Ringing in a revolution: Rudraneil Sengupta on India’s women boxers

The rich haul of four gold medals at the IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships, which concluded in Delhi last week, proves that India’s fighters are serious contenders at the top level. This is great news, because just five or six years ago, a fading MC Mary Kom was still India’s best prospect in women’s boxing, the boxing federation was mired in factional politics and it had been banned by the international governing body for the sport.

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Then a change began. At the end of 2016, a reconstituted Indian Boxing Federation took over, run by an entirely new set of people, and acquired international recognition. This meant that fighters, whether at the elite or the grassroots levels, could finally hope to get the support they needed.

“We have the best talent pool of boxers that I’ve ever seen,” the national women’s head coach Bhaskar Bhatt said to me two weeks ago, “and I think we will be at the top of the world in women’s boxing in a few years.”

The four world titles are not just a reflection of the calibre of India’s women boxers, but also of the competent administrative and coaching support they have been able to access. Two of those gold medallists, Nikhat Zareen, 26, and Lovlina Borgohain, 25, are excellent prospects for a medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics too.

Another gold medallist, Nitu Ghanghas, fights at 48kg, which is not an Olympic category, but she is a spectacular brawler. She stings like a hornet whose nest has been disturbed. She won a Commonwealth gold last year, on her debut at the elite level, and followed it up with utter dominance at the world championships, where she won her first three bouts via Referee Stops Contests (where the official puts an end to a fight when they deem that one fighter is pummelling the other without response). I predict that Ghanghas, who is 22, will move up to the 50kg Olympic weight category within a couple of years, and give Zareen, who is the finest boxer in India right now, a run for her money.

During a visit to the national camp a few weeks ago, as boxers prepared for the world championships, I saw two other young women whose talent was unmistakeable: Jaismine Lamboria, 21, and Parveen Hooda, 22. Both are from Haryana, as is Ghanghas. (Incidentally, when will other states catch up with Haryana’s prodigious appetite for sports?)

Lamboria, lean and lanky, lost in the quarter-finals at the world championships because she does not yet know how to take a punch and still stick to her plan. This is only a matter of experience and coaching input. She has excellent technique — quick on her feet, with a long and accurate jab and a leading hand hook and fierce straight punch that will trouble any opponent. She will be a fighter to fear before two years are out.

Hooda, who won a world championship bronze in her big-stage debut last year, did not make the team for this edition, but every coach in the national set-up believes she is a step away from being a world-beater.

I asked her how she started boxing, and that turned out to be a bittersweet story. “I got beaten up a lot in school,” Hooda said. “Then the sarpanch of our village started a boxing and kabaddi academy. My father thought joining would help me keep off the bullies.”

She rapidly became known in her village as a boxer with a great future ahead of her. “Some days ago I met one of the boys who used to beat me up a lot,” Hooda added with a smile. “We hugged and laughed and I told him that if it wasn’t for him maybe I would not have become a boxer.”