World Cup: India’s family secret, barely kept

Harcharan Bains

“On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves/ Or lose our ventures.”- Shakespeare ( Julius Caesar)

A 19-year-old illiterate girl from Uttar Pradesh, a house-help with a Punjabi family in Ludhiana, took a deep breath to beat fatigue. As she did so, she glanced casually  at the television set  in  the living room.  She had little interest in TV, even less in what she saw on screen— a cricket match — and knew even less about both.  Yet something pulled her magnetically towards what she saw.   It was the spectacle of  an Indian girl flailing away at a ball being thrown at her by tall, strong and athletic white women.  The girl in the middle on the television screen  appeared  a  goddess in a vengeful wrath, surrounded by demons.

Sarita was watching Harmanpreet Kaur.   A  “siddhi-saadhi kudi” from a simple Moga household  was  putting  the dreaded  Aussies to the sword on the world's biggest stage in England, exactly as  Tendulkar had  done  to the same rivals at Sharjah before he was controversially given out to a no-ball.  It was as if the girl at the crease here was nursing a grouse against the Oz and was determined to settle old Sachin scores. There was in her stroke-play as there had been in Sachin's at Sharjah — a volcanic  eruption and  a touch of disdain and anger which comes only off being underrated.

It was clear to Sarita in Ludhiana  that this girl Harmanpreet  was playing more than cricket. There was on her face a quiet fury  which roared and finally exploded before millions of viewers,   razing  to the ground everything  that came in her  way. She seemed determined to put some fear of God and of India in the hearts of her opponents — and some respect for women in the   hearts of foolish men who under-rate women. Sarita  was filled with pride that a girl who looked so like herself  was  blasting to  smithereens not  just a cricket ball but a million myths about women's vulnerability— with contemptuous ease.

In 115 tempestuous and memorable minutes,  Harmanpreet put to sleep more than 1000 years of culture of prejudice and discrimination, also  demonstrating  that when a girl is determined,  this planet is just a cricket ball on her finger tip. But I take it across Radcliffe. For girls from  the subcontinent, this Cup was nothing short of a fairy tale, literally. 

Apart from the personal dignity and charm which both Mithali Raj and Sanna Mir, the ebullient Pak skipper, radiated on the field, both skippers naturally  rescripted social morality on gender equations. They walked the world stage as consummate  generals at the head of armies that  were not afraid to challenge the might of the skies. The  significance of the spectacle of  girls from an allegedly obscurantist and brazenly gender-driven Pakistan will be lost only to the stubbornly blind. 

Confidently sporting those bold and stylish shades under the London sun, Sanna Mir, spoke of a Pakistan whose girls are undaunted by the marauding Taliban gangs — or even by the forbidding presence of the military. The subcontinent, it seems, has woken up, finally. The sound of the crash one heard at Lord's was of the  artificially sustained glass ceiling  brought down by these massive blows from Harmanpreet's wood and Sanna's shades. May be, some part of the ceiling still stays up but the cracks in that ceiling  are so huge that they  will never repair.  Even if temporarily repaired,  it will take just a minor twitch of an un-manicured finger of any of these girls (or the girls to come)  to bring it crashing down on our hypocritical heads — irrevocably. 

And this was a part of the reason why  Sarita just stood there,  her eyes moist with tears brought on by  the montage of  contradictory emotions of  suffering, humiliation, shame, glory and pride. But there is something which Sarita knows and feels  more strongly about than you and I do, better than any Narendra Modi or Sushma Swaraj or Kiran Bedi or Priyanka — Gandhi or Chopra— does.  Unmindful of the claims of  them all, this simple and illiterate girl from UP is disturbed by  a profound secret, a secret she wouldn't want any non-Indian at Lord's to find out. It is India's family secret. And the secret is this: that  Mithali, Harman, Veda, Jhulan, Poonam — these are  girls who may never have been born and who had to fight to win the right even to be born.  And that there are countless other  potential world champions in India whom the great Indian male does not allow even to be born. 

And although Mithali, Harmanpreet and co were among the luckier ones who won that right to be born, they still had to fight further to win the right to live — their way. No other team in the World Cup had players whose right to be born may have remained a matter of social debate, as had been Mithali's and her sisters' in the team. And now, here today, these beautiful children, these strong girls went up  there, challenged the world  under the arc lights watched by the biggest television viewership ever for an event of this nature and came away with their honour intact — in fact, enhanced. 

 But even more importantly, they won for other girls — born or still to be born — a victory  that  will be recorded not on parchment but on India's soul and on the conscience of its men. For a conscientious Indian, it's a heavy burden to be a male. 

—The  writer is a former Media Adviser  to the former Punjab Chief Minister, Parkash Singh Badal.