Haryana’s Little Cuba

Nitu Ghanghas is busy fielding a steady stream of visitors and journalists in Dhanana village in Bhiwani, Haryana. She has just returned home after clinching the gold medal in the 48 kg category at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. In Bhiwani, where the chief produce is boxers, champions often jostle for space under the limelight. This is Nitu’s turn to enjoy her celebrity status.

Despite a childhood in a district full of boxers, Nitu, 22, was initially not interested in the sport. It was her father, Jai Bhagwan, who sits next to her on a plastic chair in a dimly lit room, who pushed her to take it up. “Usually, it is the child who wants to pursue a career of their choice and the parents who oppose it,” says Nitu. “But that was not the case for me. My father pushed me into boxing and never let me give up, though I felt like calling it quits many times.”

The first time she considered giving up was in 2013. Nitu recalls commuting by public transport during the initial years of training and often returning home late in the evening. This was not considered “socially acceptable” for a young woman. “I come from a normal middle-class family in a village. What my neighbours and relatives said about me impacted me as it would any young girl. I wanted to quit. My father, instead, offered to quit his job to help me continue my training. He would accompany me to the training centre, which is around 20 km from my village, twice a day. And he would wait for me outside, irrespective of the weather, while I trained inside,” she says.

The first few years were difficult for the family on the financial front as well. But Nitu managed to win cash awards at various events and repay the money borrowed from relatives. “I also got a job as an Assistant Manager in the Reserve Bank of India two months ago,” says Nitu, beaming. “And I am expecting a promotion after the gold medal at the Women’s World Boxing Championships.”

A district full of boxers

Bhiwani, one of the 22 districts of Haryana and located around 130 km west of the national capital, has been the hub of boxing for more than three decades. Its tremendous success in producing champions in the sport has earned it the moniker ‘Little Cuba’.

“The players of the Indian boxing squad for international events are mostly from Bhiwani,” says Nitu’s coach, Jagdish Singh, who has been at the Bhiwani Boxing Club since 2003. “During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, four of the five boxers were from Bhiwani. Three of them made it to the quarter-finals and Vijender Singh won the bronze. Similarly, in the Women’s World Boxing Championships, eight of the 12 women boxers were from Haryana and five of them were from Bhiwani. Four of the five from Bhiwani made it to the quarter-finals.”

By Singh’s estimate, pugilists, both men and women, from his academy alone have won 19 world championship titles, including an Olympic bronze; 290 international medals; 600 national medals; and have accounted for five Arjuna Awards and six Bhim Awards.

Singh traces boxing history in Bhiwani to the late 1980s when Sports Authority of India (SAI) coach Captain (retd.) Hawa Singh and Haryana Sports Department coach Rajender Singh Yadav together laid the foundation for the sport in the city. Singh, who also coached Vijender Singh, cites 2003 as a turning point when three boxers from Bhiwani won medals at the Afro-Asian Games in Hyderabad.

“I had always believed in the capability of my boxers. There was no looking back for them after the Afro-Asian Games. That was the first time that a victory procession for boxers was taken out in the city. The players were garlanded and their pictures appeared in the newspapers. All that encouraged them and made them hungry for more,” he says.

The other turning points were the Olympic bronze medals won by Vijender Singh and Mary Kom in 2008 and 2012 respectively. Singh describes those victories as “the two defining moments in India’s boxing history” which made the sport popular among youngsters. “The gold medals won by Nitu and Saweety Boora from Haryana at the Women’s World Boxing Championships could be another turning point for the game,” he hopes. Singh remembers Nitu as a “shy” and “introverted” girl. She first came to his notice in 2016 after she won the gold in the national championship for schools.

Photographs of the women world champions who were coached by him hang on the walls of the club alongside pictures of male boxers. They show gender parity. But Singh says the number of girls taking up the sport has gone up since Mary Kom’s 2012 Olympic feat, and that he had more girl trainees than boys at his academy last month. “Of the 100 trainees, 54 were girls in February,” he says. He cites jobs, cash rewards and recognition as the three big draws for both boys and girls who wish to take up the sport.

The skewed sex ratio in Haryana is often seen as a critical indicator of gender inequality and bias. Singh admits that he was once strongly opposed to the idea of women boxing. But he changed his view seeing the dedication and determination of four young girls two decades ago. “I always thought boxing was a man’s sport. But I remember how those four girls in 2003 impressed me. I went against the SAI’s diktat and trained them. That was my first batch of women trainees. Later, three of them landed jobs in the police and one was appointed as a coach in the Haryana Sports Department. Over the years, I have found that the women players trained by me have been more loyal than the male ones,” he says.

The widespread perception in Haryana is that wrestling is more popular than boxing among women. Singh claims that there is equal participation among women in both these sports at various State, national and international events. “In the World Women’s Boxing Championships, two of the four golds were won by Haryana pugilists. But the Olympic medal has so far eluded Haryana’s women boxers and this puts the women wrestlers a little ahead of us,” he explains.

Vikas Prashar, who has been running a boxing coaching centre called Prashar Academy in Paluwas village for the last five years, reckons that Bhiwani has more than 30 boxing academies. He has observed that more and more girls seek training when there is an increase in the medals tally. “Vijender Singh’s Kaluwas village is the hub of boxers in Bhiwani. Boxing is the only sport played in the village,” he says.

Former boxing coach Ramesh Boxer, who gave up the job after an injury, says boxing academies have gradually come up in neighbouring Hisar and Rohtak as well. However, he worries that the increasing number of academies across the State in the absence of proper regulation poses a threat to the athletes’ safety and raises questions about the quality of training.

“While the craze for boxing has gone through the roof, the SAI hostel and the Haryana government’s training centre in Bhiwani are unable to deal with the rush. This has led to an increase in the number of academies. But there are no regulations in place to ensure that the coaches at these places are qualified. Also, most of the academies are run on a shoestring budget and don’t have resources to hire physiotherapists and nutritionists,” he says.

Dreams and sacrifices

Bhiwani attracts aspiring women boxers not only from Haryana, but from neighbouring Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat too. Several families have made great sacrifices in the hope that their children taste the same success that Mary Kom or Vijender Singh did.

A family from Ahmedabad says they shifted to Bhiwani city two years ago to enable the training of their 11-year-old daughter Chhavi. “While researching online, we found that Jagdish Singh was the best boxing coach in India. So, we shifted to Bhiwani. While my wife stays in a rented accommodation with our daughter, who is now enrolled in a school in Bhiwani, I still stay in Ahmedabad. I visit them once or twice a month,” says Chhavi’s father, Sanjay Solanki, a bank employee.

Vipin Kumar’s family from Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat has been staying in Bhiwani’s Sector 23 for six years now. Kumar, a 40-year-old former serviceman, is trying to fulfil his unrealised dreams through his daughter Tanisha. “My daughter was nine when we came here in 2017. Now she is 15. While my wife and mother stay with her in Bhiwani, I stay in Baghpat and visit them every two weeks. We wanted to give Tanisha the best coaching, and zeroed in on Bhiwani Boxing Club after an online search,” says Kumar.

Nitu first attempted boxing after Vijender Singh tasted success at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. His bronze medal burnished Bhiwani’s reputation; he is considered a hero. Boxing academies came up in every nook and corner of the city, and every other child aspired to be the next Vijender Singh. But Nitu struggled in the initial years.

Jai Bhagwan reassembled his family’s priorities around Nitu’s training after he saw Mary Kom’s performance at the 2012 London Olympics. He got his daughter enrolled in the Bhiwani Boxing Club in 2012, on the advice of the father of Nitu’s boxer friend Sakshi Chowdhary. He decided to spend all his time nurturing the “next Mary Kom”. He went on ‘leave without pay’ from his job as a Bill Messenger at the Haryana Vidhan Sabha in Chandigarh in 2013 so that he could accompany his daughter to the boxing academy twice a day. His decision strained the family’s limited financial resources, and they borrowed money to meet Nitu’s training expenses. When Nitu faced a string of failures in the ring in the initial years, the decision to keep fighting — both for her father and for her — became even harder.

What gave Jai Bhagwan some hope in those years were the people who watched her in action in the ring and who would often go up to him and tell him that his daughter could be the next Mary Kom. “I knew nothing about the game,” he says. “But the experts and coaches watching her play would tell me that she could be the next big thing in boxing. She is a southpaw, which I thought was a drawback, but I later learnt that this would actually work to her advantage.” Jai Bhagwan may not have always been convinced by what everyone said, but tended to believe them nevertheless, and never let Nitu give up.

Jai Bhagwan’s wife Mukesh remembers how Nitu, the naughtiest of her three children, would bully her younger sister Tamanna, now a second-year MBBS student in Shimla, and brother Akshit. In her telling, this was what prompted her father to enrol Nitu in the boxing academy. 

Mukesh wasn’t fully on board initially, worrying that Nitu would sustain facial injuries while competing, thereby hampering her marital prospects. The financial strain on account of Nitu’s training and her sister’s education too was a source of anxiety.  “We borrowed money from relatives to buy a buffalo worth ₹2.5 lakh so that Nitu could get the right diet. Her father has been on leave without pay for the last seven years. Since travelling to the academy twice a day on a motorcycle was not feasible, especially during monsoons and winters, he had to buy a small car. Neighbours and relatives would point out that we were incurring too much expenditure on the girls. I don’t even remember the last time I bought a new suit-salwar for myself,” says Mukesh, her back to a wall from which patches of green paint are peeling off. A bare cot lies in a corner.

A nasty shoulder injury in 2019 felt like the end of her career, says Nitu. But she came back to the ring after treatment in Chennai for a month. “We did not let the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic impact her training and bought her a punching bag to practise at home. Instead of going to the academy, she would practise in the fields with me during the lockdown. I repeatedly told her during the injury that she would return stronger and that her best was yet to come,” says Jai Bhagwan.

As she offers sweets and tea to the guests trickling in, Mukesh stresses that apart from making sacrifices, changing mindsets is important. “Those who would advise us not to waste effort and money on Nitu’s training are now sending their daughters to her for advice. The girls are raring to go. We are the ones who need to change the way we think,” she says.