Geeta and Babita Phogat: ‘Our father taught us never to be scared'

‘Change for women is happening, but it’s maddeningly slow,” says Geeta Phogat. “Take my mother,’ she continues. Like most women in rural Haryana state, where they live, she has worn the ghunghat, or veil, her entire life. A few years ago, when the sisters first became well-known, they urged her to change her old ways too. “Drop the veil,” they said. Cautiously, she agreed. “No one followed her example. No aunt, no female relative, no other women in the village. No one had the courage. In fact, villagers gossiped about my mother. They called her brazen. But it’s their job to bitch and our job to get on with doing what we think is right,” says Geeta. It’s not surprising the two women have strong opinions on the customs that oppress Indian women. It’s not just the rapes, dowry deaths and sexual harassment they read about every day. Last week saw a serial paedophile, a tailor, confess to the rape and attempted rape of hundreds of young girls, some as young as seven. Nor is it just Haryana’s infamy as the state where female foeticide has produced a skewed gender ratio of 879 girls for every 1,000 boys. It’s also that, after years of training, both are champions in that most male of sports: wrestling. A Bollywood film about their lives, released last month, is already the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time, earning more than £41m in three weeks. Geeta, 28, and her younger sister, Babita, 26, have suddenly found themselves poster girls for a new kind of Indian woman, a woman who seeks the same opportunities in life as men, including in sports. We meet in the lounge of the grandiose Piccadilly hotel in Janakpuri, New Delhi, an ugly northern suburb of the Indian capital, and a popular venue for gaudy weddings. The staff, recognising them, stand and stare. The phenomenal success of Dangal (a Hindi word for a wrestling competition) has brought them more fame than any of their tournament wins, a fact they acknowledge with wry bemusement. “If feels odd not to be recognised for our wrestling achievements, but for a film on us,” says Geeta. Directed by Nitesh Tiwari, Dangal tells the story of how Geeta and Babita, two girls from Balali village in Haryana, became world-class wrestlers. Geeta won gold at the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Two years later, she became the first Indian female wrestler to qualify for the Olympics. Babita won a gold medal in the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Their younger sisters, Ritu and Sangita, are also wrestlers (Ritu won gold at the Commonwealth wrestling championships in 2016), but Dangal is about Geeta and Babita’s success. To understand their achievements, remember that most Indian women are reared for domesticity: an incomplete education (if any), followed by early marriage, prompt motherhood and a life of domestic chores. Geeta and Babita, who grew up in a very modest home, with two cows in the yard supplying milk for the family, would have been destined for this fate – had they been born to a typical Haryana father. Mahavir Singh Phogat, however, was a former amateur wrestler and character extraordinaire, who responded to what he saw as the tragedy of having four daughters instead of the son he wanted, by training them to wrestle. A notorious saying in Haryana is that “raising a daughter is like watering your neighbour’s plant”, meaning that after a girl is raised, she will marry and go on to be an asset to another family. With four daughters, their father felt he was watering the whole state. But he refused to let biology thwart him. He started coaching Geeta and Babita, and as they progressed, and seeing that the village lacked proper facilities,he enrolled them at the Sports Authority of India centre, in nearby Sonipat. His courage invited the mockery of the whole village. What must have been a nasty experience – braving dirty looks and barbs almost every day – is rather glossed over in the film. There are just a couple of scenes where villagers are shown staring disapprovingly as the girls run past. “I agree with you. The hostility towards us was far worse than what is shown in the film. We were two teenage girls who, according to custom, should have been draped in loose clothes to disguise our curves but instead we were running around the wheat fields in shorts and lycra tops and cropped hair,” says Babita. Pushed to be more specific, they look at each other and remember the insults: “‘Shame on you for turning girls into wrestlers.’ ‘May insects eat up your insides.’ ‘You are spoiling your girls.’ ‘No one will marry them.’ ‘They will turn wild and bring shame on you.’” “Everyone was just waiting for us to put a foot wrong,” adds Geeta. “They thought we’d start seeing boys or do something compromising. They almost wanted us to do something to shame our parents so that they could be proved right.” Instead, the girls began winning local tournaments, then national events, and finally international tournaments for the first time in Indian wrestling. The Phogat sisters’ success paved the way for other athletes, notably Sakshi Malik, another female wrestler from Haryana, to go on to win a bronze medal at last year’s Rio Olympics – India’s first Olympic medal in the sport. Even so, Geeta and Babita were not household names. Cricket is the sport that consumes Indians. Other sports are a long way down the list, with wrestling somewhere towards the bottom, jostling for space with archery. Then came Dangal. These days, they have to be careful when they go out. “I was mobbed when someone at a mall started taking pictures of me,” says Geeta. “When I went for a haircut, people gathered around to watch, and the owner refused to let me pay, saying I had brought honour to India,” adds Babita. The women have adapted to their fame with poise, but old habits die hard. Their father forbade all feminine fripperies, so neither woman wears any makeup. Babita wears a formal grey trousersuit, Geeta is in jeans and a sweatshirt, with her hair tied up. In one scene in the film, Phogat is shown hacking off their long hair, almost as a rite of passage. Geeta was later allowed to let it grow, but with Babita and his other daughters, Phogat has stood firm. No long hair. Babita sports a pixie cut which, she says, is the longest it’s ever been. “Papa says it’s a distraction. He says if you want to worry about hair and fashion, give up wrestling,” she says. Perhaps because she is the eldest – and in Indian families, there is a clear hierarchy among siblings – Geeta tends to take the lead in conversations. Babita, perhaps also temperamentally more reserved, lets her sister talk. It’s when they talk about their father that they are most animated. They seem to adore him and fear him in equal measure. The man commands respect; after the death of his brother, Phogat raised his brother’s two daughters along with his own four and also, unbelievably, trained them as wrestlers. In the film, Phogat is shown as a towering figure who combines patriarchal autocracy with tender affection bordering on sentimentalism: he is totally pig-headed, and unrelenting in his fanatical determination that his girls must excel. But he is not a monster. “He is too tough, too strict. But we know how to get our way with him. If he want him to buy us something, we wait until we have done some strenuous training and then pop the question,” smiles Babita. Most films amplify real events for effect. The sisters say Dangal underplayed their father’s regimen. “His training was like torture. No question of Sundays off. No days off. We used to complain to our mother that even machines get time off. If he caught us arguing at home, he’d be livid: ‘You can’t have trained enough today because if you had, you wouldn’t have the energy to argue.’ He never let up,” says Babita. Geeta and Babita train for two to three hours in the morning and evening. Their father, now 55, is still involved. Age has not mellowed him. “I want to see you train so hard your sweat drenches the earth,” is his favourite refrain. They are currently in New Delhi for the new Pro-Wrestling League that was launched last year to popularise wrestling in India. They were part of a team called Uttar Pradesh Dangal, but it has been knocked out. Both have suffered injuries recently, and were not in top form. But they are pleased that more money is coming into wrestling. “With more money, more cash rewards, more sponsors, bigger audiences – this will open up wrestling as a career to more girls,” says Babita. Dangal’s success has contributed to packed stadiums for the league. “Because the film explained the scoring in detail, it has helped people understand wrestling and understand the different strategies. Before, they used to think it was WWE [the US World Wrestling Entertainment show, which is more spectacle than serious wrestling].’” Of late, parents have been turning up at their doorstep in Haryana, asking the girls and their father to help them become wrestlers. Some reports say that 50 akharas or wrestling centres have sprung up in the past few years, following their success. Girls who were not allowed to attend school are being given a chance to learn wrestling. “There is some change but it is too little and too slow,” says Geeta. “I would estimate that the lives of about 85-90% of the girls in my village are as limited as they have ever been.” Both she and her sister seem to feel a real sense of anguish at the inferior status of most women in India. “Things are not going to change until Indian women, and their parents, stop being afraid of what society will say,” says Geeta, categorically. “This is the single biggest obstacle. The fear of what people will say and how this will shame their parents means that women are paralysed. My father, once he has decided on something, doesn’t care about what anyone else thinks.All the men in our family swore at him for training us. His parents said he was mad. But he didn’t listen.” How was she able to ignore what society said? “My father gave us inner confidence. He taught us, as young girls, never to be scared. I feel that Indian women are too frightened. They all say, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ Worse, their families don’t support them.” Both of them are aware of the debate Dangal has triggered. The film came out soon after Pink, an overtly feminist film starring Amitabh Bachchan, won acclaim for stating that Indian women have the right to live as they wish. In fact, this vehement debate over how Indian women should live, socialise, dress and work has been well under way since the infamous 2012 gang rape in New Delhi – though it is also true that events last week demonstrated once again that a woman cannot make a choice without unleashing vitriolic diatribes. The latest victim was Zaira Wasim, the young girl who plays Geeta in the film. Khan chose Wasim, a 16-year-old from Srinagar in Kashmir, rather than a professional actress because he wanted a fresh face. Wasim, now also suddenly famous, was invited to meet Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti. A photograph of the meeting appeared in the papers last week. Wasim was promptly trolled on social media by Kashmiris who favour independence from India and ridiculed for meeting a politician they detest. Radical Muslims denigrated her for the “un-Islamic” act of appearing in a Bollywood film. “I am telling you this one-eared lady will one day spoil the Islamic aura of the whole Valley. Zaira you need not to feel proud bcoz the fires of hell are waiting for you and your supporters if u will not apologise before Him …” was one Facebook post. The avalanche of abuse forced the girl to apologise on Facebook, saying she didn’t want anyone to “follow in her footsteps”, whatever that meant. If journalists are crowding the hotel lobby, it’s because they want the sister’s reaction to the storm that broke over Wasim’s head. Geeta and Babita oblige – they are livid about Wasim being hounded. “I want to tell her that she has no need to ask for forgiveness,” says Geeta. “She has done nothing wrong.” In fact, the controversy confirms their belief that, despite their own success, and the success of Dangal and of Pink, Indian society has a long way to go before women are allowed to make their own choices. It is a reminder of how lucky they have been, to have a father who defied his society to give them a different life. When they were growing up and hated their father’s gruelling regime, they fantasised about wearing pretty clothes and jewellery, having nice hairstyles, maybe even getting married. Now that they have seen their cousins and friends follow this conventional path, they realise how much larger and richer their own world is. In November, Geeta married another wrestler, Pawan Kumar, but says she will continue her career. Babita is not seeing anyone but she has been told by her father that “it’s up to me what I do with my life. I can marry or not marry,” she says. It’s a freedom most women in India can only dream of. “Most things boil down to simple truths,” says Geeta. “If men can go out and work and have a good time, why can’t women enjoy their lives? But it’s going to take a long time – ages – for India to change. Women need to change themselves, and they need to force change.”