In early 2001, Mahavir Phogat, an amateur wrestler and father of four daughters, ordered his eldest two, Geeta (eleven) and Babita (nine), to join him in a mud pit he had carved out in his courtyard in Balali, a small village in Haryana. The Olympic Committee had just announced women’s wrestling as a competitive category, with the first matches slated for 2004, and Phogat wanted in on the game. For the next seven to eight years, Geeta and Babita trained daily to the point of exhaustion: long runs each morning, technique sessions throughout the day, and strength-building in the evenings using homemade equipment crafted by their father. One day they’d climb ropes, the next lift sandbags, and the day after drag tractor tyres.
To most people in the village, Phogat was just another madman – until the medals started coming in. Geeta went on to qualify for the 2012 Olympics in London, the first Indian woman to earn that honour. Babita clinched the gold medal in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. By then, the younger sisters had also been drafted.
Today, India is a major player in global wrestling, mainly thanks to the medals won by women athletes, whose presence on the mat was, until recently, widely regarded by traditionalists as unwelcome, even impure.
The wrestling arena was – and is – a celebration of brute strength and thigh-slapping, milk-glugging camaraderie, with its presiding deity, Hanuman, the monkey-warrior from the Ramayana, a lifelong bachelor who is ever-ready for a bout. Organisers of traditional wrestling events, called ‘dangals’, where men, clad in loincloths, battle in mud pits, in Haryana and elsewhere in northern India, historically did not allow women as spectators.
Change was somewhat driven by necessity. In families without sons to train, girls were pushed into the wrestling pits – and they thrived. Since Balali’s rise to prominence, versions of the Phogat family’s story have played out in many villages and towns in and around Haryana: a father or uncle picks a young girl in the family – sometimes all of them – to be trained as a wrestler. Their long hair is chopped off, wardrobes shift from loose salwar kameez to snug bodysuits, and domestic duties are partly replaced by squats and lunges. As often happens, physical fitness is more easily gained than social approval. Relatives warn parents that they’re making their daughters ‘unmarriageable’. Village committees call for boycotts. Mobs attack dangals that feature female wrestlers.
In response to the growing need for separate and safe training environments, akhadas exclusively for girls have emerged. These academies mostly draw their students from the rural backwaters in north-west India, where the harsh constraints of gender hold sway. In Haryana, which produces most of India’s wrestlers, decades of female infanticide and selective abortions have severely skewed the sex ratio. Life for most girls here often follows a set pattern – an arranged marriage after high school, followed by a lifetime of domestic labour under strict male control. In her recently published memoir Witness, Sakshi Malik recalls her grandmother sharing how her mother-in-law would dilute the milk she was given to drink – ‘for no other reason but to lower her self-worth’.
By 2022, Prarthna Singh had spent eight years photographing girls and women in wrestling. She met them at government-run training camps, where competitive wrestlers spend months preparing for selected events. It’s not the preparation that stands out in her pictures – rather the quiet minutiae of life between training sessions. We see names scrawled on lockers, clothes hanging to dry on lines, chargers tucked into sockets.
Even when catching them in ‘action’ – flexing their muscles or performing a technique – the pictures juxtapose strength and vulnerability, as if the wrestlers are expressing the fragility of the chance they have to craft a life different from the one they left behind.
At the end of that year, she invited me to join her on a visit to a girls-only academy in Sonipat, Haryana. At the time, forty-five girls were training at Yudhveer Akhada across various levels. Most of them were dropped off here by their fathers. The youngest was ten years old.
When I asked what drew them to wrestling, many pointed to India’s first Olympic medal in women’s wrestling. In 2016’s Rio Olympics, twenty-three-year-old Sakshi Malik shared a room with Vinesh Phogat, the niece of Mahavir Phogat and a three-time Commonwealth gold medallist. For both, it was their first Olympics, in separate weight classes. They had been close friends for several years. On the eve of the quarter-finals, after making the weight cut, they celebrated together with ready-to-eat Indian food: one held the pouch of curried rajma under hot water in the sink, while the other fetched bread from the Olympic kitchen.
Vinesh suffered one of the worst injuries of her career. But Sakshi won a nail-biting match against the redoubtable Aisuluu Tynybekova of Kyrgyzstan, bringing home the bronze. She received a welcome worthy of a national hero, with rewards and accolades from various governments and celebrations across the country. In her home state of Haryana, people danced in the streets.
An Olympic medal is more than a sporting prize. In an argument, it can serve as the final word. Sakshi’s bronze was the answer parents now gave nosy relatives and village elders questioning their daughters’ ambition. ‘Today, go to any district in Haryana, and you will find a wrestling academy for girls every four to five kilometres. It gives me joy to acknowledge that my victory opened doors, changed mindsets,’ Sakshi told me.
Shortly after Rio, a Bollywood blockbuster transformed even non-sports fans into admirers of women’s wrestling. In December 2016, Dangal hit cinemas, with Aamir Khan starring as Mahavir Phogat. The Phogat family went on to produce one wrestling champion after another – not only Geeta and Babita but also Ritu, Sangeeta, Vinesh and Priyanka, the last two being daughters of Mahavir’s late younger brother. A testament to Bollywood’s influence, Dangal inspired countless families to seek out the nearest akhada willing to admit girls.
Siksha Kharb’s father enrolled her at the Yudhveer academy in 2018, when she was eleven. ‘After Sakshi didi won the medal, every second girl in my village wanted to become a wrestler,’ she told me. Rounak Kumari left home when she was fifteen. ‘Papa used to watch a lot of wrestling on the television. Because he didn’t have a son, he used to make us, his five daughters, bout with each other at home. I was the oldest and the best at the game.’ Dangal was a household favourite. ‘Initially, he dropped me at a different wrestling academy, and one by one, three of my sisters followed me. Now four of us are here, training together,’ she said while preparing for the evening’s warm-up session.
Surrounded by vibrant yellow mustard fields, the main building at the akhada was a modest, two-storey cement structure. The upper floor functioned as a hostel, with two rows of rooms furnished with bunk beds and steel almirahs. On the ground floor, an expansive hall, covered in wrestling mats and equipped with exercise gear, served as the training area.
For the girls in residence, life couldn’t be more different between the two floors. The dormitory is friendly, the girls largely in groups of two or three, braiding hair, cooking comfort food on induction stoves, massaging sore limbs and watching videos on their phones.
On the mat, though, there are no friends – only players. Downstairs at Yudhveer Akhada, in the training hall, the same girls regarded each other as rivals whose strengths were to be as keenly noted as their vulnerabilities.
The first technique newcomers learn at an akhada is how to build a stance. A wrestler, as any coach will tell you, is as strong as their stance. It is the position they assume at the start of a bout: crouching, one leg at an angle to the other, one arm bent while the other is held straight out. For hours each day, a young wrestler holds this stance on the mat, mastering the art of strength in stillness.
As Prarthna took photographs, I stood in the doorway watching the school-age girls with taut muscles and intense focus lock in bouts across the length of the hall. One of the trainers broke down the techniques on display. A girl using the ‘ankle pick’ had grabbed her opponent’s ankles while simultaneously pushing her upper body in an attempt to knock her off balance. Another had dived in for the ‘double-leg takedown’, wrapping both arms around the opponent’s legs and pulling them in while shooting forward with her weight. Behind her, someone was in the middle of a ‘fireman’s carry’, having ducked under her opponent’s arm and secured it with one of her legs. She then lifted the opponent onto her shoulders, spun in a full circle, and slammed her down onto the mat. Soon after, a loud bell signalled the end of the three-hour session.
At the start of 2023, a group of Indian wrestlers launched a sit-in protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site, demanding the removal of Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI). The wrestlers accused Singh of sexual harassment and sought his resignation, followed by legal action. Singh has repeatedly denied the allegations.
Sakshi Malik publicly shared her own experience of abuse. As a budding wrestler, she had endured years of harassment, from unwanted phone calls to an attempted assault just after she won her first gold medal at the Asian Junior Championships in Kazakhstan. Back in Almaty, in 2012, she did not lodge a formal complaint. Few girls did. Some were deterred by the formidable list of other criminal charges standing against Singh, which include murder and rioting, charges that he brandished as a badge of honour; others feared his rumoured capacity for vengeance, which had ended many a fledgling career. Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh ran Indian wrestling as a personal empire, and also wielded enormous political influence as a prominent leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a six-time Member of Parliament, with close ties to powerful figures in Narendra Modi’s government.
‘We told each other: we have to fight without worrying about the result – like we do in wrestling,’ Sakshi told me. Seated beside her in the tent at Jantar Mantar was Vinesh Phogat and her cousin, Sangeeta, also an award-winning wrestler. While dressed in their usual athletic wear, they tied black bands around their heads and arms to signal their new role as activists.
By this point, women wrestlers had collectively won dozens of coveted medals for India across international competitions. Their achievements had inspired a new generation of girls to take up wrestling, and they felt it was time to reform the system that had failed them and countless others. ‘I did not want younger wrestlers to go through the same ordeal that I had to endure,’ Sakshi told me. ‘We had put everything on the line to sit in protest.’
For over forty days, they spent most of their time on the yellow tarpaulin resembling a wrestling mat – sitting, standing, sleeping, and sloganeering. With no prior experience in protesting, they were learning something new every day. Practically sleeping on the street, they were besieged by mosquitoes – a relentless swarm that multiplied at night. They covered themselves from head to toe as they slept, wearing thick socks on their feet, lest an exposed toe lure the insects. When unseasonal showers drenched their mattresses, they squeezed foldable cots through the police barricades. And when the police cut the electricity, they arranged for a generator to keep their loudspeakers running.
On 28 May 2023, they marched towards central Delhi, where Modi’s government was set to inaugurate a new parliament building. Police personnel stormed the rally. ‘There were several hands grabbing at me,’ Sakshi Malik recalls in her memoir. ‘I am sure they had plenty of experience with this sort of thing, but I was an Olympic medallist, after all. It is hard to drag me out of position.’ With orders to arrest her, a group of policewomen tried to haul her into a bus where they had detained other protesters, but Sakshi, drawing on her practice of maintaining stance, stood her ground. The police won, after one of them got the idea to tickle her. ‘My strength evaporated, and before I knew it, I was bundled into the bus.’
A procession of buses took the group to a police station, where they spent the night in detention. Released the next day, they announced a temporary suspension of their protest, assured by the sports minister of an investigation against Singh and fair elections to appoint the WFI’s new governing committee.
After seven female wrestlers filed First Information Reports against Singh, the government suspended him from the post. But when the elections were announced months later, the sports ministry allowed Singh’s close associate to contest the president’s position. ‘He was from the ruling party, so they had to side with him,’ Sakshi told me.
His proxy candidate, Sanjay Singh, won the ballot, crushing any hope of accountability or reform.
Devastated, Sakshi Malik quit the sport. She had planned to retire after another shot at Olympic gold, with the ceremonial gesture of leaving her wrestling shoes at the edge of the mat. Instead, at a press conference in December 2023, she placed a pair of shoes she had been wearing on the table before her. Both she and Vinesh had tears in their eyes.
Though defeated in her protest, Vinesh decided to compete in the selection trials for the upcoming Olympics, aware that the ad hoc committee appointed by the government to oversee selections could make it difficult for her to go to Paris. Her fears were soon realised. The committee did not hold trials for the 53 kg category, instead choosing to send another wrestler, one who had fought in the same weight class in the last big competition – while Vinesh was protesting at Jantar Mantar. She reduced her weight to compete in the 50 kg trials, even though she naturally weighed up to five kilos more, and won.
She made it to Paris, proving her mettle as an athlete at the top of her game. But before her final match for Olympic gold, she was disqualified after she weighed in 100 g above 50 kg. She had taken extreme measures to keep herself at the requisite weight – going as far as standing upside down in a sauna and letting blood – but it was not enough.
Back in India, the news reached thousands of fans who had stayed up to witness what might have been a historic match. Vinesh’s previous performances in Paris had been exceptional. One highlight was her victory over Japan’s Yui Susaki in the opening round – a landmark win, as Susaki, a four-time world champion, had remained undefeated on the international stage. For the most part, Phogat focused on defence, skilfully neutralising Susaki’s attacks through arm clinches and head-to-head resistance. With approximately seven seconds remaining, she executed a swift takedown. She lunged at Susaki and, before her opponent could react, flipped her onto the mat, using her weight to pin her down while her hands encircled her from beneath, securing two points.
Had she been allowed to compete in her usual weight class, she might have won the final match too. Her Olympic journey served as a stark reminder that politics can eclipse even the finest talent in any arena, including professional sports.
This competition was to be the 29-year-old’s last. ‘I don’t have any more strength now. Goodbye wrestling, 2001–2024,’ she posted on her social media pages.
In May, a Delhi court framed charges against Singh for sexual harassment and intimidation, among other offences. The trial is currently under way, with witness testimonies being recorded.
Sakshi now trains aspiring wrestlers at her father-in-law’s academy in Rohtak, her home town. She told me the younger generation will have to continue the fight they began. ‘I tell them it is not enough to master the techniques. It is equally important to raise one’s voice against injustice.’
Vinesh, just weeks after returning from Paris, joined the Indian National Congress, the BJP’s main opposition. By September she was standing as the party’s candidate in regional elections in Haryana, her home state. The seat she contested, Julana, had never before seen a woman candidate in the race for the state assembly.
Vinesh approached politics like a sportsperson, embracing the challenge. On her first major campaign day, she ran an impromptu foot race among party members and supporters – she came first. Her election pitch focused on the rights of farmers, sportspersons, and young people. Part of her agenda, she explained, was to give young athletes the confidence that someone was standing up for them.
On 8 October, as the votes were being counted, she initially trailed behind the BJP candidate, but eventually she took the lead, winning by 6,015 votes.
Afterwards, addressing the press, she declared her win belonged to ‘every girl, every woman who chooses the path of struggle’. For the first time in a long while, Vinesh Phogat was smiling.
