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Punching her way up: Nikhat Zareen
With her second gold at the World Boxing Championship, Nikhat Zareen is silently winning battles for women in India too
Nikhat Zareen does not speak.
Inside the boxing hall at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in New Delhi, India’s elite women boxers are in high spirits—the Women’s World Boxing Championship is just days away (it was held in March this year), and everyone’s raring to go. They are in little groups, laughing and talking, warming up, lifting weights, wrapping their hands in bandages, working the heavy bags and pads. The happy hubbub of a boxing gym, the squeak of swiftly moving feet, the sharp thwack of gloves hitting leather, reverberates off the high ceiling.
Zareen, 26, talks to no one, she has no music in her ears, her mouth is a tight, grim line. You look at her eyes. They have a kind of unyielding ferocity that’s almost scary. You realise with a start that, whatever else may happen at the championship, Zareen will come out with a second world title.
At the Championship, inside a packed, deafening stadium, Zareen drops to her knees inside the ring and holds up her palms in prayer. She has won a second consecutive world championship. The only Indian boxer since Mary Kom to do so.
“This has to be the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” Zareen tells me later, smiling through a split upper lip. “Six fights in eight days. I’ve never had to fight these many times in a competition. It was a test for me, and I’m happy with how my body and mind responded.”
Does the responsibility of carrying Mary Kom’s legacy forward now rest on Zareen’s wiry shoulders?
The Indian women’s team’s chief coach, Bhaskar Bhatt, describes her as the finest boxer in the country right now. By winning her second world title, an opportunity to explode into her own orbit is tantalisingly close. The 2024 Paris Olympics are just days away, and Zareen is keeping count.
“If I have an obsession, it is to win an Olympic gold,” she says.
Ring leader
Zareen recounts how she accidentally became the first girl from Nizamabad, 186km from Hyderabad, Telangana, to pick up the sport. “I didn’t really choose boxing,” she says. “Boxing chose me.”
It began at school. She was in Class 6 and her classes would end almost two hours before that of her older sister, who was in Class 10. (She has two older sisters, both physiotherapists. Her younger sister is a badminton player.) So Zareen would hang around campus, waiting for their father to pick them up. She’d watch her friend, a sprinter, train on the school grounds. One day, the training group called her to join them for a race. To everyone’s surprise, she won.
“The coach called me and said ‘You should put your daughter into sports’,” says Zareen’s father, Mohammad Jameel. “I was happy. Because she was very naughty and got into fights. Parents would come and complain that my girl has hit their boy. She was always outside, irritating the neighbours by climbing trees and plucking fruit. I thought sports would give her an outlet for all that energy.”
It did, but it also give her a new kind of tree to climb. At school sports competition, Zareen noticed that there were girls in every sport except boxing. She asked her father why not. “He said, ‘Girls don’t get support because people think their daughters will get beaten up, that it will scar their faces. Then who will marry them?’” Zareen recalls. “I am very stubborn. It didn’t take me one second to decide that this is the sport I want to do!”
There were no other girls in boxing in Nizamabad at that time. So, Zareen trained with the boys. The first time she came home with a bruised and battered face, her mother, Parveen Sultana, broke down crying. But Zareen quickly found out that she had a gift for calculated violence, that she could dance around the ring and throw punches with precision and power.
“When I am in the ring, it’s my platform, I stand alone there, I am fighting my own battle, and my mind has no thoughts, except calculating what I have to do to win,” she says. Within a year of taking up boxing, she was the junior and sub-junior national champion. Another year, 2011, and she was the junior national champion.
Neighbours and extended family pressured her parents to reconsider continuing with a girl in boxing, letting her wear shorts. The family also faced some financial trouble, and had to sell their house and move to a smaller home. “I have faced everything and I have fought back,” Zareen said. “I just kept going and I didn’t stop.”
Knocking it out
By 2019, Zareen was already an accomplished boxer at the senior level, with enough confidence to challenge Mary Kom to a trial for a spot on the Indian team for the Tokyo Olympics. She lost a close, bitterly fought bout, earning the wrath of the legend, but also the respect of everyone watching.
But it was at the end of the pandemic period that Zareen truly blossomed. In 2022, she won a major international tournament, won her first world championship on debut and also won her first Commonwealth Games gold on debut.
“She is quicker on her feet, and she has worked a lot on developing different punches,” says Bhatt. “Hooks with both hands, a sharper jab, body punches, everything is more accurate, more flowing. And she has worked on fighting from both close and middle range.” At the world championship in Delhi, Parveen Sultana saw her daughter fight for the first time. No one in the stadium was more vocal in their support.
There is a firm belief in their circle that Zareen is primed for the Olympics in a way no Indian woman boxer has been since Mary Kom won her bronze when women’s boxing was introduced to the Games in 2012.
“I think I breathe boxing,” Zareen said. “If it wasn’t in my life, I don’t know what I would have been.”
