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When the winter sun rises over the mustard farm, the pale orange bleeds into clear yellow, a line of 36 girls all dressed the same – T-shirts, track pants, crew cut – emerges into the open field, rubbing sleep from their eyes. Beneath the tin hut, they sat on their laps, bent over the stone hollow. For the next 20 minutes, grind the raw almonds into a fine paste, straining the bottle of nut milk. He needed it to regain his strength.
Started in 2017, Yudhveer Akhada is a residential wrestling academy for girls, run by a family of competitive wrestlers in Sonipat, a semi-urban industrial city in Haryana, a province in northern India bordering Delhi. It now hosts 45 trainees who, when they arrive, are usually between 10 and 15 and are expected to stay until the age of 20, immersing themselves in the burgeoning community of girls who wrestle. Every student who enters the academy has the same goal: to win an Olympic medal for India.
“In India we are surrounded by stories of violence against women,” said Prarthna Singh, the photographer in this story. But the country has also increased participation in women’s sports, such as wrestling. “In that patriarchal construct, we have this academy where young women carve out a place for themselves as athletes. It’s inspiring to see them put in the dedication and rigor needed to be one.
After the warm-up, the exercises are different. Cardio days can mean cross-country running or stair climbing. On sports days, they play handball or basketball. Strength-building days are the most demanding of all: The girls have to drag wooden blocks across the field or pull themselves up several meters from gnarly ropes.
“If we hadn’t come here, our lives would have been very different,” he said Siksha District, above, a 16-year-old girl from a farming family in Sonipat. If he didn’t fight, he said, “I would quit school to get married.”
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