Wrestling women: Caste and neoliberalism in rural Haryana

In the 2016 blockbuster film Dangal, a young wrestler by the name of Geeta Phogat is taken by her father to Rohtak, in the western Indian state of Haryana, to participate in her first wrestling match. He is ridiculed for attempting to enroll his daughter into the hyper male domain and sent on his way. But the organizers soon relent when they see the potential for a salacious scandal of a girl fighting a boy. The scene establishes rural Haryana as a space of hyper misogyny and public space dominated by men who enjoy crude entertainment. But when the young Geeta takes on the toughest of contestants and defeats him, the victory symbolizes something larger – vindication against routine humiliation girls are made to feel. The year 2016 brought unprecedented publicity to women wrestlers in India. Sakshi Malik won the Bronze medal in wrestling for India at the Rio Olympics, and film audiences were treated to two blockbuster films on women wrestlers from Haryana. In this essay, I suggest that the celebratory story of wrestling women both elides and is made possible by Haryana’s, and the larger Indian state’s, neoliberal agenda. I argue that neoliberalism is able to accommodate the contradictions of Haryana’s skewed sex ratio while at the same time produce and celebrate successful women athletes. Second, the story of wrestling women cannot be understood without caste as a fundamentally structuring dimension of success. I make these arguments at three different scales – body and household, village and district, the state.