In her memoir, wrestler Sakshi Malik talks about her body image issues and how she’s overcoming them

The one style of clothing I avoided wearing was anything that bared my arms. I was always conscious that I had very muscular, 14-inch-thick biceps. They were prominent even by wrestling standards and they looked massive in comparison to the arms of the skinny girls I’d see on film sets in Mumbai. I always felt my arms and hands looked weird. They looked like what I thought men’s arms and hands did.

My stylists and Nayantara would tell me they looked amazing. My muscles were something to show off, they insisted, but I couldn’t believe them.

Our wrestler bodies are built very different from most women’s bodies. We develop very strong muscles in our arms and back, thanks to all the rope climbs and pull-ups, while our waist is naturally very narrow, since we have to maintain a low body-fat percentage. It’s the combination of the two that gives us that characteristic V-shaped upper body, like that of boys.

While all women wrestlers have torsos with some definition, it’s less prominent for some. Vinesh has more of what we consider a typically feminine body shape. Her cousins Sangeeta and Geeta too don’t have very prominent V-shaped torsos. They both have heavier hips and relatively leaner arms. That wasn’t the case with me. Recently, Sangeeta Phogat took part in the Jhalak Dikhlaja dance show, for which she wore very feminine outfits. She looked so beautiful in them! If I wore the same outfits, people would think I look terrible.

I often wished I had more of what we consider a girly shape. As a teenager I’d sometimes complain to God, “You gave me such a good body, but did you have to give me such big arms?”

It didn’t help my self-image much either when other girls at the wrestling camp would comment on my arms. They’d say I had such heavy arms that I’d be able to exhaust my opponents by just hand-wrestling them (chala chala ke behosh kar denge). It wasn’t just Indians. Once when I was overseas at a training camp, an Italian wrestler pointed to my arms and gave me a big thumbs-up, saying “Hey big arms!”

He actually meant it as a compliment, but I felt very awkward about it. My arms were indeed perfect for wrestling, but they didn’t make me feel very feminine. I didn’t feel confident at all about how I looked.

That’s still something I have to deal with. If I go for a function, most of the younger women are in a saree or lehenga. Some might be wearing sleeveless blouses. I always wear a Western piece of clothing, like a shirt or a coat. I just feel a lot more secure in well-constructed Western clothes than in a lehenga or a Punjabi suit.

Sometimes there’s no option, though. Back in 2015, for my brother’s wedding, I couldn’t wear Western clothes. So I told my mother I wanted to wear a lehenga with a full-sleeved top. All the other girls wore sleeveless outfits.

This is why, although I dislike the cold, I much prefer winters to summers. I always feel I have more clothes options in the winter. I can wear ruffled sleeves, or high-neck clothes, blazers and jackets. In the summer the only options I seem to have are either full-sleeved shirts or T-shirts, with my biceps out there for everyone to gawk at.

Wrestling might seem to be this tough, macho sport, and there is this perception that women wrestlers are very mean and boy-like. Off the mat though, almost every female wrestler wants to look pretty. It’s just that we don’t get many opportunities to dress up, and in my case, it was always hard to find something to wear that I wasn’t self-conscious in.

Most of us aren’t from families or backgrounds with any knowledge of things like make-up or dressing up to be presentable. I knew there were other girls whose mothers would teach them to use make-up, but I had to learn all of this on my own. I wore make-up for the first time at my brother’s wedding, but since I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t like it. I thought I should just stick to being a wrestler. I had no business to look good.

I did start growing my hair out just before my brother’s wedding. By the time I got to Rio, it was quite long. When I started using hair curlers, I realized I didn’t look as bad as I imagined I did.

Nayantara taught me to use make-up and bought me my first make-up set after I started having to attend events following the Olympics. I didn’t have the first clue about blushers and highlighters, and did not know what foundation was. People knew that I was a good wrestler, but there was no reason they couldn’t think I was elegant too. It might seem obvious now, but it took winning an Olympic medal for me to realize I could be both.

It’s just not easy to overcome a lifetime of conditioning in India.

The American wrestlers wear sleeveless and off-the-shoulder dresses. I don’t think it suits them, but that is just my opinion. It doesn’t seem to matter to them. They are happy in their skins. I wished I could just be happy without worrying about what others thought of me.

It’s not that I’ve not made any progress on this front. I wore a sleeveless dress for the first time in my life when I came on the Kapil Sharma Show a few months after the Olympics. I had no option because none of the other clothes provided for me were the right colour or fit.

Satyawart was with me backstage at the show when I nervously tried on that dress. He said I looked great, and that convinced me I could wear it. But he always says I look great. That day, though, he gave me the confidence to wear that sleeveless dress. I’ve had my fingers twisted, my hair pulled out by its roots and my ACL ripped. But it felt far more stressful to wear a sleeveless dress for the first time.

I’m a lot more comfortable with my body now. A few days back, I went home and modelled a dress for Satyawart before a wedding I had to attend. I tried on a wedding lehenga and another dress. I also wore a mini dress, but with full sleeves – I may have changed, but some things still remain the same!

Also read

Sakshi Malik’s memoir ‘Witness’: The wrestler sees an unsparing image of herself in her own mirror

Excerpted with permission from Witness, Sakshi Malik, co-authored with Jonathan Selvaraj, Juggernaut.