Sohini Chattopadhyay
Sohini Chattopadhyay is a journalist with several national and international honours to her name, and a National Award-winning film critic. Her writing has been commissioned by The New York Times, Guardian, Lancet Psychiatry, South China Morning Post, Hindu, Mint, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and leading national and international publications. Her work has been translated into German, Bengali, Tamil and Malayalam. She won the National Award for film criticism at the National Film Awards for 2019, a prize given by the Government of India. She is a recipient of the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards, the Human Rights Press Awards citation and several international fellowships, including the Chevening and the Asia Journalism fellowships.
NIF Books
The Day I Became a Runner starts from a striking premise-that, since running is a solitary activity conducted in the public sphere, women who take up this sport pose a more direct challenge to patriarchy than those who play sports such as badminton, cricket and tennis. To support this thesis, award-winning journalist Sohini Chattopadhyay presents the compelling stories of eight athletes spanning the entire history of independent India and involving women from a wide range of social and geographical backgrounds.
Whether it is Ila Mitra, who could have been the first Indian-origin woman at the 1940 Olympics, or Mary D'Souza, who ran and played hockey for India through the 1950s; Kamaljit Sandhu, who made history for India in Bangkok, 1970, or P.T. Usha, who redefined the 1980s and the decades that followed for women in sport across the country, each of the women in this book will inspire and encourage the women reading it to break barriers and chase their dreams.
Written with remarkable insight and poignancy, The Day I Became a Runner is an alternative account of the Indian republic chronicled through the lens of its women athletes. In that sense, it is a women's history of India.
Purchase: Amazon
Reviews:
“Chattopadhyay’s book is both gripping and tough — gripping, so you don’t want to put it down, and tough, since the lives written up have been hard ones. There is no fairy-tale running story. And the training programme is not what makes these lives harsh. It’s the many obstacles that these women must clear to simply do what they love — to run.”- Menaka Guruswamy
“Sohini Chattopadhyay’s book is eminently readable and emotionally charged account of a nation just learning to view women as sportspersons.”- Taanya Kapoor
“To tell the women’s stories, Chattopadhyay elegantly weaves together details about their family lives, their social settings, descriptions of how they experienced various key races, their relationships with their coaches, and in the later profiles, media coverage of their careers. Chattopadhyay’s reporting is deep, she has a flair for storytelling, and her prose is fresh and eloquent.”- Sumana Ramanan
Book Awards
Wise Owl Literary Award 2025 in the non-fiction category