The Day I Became a Runner review: Unseen battles India’s women athletes fight

The book sets out to closely examine the constrained space and recognition accorded to women in sports, portraying it as the singular avenue for women to actively engage in a quasi-feudal male-dominated society. The media frequently employs the term ‘national duty’ for athletes representing the national team. The relationship between nationalism and sports appears unequivocally evident, particularly during sporting events when demonstrations of national pride that take centre stage.

Humiliated For Not Being Women Enough

Chattopadhyay introduces eight female athletes and scrutinizes how our society and the state responded to their contributions, with special focus on Santhi Soundarajan, Pinki Pramanik, and Dutee Chand, who faced unimaginable humiliation for their ‘defective sex’ or for not being female enough for competing as women.

Santhi Soundarajan, who had won silver medal in the 800 meters at the 2006 Doha Asian Games, was stripped of her medal after failing a sex test — ‘gender test’ as it was termed back in the days — with no results, information, or inferences from the test provided to her. “No one from the Indian contingent came to inform Santhi about the result of the examination, or even why she had been called for the test. Instead, she was handed a flight ticket back home while the rest of her long-distance team stayed back,” writes Chattopadhyay.

She observes that there is no accessible video record of the 800-meter final from the 2006 Asian Games in India. It seems as though someone wanted to erase every memory of Soundarajan, the athlete who had earned 12 international medals for India. This erasure extends beyond national boundaries, with even the World Athletic Federation stripping her of the right to compete further in any competitions.

The stories of Pramanik and Chand were also not very different. Unlike Santhi or Dutee, Pramanik was not omitted from competition, but she was arrested and jailed for rape and domestic violence in a complaint filed by her flatmate. She was later acquitted by the Calcutta High Court on the ground that ‘she was incapable of sexual intercourse like an ordinary male’.

Even though Dutee got the backing of the government for her fight in the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS) in Switzerland, the highest court for sports matters, her life, too, was not easy after she was put in the spotlight. Despite the fact that she won a landmark case, the Indian media did not spare her either. Legacy media portrayed her as a woman who had failed the gender test, showing no trace of regret.

According to Chattopadhyay, the experiences of these women athletes underline the central anxiety of competitive female athletes today. “Are they female enough to compete as a woman? Do they meet the precise requirements of anatomy, chromosomes and hormones?” she asks, arguing that no other domain in the contemporary world maintains and polices the distinction between the male and female as competitive sports does and the biological markers of sex are closely monitored in women alone as male athletes are not tested.

Disparities in Privileges Between Male And Female Players

The book is dedicated to Soundarajan ‘who never stopped thinking of the track as her home’ but its tone and character come through in the chapter on P T Usha which must have been the toughest to write. Usha has been closely observed in India due to her exceptional achievements in the Olympics, Asian Games, Asian Athletic Championships, and more. The author, also a hobby runner, acknowledges her, noting that nobody turns to look when a woman runs on Kozhikode beach because Usha has made it so normal.

The chapter on Usha reflects the conflict in the author’s mind concerning her perception of India’s greatest athlete and the political figure she has become; she sees Usha’s views on the anti-CAA protests, the women of Shaheen Bagh, and feminism in general as unsettling. “The Usha in my mind saw herself in the women at Shaheen Bagh, found a reflection of her convictions in the way they fought for their ideas. The Usha I met dismissed these women as brainwashed. It was difficult for me to separate my Usha and the Usha I met. Her politics did not take a thing away from her record on track, from the thrill it was to watch her in action. Nor did it diminish her years of work training young women in athletics on her own working outside of government institutions. It should not have mattered, but it did,” writes Chattopadhyay.

The author might have been even more disillusioned had she written the book after observing what Usha did to the protesting wrestlers as the president of the Indian Olympic Association and a nominated member of the upper house of parliament by the ruling party. There is a stark contrast between Usha and Ila Mitra, who should have been the first Indian origin athlete to have gone to the 1940 Olympics, which was cancelled because of the outbreak of the Second World War. She went on to become one of the foremost leaders of the Tebhaga peasant uprising, and a Communist party MLA in West Bengal.

“Ila never got to go to the Olympics, the most exalted arena of sports nationalism. Perhaps this is why it was easier for her to make her allegiance to the people and not to the mighty state administration that represented them,” writes Chattopadhyay.

The story of Lalitha Babar, the sole athlete to reach the final of an Olympic track and field event after P T Usha, is also highlighted. She has followed in the footsteps of Usha not only in her athletic achievements but also in her contribution to sports administration in Maharashtra. The careers of Mary D’Souza Sequeira, who participated in both track and field events and field hockey at the 1952 Summer Olympics, and Kamaljeet Kaur Sandhu, who won gold medal at 1970 Bangkok Asian Games, has also been chronicled.

The book stands out not only because it goes beyond depicting the harsh realities that women athletes encounter in their pursuit of success in the arena of sports but also because it raises hard questions about the manner in which our nation-state regards these women in terms of their citizenship. The examination of what it truly means to be a woman runner is quite an eye-opener; it underscores the disparities in privileges between male and female athletes in a patriarchal country.