00:00In a remote tribal village in West Bengal, India, a quiet revolution began in
00:112013 with a rugby ball. Chanda Oraum was just 14 when she first encountered the
00:19sport. She had never seen a rugby match, let alone played one, but that moment
00:24changed everything.
00:28The unlikely catalyst was Paul Walsh, an Irish rugby enthusiast and coach, who brought
00:56the game to Saraswatipur, a village nestled among tea plantations and home to a tight-knit
01:03tribal community. What began as curiosity soon became a passion, especially among the girls.
01:10Well, the great thing was, when we went up there, we started coaching small children,
01:16having games, having little tournaments. And it was the girls, the women, that really embraced
01:21the game, embraced the idea of playing, and they really adopted it much quicker than the
01:26boys.
01:27But while they quickly adopted the game, girls like Chanda initially faced backlash from other
01:33villagers.
01:35So it's really a dream of a lot of people who played girls with sort of many different
01:46circumstances. And then the girls had made a lot of comments. And we thought that we had a lot
01:48of reliefs. And we felt like we had a lot of reliefs and as we had many of them, since we
01:52Chanda went on to represent her state and her country in tournaments, despite the opposition.
02:14But fame didn't bring financial security.
02:18She had to take up a sales executive job to support herself.
02:47Chanda's mother, Rakimoni, raised her while working as a tea plucker.
02:52She is concerned about her daughter's future.
02:55She was concerned about her daughter's future.
03:00She said that she was born in the family.
03:03She was born in the family.
03:05She was born in the family.
03:07She was born in the family.
03:09She is born in the family.
03:19In West Bengal, where child marriage is more common than anywhere else in India,
03:49rugby once gave girls a reason to resist, but as support dwindles, so does participation, and the progress it brought.
04:19In West Bengal, there was a change in the country, and there was a change in the country, and there was a change in the country.
04:31So, will the spirit of Saraswatipur's rugby girls survive?
04:53Only time will tell if Chanda's story inspires a new generation of women rugby players.
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