We tend to find metaphors for life within our favourite sport, and yet, few come as close to boxing. The immediacy of 'hit or get hit', a steady supply of opponents against whom winning invariably means landing punches, the empowering feeling of looking everything in the eye — makes boxing the closest thing to real life. It's no wonder then that Sylvester Stallone weaved a franchise around it. Stallone understood it, more than anyone else, that few enter the ring to learn to land a right hook. Instead, many are learning how to recover from a right hook.
In Alka Raghuram's Burqa Boxers, set in the Kalighat neighbourhood of Kolkata, a handful of young girls vent their frustration with society inside a boxing ring.
The metaphor of a girl putting on gloves, to take on her strong familial conditioning, a perpetually worried mother, an iron-fisted father, a giddy-with-gossip society, and a religion that abandons you at the slightest hint of skepticism, is (perhaps) too on the nose. We saw a similar track in Asim Abbasi's Churails, where a young girl from a conservative Karachi household dons the gloves to 'smash patriarchy'. In the hands of contemporary Hindi filmmakers, this line of thought has turned into a punchline: to sell products, to add 'edge' to brands, to become 'issues' in the palms of celebrities so they can pretend to have a voice. However, like in boxing, Alka Raghuram's documentary has a directness to it. The narrative wobbles slightly in the beginning, but quickly finds its footing and then... the punches land.
The documentary begins with coach Razia Shabnam, who runs the boxing camp for girls at South Calcutta Physical Cultural Association (SCPCA), where she not only arms them with tactics inside the ring, but also coaches them to make something of their lives outside of it. Being born and brought up in the slums in and around Kalighat, these girls (most of them Muslim) are confined to the house, because of an 'unsafe' neighbourhood, parents with a rigid and dated way of life, and a society that simply doesn't see "value" in them except for being sold into brothels or being married off to a "well-to-do" groom. The friction is familiar -- where the parents are suspicious of NGOs trying to help, and girls trying to escape a fate similar to their parents. There's a primal desperation in both cases.
Raghuram's documentary has a couple of chilling moments, whose underlined "ordinariness" make it all the more disturbing. Parveen Shajda joined the boxing camp as a young girl, which she had to quit after her father lost his job. Contributing to the family's meagre income, Parveen tries to come back to boxing after the circumstances at home improve. It's her dream to become a policewoman, something she hopes will give her the independence to escape the clutches of her family. Her elder sister expresses pride in Parveen's spirit to pursue boxing while battling everyone in the vicinity, but also warns her that she "has to" get married at some point. Once Parveen gets selected in the law enforcement, there's simply no running from the inevitable. All that freedom she probably once felt inside the boxing ring, will now be stifled with the help of this forced relationship. When the Imam asks her to repeat the prayers of "accepting" the marriage, Raghuram's camera closes up Parveen's face, where she sheds a tear after repeating the Imam's words.
In another instance, when a pregnant Razia asks her small son about how he would welcome a baby sister, he says "I'll throw her away" with squeaky innocence. Razia tsks at her son's words, but this 'unguarded' moment also gives us a glimpse into how young children are conditioned, even where the mother is actively steering young girls towards hope. This moment informs us about long road ahead of us.
Alka Raghuram's documentary successfully condenses the horrors of an Indian woman, that seem to be hidden in plain sight. These girls seem 'disadvantaged' in every way - belonging to a minority community, from a deprived class, marred with a society that wants to take ownership of their bodies and minds. For an upper-caste, cis-gendered, heterosexual, upper middle-class man, it teaches me perspective. In spite of every hurdle, these girls keep coming back for another round, another opponent, as if they're choosing to embody the famous lines - "It ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!"
Burqa Boxers is available for streaming on Cinemapreneur.
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