Her mother Sudesh Malik worked at an anganwadi. Her father Sukhbir Malik was a government bus conductor who left home at 5 am and travelled two hours from Rohtak to Delhi, to get to work.
PREMIUMSakshi Malik, as a result, was a somewhat lonely child.
She was raised largely by her grandmother, Chandravali Devi, first in the village of Mokhra in Haryana, then in Rohtak city.
She loved sports in school, so her parents took her to the local stadium nearby to enrol in training. She tried gymnastics, but didn’t enjoy it; then stumbled into wrestling, which she immediately loved. It would, however, prove to be more a daunting experience than she anticipated.
This is how Malik describes her first match, as a 12-year-old novice:
“I should have been happy and excited… but I felt my stomach sink… That sense of dread heightened as my foot sank into the soft synthetic plastic mat. It peaked as I crossed the red border of the nine-metre-wide circle that I’d have to fight inside for the next six minutes.”
The fear would stay with her, surfacing before every bout. Still, by the age of 23, she became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal in wrestling (bronze, at the 2016 Rio Games). Where she had been an anomaly in a time when women weren’t allowed into akhadas, her medal helped drive the boom in woman wrestlers in Haryana.
What was it like to spend nearly two decades feeling that deep dread? How did she reconcile the fear with her sheer love of wrestling itself?
Malik, now retired and 32, writes on her life on and off the mat, in wonderful and evocative detail, in her new autobiography, Witness (co-authored with sports journalist Jonathan Selvaraj).
It is rare for the biography of an Indian athlete to go beyond banal hagiography, but Witness does this in spades.
The reader meets Malik as she really is, in her strengths and moments of weakness, deep joys and dark places. She writes on her life as an athlete and as a woman, includes details of a terrific blowout with her parents over her marriage (to the wrestler Satyawart Kadian).
For anyone interested in the landscape of Indian sports beyond cricket and behind the scenes, the book offers an intimate look at how Indian athletes are made, their struggles, and the scarcities and uncertainties they still face. There is candid detail of the physical and psychological battles that are common to all sports and all athletes.
Witness also goes behind the scenes of the battle to bring former Wrestling Federation of India chief and former Bharatiya Janata Party MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh to justice on charges of sexual harassment, a movement that Malik helped lead, and one that has marked a vital turning point in Indian sporting history.
Above all, Witness is the incredible story of how Malik harnessed her fear and eventually used it to excel at the thing she loved. With its crowning moment in Rio, it offers a dramatic account of how far such determination can take the individual, and how lonely victory can still feel.
“I had always thought I’d feel just the purest elation when I won my medal,” Malik writes, of the Rio win. “But there must have been something wrong with my brain because I felt a whole wave of other emotions. I just could not control them. I was laughing one moment and in the next burying my face in the mat and bawling.”
(To reach Rudraneil Sengupta with feedback, email rudraneil@gmail.com)
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Dwight Wheatley
