(In)visibility, Mediated, and Sporting Perceptions: Bollywood, Biopics, and the Epistemic Turn in Mary Kom

In recent years several Hindi films have been produced that delineate the difficulties and challenges faced by Indian athletes and boxers, and highlight their sociocultural struggles in asserting their pursuit of and passion for their sport. Mary Kom (2014) is one such Hindi-language biographical sports film based on the life of the eponymous boxer Mary Kom, a film that brings to the foreground the ingrained social prejudices, gender biases and marginalization that affect the personal lives of sportswomen and play decisive roles in shaping their career trajectories. Here we contend that biopics like Mary Kom are immensely significant in delinking the dominant epistemologies, ideologies and interpretations, undermining the controlling vision and visibility, and broadening the horizons of understanding through visual representations. Biopics on sportswomen, in uncovering stories of their astounding achievements, generate alternative epistemologies and disentangle the epistemologies of sportswomen from the exclusive epistemic domain of men. The article examines Mary Kom from the standpoint of “aesthetic epistemology,” a way of producing knowledge in which visualizations are intended to convey something invisible to the spectator and heighten their epistemic awareness. Finally, the article argues that biopics like Mary Kom emphasize plural modes of knowing and recognizing the hegemonized epistemologies and ontologies of Indian sportswomen, and thereby interrogate the logocentrism of power and the governmentality of male-centered Hindi sports films.