By – Sujal Bamal

Preface

For as long as I have known her, she has remained a bright light of joy and exuberance, illuminating everything that she sees and filling people up with hope and peace. Despite her struggles throughout her life, she has said that the driving forces fueling her actions are kindness and compassion. “It never deterred me to stray from my path of honesty and empathy”, she says. Her words resonate with me when I see smiles on the faces of people who interact with her. Not to forever suspend you in suspense, I am writing about Babita Bamal, a.k.a Sona Chaudhary, who is an author, educational trainer, philanthropist and former captain of the Indian women’s football team. As if all these titles and accolades weren’t enough, she also happens to be my mother. This article aims to explore the struggles and adversities she faced throughout her life and, more importantly, her response- the resiliency that helped her persevere and overcome her battles. 

The Initial Struggle to Passion

Sona, as she would like me to call her, was born in Rohtak, Haryana, in 1973. A daughter of a modest farmer in Haryana, Sona spent her early days in the village before her mother took her and her three siblings to the city for a better life and hopefully, a future. Sona discloses, “Life in the village for my mother was terrible. A mother of four aspiring to educate her children was something that the community had snarky remarks about.” Haryana’s repressive and orthodox ideologies that project disrespectful attitudes towards women are not unknown. To end the cycle of illiteracy and discrimination that Sona’s mother suffered in the village, she ensured proper education and exposure for all of her children, including Sona. 

From a young age, Sona showed a keen interest in sports. At the age of just 13, she participated in her first Athletic Nationals Meet in 1986. She went on to play sports like softball, throwball and football, pursuing her desire to stand out and perform during extremely patriarchal times when women were expected to behave with modesty and ‘laj’. What was expected of her was what she unashamedly defied. 

She found success with football when she was in junior college. After competing in a national football tournament in 1989-90, she decided to pursue football as a full-time career. She says, “I didn’t have anyone to guide me. No other girls in my locality or school played football. So the only people I could really play and practice with were senior coaches and male players, who were not very supportive.” Even then, she describes how her desire to play overpowered the societal constructs that were placed on her. She began to find her place in Indian women’s football in the 1990s under the Women’s Football Federation of India. 

Facets of Self-expression 

Simultaneously, she used to write and speak on the All-India Radio programme in her adolescence. She says it helped calm her and vent out her anxiety. This experience to artistically express herself transformed into a full-fledged passion for writing. She has gone on to author several books, including “Game-in-Game”, “विचित्र”, “पायदान” and “The First Milestone” that fictionally depict her real-life experiences. Her writings range from intense anecdotal encounters of her life in sports to her experiences of being a parent of two boys.  Her book “Game-in-Game” caused controversy when it was published in 2016. It detailed her perspective on the state of women’s conditions and struggles in sports. She writes about facing sexual harassment and gender inequality from men in power in her environment- coaches, football federation officials, and secretaries. Sona addresses how these events often led her to feel hopeless and powerless. Despite adversities colonising space on every step she aspired to take, she never quit. She says, “I had to frequently switch state teams and abandon my teammates because of the unfair treatment I received”. 

She followed her sports career with a pursuit of education that was long unfulfilled. Sona received a diploma in Computer Science, which she built on with etiquette and educational training courses in Utah and NUS, Singapore. With the knowledge she gained and her affiliation with the police since her football times, she began to train and hold workshops for multiple batches of state police and IAS cadre officials. These personal accomplishments came at the cost of parenting, which she severely lamented, “I did not want to sacrifice my children’s upbringing, and I also wanted to pursue my professional goals, which was very difficult since my husband and I were both working and did not have any other support”, she says. Working mothers face the dual responsibility of managing the home and the workplace, meeting and balancing the responsibilities become quite challenging. Sona says that education was an important priority in her life, and she wanted to ensure that her children did not go through the plights that she often faced when she was a young girl in Rohtak, Haryana.

The Road to Recognition and Inspiration

It isn’t just mistreatment that she has fought against throughout her life and career; several claims have been made about the validity of her achievements in the aftermath of the release of her book, ‘Game-in-Game’. They display the arid landscape of recognition of women’s contributions to society. As coined after suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, the ‘Matilda Effect’ refers to the oppressive nature of historical writing towards women. Women, despite constituting half of the world’s population, have their achievements disappear from history or are never accurately represented. Sona has several certificates to prove her accolade-rich sporting career, but the mainstream media and the corrupt system of sports regulatory authorities of India choose to further narratives that disregard her experiences and indirectly protect the perpetrators that haunt aspiring female youth. The same can be seen in the recent case of sexual harassment against female wrestling athlete Sakshi Malik. The Matilda effect works in such huge tides that it can be witnessed across history in all parts of the world- Women have had to fight for recognition and due credit. 

With her struggles being adequate to overbear her, Sona says with a smile, “I have tried to be compassionate with everyone I meet in life. I have found that God works in mysterious ways, and I trust the process.” She volunteers in blind orphanages on her birthdays and tries to give back to the community as much as she can. She says that her aim with writing and philanthropy has always been to inspire other women and athletes. Her goal is to see a world that does not marginalize women. A world that respects and acknowledges the contributions of women in society and, ultimately, a world that does not punish women but instead encourages young girls to dream.

About the Author

Sujal is a student at O.P Jindal Global University, currently pursuing his undergraduate studies in Law. In pursuit of excellence in storytelling, he constantly strives to explore new avenues in the global political sphere. A background in commerce studies helps him connect the dots between uncertainty and reality which he hopes to reveal through his passion for writing.