Part of the Khabar Lahariya long-form series “Sound Fury & 4G” ♦
On a cool day in February, on a ground strewn with rose and marigold petals, two swarthy pehelwans engage in intense combat. One is thick and solid, in a red singlet and undershirt; the other, more toned, wears a red langot. They grapple on the mud, freshly packed for a dangal in Jaitpur, Mahoba.
She is draped over his back, face-down, with his head tightly scissored between her thighs as she tries to force his chest to the ground while preventing his knees from rising by gripping the sides of his underwear. With immense effort, he manages to reverse the hold, flipping her to the ground.
They face off again a few minutes later, and he goes for a leg, trying to unbalance her again. But with a rush of power, she manages to drive him backwards into the earth, pinning his shoulders down with her arms, and his flailing legs with her outstretched feet. The announcer finally calls it. Paramjeet Kaur jumps up to do a little bhangra-style victory dance for the cheering crowd, including a small section of women—most of them with saris draped over their heads, a stark contrast to Kaur’s exposed calves and arms.
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Dangals are traditionally the domain of men, from the pehelwans—once warriors in a martial culture; to the spectators—historically the feudal nobility and its male subjects, and now the politically powerful and theirs. In Bundelkhand, dangals were typically held between the start of monsoon and the winter festivals, but are now held in all months but the hottest, usually as part of local seasonal and religious festivals, or political campaigns. Yet while its seasonality may have changed, kushti remains a decidedly male pastime, as Khabar Lahariya’s reporters have discovered first-hand while covering Bundelkhand’s dangals, and documenting the incremental changes over the past few years.
Chief Editor Kavita Devi recounted going to her first dangal in 2016, in Mahoba. “I saw a sea of men, thousands of them gathered together. I was the only woman. Parting the crowd, I went to the middle, where the wrestlers were. At first, I felt embarrassed, and thought of leaving. But as a journalist that wasn’t an option.”
Kavita started shooting. At the competition, she encountered “commentbaazi, harkatbaazi, sher-o-shayari, seetiyan, gaane”.
“Seeing me, the men got even more riled up. Some wrestlers started changing their clothes, their langots, right in front of me. One guy even dropped his langot, but I didn’t turn off my camera. If you want to be naked, go ahead, do your thing—I’m fine with seeing it.”
KL reporter Shyamkali had a similar experience two years ago, at a rural dangal in Kamalpura, where there were no women present in the crowd of hundreds, let alone the pit. “A lot of people were talking about how women shouldn’t be at dangals, but here’s one taking pictures!” Shyamkali learned that the local pradhan who organised the dangal (like his father and grandfather before him) was interested in establishing a women’s section in the future, once they had successfully invited mahila pehelwans—like Paramjeet Kaur—to compete.
Over the years, the women of KL have started encountering more women at dangals, even though the cracks in tradition are still little more than hairline fractures. The Phogat sisters and cousins struck the first blows, competing with pehelwans before becoming international stars of freestyle wrestling and inspiring the blockbuster film Dangal in 2016.
Haryana wrestler Babita Phogat, fresh from the phenomenal success of the Hindi movie Dangal that was a dramatization of the journey of the Phogat sisters in the sport, contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on BJP’s ticket. Credit: Babita Phogat/Twitter
Last October, KL followed Babita Phogat, then a BJP candidate in the Haryana assembly elections, on the campaign trail in Dadri. We watched the Commonwealth Games gold medallist—once defined by her boyish crop and muscular arms, and now demurely clad in a salwar kameez with a neat braid—seek the blessings of party-workers, mostly elderly men, as she left a gender-segregated rally. A woman can win knock-down, drag-out fights against men in the pit, but may still have to fold her hands and bow before the conventions of patriarchy.
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Still, though the road is long and the journey slow, Geeta, Babita, Vinesh and their sisters have opened the door for many women wrestlers. Paramjeet is part of this growing tribe emerging out of Haryana (Karnal, in her case), but also Punjab, Bihar, and lately even UP. In the Jaitpur dangal this February, she was among three women participants, all from Haryana.
The presence of these women, fighting each other or against men; the ladies’ section in the crowd; the drone whirring overhead, positioned to shower winners with confetti—point to deep societal shifts in terms of gender, tradition and even technology. “I’m not a girl right now,” Paramjeet told KL on the sidelines of the dangal.
“At home, I’m a girl. As soon as I leave the house, I become a boy.”
After her matches, she and Ashu, another mahila pehelwan, collected money from the crowd, including the small band of women sitting in a cordoned-off area, with children clustered around them. Pushing her way politely through the men, Paramjeet credited her family for helping her keep the dream of wrestling alive for the last three years. “Parents shouldn’t doubt their daughters,” she said. “If they do, they will never be able to go forward.” Paramjeet travels alone for dangals far and wide, fighting against men and women.
Many mahila pehelwans come to kushti after playing another more socially acceptable sport. Paramjeet’s opponent Ashu, a feisty Haryanvi girl sporting a topknot above her close-cropped hair, told us that she started her athletic career playing hockey. “But then I had a fight with the coach,” she said. “So I thought I should play some sport where two people fight and one of them falls.”
A senior was involved in wrestling, so Ashu decided to try it too. “Where I come from, women don’t wrestle,” she said. “I see it all the time—women aren’t allowed to leave home, they have to kneel before everyone, particularly after getting married off.” She’d like to someday open a women’s only akhara in her village, to help others realise their potential.
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Family support is crucial, which might explain why every mahila pehelwan KL interviewed cast herself in a filial role, usually using the readymade political catch-phrase, “Beti bachao, beti padhao.” Paramjeet and Ashu intoned the common refrain, as did Jyothi Verma and Ritu Sharma, two wrestlers from Haryana who we met at a dangal in Bargadh, Chitrakoot, in November 2017.
Ritu, from Hissar, used to play kabbadi but was inspired by a cousin in Rohtak to take up wrestling around the age of twelve. Her brother supported her, but her father, a retired soldier, wasn’t too keen on her travelling for competitions. But when Ritu started winning fights, he was extremely proud. “He says, do whatever you want, but do it well,” she told us. “Make a name for yourself, and don’t worry about anything else. Whatever you need, we’ll manage it. Follow your heart.”
Ritu woke up early every day to practice from 4am to 8:30, before going to college for a few hours. She came home to eat and rest for a bit, before going back for the evening practice session. “I’ll keep wrestling as long as I can,” she told us, adding, “until I find a job.” The crowd of men at Bargadh and the paucity of women wrestlers in the competition didn’t bother her.
Jyothi, who defeated Ritu at Bargadh, had been wrestling for six years by then, and had competed at a national level. She was introduced to the sport by her uncle, a pehelwan who competed internationally. In the early days, she was nervous about going to the akhara, afraid of getting injured, but she had become a confident old hand, with plans to pursue a degree in physical education. Like Ritu, she practiced for about three hours every morning and evening, and had fought both men and women at dangals. “We don’t think about boys watching us, or how we should feel about it. We both know the same techniques.”
Jyothi said it felt great to have the support of the (all-male) crowd. “Here, in your UP and Bihar, girls are married off before the age of 18, nor are they educated,” Jyothi pointed out. “Going into sports is a far-off dream. I hope that girls from backwards areas also start getting into sports.”
Ritu echoed the sentiment: “We want our sisters to come out into the world and see what it is like. And to show the world what they can do.”
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Despite the barriers, women from UP are making small inroads into wrestling, as KL discovered at a “mahadangal” in Goishaiganj, Faizabad (Ayodhya) in 2017. Anjali, a soft-spoken woman from Lucknow, told us that she got into wrestling with two or three other girls. Shivangi, a chattier wrestler from Gorakhpur, took up kushti four years earlier because her guru lived next-door, and because her older sister used to wrestle too. A national level track-and-field athlete, Shivangi had a hostel scholarship and some sixty-odd medals in her collection. Both women wanted to continue with pehelwani, but neither had a clear idea of what part the sport might play in their lives, at least compared to the wrestlers we met from Haryana at other competitions.
Things have changed between Goshaiganj and other dangals, where we didn’t see any women in the crowd, and Mahoba this past February. In the intervening years, Khabar Lahariya’s dangal coverage has apparently become quite popular among female viewers, who pore over the videos of nearly nude contestants with a kind of forbidden pleasure, often on phones borrowed from the men in their families.
Women have greater access to the secrets of the dangal, and KL reporter Shyamkali believes athletic local girls are beginning to see the sport as a viable option in the last three to five years, particularly with the example of mahila pehelwans entering the ring before them. Among other motivations, the prize money can be good. Averaging around Rs. 10,000-20,000, the money can cover training and food costs, some of which are taken care of when a wrestler is invited to a dangal.
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Within the pit, and sometime outside it, women are creating new ways to negotiate a traditionally masculine space. The most obvious difference is dress code, with women competing in less revealing clothing. Paramjeet explained having to fight in a singlet matter-of-factly as a question of a woman’s “izzat”.
But whatever you’re wearing, in kushti, there are no major rules for what body parts are off limits. Shyamkali hazards that “even if a sexual violation happens, a woman would probably ignore it,” while Paramjeet implied that once two wrestlers are engaged in a bout, all they care about is victory. She felt that sexual violation wasn’t something women even consider when they enter the dangal. “When you learn wrestling, you don’t think about who touches what—it’s not like that,” Paramjeet said; there’s nothing “wrong” in contact.
The fact that pehelwani usually involves celibacy perhaps plays a part in allowing the space inside the pit to be somewhat desexualized. According to Shyamkali, women wrestlers—who are usually single and between the ages of 18 to 35—follow the same saatvik diet regime as the men: lots of nuts, high-fat milk and ghee, vegetarian food that isn’t fried, etc. Celibacy and related diet control may be less strictly practised than in the days when akharas were more monastic, but wrestlers still hold a kind of respect for these tenets.
Shyamkali pointed out that pehelwans often choose who they fight, and even if women are present at a dangal, there aren’t usually more than two or three. In UP, mahila pehelwans are still something of a novelty: as much a spectacle for an added element of entertainment, as a bid for gender equality. Women often have to fight against men, and actually even prefer not being consigned to a sideshow.
“Sometimes you go to a dangal and they ask if you will fight with a boy,” Paramjeet told us. “So you have to. What are you going to do if there’s no girl there—go back home?” For her, “I don’t think about being a girl when I wrestle, I think of myself as a boy. Wrestling is wrestling. I want to fight with boys, more than I want to fight girls.”
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And yet, in Mahoba this February, while Paramjeet was thinking only about beating the pehelwan in the red langot from Jammu-Kashmir, the announcer circling around them kept stressing the unique quality of their “man-woman competition”, right from introducing her as a mahila khiladi. “Watch this head-on competition! Woman versus man—the fight all Bundelkhand has been talking about! Ladies and gents pehelwan!”
As Paramjeet concentrated on keeping her opponent’s head locked between her legs, the announcer noted, “That’s ninety kg he’s carrying—he won’t whistle now, he’ll think twice about whistling!”
“Our esteemed journalists have been clamouring for this fight!” he added—a nod in KL’s direction?—before lecturing the crowd about how women were getting ahead “in every field.” As Paramjeet’s opponent made a bid to throw her off, another announcer chimed in. “Ek taraf mard, aur ek taraf mardani!” A man on one side, and manliness on the other.