India's sportswomen playing to be seen
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How sport is giving some young women in India a way out of child marriage and allowing them to be seen.
Officially, the practice of child marriage is illegal in the country. But UNICEF estimates that over 200 million girls and women in India have been married before they turned 18. Take Munna as an example. Her mother was fifteen when she married and Munna herself was only 14 when she was told she would be a child bride. However, she fought back, using football as her weapon. She broke social norms and took up the sport, including wearing shorts on the pitch, and fended off various attempts to marry her off early. Now her rebellion has spread to her youngest sister, who has felt emboldened by her elder sister and has made it to the state football team.
Sport has also helped members of a marginalised community - the Siddis, who were originally brought to India from Africa mainly as slaves - to battle against discrimination. For Shahin her route was via judo.
Divya Arya reports on how sport is helping some young women to break free from the bonds of early marriage and to forge an identity for themselves.
This episode of The Documentary comes to you from Assignment, investigations and journeys into the heart of global events.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's a familiar scene of music radio podcasts. |
| 0:09.5 | It's a familiar scene of daily drudgery that greets me when I reach 19-year-old Munna's house. |
| 0:17.0 | She and her mother Lali toiling away, drawing water from the well, washing clothes, as Munna's father rests inside. |
| 0:25.6 | Once Lali is done here, she will walk for a mile to the nearby field to work as a farm labourer. |
| 0:34.5 | Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:38.4 | I'm Divya Aria and this is Assignment from the northwest of India. |
| 0:44.3 | Women in this village in the Indian state of Rajasthan, a nine-hour drive from the country's capital Delhi, are mostly illiterate and they are married off early. |
| 0:56.6 | Lali and I are the same age, |
| 1:04.9 | but the toll on her of a tough life is evident. Lali says everything changed when she became a child bride. It made life so difficult, |
| 1:14.2 | bringing up children, taking care of the husband and daily chores. |
| 1:19.3 | And if you get a husband who is alcoholic, then it's very difficult to run the household. |
| 1:25.5 | But what happened to her was set to be repeated when Lali decided to get |
| 1:30.5 | Munna and her elder sister married early too. |
| 1:34.5 | Though illegal, child marriage is widely practiced in India, especially here in Rajasthan. |
| 1:40.8 | UNICEF's latest estimate is that 216 million girls and women in India today have been married before they turned 18. |
| 1:50.8 | Munna was only 14 when she was told she would be a child bride. |
| 1:55.8 | My sister was 16 and I was 14 years old in 2020 when she was married off. When the family came to |
| 2:03.0 | see her, my mother also showed me to them and offered that I'd be married to the groom's younger |
| 2:08.6 | brother. Munna's mother, Lali, was only 15 when she was married. So why did she marry off her |
| 2:15.4 | eldest daughter in childhood, even if she knew it's illegal. |
| 2:21.7 | They say that if girls step out of their homes, they will be exposed to bad influences and run away with boys. |
| 2:29.9 | We do the marriage quietly. We don't print a wedding invitation or put up a tent. |
... |
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