A Reading Path Down a Rabbit Hole: Prarthna Singh

Selected conversations, interviews and profiles with the Indian photographer Prarthna Singh.

Whitewall

Champion is a long-term body of work where I photograph young women training to be wrestlers and boxers at sports camps in the north-central states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, a region with unfortunately high rates of female infanticide, child marriage and domestic violence. Within this daunting setting, these women are using sport as a way to change their destinies. They give us hope in a time where a toxic masculinity-fuelled political ideology, layered on to years of misogyny tightens its grip across India.

In 2023 thirty female wrestlers accused the head of the Wrestling Federation of India of sexual harassment. The same women I had photographed over the past decade were now sitting in protest. The same bodies that fought and won Olympic medals for the nation were now being used as a tool of resistance against state sponsored violence.

It was equally important for me to be able to document them at their strongest, while competing on the mat and training at camp, but also at their bravest yet most vulnerable, when they sat in protest in the sweltering heat in the capital city of New Delhi.