ABSTRACT
Boxing was a colonial import into India and it never achieved the status and popularity that wrestling always had because of its continued link to an indigenous tradition. Sport inhabits a cultural boundary of a kind: both mimetic activity and physical practice, it 'safely' reproduces duelling as fencing, but directly admits the dangerous excitement of physical contact, force and risk into the rugby field or the boxing ring. Women boxers must struggle not only against social conditions that make it extremely difficult for any but the most dedicated female athletes to pursue any sport at all, but also against the lack of recognition for women's boxing, negative perceptions of women fighters' bodies and social disapproval of women in the ring. For historians of India's troubled north-east, however, another narrative of violence and pain, linked to an unwritten history of the body, might appear to underlie Mary Kom's self-proving through physical, that is athletic, contestation.
