What do women at the grassroots do when they want to free themselves from the shackles of society, which never fails to remind them of their abilities (read limits) based on their gender? Well, if we are talking about the likes of Manipur’s Laibi Phanjoubam, Ladakh’s Noor Jahan, or Mumbai’s Shabnam Mohd Umar Shaikh, they pick up a sport to break the glass ceiling.
In a country where patriarchy is often the norm, and stereotypes and societal pressures abound, these women are trying to carve out an identity for themselves by taking to sports and building a community around them. Despite the odds, which may range from not having enough funds to fighting against stereotypes, they go out to play their game. They form associations and clubs, crowdfund and even pay from their own pockets, sometimes lying to their family members and dealing with harassing men on the streets as well as on the ground, with just a few goals in mind — to “represent India”, “become a coach”, or to “play in the Olympics”.
Bending it without breaking
In Manipur, football is not just a popular game, it is a way of life. With 13 state-level clubs for men and five major league clubs for women, and as many as 269 football clubs in all, football has given many a ticket to a better life, and in the case of some women from Andro, a small hamlet located towards the east of capital Imphal, also empowered them, especially in a state marred by social unrest.
Leading the charge is Laibi Phanjoubam, a 65-year old woman who has made it her life’s mission to produce footballers from the village. Her club is called Andro Mahila Mandal Association Football Club (AMMA-FC) where young girls of the village train in the game, managed entirely by the women of Andro with Phanjoubam at the helm.
The humble club has given Indian Women’s League a 22-year old defender, Nirmala Devi Phanjoubam, who joined AMMA-FC at the age of 12 years. Nirmala has been representing the Tamil Nadu-based Sethu FC in the Indian Women’s League and was even part of the 32-member national senior women’s team to play the Pink Ladies Cup in Dubai from February 20-26 this year. Other former players of the club, such as Salam Rinaroy Devi and Bina Devi, have also become known names in the women’s football circuit in India.
The players trained at AMMA-FC have also been bringing laurels regularly — goalkeeper Sharubam Anika Devi played in India’s U-19 squad in Dhaka, Bangladesh, for the South Asian Football Federation’s U-19 championship last year. Thingbaibam Shakhenbi Devi brought home a gold trophy playing for Manipur’s U-18 women’s football team at the 2023 Khelo India Youth Games in Chennai.
Last year, AMMA-FC defeated Eastern Sporting Union (ESU), one of Manipur’s oldest women’s football clubs. It won the government’s grassroots initiative 7-a-side U-17 Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao tournament in which Phanjoubam Nirmala Devi of AMMA-FC was termed the best player, while Chingakham Geeta Devi received the award for best goalie.
Phanjoubam underscores the problem that young teenage girls face in the village. “After the association was formed, I took up various initiatives for the welfare of the women of Andro – to prevent their children from straying away from the right path and help them become capable members of society,” she shares. “At the time, people in Andro were sceptical and often said that nothing would come of anything done by women. Despite the taunts, I gathered up kids who were enthusiastic,” she adds.
Getting involved in drugs and early elopement of teenagers from troubled families are a reality in the village. This is coupled by other political and social issues. Phanjoubam wanted to save the girls from this mess.
Most of the girls come from poor family backgrounds, and men of the family are usually ‘wasted’, hence the burden of taking care of everything falls on women, notes a documentary titled Andro Dreams that filmmaker Meena Longjam made on the life of Laibi Phanjoubam and the girls of AMMA-FC. The women don’t just take care of the households but also earn for their livelihoods, either by setting up shops, working in the farms or weaving, taking up piggery and sericulture. Phanjoubam is one such example, the documentary notes.
Phanjoubam never married to avoid gendered expectations. Instead, she got AMMA-FC recognised by the All Manipur Football Association in 1999 and continues to train young girls operating it from a thatched dormitory in the village. Not a single penny is taken from the girls, as she says: “They belong to very poor families, if I ask for money, they will simply drop out.”
The humble lady is doing everything that she can, even inviting senior players to boost the morale of the young girls. She teaches them weaving as well and provides them computer education. But funding remains an issue.
“As one knows, a huge sum of money is needed to maintain a football team. For this, AMMA-FC organised charity shows and lotteries, set up banana farms and also started a weaving society to earn some money,” she shares with FE.
There has also been some support in terms of aid from well-wishers and humanitarian organisations. Bikram Singh Thockchom, an amateur football player, quit his job as the marketing head at a multinational infotech company in Delhi, wanting to be a coach, and extended assistance for the dormitory of the club in 2015. He also purchased a small plot of land for setting up a kitchen garden. Tata Trusts supported them a few years ago, sponsoring the monthly salaries of two coaches from 2019 till 2021, but they are not doing that anymore, as per Phanjoubam.
Healing Lives, an NGO based in Delhi, also donated 50 boots and 60 sets of uniforms for the players. In 2023, a ‘well wisher’ helped in getting financial assistance of Rs 283,000 from SIDBI bank, which was used for purchasing kits for the players, Phanjoubam shares.
In one of the scenes in the documentary, Andro Dreams, some girls are seen going for their practice in their worn-out shoes. But Phanjoubam has been successful in changing the attitude of the parents in the village. “Earlier girls were forbidden to play, but now parents support them. When we organised a school-level tournament, several girls joined AMMA FC,” she adds.
A power play on ice
Ladakh has become synonymous with ice hockey – in fact, 80% of the players in the national men’s team and 100% in the women’s team hail from the picturesque region in the northern embrace of India. The men’s team made their debut in 2009 and the women’s team in 2016 but their journey has been far from smooth. Fighting the odds and scrambling to participate in international tournaments so that they can eventually get ranked and bring India its global glory at the Olympics in the near future, the men’s team recently made their debut at the 2025 Asian Winter Games held from February 7 to 14 in China.
The women’s ice hockey team, however, has its own story to tell.
When they started playing, as the ‘ice time’ was limited, they faced resistance from society. “Back in the days, we were told to do a dance performance in between ice hockey matches. So women were invited for that, but not to play ice hockey,” says 34-year-old Noor Jahan, a senior team member and top goalkeeper who has now retired from the sport to take up the role of a coach. She is also working in the administration of the Ice Hockey Federation of India (IHAI), a national sports promotion organisation.
She says that the women players held protests to be able to play the game. But they still were able to play only a few exhibition matches in between.
There were few very girls initially who were capable of playing ice hockey, so sometimes in between local championships, there would be one exhibition game in which women would play ice hockey. Jahan shares that a time came when people wanted to stop women’s ice hockey entirely which led to a movement in which female athletes came to the front. “It was led by one of our seniors, Stanzin Dolker, who along with other senior players ensured there would be women’s ice hockey — even with two teams,” she adds.
In 2015, they decided to form the Ladakh Women Ice Hockey Foundation (LWIHF) headed by Dolker. LWIHF has 15 founding members with new members joining in making the total count to 40 now. The foundation has been able to provide training to almost 500 women in Ladakh. It has been travelling to rural regions of Ladakh and providing coaching to young children.
Eventually, the local clubs saw their potential and started providing coaching to the women along with the men. They made their debut as a national team in 2016.
“There were a lot of challenges in the beginning, infrastructure, equipment, etc, were not easily accessible and a lot of times we would borrow it from the men’s team and the boys, alongside whom we were playing in the local championships… even when we went for our first championship in China in 2016, a lot of us had borrowed equipment from different clubs that we represent,” recalls Jahan.
No sporting glory comes without its fair share of struggles, shares Rinchen Dolma (34), who has been playing ice hockey as a child since 2001. Like many athletes in Ladakh, she faced significant challenges such as lack of proper equipment, infrastructure, and coaching, which made it difficult to train and compete at a higher level.
“Despite these obstacles, my passion for the sport kept me going. Over the years, I have had the honour of representing India in various national and international tournaments,” she tells FE.
In 2008, Dolma was awarded best athlete in the National Winter Games in Gulmarg, winning two gold medals and one silver. Her speed skating career took her to Finland and Romania, where she competed in international events. Later, as an ice hockey player, she represented India as captain in the IIHF Women’s Ice Hockey Championships, competing in Taiwan (2016), Thailand (2017), Malaysia (2018), Abu Dhabi (2019), and Thailand (2023 Asia Oceania Championship).
Diskit Angmo (28), too, started as a figure skater and says she “had no idea that women could play hockey”. Angmo, whose elder brother Tsewang Gylason is the captain of the men’s ice hockey team, says, “Most members of the Indian ice hockey men’s team were from Ladakh and seeing them, we also wanted to represent India.”
Similarly, Rigzin Yangdol’s (29) ice hockey journey began at the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). She had failed her Class 10th exams, but SECMOL gave her an opportunity to take up the sport. “This institution played a major role in promoting women’s hockey. I heard that they had to fight hard in the beginning to create a women’s team,” says Yangdol. She says she didn’t own her own equipment until 2019. Before that, every winter, she would use different skates and equipment of various sizes, which was a major challenge.
Dolma notes, “The foundation (LWIHF) has helped secure and distribute equipment, making it possible for more players to participate.” As a result, more women are now playing ice hockey in Ladakh, and the sport has gained national and international recognition.
The players acknowledge the growing support for women ice hockey and say that with Ladakh becoming a union territory, the pace of infrastructure development has improved. Corporates like Royal Enfield have also come forward; in 2023, they supported the team, adds Jahan.
Getting a much-needed leg-up
Parcham, a sports club working in Mumbra, Mankhurd and three locations in Bandra in Mumbai, is not just training girls to become footballers. It is aiming to break “stereotypes based on religion, class, caste, gender and other kinds of marginalisation” through an “unconventional activity of football for adolescent girls”.
It all started in 2012 in Mumbra, one of the country’s largest Muslim ghettoes marred by poverty, where “people live in a situation similar to slum dwellers except in buildings, many without access to water supply”, as per Parcham. “A majority of the school going children are first generation learners. Mumbra provides little opportunity for formal employment with a majority of the youth driving rickshaws or setting up small shops for mobile repairs and such,” it adds.
Farhat, an administrator at Parcham, tells FE that it’s a conservative locality and for girls stepping outside in itself is a challenge, let alone playing football. “So they would even go to the extent of lying to their families to play the game. Their brothers would hit them on the street itself if they saw them playing football,” she says. Their families would object to them wearing shorts and some have even forced them to stop playing the game.
“These things are a mental roadblock and societal pressures. Maulanas and fatwas act as additional hindrances in their pursuit to play,” she says. “Initially, we started with 20 girls but many dropped out and soon we were left with just five,” she adds.
With no facilities or ground for the girls to play, they had to share the existing ground with the boys, which led to harassment on multiple occasions. She shares an instance where a religious gathering was given priority over their practice even though they were present in the ground in the morning and the gathering was supposed to happen in the second half. They were asked to go but they relented, she adds.
Twenty-two-year-old Shabnam Mohd Umar Shaikh’s journey of becoming a D-licence coach — the first such feat at Parcham — is a story which is not surprising but underscores a woman’s fight to simply be, in her own right, to do what she wants to do. She started playing football in Mankhurd with Parcham as a kid. “I would go in a hijab and be scared of going to the ground. But after facing harassment in public places over the years, I have changed and now I go ‘bindaas’ (carefree),” she tells FE.
Boys would stalk her and make unwanted advancements, whistle and harass despite saying ‘no’ multiple times. She had to indulge in a physical scuffle to fight them off. Last year, when she was coaching her regular batch of around 40 children, most of them girls, she was hit on the chest and nose by a tennis ball aimed at her by boys playing cricket nearby. She had to spend six days in the hospital, where the injury to her nose was treated.
“They would not just hit me but would try to deliberately hurt girls on their chest. They would say you are a girl and you are not supposed to wear shorts and play outside, you should sit at home and do domestic work. They would mock us — playing as if they would win nationals,” she shares.
Another girl, Haram Shaikh (18), took up football with Parcham five years ago and would only tell her mother then. Her father would yell at her and ask her to wear a burqa if she wanted to go outside and play. She would wear the burqa to the ground and remove it at the ground to play. “Sometimes when abba was not at home, I would go without burqa,” she says. Burqa, she says, was made compulsory for her whether she goes to a family function or outside. But managing the game with burqa was difficult, so after a point she started speaking about it at home and steadily she has been able to shed it for the game.
However, 18-year-old Umme Hanee in Mumbra is an outlier, as her family has been supportive and she started playing football with Parcham for the past one-and-a-half years. She has wanted to play football since she was 8 and Ronaldo is her role model. She aims to play for the national women’s team. Hanee is a talented girl, she is a science student, writes and is a published author as well and wants to make a mark in football. She has found her niche in goalkeeping and is getting trained by coach Shabnam.
After persistent activism and lobbying by the young girls and Parcham, a five acres of land, adjacent to Maulana Azad Stadium, was eventually given to the girls to play by the Thane Municipal Committee in 2019.
The girls played the 3rd Fatima Bi Savitri Bai Football Tournament on that ground during that year. However, over years, the ground has turned into a dumpyard.
Some girls have been able to play at the district level with other teams but they aim to play at the district level and register as a team of their own by next year; so they find spaces here and there and practice as much as they can. For a year, they stopped practicing because of lack of space to play. Now, they are temporarily playing in a small ground where construction is happening. They have to book turfs for an hourly basis which cost around Rs 2000-3000 an hour. Crowdfunding and voluntary donations have been the sources of funds, Farhat tells FE. She says Azim Premji Foundation came forward to support them financially in June last year for sporting gear and practices but they are not able to reclaim the ground as their own.