Sakshi Malik's 'Witness' tells untold stories behind wrestlers' journey

In her memoir, Sakshi Malik doesn't hold back, revealing the untold parts of her story that the world missed while the cameras focused only on certain snippets

Witness

Author:  Sakshi Malik with Jonathan Selvaraj

Publisher: Juggernaut

Pages: 300

Price: Rs 799

  Sakshi Malik’s book begins with a tickle, but it’s not funny. The wrestler is trying to resist the police from pushing her into a bus. The men and women in khaki are there to detain the wrestlers and their supporters who have been protesting against the Wrestling Federation of India and its president, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, and they are having a tough time getting Malik to comply. She is, after all, an Olympian, in fact, India’s only female Olympic medalist in wrestling. It’s not easy to get her to budge or loosen her grip once she is in position. And then someone yells, “Tickle her!” — a move that takes the strength out of her, giving the policewomen the opportunity to bundle her into the bus.

 

When India’s champion wrestlers took to the streets demanding action against Brij Bhushan, and later threatened to throw their well-earned medals into the Ganges, there were enough television crews around to capture the action live for all the world to see. What they didn’t see was an Olympian jumping out of the bus she had been pushed into, being chased by the police through Delhi’s lanes, hiding, wailing in vain at a construction site before being led back to the bus. They also didn’t see what the medals meant to her, particularly the bronze she’d won at the 2016 Rio Games, which she’d framed so that she could one day show it to her children and tell them about the time when their mother was something. Nor did TV viewers see another champion wrestler, Vinesh Phogat, hitting herself in frustration after Jat farm rights leader Naresh Tikait took the medals away from the wrestlers just before they were to throw them into the river.

 

Malik’s book, Witness, tries to show to the world many of the things it missed amidst the flashing cameras that focused only on certain snippets of the wrestlers’ story. It is not, however, an account of the wrestlers’ protest alone, though that forms a large part of the book. And why not? The protest and its outcome is a reason Malik chose to quit professional wrestling despite having many fights left in her.

 

The name of the book comes from her own, Sakshi (“witness”), though this wasn’t the name given to her at birth. For the initial few years of her life, she was called Sofia, a name her mother gave her for reasons no one seems to know. The shift from “Sofia” to “Sakshi”, too, came about just like that when her brother started calling her Sakshi after a classmate.

 

Witness is a memoir, and a brave one at that. It is the story of a girl whose father was a conductor with the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and mother an anganwadi  worker, who was born into a conservative, feudal society in Haryana, who chose a sport dominated by men with its akharas and dangals, and who went on to make a name for herself before an incident that made national, then international, news prompted her to step off the mat.

 

This is not, however, a rah-rah account but a layered story. It is also Malik’s attempt to set the record straight with some fellow wrestlers, one of them being Manisha, and question the intentions of certain figures, such as the farmer leader Naresh Tikait.

 

The book offers a front-row view of the lives of sportspersons, particularly women, who are engaged in sports that do not enjoy the kind of spotlight that cricket or tennis attract. Wrestling is a rugged sport. You’ve literally got to fight your way to make it big here, and that fight isn’t restricted to the mat. Sometimes it includes travelling in a train sitting on a blanket on the floor outside the toilet on the way to a tournament.

 

Coming from a closed society, it’s natural to wonder how Malik reached where she did. What shines in this book is the role of the women she grew up around, starting with her paternal grandmother in a Rohtak village who would wake up earlier than the others to cook breakfast for her daughters-in-law who worked. Her mother’s support, both when it came to her choosing wrestling as her sport and when she told her about being molested, stands out. But then again, this is not an uncritically enthusiastic account of the role of the women. In another chapter, Malik writes about how she had to fight her mother hard to marry the man of her choice.

 

What also comes through is the role of the men, who stood firmly by the women, both at home and at the protest site. As she writes about these men and women in her life, Malik ends up presenting a picture of what true feminism looks like: Men and women standing side by side, equal, each there to support the other.

 

She also speaks about femininity, and how she, with a wrestler’s body, struggled with it, being so self-conscious about her strong, muscular arms that she would almost never wear sleeveless clothes.

 

She narrates her uncomfortable encounters with Brij Bhushan Singh, of how she tried to ward him off, and stay focused on wrestling. She writes about how the protest came about, and why she chose to finally speak out after having kept her head down for a long time.

 

It takes courage to stick one’s neck out and be a witness. Sakshi Malik doesn’t hold back.