Advertisement

Mirabai Chanu, MC Mary Kom, Manika Batra: Why Are Female Athletes Hailed As ‘Bharat ki Beti’?

So what if she is an Olympian champion? No matter what women achieve, they will still be talked about in terms of some hypernationalist patriarchal imagination as India’s daughters. Weightlifter Mirabai Chanu, boxer MC Mary Kom and tennis player Manika Batra may be earning laurels at the ongoing Tokyo Games, but a certain section of the media and social media users are hellbent on reducing them to the ‘Bharat ki Beti’ narrative. Much like mansplaining, it is a patriarchal urge to control a woman’s narrative in the public domain like in the private.

So what if she is an Olympian champion? No matter what women achieve, they will still be talked about in terms of some hypernationalist patriarchal imagination as India’s daughters. (In pic: Mirabai Chanu)
So what if she is an Olympian champion? No matter what women achieve, they will still be talked about in terms of some hypernationalist patriarchal imagination as India’s daughters. (In pic: Mirabai Chanu)

True, images of sportspersons sporting the national flag in victory at the Games evoke national pride. It is only deserving that our athletes are thus cheered on more so in the case of female athletes who are often underrepresented in mainstream media until they become trailblazing stars. Stories of female athletes fighting barriers, lack of access to training and coaching owing to their marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds, regional bias case in point the national apathy towards the Northeast along with the gender bias are reality brushed aside in a country like India where cricket occupies the sporting limelight. However, the ‘Bharat ki Beti’ narrative is only a disservice to women making headlines at the Tokyo Games 2020.

Award-winning journalist and author Ravish Kumar posted on his Instagram account how Mirabai Chanu, MC Mary Kom or Manika Batra are athletes, not daughters. And how the audience proudly cheering them on for their respective achievements is not a father. The nation starts looking at them through a fatherly lens, he says, and yet when these same athletes are struggling with poverty and hardships, no one stands up as a father, brother, husband, uncle to be their ally. The most telling part of Kumar’s post is perhaps when he says no matter what women achieve, their achievements are always spoken of in terms of ‘this too’. She cooks too. She writes in English too. She drives too, knits too, sings too. She brings the Olympic medal too. And long goes the list of a woman’s accomplishments that are always spoken of as an appendage to her being primarily a woman.

Also read: Sport Appeal, Not Sex Appeal: Insanely Sexist Memes We Still Can't Get Over

‘Bharat Ki Beti’, Nationalism’s PR game

Whipping this beti-sentiment, some old tweets hailing wrestler Sakshi Malik’s winning streak at the Rio Games in 2016 also resurfaced. Notably, the bronze medalist became the very first Indian woman wrestler to win a medal at the 2016 Rio Games. Shuttler PV Sindhu who represented India at the 2016 Rio Games and won a silver, became the first Indian badminton player to reach a final. The Produnova-vault fame Dipa Karmakar became the first Indian female gymnast ever to compete in the Olympics. Indian women athletes were hailed for scripting history with their sheer grit and determination amid mountains of adversities. Karmakar’s biography The Small Wonder chronicles her 8-10 hour-long practice sessions at ill-equipped gyms in her hometown Agartala, Tripura.

It has indeed been a glorified State-approved tradition to celebrate such victories in the emotionally pitched ‘Bharat ki Beti’ narrative. Social media only captures the national zeitgeist.

Some were quick to point out the inherent hypocrisy.

So, why is something so innocuous regressive?

The term beti apart from the biological relationship that it signifies is rooted in a culture of control. When the Phogat sisters - Geeta, Babita and Vinesh - arm-twisted patriarchy and shook Haryana’s deep gender divide to step into the male-dominated akhara, they created a legacy for a generation of girls. The beti was no longer the proverbial beti, just like Malik later, but a brand ambassador of empowerment. So, in came the slogan ‘Beti Bachao, Medal Pao’.

In her book Fearless Freedom, Kavita Krishnan writes, “In June 2018, the Indian social media saw a photograph of a mural against sex selection on a wall in Haryana. The image showed a little girl, with her head covered, rolling out rotis, with the slogan ‘Kaise khaoge unke haath ki rotiya, jab paida hone nahi doge betiyan?’ (Who will make rotis for you if you won’t let daughters be born?) The Haryana government got considerable criticism online for this mural. Other similar slogans abound in the ‘Beti Bachao’ campaign, such as ‘Beti nahin bachaoge to bahu kahan se laoge’ (If you don’t save daughters, where will you get daughters-in-law?) and ‘Ma chahiye; behen chahiye; patni chahiye; to beti kyon nahin chahiye?’ (You want mothers, sisters, wives, then why don’t you want daughters?)” Upholding gendered domestic labor, this stand against the regressive practice of sex selection further reduces daughters to be viewed as utilitarian and hence desirable. Krishnan writes, “Is a daughter’s right to be born and cherished dependent on her role as a future mother/daughter/sister/daughter-in-law/wife to men?”

Also read: Female Athletes Are Finally Calling The Shots Against Sexist Wardrobe Regulations

‘Bharat ki Beti’ is symptomatic of the same culture of dumbing down women as daughters. Daughters who don’t need to be controlled can still be patronized even if it’s a Saikhom Mirabani Chanu winning a silver medal and India’s first at the Tokyo Games 2020 in the women’s 49kg category. Betis are often the byproducts of a society that has viewed them as a liability, not educated as equals to sons and married off ticking a box of dowry or abuse. ‘Bharat ki Beti’ is a hypernationalist trope of reclaiming the shining daughter saga as patriarchy’s very own poster child of women emancipation.

The word beti carries a lot of baggage, a history of silence, violence and oppression. For ages, daughters have been moral-policed into not falling in love and marrying outside the boundary lines of caste, religion and class. Daughters have been told to return home within the curfew hours to protect their honor, to speak, dress and behave in a certain way, to not to raise their voice or question authority. Daughters have been punished for questioning, transgressing and exercising their agency. Last week, a 17-year-old girl was killed In Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria district for violating her family’s ‘no jeans’ diktat.

To give a mellow pop cultural analogy, the ‘Papa ki Pari’ or the ‘Papa’s Princess’ tags romanticize the spoiled girl as hare-brained, innocent, good-hearted, yet demanding and unreasonable. ‘Bharat Ki Beti’ may be a good PR exercise in patriotism but women are not daughters of the nation. Being a woman doesn’t make her automatically a metaphor for motherhood, daughterhood, the nation or nationalism. Women’s success stories shouldn’t be owned by a male sentiment or represented in relation to men.

(Edited by Amrita Ghosh)

Follow us on Instagram for the latest updates.