Tweet A shooting star ahead of her time - 94-yr-old gender bender who hit bullseye after marriagE SUDESHNA BANERJEE Sobhita Chatterjee takes aim with her Walther rifle during practice at Serampore Rifle Club, where she had fired her first bullet; (right, in picture by Santosh Ghosh) the champion at 94, during a felicitation by the state sports department at Netaji Indoor Stadium in June Back in the Sixties, when it wasn’t quite proper for women from respectable Bengali families to go out to work, a sari-clad Calcutta wife and mother shot the stereotype with her gun. Sobhita Chatterjee, national shooting champion from 1961 to 1966, was a household name in those days. The newspapers called her the queen of the range, though her mother-in-law would be more bothered about her ghomta being in place in the pictures than what the reporters wrote about her daughter-in-law’s shooting skills. Now 94, Sobhita slowly walks into the living room of her Lake Gardens home supported by her son. Her rosy white skin is wrinkled and you need to shout into her one good ear, the left, to be heard. But trust her to remember right — as with her Rodda-made Walther rifle, the grand old lady of the range is never off the mark with her memory. Leafing through an album of black-and-white photographs, Sobhita picks one where she is seated next to a shield in a sari. “Do you notice my ghomta? I had to be careful when they clicked pictures. My mother-in-law would get very upset if she saw me bare-headed in the papers,” she recalls. Once, at a prize distribution, a newspaper photographer took a picture of her and the district magistrate from an angle that made it look like they were seated too close for mom-in-law’s comfort. “Ke chheleta, chokra bokra jama pora (Who’s that lad in a printed shirt)?” Sobhita was quizzed the next morning, rather icily, she remembers. If she could still pursue her passion for shooting, it was because of husband Sambhunath’s support. “Except the first time, my father was always with her when she travelled for the National Championship,” recounts younger son Amitabha, a national shooting coach. Finding the resources to become a champion in the range was a problem, though. Even bullets of inferior quality manufactured by local ordnance factories would cost Rs 1.50-2 each. “A friend of my husband used to joke: ‘Ekta guli chhurlen aar ekta breast cutlet-er songe ekta rajbhog chole gyalo (You fired one shot and blew up a breast cutlet and a rajbhog)’,” chuckles Sobhita . Although Sobhita herself didn’t know it, her easy relationship with the rifle and the range can be traced to her childhood. “As a child (in Ranaghat), I would climb walls to catch kites, play marbles, danguli and football with the local boys. Even after we shifted to north Calcutta, I would be the best in the knife and lathi-wielding classes. People called me a tomboy,” she recounts. Sobhita’s father was a crack shot whose hunting trophies adorned the living room walls, but it wasn’t until long after marriage and motherhood that she discovered she had inherited his shooting genes. “My husband had just been transferred to Serampore and I was already a mother of two boys, aged six and eight. We visited the Serampore Rifle Club one day and I was asked to try my hand with an open-side Brno rifle. I hit the bullseye with every shot except one. Everyone was stunned to hear I hadn’t shot before,” Sobhita reminisces. It was to prove the turning point in her so far humdrum existence. Sobhita began spending time at the club range on Sundays and getting better with each outing. There were only two big tournaments for shooters then — the National Championship and the All India Shooting Championship — and Sobhita wasn’t quite keen to compete yet. “Ma refused to go to Bangalore in 1958 for the first competition. The second one was held at the police range in Calcutta. In consultation with my father, the secretary of the Serampore Rifle Club, Shyam Sanyal, laid a bait. She was told she would be given a rifle as prize if she got a medal. That did the trick,” recalls Amitabha. In her first-ever competition, Sobhita lost a tiebreaker in the final. But she got her rifle. Import of guns and ammunition had stopped with the British quitting India, so Sobhita had to make do with an almost antiquated piece. “God knows how old the gun they gifted me was. A 0.22 peep side Rodda-made Walther rifle, it weighed 12 pounds (5.44kg). I was asked to practise carrying bricks,” she recounts. The National Championship wasn’t held in 1959, so two editions were held the next year. Sobhita travelled to Delhi for her first national meet and finished third in prone, the only time she had only a bronze to show for her efforts. The year’s second National Championship saw Sobhita graduating to silver. She became the national champion for the first time the next year. So emphatic was her victory that she finished third in the open event where the scores of the men and women shooters were tallied together. Her best year was 1965, when she won gold medals in all 13 events that a shooter could compete in. “That included three open events where I beat the men,” she smiles. As a competition shooter, Sobhita ’s biggest disappointment came at the World Championship in Germany in 1966. “The Maharaja of Bikaner was our team leader and put us up in such a posh hotel that we could not afford two meals there. We had no coach, no proper equipment. Our technique was faulty. Others laughed at my rifle. I didn’t even have a shooting coat,” she says, a tinge of regret clouding her face. “If only I had a good rifle....I will carry this despair to my deathbed,” she adds. Sobhita gave up shooting after returning from Germany. “My (younger) son was already a district champion. I wanted to focus on him,” she explains. Sobhita still religiously reads the sports pages of her morning newspaper. She has pinned her hopes this Olympics on Bengal boy Joydeep Karmakar. “Ki sundar score korchhey chheleta prone-ey. Amar bishwas o kichhu ekta niye ashbe (He is scoring so well in the prone position. I believe he will win something),” she says, raising her folded hands to her forehead in prayer.
Posted on: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 14:59:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015