Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 18 June 2018 | Page 58
WEIGHTY MATTERS
Arms
And
The
Pious
Girl
A rare hijabi a
thlete
flourishes amid Kerala’s
charged atmosphere
AKHIL KOMACHI
by Thufail P.T.
M
AJIZIYA Bhanu has not read
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. But, as
she prepares to travel to Tur-
key this October, the novel
seems to hold up a mirror to
her life. The Nobel laureate’s
2002 book, set in the eastern Turkish
city of Kars, has the headscarf as one of
its central themes. It probes the inner
conflicts of hijabi girls amid growing
tensions between secularists and Isla-
mists in modern Turkey. Bhanu, a
23-year-old Muslim girl from Orkat-
teri, a serene village in Kerala’s
Kozhikode district, has knowingly or
unknowingly pushed the headscarf into
the centre of a socio-cultural debate.
The burkini-clad Bhanu has qualified to
58 OUTLOOK 18 June 2018
participate in the World Armwrestling
Championship to be held in Antalya, 17
hours away from Kars, after winning gold
in the National Armwrestling Champ
ionship held in Lucknow in May. Earlier,
she had taken the ‘Mr Kerala’ physique
contest by surprise to win the women’s
title in Kochi this February. Local media
celebrated the victory by flashing pictures
and visuals of her flexing her muscles in a
black modesty suit covering her skin from
head to ankle. She soon became an inter-
net sensation and gained fame as a rare
hijabi athlete—perhaps India’s only one.
Bhanu had worried that the hijab would
prove to be an impediment. “I started
doing research on the internet and found
an Egyptian woman using modesty dress
for fitness contests. So, I ordered a similar
one just ahead of the competition in
COVERED IRON Majiziya Bhanu at
a gym in Vatakara, Kozhikode
Kochi,” she tells Outlook. Her mother
Raziya says, “We have no role model in
sports who wears the hijab. Sania Mirza is
the one Muslim woman we hear about in
sports. But she doesn’t wear the hijab.”
Bhanu says she has not seen any Muslim
woman from her home state compete in
armwrestling or powerlifting. She’s seen a
few from other states, but “We learn they
are Muslims only when they reveal their
names, because they don’t wear the hijab.”
“I was initially keen on boxing, but my
coach directed me to powerlifting and
armwrestling,” says Bhanu. She has won
medals in powerlifting, including the sil-
ver medal in the Asian Powerlifting Cha
mpionship held in Indonesia in May 2017.