The New India Foundation began over two decades ago with a single mission: to facilitate quantity and quality in histories of India after Independence. In the early 2000s, finding modern and contemporary analyses of the world’s largest democracy was still a task. Today, things have changed for the better. Yet there are still gaps in how public history is funded, and how it reaches the people it writes about. The NIF Book Fellowships aim to bridge this chasm by funding a diverse array of research projects from concept to publication.
Open for applications in alternate years, the NIF Book Fellowships are currently accepting proposals for Round 12 until December 31, 2024. A query we often receive is on the structure of the Proposal, which forms the main bulk of each application along with the Writing Sample (which is also supposed to be drawn from the Proposal). While a list of FAQs is available on our website www.newindiafoundation.org, it is perhaps more helpful to see samples of Proposals from our Fellows of the past few rounds. The selection of projects is indeed, as the proposals below will indicate, ecumenical with regards to topic and scope. There are no constraints on the style or approach used by applicants – the only consideration is with regard to how each proposal helps us to better understand the India we live in today.
Below is Sohini Chattopadhyay’s proposal for the book that became The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India through the Lens of Sport. It was published by HarperCollins India in 2023. In this book, Chattopadhyay presents the compelling stories of eight athletes spanning the years of independent India and a wide range of social and geographical backgrounds.
India has produced zero Olympic medals in track athletics and perhaps, a couple of world-class female athletes till date. Yet, for a country which is known for its brutal rape culture, killing girls in the womb and a savage gender index overall, it is a nice surprise that women have been representing the country at athletics consistently since 1951. After all, even the act of walking is fraught with anxiety.
When I walk on a street in the capital city Delhi, and indeed in any of our megacities, I can feel the heat of the gaze directed at me. Every eye on the street seems to gather in a collective ray that glowers and tracks my movement, like a red dotted line in a science-fiction film. Where is she going? What is she wearing? Surely, she isn’t walking for pleasure? What could motivate women to run in a society like this?
I use running as a device to examine the lived experience of being a woman in India outdoors and indoors. What is it like to inhabit the body of a woman in India? The physicality of running, as well as its relative ubiquity and acceptance in contemporary life, make it a potent lens. This is an account of the “losers”, the women who have represented India in athletics, and the more recent hobby runners, the women who run in spite of the GDG (gross disapproving gaze) of the nation.
Prologue: A Bengali woman’s running diary
I started running in grief and confusion 10 years ago. My grandma passed away suddenly, and I had avoided being by her side, scared of seeing her bird-like frame shrunken, her belly swollen.
Running became my mourning ritual. Round after round, I charged on a patch of dusty green, without any sense of proportion for my squat lump of a frame. I had no rhythm, no stamina, no target.
The pain was penance: I was paying off my guilt. The pain was also a marker of my bereavement; I was here because of my loss, I was charging madly on a small patch of dusty green because I had to remember and grieve.
It had been after breakfast, the household was settling down to chores when she suffered a heart attack. I would tell myself to go a little longer when I thought my chest would burst, to stop a little bit later. I made counting pacts, I would run till ten, then twenty. Was there this deafening, rushing sound in the head? Did it tear your chest? Was it anything like this, Tabba?
When I struggled to draw breath, perhaps I would intuit what her last moments were like. Perhaps I could be by her deathbed after all. I could grasp what death feels like.
I could grieve after all.
Now, there is a nagging sense something not being right when I don't run. Running helped me discover my prejudices, my proclivities, my timidnesses. That I am afraid to run on Indian roads, where I would likely be the only woman running. That I am afraid of asking men to give me way to run past for fear that I might erode their tolerance for women in public spaces.
What is it worth then, this self-awareness, if it translates to no action? Quite a lot, I think – a sharpened sense of self, even if it is a disappointing one. Running outside, as John Muir wrote, is actually travelling in. It helps me map my place in the world, chart the journeys to my Ithacas.
Chapter 1. Mary D’Souza: The woman who danced her way to the Helsinki Olympics
In the beginning is a quiz question: who were the first women to represent India at the Olympics? Answer: Nilima Ghose and Mary D’Souza at the 1952 Olympics. What do we know of Ghose and D’Souza?
I drew a blank with Ghose. But D’Souza has a Facebook page, listed as India’s first double international athlete. After coming back from the 1952 Olympics, she participated in the Asian Games and won gold for relay. She played in two hockey World Cups for India. For someone in 1950s India, she was quite the globetrotter.
I met D’Souza in Bombay at the quaint cottage she lived in most of her life, in a fishing village colony opposite the gleaming rectangle of the sea on Carter Road. Her son lives here now, and like most old families in villages, everyone knows Mary D’Souza even if they don’t know that she ran in the 1952 Olympics. Mary took me to the handsome greystone St Andrews’s school where the “East Indians” of Bandra organised a dance on a summer evening in 1952 to raise pocket money for her trip to Helsinki. Mary, one of twelve children raised on the single salary of a railway motorman, had no pocket money for her first trip abroad. In fact, until the government sent her ticket home, Mary had not believed she was going. Nobody in her family had flown abroad. The farthest journey the D’Souzas had made was from Goa to Bandra.
That summer in 1952, Mary prayed that she did not come last in her heats. She had landed in Helsinki with zero expectations. The penny dropped when she saw athletes in training at the Olympic Village in Helsinki. She and Nilima Ghose had no coach, not even starting blocks. The day the Games was officially launched, a light rain fell. As she walked in a jacket emblazoned with the India insignia and the national anthem playing, Mary felt something shift inside her. This was not a lark of a trip to Europe any more, the sense of representing a nation felt tangible then. How was it possible to feel both proud and lonely, so terribly lonely?
Mary came last in both her 100m and 200m heats. But if you look at the times of all the participants in the competition, she was fifth from the bottom in both races. And she bettered her own timing. There is never any decency in losing, especially when the government pays for your ticket. Mary knew this but she took succour from the fine print: she came fifth last, not last.
This much was enough to make up her mind: she would not return to her life as a physical education teacher. She would be a sportsperson for whatever it brought her.
And it was enough to shape a unique life as a woman at the time. My grandmother grew up in Bombay at the same time as D’Souza, about five miles from her. The year Mary went to the Olympics, my grandma became the first girl in her family to go to university. Despite her university degree, she chose a domestic life looking after her husband and children. Although she was a child of the Independence movement and colonial modernity, she was distrustful of the world outside the home. She chose not to negotiate the choices that the 20th century had brought to her. And in so doing, she circumscribed the lives of my mother and me.
Chapter 2. Kamaljeet Sandhu: The woman who took gold unexpectedly
On 13 December 1970, when Kamaljit Sandhu won gold at the 400m at the Asian Games in Bangkok, India was on the brink of the 1971 war with Pakistan that reshaped the subcontinent, crippled by industrial strikes, and bloodied by a civil unrest movement known as the Naxalite revolution. Sandhu became the first Indian woman ever to win gold outside India. It put her on the front page of major English-language newspapers across the country, the only woman who could be seen on the news pages at the time aside from then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She had, after all, defeated an Olympic bronze medallist, the Taiwanese sprinter Chi Cheng, to win gold.
Sandhu became the first Indian woman to train at an athletic club in the US and she represented India at the Munich Olympics. But she had a lacklustre showing at the infamous Munich Games, marked by the terrorist attack in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Sandhu was an eyewitness to the attack in the Village, and retired from sport after returning to India.
Perhaps the shock of the attack had something to do with it, but her disillusionment had begun earlier during her stint at the athletics club. It was a rare opportunity to spend months in close proximity to the best athletes in the world, and it made Sandhu realise how limited her prospects were. For a young person feted as the best in her corner of the world, this is never easy to realise. Like Mary in Helsinki, she felt deeply lonely in California, shrouded in a sense of shame that she could not share with her family over trunk calls.
When I meet Sandhu, it is 50 years since she made history for India. She is still a striking figure, but that gleam that shone through even in B&W newsprint is gone. She lives in an enormous mansion in Chandigarh’s poshest enclave, and is an anomaly among the women in India’s sports history. Sandhu comes from wealth and privilege. There is, ineffably, about her a sense of a princess past her time. In her memories of the moment she made history, she speaks more of the girl who fell than herself. “Chi Cheng was the first to congratulate me, you know. She said that in sports, whoever wins is the winner. [Chi Cheng had collapsed dramatically mid-sprint while Sandhu had powered to the finish line.] Over the years, I’ve realised how true that is. Some days are yours, and some not. I made history for India, no one can take that away from me.”
She spoke more enthusiastically about her career as a coach. She was one of the first trained women athletics coaches in India and played a big role in the 1982 Asian Games hosted in Delhi. In those Games, India stood fifth in the medals tally 57, and for the first time in India’s sports history, women won more than half the country’s tally in athletics. “This was my idea,” Sandhu said. “When the sports minister asked how India could improve her performance, I said, focus on the women.” Among the women who won medals at the 1982 Games was PT Usha, India’s greatest woman athlete.
Sandhu’s rise in the 1970s marked a time of violent unrest in the east of the country where my mother was growing up. In contrast to Sandhu whose world opened up, the violence shrunk the lives of my mother’s generation in Bengal, circumscribing them largely to the “safety” of home. My mother’s life, like that of many women, was shaped by a different violence – that of savage regulation.
Chapter 3. PT Usha: The woman who finished fourth
When PT Usha did not thrust her chest out at the finish line of the 400m hurdles final in Los Angeles on 8 August 1984, she became arguably the best-known fourth-place holder in Olympic history, losing by one-hundredth of a second. The World Athletics Federation rule is that some part of the torso must touch the finish line for the runner to register her finish. One of the terms for reaching the finish line in athletics is, in fact, breasting the tape. Thus, athletes often thrust their bodies forward at the finish. At the 2016 Olympics, Shaune Miller dived forward in the 400m finals in one of the most controversial finishes ever. Miller won gold. But Usha hadn’t learnt this trick. She came fourth with a timing of 55.42 seconds, behind bronze medallist Christeana Cojocaru’s 55.41 seconds.
That night in Los Angeles, Usha lay without sleep until morning. It was not sadness, it was excitement. She had known for a long time that she was good, but this good? Among the best in the world? In the end, she thought, it had come down to a trick. She didn’t feel regret for not knowing a trick, instead, she could feel an excitement growing warm inside her. Like the beginning of something special.
The subsequent decade brought magnificent returns for Usha. She emerged as a medal factory of astonishing stamina, running in several events. She shouldered the entire responsibility for the track and field show for Indian women, turning up for 100m, 200m, 400 sprints and the hurdles. Her performance in the Seoul Asian Games marked her as the supreme athlete of the continent, and she was expected to do well at the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
But Usha suffered a foot injury, plantar fasciitis, in the run-up to the Games. She didn’t make it past her heats. There was a virulent reaction from sports fans in India, who were used to Usha’s podium finishes. The family home she built in Kerala was stoned. Stunned, Usha decided to quit running.
I would run with Usha as a child. Every Sunday, when we watched the weekend programming on the state broadcaster Doordarshan, she would appear on a national integration video running with an Olympic flame-like torch. I would wait. When she arrived on screen, I held my plastic mace aloft and ran around our living room. As a child, Usha was the only woman I knew who ran. My mother and the other women I encountered in my lifeworld never ran.
20 years later, when I started running regularly, first in grief and then in pleasure, the infamous men of Delhi would on occasion make way for me to run. More often than not, they would say something about PT Usha: “Go PT Usha”, or “Come on Usha”, or some throwaway comment like that. It made me realise the licence that Usha had given us all. We could run, because she had made such a mark.
When I met Usha, it is 35 years since her heart-stopping performance at the Olympics. We met at Payyoli, the village she had grown up in and lived all her life, running next to the sea. It was here that she first fell in love with running, listening to the ceaseless rhythm of the water, and here that she decided not to retire after all. It was the sea that calmed her, the sight of the shoreline – giving itself to the water and yet standing still – firmed her resolve to return. She retired for the first time in 1990 but returned in 1993, among the first mothers to return to international sport in India. When she finally retired in 2000, she had won a total of 102 international medals, an average of 5 medals every year she played. There is something of the sea in her, that ceaseless resolve to keep going.
Chapter 4. Shanthi Soundarajan: The woman who was dumped by her country
In the photograph of hers that has been used most often, middle-distance sprinter Santhi Soundarajan is lying belly down on a tartan track. It is 2006. She had won silver at the 800m event in the Asian Games in Doha, her second international medal in two years after her silver at the Asian Championships in Incheon, in 2005. Two days later, she was summoned for some tests. Afterwards, she was handed a ticket to return to India. She was surprised to find no one waiting to welcome her at the airport, but didn’t think much about it. Some days later, she saw herself on the television news. Her medal had been taken back because she had failed her “sex-verification” tests – she had been found to not possess “the sexual characteristics of a woman”.
Soundarajan, a magazine report notes, was the first athlete to be tested after the International Olympic Committee had banned the mandatory testing of all female athletes to check their “femininity”. Instead, only “suspected” cases are now tested.
Unlike South Africa’s Caster Semenya and now India’s Dutee Chand, the Indian government dumped Soundarajan like a defective toy in 2006. We next heard of Soundarajan in 2012 when a newspaper reporter found her working in a brick kiln. The story fomented the usual outrage: an Asian Games medal winner was labouring in a brick kiln. But the striking thing in the report was the photo: Soundarajan had shorn her hair, wearing it closely cropped like a monk. She told the reporter that she was tired of being called a boy, so she decided to look like one.
The story reached the Sports Authority of India thanks to a concerned sports researcher, and the SAI offered Soundarajan an opportunity to train as a coach. But here too, foolish questions were raised: would Soundarajan stay in the women’s hostel or the men’s? Nevertheless, she graduated in 2014.
I want to meet Soundarajan as she re-arranges her dreams and life as a coach. She comes from an impoverished, Dalit background and her story is the story of Indian sport in general – the search for respectability through sport and its high nationalism. But her story also comprises the fundamental question in contemporary sport – what is sex and how do we categorise the world on its basis?
Chapter 5. Pinki Pramanik: The woman who was charged with rape
In 2012, the middle-distance runner Pinki Pramanik was accused of rape by her roommate. The photograph of her arrest, splashed across Indian media, was sickening: Pramanik squashed between two male policemen, averting her gaze, while one policeman’s hand groped her breast. An MMS of her “sex test” was leaked in the public domain, most likely by the police themselves. In November that year, she was charged with rape and assault among six criminal charges.
In September 2014, Pramanik was acquitted of all charges by the Calcutta High Court. The medical examination, quoted in the judgement, noted that Pinki has a disorder of sexual development (DSD) called male pseudo-hermaphroditism. She has an intersex anatomy with a rudimentary testis. (Female pseudo-hermaphroditism is when a rudimentary ovary is present.) Persons with this condition are born with the primary characteristics of one sex, but develop the secondary features of the other sex over time. Pramanik was born with the primary characteristics of the male anatomy, but developed the features of the female anatomy over time. The medical board diagnosed that she was “incapable of sexual intercourse”. It was on the basis of this note that Pramanik won the case.
The estimate that is accepted widely today is that 1 in 1,500 babies is born such that “a physician is unsure of which gender to assign at birth”. The general perception is that intersex individuals possess advantages over female athletes. But research indicates that intersex anatomy offers no competitive advantage in sports.
I met Pinki Pramanik a year after this court victory. She was back at her Railways job as a platform inspector on a busy railway station in Kolkata and seemed to take a defiant pleasure in the public nature of the job. She had become a known face, or perhaps it was her boy-like face that attracted attention, but Pramanik knew she had authority here by dint of her job, and was good at staring back at people. She had also fashioned herself as an activist at the time, appearing in rallies for LGBTQ rights and speaking up on behalf of the sexually marginalized. If the public gaze had devoured her once, there was the unmistakable sense that she was now staring back.
I travelled to Pramanik’s village and met her parents and a childhood friend. Purulia is historically one of Bengal’s poorest districts, where life continues to be shaped by the agricultural economy and its pre-modern rhythms. Although she was now regarded as an “Indian” hero, her “otherness” was clear to the village from a very young age. It was clear that if she had not played for “India”, she’d be a freak show. In this sense, it was no different from “cosmopolitan” Kolkata, where she was devoured by the media.
Pramanik had suddenly stopped talking to me, and I went to her village alone, annoyed with her. It was sometime after I returned from that trip that something changed that annoyance: Pramanik’s story is not about her middling career in sport, but how she instrumentalised the high nationalism of sport to hold on to her unusual identity.
Chapter 6. Dutee Chand: The woman who took on the Olympic Committee
Sprinter Dutee Chand made the front page in 2014 for showing high levels of testosterone in her blood in the trials for the Commonwealth Games that year. The Athletics Federation of India barred her from competing with women until her testosterone levels dropped below the “male level” defined by the International Olympic Committee. This is a condition known as hyperandrogenism, the same diagnosis that South African Olympic medallist Caster Semenya received in 2009. The South African government and sports establishment rallied around Semenya, and she won silver in the 800-metre category at the 2012 Olympics.
A New York Times report dated 6 October 2014 says 7 out of 1,000 international-level athletes test positive for hyperandrogyny (a paper in the journal Review of Clinical Signs defines the condition as the excess production of androgens). Unlike Soundarajan eight years before her, Chand secured the support of the Indian government and appealed to the Court of Arbitration in Sport, considered to be the highest court in sport. All disputes concerning the Olympic Games are submitted to the CAS. On 29 July 2015, she won her case; CAS set aside the International Association of Athletics Federation’s rule barring athletes with hyperandrogenism from competing in the female category. Chand returned to the track, and won two silvers at the Asian Games in Jakarta in 2018, a bronze at the Asian athletics in Qatar, and a gold at the World University games in Italy in 2019.
In 2019, Chand made headlines again: she became the first Indian sportsperson to come out when she said she was in a relationship with a girl from her village. The year before, the Supreme Court in India decriminalised same-sex relationships. In November 2019, Chand made the cover of the Indian edition of Vogue magazine, a space reserved for the 1 one per cent – Bollywood actors and their spawn and the super-wealthy. Certainly, no one like Chand – one of seven children of a rural weaver couple in Odisha – has ever made it to Vogue India. The popular American talk show host Ellen de Generes mentioned Chand on her show. Even more than her landmark victory in the “sex dispute”, it is perhaps this decision that has now made Chand something of an icon. But it is also a decision that can have consequences. Indians are a conservative, judgemental people. If she fails to perform, wouldn’t Chand be accused of being a publicity-hungry “freak”?
I want to meet her as she trains for the Olympics pushed to 2021. It is an unusual time for sportspersons, this period of suspended animation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. I hope to get her to reflect on her unusual win in sports, her personal decision to come out as gay, and the difference she may have made in her community.
Chapter 7. Lalita Babar: The woman who took the long road
In 2016, Lalita Babar became the second Indian woman to run in an Olympic track-and-field event final, 32 years after PT Usha, when she qualified for the steeplechase. This is a 3,000-metre hurdling race with low, solid barriers and one 12-foot wide water pit. She finished tenth in the 18-person field, in what was her first appearance at the Olympics.
Babar, the daughter of agricultural labourers in Vidarbha district famous for its farmer suicides, started out as a marathoner. She pulled her family out of the poverty line with the money she won in marathons, including three golds in a row at the prestigious Mumbai marathon from 2012 to 2014.
We’ve seen this story in Indian sport – an impoverished, rural athlete clawing their way out of impoverishment through sport. But Babar’s route is different: she took to road running, which came to India in the new millennium. It offers two advantages over conventional track-and-field events—handsome monetary rewards, and more importantly, it cuts out the infamous sports bureaucracy of India. Marathons are growing in popularity across India, and have been coming up all over the country. The Athletic Federation of India had, in 2010, estimated that marathon sponsorship would be second only to cricket sponsorship in the future.
I want to meet Babar in her village, around her family and community to chronicle her journey. In particular, I want to examine how caste, landlessness and agricultural debt can be “neutralised” by the “high nationalism” of sport. I also want to look at some sport technicalities: what the switch to track athletics means. Marathon runners have notably different skills from track athletes – endurance, strength, and speed whereas the track is necessarily about speed.
Chapter 8. Sagroli Sunrise Project: The school for long-distance running
The Sagroli Sunrise Project was set up in 2005 on the belief that the more impoverished you are, the better, more disciplined you will be as a runner. The school has the objective of shaping marathoners and road runners out of those malnourished rural youth who fail to qualify for state sport training. The idea is to capitalize on the exponential growth of the marathon industry in India. The project houses 50 kids in the age group of 8-19 years to train in Sagroli village in Maharashtra, 30 boys and 20 girls. The kids train on a “dried river bed, a small hillock, a tar road bridge and a half-baked athletics track”.
If you look up the Sagroli Sunrise Project online, you will find a large number of stories which are slightly dated. The SSP, which attracted a flurry of stories around 2010, is no longer very much in the news. The school, though, still exists. Its students still participate in road races, and turn out top-five finishes.
I’d like to visit the school and see how the village looks upon the girls training at the school. Caste is always interesting to me: what kind of caste backgrounds do the runners come from and what difference does their success make to their caste status?
Chapter 9. The missed olympian who led an agrarian revolt
I suggest this as my closing chapter because of the timing: the pandemic devastation of the 2020s reminds me of the ravage of the 1940s in Bengal, wrecked by the famine of 1943 and then ripped apart by communalism around Partition. The story of Ila Mitra, junior Bengal Presidency champion selected for the 1940 Olympics which were cancelled for WWII. She became a prominent leader of the Tebhaga peasant movement, jailed by the Pakistan government in erstwhile east Pakistan, and became in 1951 possibly the first woman from the subcontinent to articulate her experience of gangrape in public when she gave testimony about custodial torture in court. She returned to India on medical parole in 1954, recovered the use of her legs again although she carried a slight limp for the rest of her life and went on to become a four-time Communist Party of India legislator in West Bengal. She remained a lifelong Communist, while a critic of the CPI, and fiercely secular personally holding up rioting mobs in Entally in the post-Babri demolition violence that singed Calcutta as well. In her political convictions, she went where almost no sportspersons go, critiquing the actions of the nation-state despite being an embodiment of national honour so to speak. She had come of age during the Bengal famine of 1943 and she upheld in her life the commitment to people that she learnt in that wretched time, never being awed by the might of the state. In the pandemic ravage of 2020-2021, she reminded me that repair is possible again after ruin, that the most vital lesson of sports is the obvious one of picking yourself up after a fall.
Potential epigraph: Why is the Muslim athlete missing?
I begin my book with an East Indian Catholic from Bandra, Mary D’Souza, and follow it up with a Sikh woman from Punjab, Kamaljeet Sandhu. There are cameo appearances by Parsi athletes Roshan Mistry and Bano Gazdar, who were D’Souza’s contemporaries in Bombay. Mistry won two medals at the 1951 Asian Games in New Delhi. But there is no Muslim athlete of note that I found. In fact, other than tennis player Sania Mirza and former Indian cricketer Nooshin Al Khadeer, there are no Muslim sportswomen of prominence that I could find. Where is the Indian Muslim woman? And why is she missing from the field?
Alternate epigraph: The gods and goddesses of running
The sports story I heard most often growing up is the circumambulation of the earth by the brothers Ganesh and Karthik. Their parents Shiva and Durga offered a celestial mango as a prize for whoever returned first from journeying around the world thrice. Karthik, who actually journeyed around the universe on his peacock lost to Ganesh who waddled around his parents thrice.
How does this count as a journey around the world, his parents asked. Because my mother and father constitute the entire universe for me, Ganesh replied.
To my mind, this story symbolises the attitude towards sport in India beautifully: we look down on physical exertion, we value gimmicks more than actual sport. I examine the stories of Vishnu, Shiva and Shakti – the high-profile triumvirate of Hinduism – to test my thesis.
