The Female Fight Club

Back in 2018, Sonam Zomba, barely out of her teens, rushed out of the corner in her first profes­sional MMA (fight), only for her head to get caught viciously under her opponent’s arms. “I was very inexperienced then,” Zomba says, recalling that match. Kiran Singh, the opponent, held Zomba’s head tightly under her arms, and although Zomba tried to work her way out of it, punching Singh several times, and then rolling her body, along with Singh’s, again and again on the mat, the grip only kept getting tighter.

Back in her hometown in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, her family members and neighbours watched the fight unfold on TV astonished. They had no idea that Zomba, who had moved to Guwahati to pursue a college degree, had taken up this chal­lenging and sometimes ultra-violent sport professionally. “All they knew was that I had joined an MMA gym to lose weight and for self-defence,” she says with a big laughter. “It was a huge shock to them to see me fighting.”

To make matters worse, the fight wasn’t going according to plan. As the grip over Zomba’s head tightened, and she tried to fight her way out, the referee suddenly called for the bell. He had spotted something. Zomba’s elbow had popped off from its socket. Zomba doesn’t know how the people back home responded to this image, but she imagines their astonishment would have quickly turned to horror. “My elbow had dislocat­ed. So they were obviously unhappy,” she says.

Zomba’s family and friends back home became completely against her taking up the sport, but Zomba persisted. “They would keep telling me, and they still do, to take up something else. Why couldn’t I play cricket or football or some other sport like other girls?” says Zomba. “They would say, this is not a sport for a girl.”

However, Zomba—whose victory last week over Singa­pore’s Shi Yin Tan at Matrix Fight Night, currently India’s larg­est MMA promotion, brought high praises, including from her state’s chief minister—remained adamant. And she is today part of a growing breed of women taking to the tough and often times violent world of MMA in India.

The origins of MMA can be traced right back to ancient times, to even ancient Greece, where the sport of pankration— meaning “all powers”—allowed contestants to use a blend of fighting styles to fight one another. MMA, as we know it today, is said to have evolved directly from a Brazilian combat sport known as vale tudo—Portuguese for “anything goes”—which was popular in the 1920s. The sport started to come into its own in the 1990s, with the formation of different promotions in the US. But it struggled for mainstream acceptance. It was viewed as a barbaric sport, with critics calling it human cockfighting— the promotion of the sport as one with no rules did not help— and it was even banned in many states in the US.

The game is more evolved and sanitised today. Fighters are separated into different weight categories, there are time limits for fights, and judges determine a winner if both fighters en­dure. Fighters from various fighting styles still compete with one another, but many things that were once permitted—such as knees and kicks to the head of a downed opponent or strikes to the back of the head or to the spine—are now outlawed, and the fights themselves have become more athletic and skill-oriented. The sport has also become incredibly popular, not just in the US, but globally.

But it has been, until recently, mostly male-dominated. Most promotions did not include female MMA fights, and if they did, they were seen more as novelty acts. This has changed in the last decade or so with the emergence of female fighters like Ronda Rousey, who went on to become a huge star at Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the most dominant MMA promotion today.

MMA has been growing in India too, with the emergence of many local promotions, and the fights getting telecast on TV channels too. But the growth in female fighting has been slower here. That is now changing, as young Indian female fighters like Zomba take to the ring professionally, and some even traveling to fight in MMA promotions abroad.

Of all the women who took to professional MMA in India, the one to arguably create the biggest stir was Ritu Phogat. A member of the country’s illustrious wrestling family—her elder sisters Geeta Phogat and Babita Kumari were coached by their father Mahavir Singh Phogat to gold medals at the Commonwealth Games, a story that was made into the hit Bollywood film Dangal—Ritu Phogat was also a top wrestler in her own right. Phogat was the first Indian to win a silver at the U-23 World Championship (to add to a bronze earned earlier), and an Asian Championships bronze-medallist. She created a stir when she quit wrestling for MMA in 2019.

Switching from wrestling to professional MMA isn’t un­common internationally, but it was something no top Indian athlete had done before. Many were stunned by her decision, but to Phogat, it was a way to create a name in a new sport.

Phogat had a blazing start to her MMA career, going on to win seven out of eight matches in ONE Championship, a top combat sport promotion, but then lost two fights in a row, before she took a break.

Last month, barely a year since she became a mother, she made her comeback with a match against Japan’s Ayaka Miura in Qatar.

“I’ll admit it, it was hard,” she says, referring to juggling her training with caring for a newborn. “There were lots of ups and downs, and it was both emotionally and physically draining. Here, there is this little life in one hand. But then I also have this big dream. And it was hard to match those.”

Training for a comeback, while caring for a newborn, Phogat says, was incredibly tough. “I was working out even when I was pregnant. After delivery, I began training, doing what I could, from yoga, cardio [exercises], workouts. But it is hard. Your body changes after pregnancy,” she says.

She would often feel low, Phogat says. But she would keep telling herself that motherhood could not mean the end of her dreams. “Usually people think after you become a mother, you can’t do anything. But I have always been someone who has set high standards for myself. I wasn’t going to let pregnancy or motherhood become a barrier to achieving my goals,” she says. Phogat did not win the match, losing to her opponent by submission, but she is incredibly proud, she says, that she even made it into the ring so soon after becoming a mother.

Phogat isn’t the only Indian female fighting in some of the biggest MMA leagues. Last year, Puja ‘The Cyclone’ Tomar was standing at the centre of the UFC’s octagon in Louisville, US. “I want to show the world that Indian fighters are not losers,” she said into the microphone. Tomar, who hails from Uttar Pradesh, had just defeated Brazil’s Rayanne Amanda dos Santos, and become the first Indian to win a bout at UFC. “We are going all the way up. We are not going to stop.”

The sentiment that Indian fighters aren’t the toughest isn’t an uncommon one internation­ally. MMA took root here rela­tively late, and women took to the sport even more recently. But it is something female fighters from India wish to abolish.

Priya Sharma, an MMA fighter from Zirakpur in Punjab, has spent the last many years, travelling to various MMA gyms and camps in countries like Brazil and Thailand. It was driven by ne­cessity, Sharma says, because when she first started out, there were very few female fighters. But it was also to improve her skills. “The standards in countries like Brazil are very high since they have been into MMA for a long time. So to improve myself as a fighter, it is very important to be honing my skills there,” she says.

Sharma has had a long journey in the sport, relocating from Zirakpur to Gurugram, and then to Mum­bai, to compete in MMA fights there, while taking up jobs to support herself, before she began moving abroad for training camps and fights. A big opportunity opened up last year in the form of an entry to ‘Road to UFC’ in Shanghai, where top Asian MMA prospects compete to win contracts with UFC, and al­though she bowed out of the tournament with a loss, Sharma was scheduled another top bout, in Brazil’s SFT Combat. She however had to pull out after her father died just days before her match.

“It has been very difficult for me and my mother since. I couldn’t even get back into the gym,” she says. She resumed training earlier this year, and is set to fly to Brazil in early April to begin training there again. “I want to get back into the ring because that is where I belong. And I want to show how tough women from India can be,” she says.

While much has changed in the MMA scene in India, with very few batting an eyelid at the prospect of two women fight­ing it out in an octagon, female fighters say much still needs improvement. There is more interest in female fights, as a result of which it has gone from a novelty factor to one of the main fights at MMA events in India, but there will still be comments about how women lack power and skill. “The thing is when two guys have a bad fight it is because they are lousy at it. But have one bad match between girls, and it becomes about how women are terrible fighters,” a female fighter says. “They will say women lack the killer instinct.”

Manjit Kolekar, a Mumbai-based boxer and MMA fighter, is familiar with such comments. Several years ago, when Kolekar tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in a knee during a box­ing match, she remembers reading online posts claiming she had feigned an injury. “Here I was, in very bad shape, recovering from the match, and people were saying how I got scared,” she says.

Kolekar has been a regular in the MMA scene for many years. The female winner of Super Fight League Challengers, a reality TV show around MMA fighters that was developed in 2012 by the now abandoned promotion Super Fight League in India, Kolekar has travelled widely as an MMA fighter, competing in Invicta Fighting Championships, one of the top MMA promo­tions in the US, and even to Russia. After she had returned from her stint in Invicta in 2019, and just days before a fight against the Italian fighter Samin Kamal Beik at BRAVE CF (Combat Federation) in Hyderabad, Kolekar felt the familiar sense of an ACL tear again. She was in a training camp then, and when she had her injury examined, she found that it wasn’t just an ACL tear, but the meniscus, the cartilage in the knee that cushions the space between the shinbone and thighbone, got injured too.

“I only told my dad. I didn’t even tell my coach,” Kolekar says. Determined to compete, Kolekar changed her fighting style, she says, to protect her knee while fighting. What followed was a spirited fight, where the two fighters went toe to toe, and which even the judges couldn’t help but heap praise over Kolekar’s fighting spirit. Eventually, a nasty cut above Kolekar’s eyes led to the referee calling for the bell.

Kolekar was crushed to hear the referee call off the match then, but today, she rates this match as amongst her best. “I fought because I didn’t want someone to say I was faking an injury,” Kolekar says. “I didn’t want to hear that Indian girls lack a killer instinct.”

boxinghyper-masculineManjit Kolekarmartial artsPriya SharmaRitu Phogatwomen issue 2025women players