Indian women’s boxing has surged globally, yet the athletes powering this rise still train within a fractured, unequal sporting ecosystem. Avantika Meattle’s The Champion Stories reframes their journeys through intimate, ground-level portraits that highlight both their extraordinary resilience and the pressing need for equitable resources and institutional support.
Over the last two decades, Indian women’s boxing has moved from the peripheries to the podium. The meteoric rise of Mary Kom, Laishram Sarita Devi, Lovlina Borgohain, Saweety Boora, and an emerging generation of youngsters punching their way into international circuits has signalled a paradigm shift in Indian women’s boxing. But these celebrated victories obfuscate a sports landscape shaped by limited infrastructure, uneven access to training, the persistent burden of social expectation, and conditions that continue to shape the journeys of most young women who enter the ring.
Filmmaker Avantika Meattle’s ‘Champion Stories’ is an ongoing anthology of short documentaries celebrating these women athletes whose grit, sacrifice, and achievements are rarely acknowledged in mainstream media. The series consists of eight compelling short films about India’s women boxers who have won World Championship gold and international titles but remain largely unrecognised outside the ring.
The rise of Indian women boxers has often been described as miraculous, but that framing obscures the structural inequalities that make their achievements appear exceptional rather than expected. Instead of retelling this familiar narrative of triumph, Meattle turns her camera to how these athletes, whose aspirations stand in stark contrast to the scarcity of resources around them, navigate their circumstances. Funding remains unevenly distributed across states; access to physiotherapy, nutritionists, and sports science is still concentrated in a few elite academies; and institutional funding frequently bypasses promising talent until they have already proved themselves on international stages. For women, these gaps widen further under the weight of gendered scrutiny masquerading as safety concerns, restrictive social norms, and the constant need to justify a career in sports.
Meattle insists that these boxers are not merely icons, but individuals whose daily lives reveal the resilience required to stay in the ring. By lingering on these domestic, profoundly intimate moments, she captures a form of endurance that rarely makes it into mainstream sporting discourse and humanises these young women athletes, who are often transformed into superhuman symbols by the media.
Indian women athletes deserve more than fleeting celebration after victory; they deserve sustained, systemic support that allows their potential to flourish long before the medals arrive. In amplifying their voices, Meattle returns our attention to the ground realities of women’s sport in India and to the champions who, despite everything, fight on. Champion Stories is Meattle’s tribute to them.
Watch The Rise of Parveen Hooda here:
Know more about the project @TheChampionStories.
Watch The Champion Stories here.
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