Wrestling women: Caste and neoliberalism in rural Haryana

Abstract

In the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, a young wrestler by the name of Geeta Phogat is taken by her father to Rohtak, in the western Indian state of Haryana, to participate in her first wrestling match. He is ridiculed for attempting to enroll his daughter into the hyper male domain and sent on his way. But the organizers soon relent when they see the potential for a salacious scandal of a girl fighting a boy. The scene establishes rural Haryana as a space of hyper misogyny and public space dominated by men who enjoy crude entertainment. But when the young Geeta takes on the toughest of contestants and defeats him, the victory symbolizes something larger – vindication against routine humiliation girls are made to feel. The year 2016 brought unprecedented publicity to women wrestlers in India. Sakshi Malik won the Bronze medal in wrestling for India at the Rio Olympics, and film audiences were treated to two blockbuster films on women wrestlers from Haryana. In this essay, I suggest that the celebratory story of wrestling women both elides and is made possible by Haryana’s, and the larger Indian state’s, neoliberal agenda. I argue that neoliberalism is able to accommodate the contradictions of Haryana’s skewed sex ratio while at the same time produce and celebrate successful women athletes. Second, the story of wrestling women cannot be understood without caste as a fundamentally structuring dimension of success. I make these arguments at three different scales – body and household, village and district, the state.

Keywords:

• Caste
• Haryana
• India
• Neoliberalism
• Scale
• sports
• wrestling women

Acknowledgements

This article was first presented at Asoka University, I am grateful to Ravindran Sriramachandran and Mitul Baruah for inviting me and to the participants for their comments. I am grateful to Prem Chowdhry, Mary E. John, and Shirin M. Rai for comments on earlier drafts. The essay has also benefited tremendously from incisive questions and suggestions by the three anonymous reviewers, I remain in their debt.

Disclosure Statement

I have no personal financial or any other benefit from this research.

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Notes on contributors

Rupal Oza

Rupal Oza is associate professor in the department of Women and Gender Studies, Hunter College, CUNY. Her work focuses on political economic transformations in the global south, the geography of the right-wing politics, and the conjuncture between gender, violence and political economy. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization was published in 2006 by Routledge, New York and by Women Unlimited, India. She was part of the Hunter Women’s Studies Collective who wrote the fourth edition of Women’s Realities, Womens Choices (2014, OUP). She is currently working on a book length project on the after-life of sexual assault in Haryana.