Month: July 2019

Most Indian women athletes face hurdles — from gender bias (girls can’t play; it’s unseemly; they will become dark) to lack of opportunity. In many cases, they must also grapple with poverty

In many cases, Indian women athletes must grapple with poverty. Hima Das, who brought home four gold medals in 15 days, is the daughter of a farmer(Getty Images for IAAF)

As Monika Kumari begins a two-week, all-female scientific wilderness expedition to Mount Baker, an active volcano, in Washington, USA, she might want to consider the distance she ha s come.

Hutup village, Jharkhand, where she lives, is over 11,500 km away. But the terrain that this 16-year-old daughter of a security guard has travelled is long and hard. When she first showed her outdoor spirit, playing football as a six-year-old, relatives and neighbours scoffed: Who had ever heard of girls wearing shorts and playing sport? Moreover, if girls started goofing off at play, who would do the housework?

She stuck it out. Today, she continues playing football and earns money by coaching younger girls at the Yuwa camp. “In my village, girls don’t get many opportunities to follow their dreams,” she says. Monika’s younger brother, the only son, is named Golden, reflecting perhaps the sheen of his father’s aspirations.

Supported by BookASmile, Yuwa works with girls from impoverished, mainly tribal, families in rural Jharkhand and was set up by Franz Gastler, an American who came to India as a business consultant in 2007, visited a village near Ranchi on work, and never went back.

Starting with just 11 girls, Yuwa now runs a school, and coaches 470 girls who are trained by 43 coaches, most of them women. Through football, education and mentorship, the girls, “work as a team, gaining confidence, camaraderie and community,” Gastler tells me on the phone. The girls practice six days a week, travel and compete in tournaments, and have become role models. Goalkeeper Monika has been to Spain to play, twice.

It is not easy. “The girls get a lot of pushback from their families, especially after they hit puberty,” says Gastler. They face harassment on the street when they step out in shorts and some are even beaten at home for daring to play.

Most Indian women athletes face hurdles — from gender bias (girls can’t play; it’s unseemly; they will become dark) to lack of opportunity. In many cases, they must also grapple with poverty. Hima Das, who brought home four gold medals in 15 days, is the daughter of a farmer. Swapna Barman, who won India’s first heptathlon gold at the 2018 Asian games, is the child of a handcart puller.

Slowly, these girls are breaking the stereotype of an impoverished girl’s life in rural India. Jharkhand does poorly on many gender counts. It has the most cases of human trafficking and child marriage in the country. Only 59% of women are literate, below the national average of 68.4%, according to the National Family Health Survey-4, 2015-16.

Sport has given her confidence. When Monika’s dad wanted to marry off her elder sister right after her 10th boards, Monika along with her mother was able to convince him to postpone the marriage for a bit. The sister is now enrolled in an IT course.

Namita Bhandare writes on social issues

The views expressed are personal

In a country where 52% of women believe it is okay to be beaten by their husbands, the views of Sandeep Reddy Vanga, director Kabir Singh, apparently endorsing physical violence as a sign of love, are deeply disturbing.

In the first 10 years since the Domestic Violence Act came into force in 2006, over 10 lakh cases of domestic violence have been registered. And, yet, domestic violence remains vastly underreported primarily because of the victim’s relationship with a husband or a partner.(SHUTTERSTOCK)

In a country where 52% of women believe it is okay to be beaten by their husbands, the views of Sandeep Reddy Vanga, director Kabir Singh, apparently endorsing physical violence as a sign of love, are deeply disturbing.

“When you are deeply in love … if you don’t have the liberty of slapping each other, then I don’t see anything there,” Vanga told Anupama Chopra in an interview.

I am not sure the one in three married women who have experienced physical violence – slapping, choking, punching and burning — by their husbands, according to the National Family Health Survey 4, would agree. In the first 10 years since the Domestic Violence Act came into force in 2006, over 10 lakh cases of domestic violence have been registered. And, yet, domestic violence remains vastly underreported primarily because of the victim’s relationship with a husband or a partner.

Mainstream Hindi cinema has not been known for its affirmative messages of women’s empowerment. A 2017 study on gender stereotyping by Nishtha Madaan and others shows that the percentage of female-centric films has gone up only marginally since the 1970s and remains in the low teens. Certainly, Kabir Singh’s female lead played by Kiara Advani is no more vacuous than the character played by Sonakshi Sinha who says in Dabangg: “Thappad se darr nahin lagta saab, pyaar se lagta hai.” (I’m not scared of your slap, but of your love).

Those in the film business often argue for the need to separate art from the artist. With his interview, Vanga breaks this barrier. Kabir Singh is not formulaic cinema made for the box office but a belief, as expressed in his interview: True love includes the right to violence. In the film we see this violence, not just by the lead actors but also by the heroine’s father and adolescent brother.

It’s a violence that is reflected in social reality. The daughter of a BJP MLA, Rajesh Mishra, makes a video asking her father to call off his goons who have been harassing the man she has recently married. Adolescent girls, finds IndiaSpend, are lured into trafficking by boyfriends who profess to love them and convince them to ‘elope’. And in Ahmedabad district, a Dalit man is hacked to death by his upper caste in-laws when he goes to pick up his wife who is two months pregnant.

There is a global struggle to eliminate violence against women — not easy in a society that has internalised, even normalised, it. “Showing how pervasive gender-based violence is, runs the risk of normalising it,” states the Economic Survey 2018-19 that calls for a gender campaign that uses positive role models.

Vanga has a right to his creative license but to justify this nonsense as ‘true love’ is dangerous.

Mercifully, not everyone is buying his message. I watched on the big screen as my co-watcher, a woman scientist in her 30s, remarked: “Kabir Singh is a psycho. The heroine should run away from him as fast as she can.”

Namita Bhandare writes on social issues

The views expressed are personal