The significance of Rezoana Mallick Heena, India's fastest 400-meter sprinter

Rezoana Mallick Heena, 15, became the fastest 400-metre sprinter in India, with a time of 53.22 seconds, at the National Open 400m Championships in Thiruvananthapuram. (Photo credit: Arjun Ajay)

After six years of working on my book on women, sport and citizenship in India, the writer Ramachandra Guha had an editorial intervention for me in 2021. “You have an East Indian Catholic, a Sikh, a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee, a Bengali Communist, there are Parsis and Anglo-Indians in the background. There is no Muslim woman in this book. You should address that absence, even if it is in 200 words.”

It was an interview on Zoom, conducted for the New India Foundation fellowship, which had changed its in-person interview in Bangalore for the pandemic. Guha made the concluding remark on my book project, a history of the Indian republic told through the lives of eight women athletes and one running school. A women’s history of India, experienced through the body, as I saw it.

I had begun writing this book in 2014, in the aftermath of the killing of the 23-year-old student who went to watch a film at 6 pm on a Sunday evening. The protests and marches that followed her death filled media, social media and public discourse for the next several months. Yet even in those conversations, within and without the rallies, I heard the three questions: But what was she doing out at night (around 8:30 pm, as it happened)? Where was she going? What was she wearing?

Women in the subcontinent are often primed to stay at home, within the Lakshman Rekha drawn for them. Is there anything for which they are permitted to put themselves out there in the world? My answer was sport. Sport permits women to perform their nationalism. It seems to bequeath them a higher degree of citizenship. My idea was to look at remarkable women athletes through the decades of independent India (more or less) from the 1940s to the current moment.

Guha was right. If this was a history of women’s citizenship in India, where was the Muslim woman?

This year, some months after I finally handed in the manuscript I had worked on for eight years, 15-year-old Rezoana Mallick Heena emerged as if in answer to Guha’s question.

Rezoana Mallick Heena, 15 (Photo credit: Arjun Ajay)

Heena became the fastest 400-metre sprinter in India, with a time of 53.22 seconds, at the National Open 400m Championships in Thiruvananthapuram. Although she won the event in the under-16 category, journalist Jonathan Selvaraj noted that she also beat the timing of senior 400-metre champion Jyothi Dandika who did 53.25 seconds. In the process, she also broke a 10-year-old national record in the under-16 category set by Anjana Thamke in 2012 who ran 400 metres in 54.57 seconds. Heena ran more than 1.35 seconds faster. In athletics, it is the equivalent of a generation.

The athlete who scouted her coach

The very next month, at the Asian Under 18 Athletics Championships in Tashkent, Heena won gold at the 400 metres event, shaving 0.24 seconds off her time in March to post a timing of 52.98 seconds. In the process, she became the fastest under-18 400-metre sprinter in Asia, breaking an eight-year championship record set by Salwa Eid Nasser of Bahrain, a significant milestone considering any Asian competition includes sports giant China. And she is the fastest quarter-miler in India this year across all age groups. (To put it in perspective of global timings, this would not be good enough to place her in the final of the 400 metres at the Olympics. At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the seventh-place finisher had a time of 50.88 seconds, the eighth competitor did not finish.)

There is much that remains to be achieved. But in 2023, she is the fastest quarter-miler in Asia (and India). Heena also won silver in the 200 metres and the 400 metres relay at Tashkent, emerging as the athlete who won the most individual medals for India.

Heena is the daughter of a contractual schoolteacher in Nadia, West Bengal. In 2021, she inverted the natural course of events by scouting her coach Arjun Ajay, the reporter Selvaraj has written. Heena had created an Instagram account on her father’s phone without informing him, and started following athlete Priya Mohan, the fastest 400-metre runner in 2021, and other athletes. Mohan trained under coach Arjun Ajay, and Heena liked so many of Ajay’s posts that he had looked her up in return. A Bengal athlete at the time, Heena had put up her training videos on her profile, and the coach thought she had potential and reached out to her. The family agreed to buy her a train ticket to Ooty to train under him.

“We are Muslim, so sometimes it might seem that girls will not be encouraged to play sports or that it might be a problem because she had to wear shorts when she trains,” Heena’s uncle Imran said in the Sportstar interview. “But we are more adhunik (modern) in our thinking. That has never been an issue in our family. And it’s not a problem in the village as well. Everyone has supported her and when we realised how senior a coach Arjun sir was we trusted him completely.”

Heena’s parents Rezaul and Anima both played kabaddi at the national level. Her mother Anima accompanied her when she moved to Bangalore to train, setting up a household almost entirely by herself so she could be with Heena. She left her younger daughter, aged 10, back home with her husband and in-laws. "Initially, I was reluctant. She was only 14 then," she said on the phone. "But Heena said this is the time that she could make her career. And my husband and in-laws were all in favour of her going. My husband (Rejaul) played kabaddi at (the) nationals. My brothers-in-law have all played kabaddi. Even my mother-in-law played sport as a young person. So I decided to come with her. People make careers in different ways. Some study and get jobs. She will win medals for Bengal, for India. She will go to the Olympics."

Rezoana Mallick Heena with her mother, Anima. (Photo credit: Arjun Ajay)

Anima herself got two chances to play at the national level, and kabaddi was how she met her husband Rejaul. She did not mention her playing career herself but spoke about it when asked. "My family allowed me to play but they did not support me. But I am supporting Heena. She will do what I couldn't."

If I were writing the book today, I would have profiled Heena. She is the fastest 400-metre sprinter in Asia at this moment. Consider also the improvement she has demonstrated. From March to April 2023, she shaved off 0.24 seconds from her timing to drop below 53 seconds at the 400 metres. If she continues in this rich vein, she is likely to win medals for India in the future (she's not going to the Asian Games in Hangzhou). But more than anything else, it is her age. She is only 16, the age Pillavullakandi Thekeparambil Usha was when she went to her first Olympic Games in Moscow, 1980. She could well be the definitive Indian athlete of this decade.

Heena’s story addresses Guha factually. But structurally, his question remains. Because Heena is an outlier. Unambiguously. Not only as a prominent elite athlete, but in athletics or track and field in general in India. Look up the events section on the Athletics Federation of India website. Year by year, over the 10 ten years, go through the major national (junior and senior) competitions where the results are uploaded. Count how many Muslim women you find. I found one before Heena, M. Mubassina, who won silver medals at the long jump and heptathlon events at the Asian Youth Athletics Championships in 2022 and bronze at long jump at the Asian Under-18 Athletics Championships in Tashkent this year. Both Heena and Mubassina are exceptional not only in their results, but by their presence itself. At best, there are a couple more Muslim women who compete in track and field.

What about other sport? If you are thinking of Nikhat Zareen, the boxer who won the World Championship in 2022 (in the 52-kilo category) and in 2023 (50 kg), you would be thinking of another exception. She is a headlining champion and the only one of her kind. There are no Muslims among her competitors in India at this moment, there were none before her. A sui generis case. (Zareen is a particularly interesting example because she has vocally supported the hijab, though she doesn’t wear it herself, pointing to the International Boxing Association’s 2019 decision to permit the hijab on television interviews when the debate about the hijab going against school uniforms arose in Karnataka.)

“Alfiya Pathan from Nagpur is doing well at the junior level,” Selvaraj said. “Last year, Alfiya, who wears black, form-fitted shirt and tights under her boxing vest, won gold at the Asian Championships in the 81kg + category. There a few athletes in other combat sports—Afreen Hyder from Kashmir has competed for India at international competitions in taekwondo while Ayeera Chisti—also from Kashmir—has medalled at the Wushu junior world championships. Tasnim Mir in Indian badminton is another player to keep an eye on. She was briefly World No. 1 in the juniors last year and has started competing at the senior level this year. She is currently supported by Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), who also signed P.V. Sindhu early in her career, so they clearly see potential in her.”

These are promising talents, most of them junior level. But think about the question yourself. How many Indian Muslim women in sport can you name? Look it up on the internet too. Other than Heena and Nikhat Zareen, the other names you will find are 20 years old —Sania Mirza, the first Indian woman to be seeded in tennis, and Nooshin Al-Khadeer, one of three Indian women to have 100 wickets in one-day Internationals. Four Muslim women in 76 years of Independence.

What explains this tiny number? There is no data that looks at women in Indian sport in terms of their religion—indeed, there is little data on women in Indian sport in general. To my mind, the Sachar Committee Report of 2006 offers the most likely reason—the ghettoization of Muslims in India, due to historical and political reasons, the community’s own sense of insecurity and the attitude of ‘neglect’ that the authorities had towards these ghettos. ‘Water, sanitation, electricity, schools, public health facilities, banking facilities, anganwadis, ration shops, roads and transport facilities are all in short supply in these areas… the absence of these services impacts Muslim women the most, because they are reluctant to venture beyond the confines of “safe” neighbourhoods to access these facilities from elsewhere,’ the report noted.

When the women of a community are afraid to step out for water and toilet access, how likely are they to play sport?

What is more likely to encourage them to take up sport, Selvaraj said, is the visible success of a Rezoana Mallick Heena and a Nikhat Zareen. “Nikhat (Zareen) is from a very different social class compared to Sania (Mirza). Her dad is a working-class man from Nizamabad which has a very significant Muslim population. Nikhat also obviously has Muslim identifiers—her name, the fact that she does the ‘sajdah’ after winning, her pictures with her sisters who wear the hijab. In Nikhat, a lot of Muslim girls see a pathway to the visible hallmarks of success in modern Indian life—job, government acclaim and prize money, Instagram fame.”

I had thought I’d end with a set of recommendations. But instead, I’ll end with a prayer. May everything Selvaraj said be true by 2047. May Ramachandra Guha never have to ask the question he asked me again.