“I’ve by no means loved the precise act of confrontation,” writes Sakshi Malik. She goes on to explain her life that’s suffering from confrontations. Her numerous bouts on the wrestling mat. The fights together with her household to marry long-time accomplice Satyawart Kadian. Difficult the patriarchal set-up. Grappling together with her fears. And, in fact, taking up the institution in her battle for justice.
Sports activities autobiographies, particularly the Indian ones, typically fall into a well-known lure: the authors — the athletes themselves — being reluctant to delve into any gray areas of their personalities or careers. The goody-goody illustration and managed narrative should present some fascinating, beforehand unknown tidbits. However they don’t at all times give an trustworthy, 360-degree view of what they really are and suppose.
Malik’s Witness — co-authored with award-winning sports activities journalist Jonathan Selvaraj — gives a breath of contemporary air by breaking away from the same old tropes.
It isn’t as candid as, say Andre Agassi’s Open (2009) — one of many benchmarks of bare-it-all storytelling — nevertheless it nonetheless is brutally trustworthy. In her memoir, Malik takes the witness stand to present a ringside view into the insecure lifetime of an elite athlete and the murky world of Indian sport.
Unsurprisingly, all of the early headlines upon the e-book’s launch have been round Malik’s bout with former Wrestling Federation of India president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, whom she and different wrestlers have accused of sexual harassment.
Unsurprisingly, once more, that’s how the e-book opens — with Malik reliving the painful recollections of being dragged on the streets of New Delhi by the police through the peak of the protests, and the following choice to throw their medals into the Ganga owing to the delay in taking motion in opposition to Brij Bhushan.
She takes the readers proper to the guts of all of the behind-the-scenes discussions: from the freeway dhabas in Haryana the place the primary protest was deliberate in January 2023 to the home of the then-Sports activities Minister Anurag Thakur, the place it ended; from the again seats of vehicles to Jantar Mantar. This, other than her many conferences with Brij Bhushan as a wrestler, the place she claims the BJP MP harassed her.
A number of the details have been disputed. However it’s Malik’s reality and she or he has stood by it.
Witness, nevertheless, is rather more than this this episode. The wrestler is cautious to not make her autobiography solely about Brij Bhushan and it’s richer due to that. As a result of the one Indian lady to win a wrestling medal on the Olympics has been elusive about her story.
Malik hadn’t executed a lot earlier than the Rio Olympics that will make her a strong medal prospect at these Video games. But, defying everybody’s expectations, she grew to become one of many solely two Indian medal winners in 2016. From then on, she’d been on a downward spiral and by no means might attain the identical heights once more. It’s virtually as if the wrestling gods smiled on her for that one August day.
Malik dedicates a whole chapter the place she confronts her struggles, admitting that even as we speak she doesn’t know what had gone unsuitable, opens up about the way it impacted her mentally and the extent to which her household went to reverse her fortunes.
It’s ironic how bravely Malik talks about her shortcomings as a result of on the wrestling mat — be it on the inter-school stage or Olympic medal playoff — she admits to being consumed by concern.
That is how she describes her first-ever bout: “I ought to have been blissful and excited to wrestle however I felt my abdomen sink earlier than my first bout. That sense of dread heightened as my foot sank into the delicate artificial plastic mat. It peaked as I crossed the crimson border of the nine-metre-wide circle that I’d must battle inside for the following six minutes. It’s a concern that I’ve carried to the tip of my profession. I’ve by no means loved the precise act of confrontation.
Malik’s openness is complemented by Selvaraj’s descriptive fashion, which in delicate methods educates the readers concerning the finer nuances of wrestling. In the identical chapter, Malik’s articulation of totally different wrestling strikes and their desi names have been deftly worded by Selvaraj. This elevates Witness from being simply one other memoir and turns it right into a handbook of kinds for anybody prepared to study the fundamentals of the game.
Maybe, one of the crucial essential chapters within the e-book — and likewise one of many boldest talks by an Indian lady athlete — is when she opens up about her physique: The ‘14-inch thick biceps’ that made her self-conscious (“an Italian wrestler pointed to my arms… saying, ‘Hey huge arms!”), the urge to decorate up (“Each feminine wrestler needs to look fairly”) and wrestling with self-doubts over how she appeared and what she wore (“I’ve had my fingers twisted, my hair pulled out by their roots and my ACL ripped. Nevertheless it felt much more aggravating to put on a sleeveless costume for the primary time”).
It could have been far simpler for Malik to glorify her Olympic medal and deal with the wrestlers’ protests in opposition to Brij Bhushan. However she’s courageously gone past that to discuss intimate points that make Witness as a lot a e-book on rights and feminism as it’s about wrestling.
Given the extreme paucity of high quality sports activities literature — particularly Olympic sports activities — in India, Witness, like Abhinav Bindra and Rohit Brijnath’s A Shot at Glory (2011), turns into an automated important studying.
