In early 2001, Mahavir Phogat, an amateur wrestler and father of four daughters, ordered his eldest two, Geeta (eleven) and Babita (nine), to join him in a mud pit he had carved out in his courtyard in Balali, a small village in Haryana. The Olympic Committee had just announced women’s wrestling as a competitive category, with the first matches slated for 2004, and Phogat wanted in on the game. For the next seven to eight years, Geeta and Babita trained daily to the point of exhaustion: long runs each morning, technique sessions throughout the day, and strength-building in the evenings using homemade equipment crafted by their father. One day they’d climb ropes, the next lift sandbags, and the day after drag tractor tyres.

To most people in the village, Phogat was just another madman – until the medals started coming in. Geeta went on to qualify for the 2012 Olympics in London, the first Indian woman to earn that honour. Babita clinched the gold medal in the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. By then, the younger sisters had also been drafted.

Today, India is a major player in global wrestling, mainly thanks to the medals won by women athletes, whose presence on the mat was, until recently, widely regarded by traditionalists as unwelcome, even impure.

The wrestling arena was – and is – a celebration of brute strength and thigh-slapping, milk-glugging camaraderie, with its presiding deity, Hanuman, the monkey-warrior from the Ramayana, a lifelong bachelor who is ever-ready for a bout. Organisers of traditional wrestling events, called ‘dangals’, where men, clad in loincloths, battle in mud pits, in Haryana and elsewhere in northern India, historically did not allow women as spectators.

Change was somewhat driven by necessity. In families without sons to train, girls were pushed into the wrestling pits – and they thrived. Since Balali’s rise to prominence, versions of the Phogat family’s story have played out in many villages and towns in and around Haryana: a father or uncle picks a young girl in the family – sometimes all of them – to be trained as a wrestler. Their long hair is chopped off, wardrobes shift from loose salwar kameez to snug bodysuits, and domestic duties are partly replaced by squats and lunges. As often happens, physical fitness is more easily gained than social approval. Relatives warn parents that they’re making their daughters ‘unmarriageable’. Village committees call for boycotts. Mobs attack dangals that feature female wrestlers.

In response to the growing need for separate and safe training environments, akhadas exclusively for girls have emerged. These academies mostly draw their students from the rural backwaters in north-west India, where the harsh constraints of gender hold sway. In Haryana, which produces most of India’s wrestlers, decades of female infanticide and selective abortions have severely skewed the sex ratio. Life for most girls here often follows a set pattern – an arranged marriage after high school, followed by a lifetime of domestic labour under strict male control. In her recently published memoir Witness, Sakshi Malik recalls her grandmother sharing how her mother-in-law would dilute the milk she was given to drink – ‘for no other reason but to lower her self-worth’.