For the last 10 years or so, I have been running three days a week around my apartment complex. I am middle-aged, slow and sulky, and my runs are not in preparation for a race. Yet, I am always surprised by the amount of interest other people take in it. My party stories are about older, unfit men, who stop me and give me irrelevant running advice. But what I really love, despite the fact that I hate early morning interactions, is the response it produces in some of the older ladies in the building. There are two in particular, one stops her walk, leans on her stick and beams at me as I run past her. The other, raises both her hands, fists closed with the thumbs up, and pumps them as though she is cheering me past an invisible finish line. “Very good, very good,” she says.
Athlete Mary D’Souza of Bombay. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
Even today, even in a cosmopolitan, upper-middle class apartment society, a woman running is a bit of a strange sight. Imagine then, Mary D’Souza in 1952 in Bombay or Kamaljit Sandhu in 1968 in Chandigarh or even a young Usha running on the beach in Payyoli in 1980. In tracing the stories of these women in her book, The Day I Became a Runner, this is the question that author Sohini Chattopadhyay keeps at the centre, “what does sport offer women in a viciously gendered society such as India? Does it make us more equal citizens? How equal?”
India’s Kamaljit Sandhu (centre) at the 1970 Asian Games in Bangkok. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
Constructed as a series of profiles, the book is both an educative exercise in introducing the reader to members of the hall of fame of women runners in India as well as an editorial on the cultural and societal mores about the role of women in our homes and streets. I must confess I had no idea at all about women runners before P.T. Usha and it was fascinating to discover D’Souza, who represented India at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 and Sandhu, who won a gold in the 400 metres at the Asian Games in Bangkok in 1970. Their stories are gritty and inspirational, fighting for a place to make a young, new, country proud. In order to, perhaps, highlight their determination, Chattopadhyay, weaves through these profiles, the stories of her grandmother and mother, both of whom showed intellectual promise, but eventually settled down to playing the roles of wife and mother.
Santhi’s story
Santhi Soundarajan holds her silver medal on the winner’s podium after the women’s 800m final at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Running is a solitary sport. But nothing in their training prepared some of India’s former champions who got mired in the ambiguous world of gender/sex testing. It is in exploring these stories that Chattopdhyay really comes into her own. Santhi Soundarajan was a silver medalist for India in the 2006 Asian Games at Doha. Soon after the race, she was subjected to a “sex test”, which they claimed she’d “failed”. She was stripped of her medal and debarred from future competitions. Although she is now an NIS certified coach, she is still subject to humiliating gender slurs. Chattopadhyay sketches her not as a person broken by the system, but as one who has risen above it.
Pinky Pramanik | Photo Credit: PTI
Similarly, the last time 400 and 800 metre champion, Pinky Pramanik, made headlines was because she was accused of rape by a friend in 2012. In revisiting Pramanik’s story years later, Chattopadhyay shines a light on the vulnerabilities of the sexually ambiguous. In small pockets of India’s urban elite, our teenagers may be teaching us that gender is not a binary, but for an overwhelmingly large majority of the country, it continues to be. In stepping into the story when it is out of focus, Chattopadhyay is able to craft a different narrative, one that is anchored with the person at the centre of it. These are the best pieces in the book, undoubtedly.
The Day I Became a Runner; Sohini Chattopadhyay, HarperCollins, ₹599.
In a format like this, it is always difficult to gauge how much of the author should be in the profile. My quibble with the book is that Chattopadhyay errs on the side of too much. Early on it is endearing, bringing the threads to oneself. But it quickly gets tiring. Chattopadhyay runs, but she is not a runner. She should have just allowed her runners to tell their stories, without popping in every few paragraphs to tell us a little bit about herself. Their stories are powerful enough to illustrate the points being made. There is no real need to underline it with one’s own.
The reviewer is the author of Independence Day: A People’s History.
