India’s Sakshi Malik poses with her bronze medal for the women’s wrestling freestyle 58-kg competition during the medals ceremony at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) India’s Sakshi Malik poses with her bronze medal for the women’s wrestling freestyle 58-kg competition during the medals ceremony at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Congratulations have been pouring in since morning, as India woke up to a freedom of another kind: Sakshi Malik won a wrestling Bronze in the 2016 Rio Olympics, breaking the jinx of the almost-there-but-not-quite fourth places.

Finally, we Indians are free to rejoice and revel as our sportspeople break through to that coveted podium, holding aloft that treasured medal.

But in all this noise, there has been the usual gendered appropriation of Sakshi’s incredible feat, calling her ‘India’s Daughter’ on social networks.

Yes, she is someone’s daughter. And will go on to be, if that’s where life takes her, a wife and mother too. But this gendered appropriation of a young woman’s fabulous achievements reduces it, and her, to a label: the sort of patriarchal label which has enabled us to keep our women in shackles for centuries.

Malik is a sportsperson first and foremost. Do you have any notion of what it takes to get where she has? The hard, hard grind that knows no night or day, no holiday, no cheat days, just endless, relentless practice, just to get that one-hundredth of an edge over a rival practicing just as hard in other corners of the world.

Let’s dump this dominant discourse of ‘ma-behen-beti’. Let’s celebrate Sakshi’s feat for what it is: a great, great sporting achievement.

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You go, Sakshi! Please do nibble one more corner of that medal you so richly deserve : it is real. You’ve done it. Clap, clap.

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