Nitu Ghanghas is busy fielding a gradual stream of holiday makers and journalists in Dhanana village in Bhiwani, Haryana. She has simply returned dwelling after clinching the gold medal within the 48 kg class on the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. In Bhiwani, the place the chief produce is boxers, champions usually jostle for house underneath the limelight. This is Nitu’s flip to take pleasure in her superstar standing.
Despite a childhood in a district stuffed with boxers, Nitu, 22, was initially not within the sport. It was her father, Jai Bhagwan, who sits subsequent to her on a plastic chair in a dimly lit room, who pushed her to take it up. “Usually, it is the child who wants to pursue a career of their choice and the parents who oppose it,” says Nitu. “But that was not the case for me. My father pushed me into boxing and never let me give up, though I felt like calling it quits many times.”
The first time she thought of giving up was in 2013. Nitu remembers commuting by public transport in the course of the preliminary years of coaching and infrequently returning dwelling late within the night. This was not thought of “socially acceptable” for a younger girl. “I come from a normal middle-class family in a village. What my neighbours and relatives said about me impacted me as it would any young girl. I wanted to quit. My father, instead, offered to quit his job to help me continue my training. He would accompany me to the training centre, which is around 20 km from my village, twice a day. And he would wait for me outside, irrespective of the weather, while I trained inside,” she says.
The first few years have been troublesome for the household on the monetary entrance as nicely. But Nitu managed to win money awards at varied occasions and repay the cash borrowed from family. “I also got a job as an Assistant Manager in the Reserve Bank of India two months ago,” says Nitu, beaming. “And I am expecting a promotion after the gold medal at the Women’s World Boxing Championships.”
A district stuffed with boxers
Bhiwani, one of many 22 districts of Haryana and situated round 130 km west of the nationwide capital, has been the hub of boxing for greater than three a long time. Its super success in producing champions within the sport has earned it the moniker ‘Little Cuba’.
“The players of the Indian boxing squad for international events are mostly from Bhiwani,” says Nitu’s coach, Jagdish Singh, who has been on the Bhiwani Boxing Club since 2003. “During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, four of the five boxers were from Bhiwani. Three of them made it to the quarter-finals and Vijender Singh won the bronze. Similarly, in the Women’s World Boxing Championships, eight of the 12 women boxers were from Haryana and five of them were from Bhiwani. Four of the five from Bhiwani made it to the quarter-finals.”
Nitu’s coach Jagdish Singh.
| Photo Credit:
V.V. Krishnan
By Singh’s estimate, pugilists, each women and men, from his academy alone have received 19 world championship titles, together with an Olympic bronze; 290 worldwide medals; 600 nationwide medals; and have accounted for 5 Arjuna Awards and 6 Bhim Awards.
Singh traces boxing historical past in Bhiwani to the late 1980s when Sports Authority of India (SAI) coach Captain (retd.) Hawa Singh and Haryana Sports Department coach Rajender Singh Yadav collectively laid the muse for the game within the metropolis. Singh, who additionally coached Vijender Singh, cites 2003 as a turning level when three boxers from Bhiwani received medals on the Afro-Asian Games in Hyderabad.
“I had always believed in the capability of my boxers. There was no looking back for them after the Afro-Asian Games. That was the first time that a victory procession for boxers was taken out in the city. The players were garlanded and their pictures appeared in the newspapers. All that encouraged them and made them hungry for more,” he says.
File photograph of Olympic boxers Vijender Singh and MC Mary Kom throughout a felicitation operate in New Delhi.
| Photo Credit:
RAJEEV BHATT
The different turning factors have been the Olympic bronze medals received by Vijender Singh and Mary Kom in 2008 and 2012 respectively. Singh describes these victories as “the two defining moments in India’s boxing history” which made the game fashionable amongst children. “The gold medals won by Nitu and Saweety Boora from Haryana at the Women’s World Boxing Championships could be another turning point for the game,” he hopes. Singh remembers Nitu as a “shy” and “introverted” lady. She first got here to his discover in 2016 after she received the gold within the nationwide championship for colleges.
Photographs of the ladies world champions who have been coached by him dangle on the partitions of the membership alongside photos of male boxers. They present gender parity. But Singh says the variety of ladies taking over the game has gone up since Mary Kom’s 2012 Olympic feat, and that he had extra lady trainees than boys at his academy final month. “Of the 100 trainees, 54 were girls in February,” he says. He cites jobs, money rewards and recognition because the three huge attracts for each girls and boys who want to take up the game.
The skewed intercourse ratio in Haryana is commonly seen as a important indicator of gender inequality and bias. Singh admits that he was as soon as strongly against the concept of ladies boxing. But he modified his view seeing the dedication and willpower of 4 younger ladies 20 years in the past. “I always thought boxing was a man’s sport. But I remember how those four girls in 2003 impressed me. I went against the SAI’s diktat and trained them. That was my first batch of women trainees. Later, three of them landed jobs in the police and one was appointed as a coach in the Haryana Sports Department. Over the years, I have found that the women players trained by me have been more loyal than the male ones,” he says.
The widespread notion in Haryana is that wrestling is extra fashionable than boxing amongst girls. Singh claims that there’s equal participation amongst girls in each these sports activities at varied State, nationwide and worldwide occasions. “In the World Women’s Boxing Championships, two of the four golds were won by Haryana pugilists. But the Olympic medal has so far eluded Haryana’s women boxers and this puts the women wrestlers a little ahead of us,” he explains.
Vikas Prashar, who has been working a boxing teaching centre referred to as Prashar Academy in Paluwas village for the final 5 years, reckons that Bhiwani has greater than 30 boxing academies. He has noticed that increasingly more ladies search coaching when there is a rise within the medals tally. “Vijender Singh’s Kaluwas village is the hub of boxers in Bhiwani. Boxing is the only sport played in the village,” he says.
Girls practice on the Bhiwani Boxing Club, the place Nitu Ghanghas has been present process coaching underneath coach Jagdish Singh.
| Photo Credit:
V.V. Krishnan
Former boxing coach Ramesh Boxer, who gave up the job after an harm, says boxing academies have regularly come up in neighbouring Hisar and Rohtak as nicely. However, he worries that the growing variety of academies throughout the State within the absence of correct regulation poses a risk to the athletes’ security and raises questions concerning the high quality of coaching.
“While the craze for boxing has gone through the roof, the SAI hostel and the Haryana government’s training centre in Bhiwani are unable to deal with the rush. This has led to an increase in the number of academies. But there are no regulations in place to ensure that the coaches at these places are qualified. Also, most of the academies are run on a shoestring budget and don’t have resources to hire physiotherapists and nutritionists,” he says.
Dreams and sacrifices
Bhiwani attracts aspiring girls boxers not solely from Haryana, however from neighbouring Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat too. Several households have made nice sacrifices within the hope that their youngsters style the identical success that Mary Kom or Vijender Singh did.
A household from Ahmedabad says they shifted to Bhiwani metropolis two years in the past to allow the coaching of their 11-year-old daughter Chhavi. “While researching online, we found that Jagdish Singh was the best boxing coach in India. So, we shifted to Bhiwani. While my wife stays in a rented accommodation with our daughter, who is now enrolled in a school in Bhiwani, I still stay in Ahmedabad. I visit them once or twice a month,” says Chhavi’s father, Sanjay Solanki, a financial institution worker.
Vipin Kumar’s household from Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat has been staying in Bhiwani’s Sector 23 for six years now. Kumar, a 40-year-old former serviceman, is making an attempt to fulfil his unrealised desires by way of his daughter Tanisha. “My daughter was nine when we came here in 2017. Now she is 15. While my wife and mother stay with her in Bhiwani, I stay in Baghpat and visit them every two weeks. We wanted to give Tanisha the best coaching, and zeroed in on Bhiwani Boxing Club after an online search,” says Kumar.
Nitu first tried boxing after Vijender Singh tasted success on the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His bronze medal burnished Bhiwani’s popularity; he’s thought of a hero. Boxing academies got here up in each nook and nook of the town, and each different youngster aspired to be the subsequent Vijender Singh. But Nitu struggled within the preliminary years.
Nitu Ghanghas and her father Jai Bhagwan at their dwelling.
| Photo Credit:
V.V. Krishnan
Jai Bhagwan reassembled his household’s priorities round Nitu’s coaching after he noticed Mary Kom’s efficiency on the 2012 London Olympics. He received his daughter enrolled within the Bhiwani Boxing Club in 2012, on the recommendation of the daddy of Nitu’s boxer good friend Sakshi Chowdhary. He determined to spend all his time nurturing the “next Mary Kom”. He went on ‘leave without pay’ from his job as a Bill Messenger on the Haryana Vidhan Sabha in Chandigarh in 2013 in order that he may accompany his daughter to the boxing academy twice a day. His resolution strained the household’s restricted monetary sources, and so they borrowed cash to fulfill Nitu’s coaching bills. When Nitu confronted a string of failures within the ring within the preliminary years, the choice to maintain preventing — each for her father and for her — turned even tougher.
What gave Jai Bhagwan some hope in these years have been the individuals who watched her in motion within the ring and who would usually go as much as him and inform him that his daughter could possibly be the subsequent Mary Kom. “I knew nothing about the game,” he says. “But the experts and coaches watching her play would tell me that she could be the next big thing in boxing. She is a southpaw, which I thought was a drawback, but I later learnt that this would actually work to her advantage.” Jai Bhagwan might not have all the time been satisfied by what everybody mentioned, however tended to imagine them nonetheless, and by no means let Nitu hand over.
Jai Bhagwan’s spouse Mukesh remembers how Nitu, the naughtiest of her three youngsters, would bully her youthful sister Tamanna, now a second-year MBBS pupil in Shimla, and brother Akshit. In her telling, this was what prompted her father to enrol Nitu within the boxing academy.
Mukesh wasn’t totally on board initially, worrying that Nitu would maintain facial accidents whereas competing, thereby hampering her marital prospects. The monetary pressure on account of Nitu’s coaching and her sister’s training too was a supply of tension. “We borrowed money from relatives to buy a buffalo worth ₹2.5 lakh so that Nitu could get the right diet. Her father has been on leave without pay for the last seven years. Since travelling to the academy twice a day on a motorcycle was not feasible, especially during monsoons and winters, he had to buy a small car. Neighbours and relatives would point out that we were incurring too much expenditure on the girls. I don’t even remember the last time I bought a new suit-salwar for myself,” says Mukesh, her again to a wall from which patches of inexperienced paint are peeling off. A naked cot lies in a nook.
A nasty shoulder harm in 2019 felt like the tip of her profession, says Nitu. But she got here again to the ring after remedy in Chennai for a month. “We did not let the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic impact her training and bought her a punching bag to practise at home. Instead of going to the academy, she would practise in the fields with me during the lockdown. I repeatedly told her during the injury that she would return stronger and that her best was yet to come,” says Jai Bhagwan.
As she gives sweets and tea to the visitors trickling in, Mukesh stresses that aside from making sacrifices, altering mindsets is vital. “Those who would advise us not to waste effort and money on Nitu’s training are now sending their daughters to her for advice. The girls are raring to go. We are the ones who need to change the way we think,” she says.