Sohini Chattopadhyay’s book speaks of Indian history through its women athletes

Opening with Mumbai girl - Bandra, to be precise - Mary D'Souza, who was part of the first group of women to represent India at the Olympics, her research took her across the length and breadth of the country, to rediscover the genius behind the women who dominated the tracks. There's Kamaljit Sandhu, PT Usha, Santhi Soundarajan, Pinki Pramanik, Dutee Chand, Lalita Babar, and Ila Mitra. There were a few names she had to sadly weed out as well, but that was only because she wanted to avoid over-representing athletes from a particular decade.

"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."

Her subjects' reluctance, however, did little to undermine her determination to tell this story, which was put together through several hours and even days of interviews, and poring over news archives, where sometimes the inane weather report on the morning of the race, served as a trigger for memories for the athletes. "Like Mary remembered Helsinki was not as cold as she thought it would be," she says. The newspaper reports not only helped Chattopadhyay get a sense of the athlete in question, but also what India was like during that time. "For instance when Kamaljit Sandhu won in December 1970 [she became the first Indian woman to win a gold medal outside India at the Asian Games in Bangkok], the mill strikes in Bombay and Naxalism in Bengal, and tensions between East and West Pakistan occupied the page one [of newspapers]. The year 1970 was the beginning of a very volatile period in India. In that context, Kamaljit's win becomes very important, because here's a spark of good news," says Chattopadhyay.

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."