Ice and fire: This ice hockey goalie saves goals and precious art too
In cold, cold Leh, one young woman is holding down two unusual jobs. Noor Jahan is both art restorer and goalie on India’s women’s ice hockey team
Inside a 200-year-old building in Leh, at the region’s first art conservation lab, Noor Jahan, 33, gently scrapes oil and soot off a decades-old thangka painting, using a long cotton bud. The work comes from Keylong village, 350 km away in Himachal Pradesh. And under the bright, white light of her studio and her careful cleaning, vivid reds and yellows of Buddhist deities slowly emerge.
Jahan’s hands are used to such delicate work. But that’s not all they can do. Jahan is also the goalie of the Indian women’s national ice hockey team. She saved 190 goals of 230 attempted shots at the 2016 IIHF Women’s Challenge Cup of Asia, her first international competition. “We didn’t even know that the number of goals attempted and saved are counted in international tournaments,” she says. Jahan won the best goalie trophy at the event.
Ice hockey is very much part of Ladakhi culture, says Jahan. She spent much of her childhood playing on frozen lakes. “The girls would split into teams, sometimes competing in district-level tournaments,” she says. “It was all for fun, but I loved every bit of it.” So, when most of her friends moved out of Leh after Class 10, Jahan persuaded her businessman father and farmer mother to move her to a government-run school, so she could stay back, cheaply. “I was happy to play ice hockey for two more winters,” says Jahan.
She moved to Delhi eventually, pursuing a degree in Commerce, but returning to Leh every winter, despite the minus-30-degree temperatures, to play. “My parents were fed up,” she recalls. “I had lost interest in my studies and kept asking them for money so I could come home to play.” She also worked odd jobs to fund her trips.
Jahan scraped through graduation in 2011. That summer, her life changed. In Leh, she watched art conservationists restore wall paintings at the Chamba temple for the first time. “I was hooked,” she says. It excited her enough to return to Delhi to spend two years at the Delhi Institute of Heritage Research and Management, heading home to Leh on breaks. For her first internship, Jahan was part of the Himalayan Cultural Heritage Foundation’s project to restore a stupa below Ladakh’s Shey Palace.
“I was doing menial jobs such as collecting and clearing stones from the site. But it was fun because I was learning so much,” she says. She also lived on-site in the Nubra Valley’s remote Diskit Monastery for about a month, helping to restore their murals.
By 2013, Jahan had found her mentors: Sreekumar Menon and Maninder Singh Gill of Noida-based Art Conservation Solutions. “They believed that Ladakh needed a permanent conservation studio, and pushed me to open one,” says Jahan.
A new beginning
The idea was enticing. Ice hockey doesn’t pay the bills. Conservation projects, at least, come in fits and starts. So, in 2017, Jahan set up Shesrig Ladakh, continuing with ice hockey and pursuing a PhD in wall paintings from the National Museum Institute, Delhi. She also caught a lucky break. Switzerland-based Achi Association, which supports Buddhist art and architecture conservation, helped restore the three-storey building that housed her studio, and opened a small museum alongside, documenting the organisation’s conservation work in the union territory.
Shesrig Ladakh has been busy since it formally opened in May 2022. “Every household here has paintings and artefacts that need restoration,” she says. She just spent 25 days in Shara, a village 60 km from Leh, restoring the paintings inside a 13th-century stupa.
Freeze frame
On the ice, it’s been a different story. The women’s team to play a tournament in Thailand in 2017, but had no funds, no sponsor. A news website ran a story on their struggles, and donations poured in. In 10 days, the team had ₹32 lakh. They did a 10-day training session in Kazakhstan before heading to Thailand.
They lost the first match against the UAE, but after a nail-biting finish, won the second one against the Philippines. “We were crying and shouting when we heard the national anthem. I’d waited for that moment all my life,” says Jahan. “The Philippines team was crying too. They knew how hard we had struggled for that victory.”
India has no Olympic-size ice hockey rink. Players practise in smaller recreational rinks in malls. The women’s team, with 18 out of 20 women from Ladakh, hone their skills on frozen ponds in winter. But interest has been building. “Our 2017 win got noticed,” says Jahan. “People started donating gear and funds. More girls from across the country now come to us, wanting to play ice hockey.” The team has been organising national training camps in Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh for them.
In 2022, the team won silver at the Union Women Ice Hockey Tournament in Dubai, UAE. Jahan was awarded the best player in a match against Thailand at a major championship in Bangkok last month. But Jahan has bigger dreams. “If we had just one Olympic-sized rink in India, we would be playing in the Olympics,” she says. “That’s how dedicated, disciplined, talented and eager the women’s team is.”
