This nursery in Uttar Pradesh’s mango belt is turning girls into boxers

MALIHABAD: Walking through the boulevard with densely covered mango trees, an intriguing sound leads you to a ‘squared circle’ where a bunch of petite girls in their boxing vests and shorts are busy punching hard at sandbags hanging from a mango tree trunk.
Aged between 7 and 17, the trainee boxers hail from marginalized backgrounds, some of whose parents work under MGNREGA or sell vegetables.This makeshift boxing facility in rustic Malihabad, nearly 43km from Lucknow, has brought out at least 10 district-level boxers and one national-level boxer in the junior category, in recent years.
Apart from jousting in the ring for professional achievement, these 87 boxers, primarily girls, have learnt to safeguard themselves from attack and assaults too. “I started off with the intent to teach boxing as a selfdefence sport to girls but, over the years, dozens of my teenage boxers have brought medals and glory,” Mohammad Saif Khan, 47, their coach, says.
With his family primarily engaged in mango business, Khan has competed at state level in Uttarakhand once. A heart wrenching incident around 15 years ago forced this former heavyweight boxer to shift focus from mango farming to training self-defence techniques to girls. “A young girl in my neighborhood was raped and I couldn’t do anything to bring justice for her, as her family feared that revealing information about the sexual assault would bring bad name to them,” Saif, who now ‘empower girls’ of the area, said.
One of his students, Kamna Rawat, 15, has won two district-level gold medals. The youngest among six sisters, she joined Saif ’s boxing centre this January.