The Most Dengerous Raceler Girls

There are no women in the heaving crowd watching the dangal, a traditional wrestling tournament. It is being held in a large bowl-shaped clearing, surrounded by the village of Salawa, vast fields of ripe sugarcane and the Ganga canal that runs along the Doab plain of western Uttar Pradesh. The dangal has been organised by Salawa residents although the 10,000-odd spectators could be from any of the nearby 24 villages, referred to collectively as the chaubisi.

The area is brimming with men, with more arriving by foot and on packed autorickshaws and tractors. The organising committee, comprising politicians, a few holy men and police officials, sits in a tented bandstand, sipping cold drinks. Others — moustachioed old men in turbans, teens watching through smartphones — squat on the fringe of the wrestling ring. Inside a circle marked in white chalk, the men slathered in mitti — the driven earth on which kushti is fought — grapple, to the rhythm of beating dhols.

The women, meanwhile, are to be found at the mela nearby. They shop for clothes and trinkets and watch over the children. A curious few glance across the invisible gender line but stay on their side.

As far as anyone can remember, that’s how it has been. The Salawa dangal, held to mark the full moon of the lunar month of Kartik, isn’t the biggest or the richest dangal around but it is old. Perhaps not as old as the village itself, which locals reckon dates to the time of the Jain tirthankaras, but certainly older than the Ganga canal which the East India Company built in the first half of the 19th century. “The kushti would take place here when I was a boy. And my grandfather told me that it was held in his time.

In all that time, kushti has always been a man’s business,” says Thakur Vikram Singh Rathore, a white-bearded politician who is sponsoring the tournament. “But times change,” Rathore says. That’s why Divya Kakran will be wrestling in Salawa today.

Divya strides forward self-assuredly. She has broad, powerful shoulders, like the dust-coated men in the ring. Her face, despite its baby fat, is framed by black hair cut short at the nape, the way a wrestler’s face must be framed. She has no doubt she belongs here.It is late afternoon when the crowd parts to let the 17-year-old girl through. Her elder brother, Dev, follows with three other girls — Megha, Neena and Geetanjali. They have all made the four-hour journey from Delhi in order to wrestle here. The three shuffle forward cautiously, without a word, as they take in the multitude.

The announcer introduces the girls and the prize money the committee will offer for Divya’s match with Megha: Rs 2,100. The crowd marks the change in tradition with a few good-natured hollers and a couple of less supportive whistles. The announcer then asks how long the fight should last. Between the crowd, the announcer and the
committee, it is decided that the kushti will go on for five minutes. It lasts less than a minute before Divya flips her opponent, pinning both her shoulders to the earth. “Chit!” declares the referee by blasting a whistle in the middle of the ring. He raises Divya’s left arm.