Punching back at the patriarchy: The Sporting Life by Rudraneil Sengupta

I wonder how many of our women fighting athletes have heard the sentence: “Why this sport? It will spoil your looks, who will marry you then?”

It’s a rhetorical question. The answer is: Everyone.

Nikhat Zareen, like Mary Kom or Sarita Devi or KC Lekha or RL Jenny before her—the only five boxers from India to have won world championship titles—has heard it.

Our women wrestlers hear it all the time too, especially because wrestling, unlike boxing, inevitably causes a change in facial features, the distinctive mangled mass of tissue called “cauliflower ears”.

One response is that wrestlers marry other wrestlers. Boxers, like Zareen, say “I’ve always wondered, who are these people so concerned about my marriage prospects?” with an unmistakable veneer of menace in their voice.

Those questions stop, of course, when they start winning at national and international tournaments. Or when they become world champions.

Being a young woman in a sport in India is almost always hard. There is always opposition from somewhere or the other. For Kom, it was her own father. For most, it’s extended family, friends of the family, or neighbours who provide the opposition chorus, while the parents steel their hearts, seal their ears and create a protective barrier around the daughter. That’s just what happened to Zareen, whose father was a former national athlete.

“My mother, out of soft, maternal feelings, used to be scared too that I’ll get hurt in boxing,” Zareen had told me a couple of years ago. “But now she watches me fight and says things like, ‘You are not moving your feet enough. Maintain your distance.’”

Did being Muslim pose additional problems?

“Well, not much, though there were some people who would say that they don’t like it that I have to fight in shorts. Some people told my parents that I should wear a hijab,” she said.

Zareen is not a believer in hijabs, but there are girls who make a choice to wear them, and that choice should make no difference to whether they can fight or not. In 2019, in a landmark ruling, amateur boxing’s global governing body allowed women to fight in hijabs should they wish to. It was the culmination of a three-year long campaign by American boxer Amaiya Zafar. The teenage boxer from Minneapolis had been stopped from fighting in the US nationals final back in 2016 because her hijab was deemed to violate the sports’ dress code. In a remarkable response, her opponent gave her the championship belt in a show of compassion and solidarity. Next year, she successfully egged USA Boxing into introducing a religious exemption to the dress code.

In Zareen’s city, Hyderabad, burqa-clad women regularly train at the Golconda Boxing Academy, run by former national champion Aijaz Ahmed.

One of the first places in India to start training girls in boxing in a formal way is a physical education school in the slums of Kidderpore, a largely Muslim neighbourhood close to the Kolkata docks. There, one of India’s first women boxers, and the country’s first woman international referee, Razia Shabnam, continues to provide the opportunity of a sporting career for girls from the area. There is a wonderful documentary from 2016 called Burqa Boxers on Shabnam and three of her students.

Fighting sports have always been about beating the odds. Zareen has done just that. There is little doubt that she is now the finest boxer in her weight class in India, and one of the best in the world. She’s got two years—which, in training terms, is pretty much the perfect timeframe—to maintain her supremacy and add to her strength, skills, and swagger. She’s already set a countdown clock for Paris 2024.