Rio 2016 | Sakshi Malik's bronze is worth more than we realize

The great Aristotle once said that “the courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman's lies in obeying; that 'matter yearns for form, as the female for the male and the ugly for the beautiful'; that women have fewer teeth than men; that a female is an incomplete male or 'as it were, a deformity”, and he was applauded for such enlightening thoughts back then. Times have changed now. Had he been alive, he would have been barraged by lawsuits, or worse, he would have been nominated by the Republican Party in America.

Wrestling is one of the most ancient sports in India. It has been mentioned in various Hindu mythologies, where the military used it as an exercise to develop strength. Most importantly, though, it was exclusively a masculine sport, and it was not until the mid-1990s that women's wrestling really took off in this nation, and it took another six years for it to infiltrate Haryana.

“She (Sunita) was around 14-15 years and had short hair. I mistook her for a boy and gave the nod. In the evening when she came with her friend Kavita, I realised she was a girl. As I had already given permission, there was no question of backtracking and that’s how the girls’ centre started,” Dahiya told Hindustan Times in an interview.

Sakshi Malik, who became the first Indian women wrestler to win an Olympic medal on Wednesday night, was 12 back then, still unaware of the intricacies of the sport. In fact, it was a newspaper article which grabbed her attention first. In that article, a senior women wrestler posed for a picture in full wrestling kit, holding a gada in her hands. She was so aroused by the mace and the kit that she ran to her parents with the picture and told them, “mujhe ye wala game karna hai” (I want to play this game).

A 12-year-old girl wanting to wrestle is nothing out of the ordinary. But the village she belonged to—Mokhra Khas—is.

However, luckily for Sakshi, she was born in a family which was open-minded, and they did not bother about the social stigmas surrounding women. She received tremendous support from her mother, Sudesh Malik, who egged her daughter on despite being questioned by their neighbors and locals. Some even warned Sudesh that her daughter would develop puffed-out cauliflower ears, common among wrestlers, which will make her undesirable for potential husbands.

Sakshi's mother disregarded everything, though. She took her daughter to Rohtak, and admitted her to Ishwar Singh Dahiya's centre. Initially, Sakshi did not dream about winning medals for her nation or hold any desire of participating in the Olympics. Unlike the Phogat sisters, who come from a family with a rich history in the sport, she did not had too many people around to guide her, and set targets for her. The only thing she ever wanted to achieve through wrestling was to get on a plane and fly. And boy did she!

After 12 days of struggle, the nation woke up to their first medal at the Olympics. When the euphoria dies down, we will reflect back on what has been an underwhelming outing for the largest Olympic contingent in the nation's history. But, we must also remember that all of the memorable moments in Rio, be it Dipa Karmakar’s 'Produnova' in the final, the appearance of the women's hockey team after a gap of 36 years, Lalita Babar breaking the national record, PV Sindhu's stunning victory over World No.2 Wang Yihan, or Sakshi's incredible comeback to win the bronze, have been brought to us by female athletes of the nation. That for me will be the biggest takeaway from this Olympics. Sakshi's medal was a sentence for a state like Haryana, written in bronze.