I, ‘Witness’: Getting Sakshi Malik To Speak Her Truth

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Last weekend, Juggernaut Books launched Witness, the autobiography of ace Indian wrestler Sakshi Malik, the first Indian woman to medal in wrestling at the Olympics and whose more recent stint in the headlines owes to her lead role in the protests against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, former president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) and now facing trial in a case of serial sexual abuse.

It is one of the best autobiographies by an Indian sportsperson I’ve read — honest, searing in parts and hugely insightful into the complexities of her sport. I read a pre-publication copy and reviewed it here.

The book was co-written — with a deft, delicate touch — by veteran sports journalist Jonathan Selvaraj of The Hindu. Curious to know how the book had come about, and for Jon’s insights into Sakshi as both champion and insurgent, I got on a Zoom call with the writer. 

Edited excerpts from our chat: 

To begin at the beginning, Jon, why did you and Sakshi decide to write the book?

That is the first question I asked her: Why do you want to write this book? I mean, it is one thing to do a book because it is the done thing – but why do you particularly want to write a book?

She told me she was interested in having her story told. She felt like, a lot of the time when her story is told by others, like the media, people like me, those stories capture a particular moment in time and we say, okay, this is what happened there. And it's usually our perspective of what happened. She wanted to tell her side of the story and tell it fully. Some people want to do it because they think they will get a movie out of it. I didn’t get the sense that was the deal for her — she just wanted to tell her story the way she saw it. At one point while discussing the book, she said she wanted to do it for her kids — she wanted them to know about her life the way she lived it, to know about the things that were important to her, without the filter of the media.

That actually cues my next question: One of the standout features of the book is the wealth of detail, and to gather all that must have taken time, effort; it must have involved conversations where you went back over the same ground multiple times. What was the process like?

We began working together in September 2023. Initially, I wanted to know how much time she could give — ideally, I would have liked to speak to her continuously. I knew it would be a physical burden on them (Malik and her husband Satyawart) because they're not used to speaking at length, they're not talkative people. So I knew I couldn't speak to her in one continuous stretch; I told her, fine, we'll speak once a week. And I was aware that there could be weeks when there will be other things on her mind — there is the case she is fighting, for one thing. I knew she wasn’t going to be able to give me all her time. So we agreed that we would speak once a week, provided she had the time.

Before I began, I asked Rohit Brijnath (sportswriter and co-author of Olympic gold medallist Abhinav Bindra’s autobiography), how do you write a book? Because I had no idea how to do this. He told me that you have to spend time — a lot of time. I remember the first day, I think I spent three or four hours with her. Then there were other days when she would get tired after an hour and a half or so and when I sensed that, I’d stop, and pick up again in the next meeting.

You said she is not a talkative person, that she is not used to speaking. Co-writing an autobiography involves trust — the subject has to implicitly trust the writer. Was that hard for her to do?

That is what surprised me, actually. I thought she would find it hard to open up, to be totally frank and open — but as it turned out, she opened up even about things, parts of her private life, I didn’t know to ask about. The thing with her is, once she decides she wants to let you in, she lets you in all the way. There's almost nothing that she holds back — I mean, there was stuff which I had to hold back when writing because of legal and other issues, but outside of that she was all in. 

These conversations — did you first prep a timeline of her life and career and walk her through each phase, or were the conversations organic, evolving and going wherever she wanted it to?

We were talking every week — except for those weeks when she had other things on her mind. She has a home in Delhi; I went there for our chats because it is not too far from where I live, and I thought that she would be more comfortable in her own home, her environment. When you are telling people things about your life, you want to feel secure, comfortable, so I figured this was best.

We didn’t work with a timeline — I didn’t start by asking her about her childhood. In fact, I started from the other end, the most recent events, the battle against Brij Bhushan (Sharan Singh, ex-president of the Wrestling Federation of India and accused serial abuser). This was because it was most recent for her, and I thought that would be the easiest for her to recall in detail. Also, because it was recent, she remembered everything with great clarity, and those conversations helped ease her into talking at length.

What were the parts she found hard to talk about?

She found it difficult when we got to the part about her career, her bouts — I think most athletes find that the hard part. I was asking her questions like, what was it like that day? What were you wearing? What did you smell that day? Those kinds of questions, meant to elicit granular details, threw her a bit. After a few such conversations she asked me, when are you going to get to the point of this book? I said, no, that is not how it works, I'm trying to get all of it and then we’ll figure out what we need to put in, what the point is. 

It’s surprising that Sakshi, a champion wrestler, found wrestling the hardest thing to talk about…

I think that is down to both of us. See, take sports like cricket, or badminton, most of us have played it at some point, and we have a shorthand understanding of it. So if someone says “outswing”, we know what "outswing” is even if we have only played gully cricket. We have a cultural shortcut for it. Wrestling though, it is a weird sport, you can’t half-ass your way into wrestling. No one does gully wrestling — so we don’t even know the basics of the sport. 

See in cricket, some things are simple to understand — like your stance, which is the most basic thing in cricket. Equally in wrestling, the stance is most important — but I had no idea of that, no sense of the intricacies of stance, of balance and what it means for a wrestler. For her, because it was muscle memory built from her earliest days, it was instinctive — and she found it difficult to put the mechanics of it into words. Luckily, Satya (Malik’s husband, Satyawart) was usually around — he is very well-read and articulate, he has the vocabulary for these things. So there were times when she just gave up trying to explain some nuance, and she would call Satya and tell him something in Haryanvi. He would be reading something or the other – I remember he was reading the autobiography of Satya Pal Malik, the former Jammu and Kashmir governor – and he would put his book down and explain things to me in Hindi. I think that helped her a lot, having him there, because while she knew what she wanted to say, she didn’t have the vocabulary to say it, to explain the intricacies of the sport.

It worked — my favourite parts of the book were the bits when she goes into technical detail about the intricacies of her sport.

Also the hardest parts to elicit. When she talks about wrestling, it's something that's very obvious for her. It's like asking a fish what water is like. Ask any sportsperson about their process, and they give you shorthand answers because they just don’t know how to explain the things they do from muscle memory. But for us, it's super interesting because these are the things that we don't know about. 

For instance, in chapter ten she goes into great detail about weight-cutting. As journalists, we know broadly what it is and why wrestlers have to do it. But the kind of detail she gave me, like the bit about standing upside down in the sauna because she thought it would help – those bits where she talked of the intricate details of wrestling, they helped me better understand a sport I have been covering for years. But to get that, I had to keep probing, I had to keep asking her to explain more, and in more detail.

The thing is we come from different worlds. It is like if she asked me to describe my writing process, I wouldn’t know how to answer cogently. It’s the same thing for them when they talk about their sport. But after a bit, she sort of started getting it, she understood what I was going for. And then she started to enjoy talking about it, things like certain wrestling moves, she was happy to dig deep, go into details.

I think that is when the book became real, for me. See, she would say something like, oh that match, I won 10-0 — but for us, what does 10-0 even mean in wrestling? It’s not like football, where we all know what a goal is, and can read a scoreboard — with wrestling, most of us cheer when one of our athletes wins a bout, but we have no idea how the points were scored. We can discuss a cricket pitch, even those of us who have only played street cricket, in great detail, but we don’t even know the size of the mat, or how squishy it is to walk on, nothing. Once she got into it, once she understood my need for granular detail and began digging deep into her memory and learned to explain things to a layperson, that is when the process came alive for me.

Besides the detail, the other thing that struck me — startled me really — is her absolute openness, her honesty about everything she speaks of. Did you have to work for it?

Yes, she was honest, incredibly so. For instance, remember where she talks of her fear of confrontation? As a journalist, I know most sportspersons have that fear, but very few are willing to admit it, they think it might affect how the public sees them. She was remarkably open about it though. In fact, to your question, I didn’t ask her that — she brought that up herself, on the very first day we talked. I remember laughing when I heard that — you are in the wrong sport, I remember telling her. But after I left her home that day, I knew I had something good — that fear of confrontation that she spoke about, I had to connect it up with her life, which was entirely about confrontation, first in the wrestling ring, then in her fight against sexual abuse.

And it is not just that — the stuff about stealing money when she was a kid, again, it is not like I asked her, did you steal? I asked her to speak about her childhood, and she brought it up herself, that bit about stealing from her classmates. She was very candid about her insecurities — you know, coming from a small village, moving to Rohtak, finding herself in an English medium school, she mentioned that three or four times, the English medium thing, it clearly mattered to her, that feeling of being out of place, of not belonging. 

It's like I said earlier – the thing about Sakshi is, she takes time to decide whether she wants to let you in, but once she decides, she goes all the way, there is no holding anything back, no matter how bad it may sound. Her insecurities, the bit about her family and money, she was totally open about every single thing.

Other than the openness and the honesty, a notable aspect of the book is the voice. I’ve followed your sports coverage for years, I know your writing voice. But though this book is in English, not Sakshi’s natural language, it is her voice I heard as I was reading, not yours. Was that difficult to pull off, subsuming your own writer’s voice and letting hers come through?

To be honest, I only realised that had happened just now, when you brought it up. I think it's because I was talking to her for as long as I did, I somehow internalised her voice, her speaking rhythms, and that came through in the writing. 

Now that I think about it, the reason her voice comes through is not because of the bits about wrestling, but the things she recalls about herself as a person. For instance, her early fascination with planes, and how when she was returning from her first international tour, the airline upgraded her to business class, and she was so thrilled, she decided to stay awake and enjoy it all, but she ended up sleeping through all of it — one of her greatest regrets, she told me. 

I’ve noticed this about other athletes as well — these small dreams, little disappointments, are where the human side of the star shines through. Like when Neeraj Chopra won his first Olympics, and when we talked, it was not so much about how that winning moment felt, but how happy he was that he could take his parents on a plane. You asked about voice — I think that comes once a sportsperson reveals the human being beneath the athlete, and if you can capture that, the person comes through, and so does the voice.

When the book hits the shelves, much of the curiosity among the reading public will be about her encounters with sexual abuse, her fight against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh — speaking of which, the impression I got was that she was, at least at first, a reluctant protestor even though she had some personal experience with sexual harassment.

Yes. To understand that, think about the sex abuse scandal in the US gymnastics team (the case of Larry Nassar) — and again, she was the one who brought it up. That case involved dozens of girls, including some very famous names. Sakshi told me, look, those girls who spoke out, they are well educated, some of them from well-off families, and they live in a country where you are encouraged to speak out. And yet the story did not come out for years. She also pointed out that in that case, it was just a doctor, not someone powerful or influential in the way an Indian politician can be — and yet, look how long it took for Nassar’s crimes to be outed.

India, she pointed out, is the complete opposite. Here, it is impossible, almost, for young girls from little villages to speak out. The abusers are invariably powerful, influential people and the system sides with them. The girls want to wrestle badly, so there is always the fear that if they speak out, that is the end of their career. They also fear that their parents will say ‘your safety and your good name is more important than any sport’, and keep them at home and get them married off. 

Sakshi knows all this, she lived that life — so initially she was reluctant to come out openly. But like I said, it takes her time to make a decision but once it is made, she is all in, all the way — and with the protests also, it was no different. 

You’ve spent enormous amounts of time with her — how would you sum her up as a person?

She's an absolute sweetheart – there is this innocence about her which seems really surprising considering all that she has achieved, all she has gone through. 

She was so totally open and giving. I’ve covered wrestling, spoken to other wrestlers — it is very difficult to get anything out of them; most times, you have to speak to their parents, coaches. In her case, it wasn't that, she was doing all of it on her own — even going places I didn’t know about, like the problem she had with her family when she decided to marry Satyawart, she talked about it, just like that, with no prompting. So yeah, my overriding impression was of someone who wore her accomplishments lightly, someone who was comfortable in her own skin, who was fine with being who she was, with all her insecurities and her failings, all of that.

I remember that press conference where she quit the sport, when Brij Bhushan’s cronies were elected to the WFI. I was watching, and even through the medium of television, I could sense how much she was hurting when she placed her shoes on the table and announced that she was done with the sport. What is your sense – is she, finally, at peace with herself, with her decision?

She wants to wrestle. Whenever we talked, it was very obvious to me that the wrestling mat is her true home, the place where she is most herself, where she feels the most at ease about who she is. And I think she salvages some of that, assuages some of the hurt, by coaching – she is a coach now, in her father-in-law’s academy. 

Actually, that was a chapter I wanted to write, but she felt that it was extending the book too long and it wasn’t really taking the story anywhere. I obviously disagreed with her about that, but it is her book, so yeah, I left that out though I did want that chapter on life after wrestling.

But to return to your question, see, her skills are still right up there. She would have been the favourite to qualify for her weight category for the Paris Olympics — and my sense is she would have medalled. So from a wrestling point of view, she was nowhere near done.

But at the same time, even though she knows that she could have been in Paris, I got the feeling that she is okay with how things have turned out, she is okay with the decision she took to quit when she did. That does not mean, though, that she is done with wrestling – like, even last year when we were speaking, she was going early mornings to the Karnail Singh Stadium where she would spar, sometimes with Satyawart, or with the kids she is coaching. And it is then, when she is kitted out and she steps onto the mat, that she feels most at home. 

Is she at peace? The sense I got of her, through all those conversations, is that she knew the consequences of her decision — and she is at peace with those consequences, and with herself.

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