“It is indisputable,” reads a line in the autobiography of an Indian cricket icon co-written by a journalist, “that my parents were very supportive.”
Indeed?
There is a reason (auto)biographies of Indian sportspersons are almost uniformly inane – a reason explained by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and memoirist JR Moehringer in a May 2023 piece in The New Yorker.
Moehringer, whose own coming-of-age story The Tender Bar ranks as a classic of the memoirist’s art, and who has co-written the bestselling autobiographies of tennis legend Andre Agassi, Nike founder Phil Knight, and England’s estranged Prince Harry, recounts a conversation he had with the latter during a pre-writing session that did not end well.
A story, carved from a life
After a long discussion with Harry, Moehringer refused the offer to co-write the book. Why? “Because, I told him, everything you just said is about you. You want the world to know that you did a good job, that you were smart. But, strange as it may seem, a memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people…”
The art of memoir, encapsulated in six words: A story, carved from a life.
That is the problem with autobiographies of Indian sportspersons – they tend, more often than not, to be a highlights reel of their careers as they lived it – or, often, as they want you to think they lived it. What you get is a one-dimensional portrait – scorecards and career graphs rendered in prose and wallpapered with a litany of clichés; what you don’t get is insight into the living, breathing human being behind those accomplishments; the stories carved from their lives.
There are exceptions. A Shot At History by Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra, co-authored by Rohit Brijnath, is one; the more recent I Have The Streets by India’s ace off-spinner R Ashwin, written with Sidharth Monga, is another. To that sparse canon add Witness, the autobiography of champion wrestler Sakshi Malik co-written with veteran sports journalist Jonathan Selvaraj.
When the book hits the shelves, the large-type headlines and the buzz in the social media echo chamber will be about Malik’s first up-close experience of sexual harassment and her ongoing battle to bring BJP politician and former Wrestling Federation of India president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh to book for the serial sexual abuses he is accused of. And that will be a pity, because there is so much more to Malik’s story as both a champion wrestler and an insurgent fighting injustice.
The battle against Brij Bhushan and his backers in politics – and, by extension, against the strong arm of the police force – bookends the story of Malik as an insecure girl from a small village in Haryana; her early, occasionally risible forays into various sports; her discovery of wrestling as the career she always wanted and never knew it till her wandering footsteps led her to the mat.
The book is hung on the tick-tock timeline of her life and times, both in the ring and out of it, and it is a story of stark contrasts. There is the self-assured sportsperson juxtaposed with the awkward, unsure woman in the throes of a first, and lasting, love. She is the ace wrestler, proud of the painfully acquired strength of thighs and biceps, but also the woman who hates how those same biceps look when she is forced to wear high fashion. She is the gawky village girl who leans heavily on parental support and encouragement in a rigidly patriarchal environment that frowns on women “displaying” themselves in skimpy sports costumes but equally, the mature woman battling the realisation that the love of even the most supportive of parents can be subsumed by the lure of the money their accomplished daughter brings in…
Sakshi Malik, the person
Malik’s story is layered; it lends what we know of her life a larger frame and a deeper context. Through the pages of Witness, a Sakshi Malik emerges who is no longer just a champion wrestler, or a leader in an ongoing battle against a political strongman and accused sexual abuser – she is a human being in the true sense of the word, with all the fears and uncertainties, the faults and the foibles that being human entails.
And it is all down to a clear-eyed awareness of her own self, abetted by honesty as unsparing of herself as it is of everyone in her orbit. Thus, if she is open about her parents’ unconditional love turning into unbridled greed as the money begins to pour in, or about the politicking of farmer leader Naresh Tikait who insinuated himself into the wrestlers’ protests for his own ends, or about her disenchantment with what she sees as the self-interest of her comrades-in-arms Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia, she is equally forthright about her own early forays into petty theft and, more startlingly, about her deepest insecurities.
“Sometimes,” Moehringer said in an interview where he discussed the art of the memoir, “in order to tell the truth, you simply cannot avoid hurting someone’s feelings. It goes down easier if you are equally unsparing of yourself.”
Parts of Witness will hurt. Parents, siblings, former opponents, and present comrades will all find reflections of themselves that they would far rather have hidden from the world – but there is no part of the book that cuts as deep, and is as unsparing, as the image Malik sees in her own mirror.
In an early chapter, she talks of the paralysing dread that envelops her before every bout, and about how she has “never enjoyed the actual act of confrontation.”
“Many wrestlers have a little bit of nervousness before their bout starts, which helps them get focused for the contest,” Malik writes. “I have come across contestants who tell me they are excited before a bout. They enjoy that feeling of getting into a fight.
“I’ve never experienced that. I’ve always been afraid, sometimes almost sick with worry.”
Who knew? As one accustomed to reading, and listening to, sportspersons natter on about “embracing the challenge”, “soaking up the pressure” and suchlike inanities, it came as a refreshing change to read an elite sportsperson – a practitioner of one of the most physically confrontational of all sports – talk with such openness about the crippling grip of fear that she had to confront, even before she confronted her opponent on the mat, right through her career.
If being honest – with oneself first, and then with the reader – is hard for sportspersons, it is equally difficult for them to talk in an accessible fashion about the nuances of their sport. And there is a reason for this: in her formative years, the sportsperson practices the mechanics of her sport for countless hours until it becomes part of muscle memory. In the heat of competition, she instinctively does what all that practice has prepared her for. Asking her to relieve a bout, to explain the mechanics of a takedown, is akin to asking a pilot how she flies a plane, or a writer how she organises her material and engages her reader.
Here, again, Malik scores – a favourite section, one that I went back to after a first read-through of the entire book, is chapter ten where Malik delves into the arcana of “weight cutting”, a phrase that entered the public consciousness thanks to the fiasco of Vinesh Phogat failing, by 100 grams – one third the weight of an adult human heart – to qualify for the final of the 50kg wrestling competition in the Paris Olympics.
Elsewhere, there are illuminating details about the mechanics of various forms of takedowns, insights into how a wrestler reads and counters an opponent’s strategy – a wealth of detail, told in accessible form, that made me go back to YouTube videos of her various bouts, including the Rio Olympics bronze medal match in the 58-kg category that made her India’s first woman Olympic medallist in wrestling, with a new awareness and appreciation of the sport.
We consume sport in boxes – the playing field, the wrestling ring, the boundaries of our television screens. And yet the real story, unseen by us, lies outside these boundaries, in what ace sportswriter Gary Smith calls “the psyche of the sporting spirit.”
Writing an energising memoir
The likes of Andre Agassi, Phil Knight and Prince Harry needed a Moehringer to go outside those boxes, to delve into and unearth the stories hidden behind those medals, the fame, the public persona. Malik finds the ideal amanuensis in Jonathan Selvaraj, a veteran sportswriter who has spent decades covering those sports, including wrestling, that play out in the nearly impenetrable shadow cast by cricket.
On the evidence of this book, Selvaraj has mastered sprezzatura, the ability to conceal art. Selvaraj brings to the book the art and the craft of a skilled storyteller – a mastery of narrative arc and of pacing, the ability to focus on what is important, the minute attention to the telling detail. Rather than chisel and sand and buff and polish the story to death, Selvaraj helps Malik embrace the volatility, the insecurities, integral to the human condition.
Where Selvaraj really excels though is in his ability to step back and let Malik’s natural voice, with which we have become familiar through the many press conferences and interviews she has given in the course of her battle against Brij Bhushan, shine through. It is Selvaraj who writes, but it is Malik we hear.
Malik’s lived experiences and refreshing honesty combine seamlessly with Selvaraj’s self-effacing pen to produce a sports biography that is energising, and compellingly readable.
Witness, Sakshi Malik with Jonathan Selvaraj, Juggernaut.
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