The Meaning Of Nikhat Zareen In Today's India

A punch against patriarchy, but her pluckiness is also a message of hope for young Muslims

- Siddharth.Saxena

For a girl who once defied menfolk in her family, stubbornly refusing to wear a salwar under her school uniform in mofussil Nizamabad, to a young woman possessing that rare instinctive cool of natural celebrity and asking the world whether she was trending on Twitter – India’s latest world champion Nikhat Zareen stands atop a podium of her own making.

Behind her very earnest inquiry on Twitter lay a larger statement. It was a heartfelt articulation of aspiration. It was an inquiry of, and for, herself, her life, her moment – the manicured hypocrisy that comes with adulthood not yet clouding her thinking.

But consider this: Zareen, the woman’s boxing world champion, is a proud, fiercely independent 25-year-old Muslim woman, and her go-to source for self-validation, Twitter, and by extension social media, is the space where many Muslims face daily vilification and demonisation.

That is why her victory, in that strange brawl-ballet that is women’s boxing, cannot be hers alone. It gets broken down into a million little pieces and gets passed along to thousands like her, the message getting amplified along the way.