that of the father. These have been significant aspects that feed into cultures of masculinity.

It is from this social context that the young women who filed two FIRs alleging sexual harassment against Wrestling Federation of India chief and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh come. It may be a world that is changing but the norms of masculinity — the opportunities they provide to men and the restrictions imposed on women — remain largely intact. It is also to this world that the women wrestlers protesting against the alleged sexual harassment suffered by their colleagues belong. What is remarkable with respect to both groups is their fundamental questioning of three types of hierarchies and restrictions.

The first concerns restrictions upon male and female bodies. Female wrestlers confront a very particular kind of male horror: Women who “act like men”. For this disrupts the relationship between men as well as men and women. This is a psychic horror that men are schooled in and grow into and forms the basis of masculine identity. In urban India, there are changes (the increasing number of men and women who frequent gyms, for example), however cultures of the body in rural India remain strongly masculine. The women who filed the FIR and those protesting in their support are part of an extraordinary cohort that challenges not just the gender codes of wrestling, but some very fundamental social norms that surround them. Their journeys and aspirations are remarkable in as much as they might not have the structures of social support their urban counterparts might enjoy. It is courage of an extraordinary level.

The second aspect concerns the implicit debate regarding the idea of the public and the identity of those who may pass unmolested in the public sphere. The nature of the actions by the protesting women wrestlers and those who filed the FIR is also a questioning of the age-old taboo regarding women as public beings and the kind of behaviour expected of them. In seeking to fulfill their aspirations — as men do — women wrestlers question their prescribed identity of “gentleness” and its confinement in domestic spaces. They problematise the idea that their achievements must track along male notions of female behaviour and identity.

Women wrestlers are a challenge to our ideas that the public sphere is largely a male one and that women who seek equality within it — through refusing to stick to “feminine” activities — must learn to put up with some level of harassment and hostility. Male office holders of an association that oversees a traditionally male sport might have problems coming to terms with this.

Women frequently hesitate to file police complaints that relate to sexual harassment, fearing the “reputational” consequences of such action. In light of this, the actions of those who filed the FIR in question and others such as Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik and Sangeeta Phogat are nothing short of a fundamental questioning of who we are as a people and how seriously we are willing to reflect upon the restrictions on women and the impunity enjoyed by men.

It is also a questioning of a particular aspect of national character: Is national pride only about winning medals and ignoring the actual lives of those who secure the medals in the face of extraordinary social restrictions and odds? Women wrestlers might have enhanced national pride but the lack of large-scale public support for them suggests that we haven’t exactly covered ourselves in glory.

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The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology SOAS, University of London