A journalist’s desire to reclaim public spaces for women, sets her on a quest to follow female athletes and their tryst with a young nation
Sohini Chattopadhyay says that by the 1980s, a lot of female sportspersons began emerging out of Kerala due to the government scheme to promote sports among young women. PT Usha, seen here in a photo from 1986, streaking her way to pass in the women’s 200-m heats with a new Asian Games record time of 23.68 secs, was a product of this scheme. Pic/Getty Images
The seeds for Sohini Chattopadhyay’s debut book, The Day I Became A Runner (HarperCollins India), were planted in the aftermath of the gangrape and death of the 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi, in December 2012. Protests had followed. “And while there was a lot of condemnation of the viciousness of the attack,” Chattopadhyay says over a video call from Kolkata, “Within that, there were those three inevitable questions—what was she doing, where was she doing and what was she wearing. It was almost like a chorus, ‘doing what, going where, wearing what’.” Then came the “staggering remark” by Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of then President of India Pranab Mukherjee and a Congress MP from Jangipur in West Bengal, who claimed that “dented and painted women were part of these protests”.
Chattopadhyay, a National Award-winning film critic, had by then been a journalist for eight years, and was on a year’s break to pursue a Master’s degree in sociology in Edinburgh. She remembers feeling angry about everything that was happening around her. “My response was purely physical. I felt like I had to put myself out there on the streets… I had to claim public space, inhabit it, and legitimately.” The one way she could do that, she remembers thinking to herself, was through running.
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That spurred her on a journey as a hobby runner, but also a quest to document the stories of women who were representing their country in athletics. “Right from the beginning, this book was, for me, about citizenship. I wanted to ask ‘why don’t I as a woman have the right to be here, occupy space?’.” Sports was a lens through which to look at it. I thought ‘Can I tell a history of a republic through these women?’” The athletes, who form the core of Chattopadhyay’s book, hence represent around eight decades of the country since independence.
“If you read Mary’s chapter, you will realise that in the 1940s, most of the women athletes who were coming up, were primarily Goan and East Indian Catholics, Parsis, Anglo Indians and Bengalis, perhaps due to their early encounter with colonialism.” By the 1980s, a lot of female sportspersons began emerging out of Kerala, and that’s because, in 1976, the Kerala government introduced a scheme to promote sports among young women, setting up hostels in certain districts to train them in track and field events, basketball and volleyball. Pilavullakandi Thekkeparambil Usha, who missed the 1984 Olympics bronze in the 400-metre hurdles by one-hundredth of a second, becoming “the most famous fourth-place finisher in Olympic history”, was a product of that. So, was Anju Bobby George.
For her, the real challenge while stitching the portraits was getting the athletes to talk. “Athletes do not articulate in words. They articulate in action. They perform. They like to run,” says Chattopadhyay, who has been working on the book, which was among the works awarded the New India Foundation fellowship in 2021, for nearly a decade. “I remember Usha telling me, ‘why are you wasting your time on this?’ I think she found the exercise useless.” D’Souza, she remembers, had been the more “talkative” among the lot. By the time Chattopadhyay had interviewed her, D’Souza had already been honoured with the Dhyan Chand Award in 2013. This was 61 years after she travelled to the Helsinki Olympics. “With the recognition, I think it finally struck her, that she had a place in history,” she says. There was also the fact that most of these athletes had come from lower middle class backgrounds. “There was this gap between them and me,” confesses Chattopadhyay. “For them, sports was the most viable ladder for social mobility. It was a lot of hard work. I, on the other hand, was at best a hobby runner. Naturally, they’d find a question like, ‘why do you run’, stupid.”
There were also other discoveries on the way. When Chattopadhyay started her research, she thought that among other things, this book would be about the cultural prejudices prevalent in society, like our attitudes about the clothes that sportswomen wore. “Because when I was working [as a journalist] in the 2000s, there was so much conversation about Sania Mirza and her choice of clothes. I thought that this would be the universal thing that sportswomen from every community would have experienced to some degree,” she says. “But this book was actually about hunger.” She remembers being shocked by how little these athletes could afford to eat. “It reminded me how poor India actually is.” In the book, she relays a story of the Chand siblings—Saraswati and Dutee—whose family home she visited in the village of Chaka Gopalpur in Odisha. Chattopadhyay writes: “Saraswati got a job with the Odisha Police in 2004, a household of seven children and two adults survived on Akhuji and Chakradhar’s weaving income alone, which rarely crossed R3,000 a month at the time. On good days, they ate rice and potatoes, most often rice and salt. The first time the family purchased eggs was when Saraswati bought them with her first salary at the age of 23, along with a pair of canvas shoes for Dutee. As a constable, she earned Rs 7,000 a month and sent Rs 5,000 home to her mother, with instructions to feed eggs to her siblings every day.”
Another grim reminder comes towards the end of the book, when Chattopadhyay talks about the Sunrise Project, an initiative to train teenage long-distance runners for the new marathon economy, which kick-started in Nanded, a drought-prone Marathwada region of Maharashtra. “The PE teachers shared how in the last decade, parents have been approaching him, asking how they could get their girls to enrol for the project. He told them, ‘Start feeding them as much as you feed your sons’. At first, I didn’t understand what he meant, but then it hit me… the needle is moving at that basic a level.”
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