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Sohini Chattopadhyay’s book speaks of Indian history through its women athletes
Updated On: 22 October, 2023 08:13 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
A journalist’s desire to reclaim public spaces for women, sets her on a quest to follow female athletes and their tryst with a young nation
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Sohini Chattopadhyay says that by the 1980s, a lot of female sportspersons began emerging out of Kerala due to the government scheme to promote sports among young women. PT Usha, seen here in a photo from 1986, streaking her way to pass in the women’s 200-m heats with a new Asian Games record time of 23.68 secs, was a product of this scheme. Pic/Getty Images
The seeds for Sohini Chattopadhyay’s debut book, The Day I Became A Runner (HarperCollins India), were planted in the aftermath of the gangrape and death of the 23-year-old paramedical student in Delhi, in December 2012. Protests had followed. “And while there was a lot of condemnation of the viciousness of the attack,” Chattopadhyay says over a video call from Kolkata, “Within that, there were those three inevitable questions—what was she doing, where was she doing and what was she wearing. It was almost like a chorus, ‘doing what, going where, wearing what’.” Then came the “staggering remark” by Abhijit Mukherjee, the son of then President of India Pranab Mukherjee and a Congress MP from Jangipur in West Bengal, who claimed that “dented and painted women were part of these protests”.
Chattopadhyay, a National Award-winning film critic, had by then been a journalist for eight years, and was on a year’s break to pursue a Master’s degree in sociology in Edinburgh. She remembers feeling angry about everything that was happening around her. “My response was purely physical. I felt like I had to put myself out there on the streets… I had to claim public space, inhabit it, and legitimately.” The one way she could do that, she remembers thinking to herself, was through running.
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