SWIMMING: THE FIRST LADIES OF THE POOL

The first time Pakistan’s fastest female swimmer competed was when she snuck into a men’s race at Karachi’s elite Sind Club. It was the late 1980s, and women like Shaan Kandawalla had nowhere to swim competitively. And while she was just a teenager, Shaan’s mission in life was to correct this bias.

By the time she bowed out of the sport a decade later, her greatest achievement was not the records she had shattered every year, or the garland of gold medals she had won at every championship, but the fight she had put up so women could finally compete officially. 

Three decades on, these athletes are still struggling, but they’re fighting to squeeze into the latest $500 Speedo Fastskin LZR swimsuit rather than the basic right to get into a race. In fact, the Women’s Sindh Open just marked its 30th edition last year, a milestone that speaks of the dedication to the sport. But what did it take to reach this point?

MATERNAL UNITY

Shaan remembers gliding through the overly chlorinated water for hours, her freestyle interrupted by the flip turn at the end of every 22m lap of the Sind Club pool. One lane over was national prodigy Kamal Masud, training for an evergreen competition schedule, as his mother Veena looked on from the poolside.

The Women’s Sindh Open celebrated its 30th edition last year. The story of women’s swimming in Pakistan owes a great debt to a bunch of mothers from Karachi who came together to create a competition for women at a time when girls’ swimming had no supporters in the country

Shaan envied him. It was also easy to envy Egypt’s Hafez sisters who, at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, became the first Muslim women to swim in front of a mixed audience, while women in Pakistan did not have so much as a local competition. The one person Shaan knew who could change that was Veena Masud. 

It took some prodding and pleading, but Veena didn’t need much persuading that women deserved their own regional and national championships. She broached the subject to some other “swimming mothers” at Sind Club, such as Nargis Rahimatoola, who figured Fatima Lakhani would be invested in the project since her daughters also swam.

So did Firouzeh Majidullah’s children and, over at Karachi Club, and Sumbul Sadiq’s four daughters, and Shugufta Sheeshmahal’s children at Karachi Gymkhana. And, of course, there was Shaan’s mother Spenta, and Gulbanoo Bamjee and Thrity Kharas over on the Parsi front. A couple of phone calls later, this cluster of women formed the Karachi Women’s Amateur Swimming Association (KWASA). It was 1992. 

THE FIRST SINDH OPEN

That same year, the first women’s Sindh Open was held at Karachi Club. It was “surreal”, Nadia Kharas recalls. She and other swimmers scurried out the pool premises after every race to share results with anxious fathers waiting outside. Some of them wore leotards instead of swimsuits. Others could barely finish a lap.

Some swam with sanitary pads on because tampons were (and still are) taboo. They downed spoonfuls of glucose powder right before their races in a misguided attempt to obtain a microdose of energy. The two-day event had only a few dozen swimmers, but it meant everything to these women to finally have what men had as a birthright. 

A women’s Sindh Open was revolutionary not just because sports in general tended to be a testosterone-filled affair, but also because Pakistan was barely emerging from the dictatorship of Gen Ziaul Haq. His policy to push ‘Islamisation’ had far-reaching consequences beyond his death; women’s swimming competitions were approved on the condition that they strictly adhered to religious sensibilities. No male spectators or officials were allowed. The athletes had to wear knee-length swimsuits. The media was not permitted to cover the events.

As a result, corporations could not get any mileage out of sponsorships. Cricket, by comparison, attracted millions of rupees. But the mothers had a solution to this hurdle as well. Fatima and Ronak Lakhani roped in Colgate-Palmolive to help, and the corporate has sponsored the Sindh Open from 1994 onwards.  

The financial largesse elevated the humble swim meet by giving it all the trimmings of a professional competition. Swimmers received gift box mementos, the medals and certificates grew regal and, for two days of the year, an unassuming poolside at a private club in Karachi was transformed into a competitive arena. 

“It helped us immensely to have KPI [Karachi Parsi Institute] and its pool, otherwise none of this would have been possible,” Gulbanoo says of the 130-year-old enclave in the heart of Saddar. KPI was where Hanif Mohammad scored a then-world record 499 in first class cricket in 1959, where the Sindh Open found a third home over the years, and where Parsi women such as Shaan, Nadia and Julia Irani trained year-round to become national champions. 

This trio was largely responsible for Sindh’s success at every national championship, which the women finally had 1996 onwards. The archives are replete with images of Shaan and Nadia divvying up the records among themselves, or a motherly Julia posing with the Sindh team, the dozen women flanked by team officials such as Nargis, Sumbul, Gulbanoo and Fatima, who rotated through the list of responsibilities needed to host competitions and chaperone swimmers to Lahore and Islamabad. 

GOING INTERNATIONAL

It was, however, in 1997 that the sport had a breakthrough. Pakistan’s women swimmers made their international debut at the 2nd Women’s Islamic Games in Tehran. The event was the brainchild of Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of Iran’s president at the time, who wanted to give women athletes from conservative Muslim countries a chance to compete at an international level. 

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto championed the Iran cause and offered to host the second edition of the games in Islamabad. She directed that a women’s sports board be formed to oversee preparations, and it was around this time that the Pakistan Women’s Swimming Association also came into being.

But Islamabad was allegedly unable to meet the hosting criteria, ironically because of too much male interference, which was antithetical to the stipulated gender guidelines, and the games were instead held in Tehran. 

“We were proud not in terms of competing, but being the first female swimming from Pakistan,” Julia says. 

Shaan would have been the first woman to swim for Pakistan at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but staunch disapproval of swimming in front of a mixed gender audience dashed her dreams. It was instead Kamal who flew to Atlanta alone as the male wildcard entrant, marking his and Pakistan’s swimming debut at the Olympics. Shabana Akhtar became the first female debutant in the long jump. 

Shaan never competed internationally, despite her heroic foray into the men’s race like Katherine Switzer at the 1967 Boston Marathon. “But I was glad to see Rubab Raza make it to the 2004 Olympics,” she says. “The 1996 Olympics would have been icing on the cake, but so much had already happened for women’s swimming by then, and I got to be a part of it all.”

THE WOMEN OF KWASA

KWASA itself was an assortment of mothers who orchestrated the initial years of competitive swimming on a voluntary basis. 

The backbone has been Veena, the bejewelled, green-eyed, red lipstick-sporting Trinidadian who has been synonymous with the success of women’s swimming in Pakistan as long as it has existed. She conducted every meet in line with international standards, which she was exposed to while accompanying Kamal when he represented Pakistan. 

But more than overseeing every rule and technicality and being head of the meet, Veena was what Firouzeh calls their “guiding force and mentor”, showing these 40-something-years-old mothers the blueprint to a world they were creating for generations to come.

Firouzeh would tabulate the race results since she was an Excel spreadsheet wizard because of her job at Saudi Airlines. PM was starter of the meet, and later became referee. PM is short for Perveen Minwalla, who is notoriously short of patience, especially if anyone disrupts the schedule she maintains like a drill sergeant. Her discipline as a national table tennis champion in the 1960s resurfaced when she rejoined the world of sports poolside. 

Fatima and Ronak were omnipresent, their time and generosity going well beyond the championships itself. Women such as Sumbul, Shagufta, Yasmin Ahmed and Seema Zuberi were technical officials or timekeepers or helped out with administrative tasks. Gulbanoo shuttled between shops in Saddar to have the medals and trophies embossed with the Sindh Open logo.

The Sindh Open was adapted to accommodate its growing popularity; an under-8 category was created, while the U-18 was dissolved. Longer events, such as the 400m Individual Medley and 400m and 800m Freestyle, were eventually introduced as women began training with private coaches who once dominated Pakistan’s swimming scene. What was once the only opportunity for women to compete became grassroots competition in preparation for international championships. 

The grandeur of the global stage couldn’t compare to the sanctuary the Sindh Open was — an entity created by women, for women. The camaraderie and feeling of belonging was a first for many swimmers, numbering close to 300 at the event in recent years. It was a weekend of mingling with friends from other schools, skipping homework, adding each other on Snapchat, stretching silicone swimming caps over each others’ heads two minutes before a race, crying because a false start got you disqualified from the race you would have won, crying because you unexpectedly broke the record, and months of training to the point of exhaustion — and it was all worth it.

Veena’s playlist competed with mothers and teammates cheering on swimmers, the music dimmed only when she announced race results over the microphone in her smooth-as-butter, racially ambiguous accent that breathed life into every meet.

GOING UNDER WATER

But the sport’s milestones have been overshadowed by poor governance, corruption and an overall disinterest in sports in recent years. 

“There’s just no future for swimming in this country,” Kiran Khan says over the phone from Lahore. The multiple national champion and record holder was monumental in the sport for two decades after becoming the first Pakistani female to swim in front of a mixed audience at the 2001 World Swimming Championships in Barcelona, alongside Sana Wahid. 

“Now you only make it to world championships if your parents can afford to send you,” Kiran says. “What is the government doing if parents have to pay for their children to shine as athletes?”

In the early 2000s, the Pakistan Sports Board organised training camps ahead of international championships and imported the expertise of Chinese and Australian coaches. Neither have been arranged 2012 onwards, partially because sports was devolved from a federal to provincial responsibility in 2011.

The kind of sports infrastructure elite athletes like PM had has now crumbled through years of neglect. The government has scarcely invested in new facilities. “You can’t expect gold medals with facilities like the ones you have in Pakistan,” Kiran says. “You simply cannot expect gold medals at the price of nothing.” 

Even so, women like her, Sana, Rubab and Julia have bagged several medals at the Islamic Games and South Asian Games. Sana went on to become Pakistan’s first qualified swimming coach in 2007. 

Women like Ronak and Fatima have repeatedly asked the Sindh government for an amenity plot to build an international-standard swimming pool, generously offering to pay for its construction. Year after year, that call has been entertained with no more than a smile and empty promises. It is no wonder then that the sport is an elitist venture, inaccessible to the common citizen by a long shot. 

The inaugural excitement of women’s swimming has died down in recent years. The pioneering women are exhausted, not only because they’re in their seventies now, but because there’s too much parental interference, too little appreciation for something being done entirely on a voluntary basis. 

Hysterical mothers have been a staple source of amusement and chaos at competitions, particularly the Sindh Open. They’ve brawled among themselves over whose daughter won the race, and dissolved into fits of hyperventilation when Firouzeh refused to tamper with the results at their insistence. Some have abandoned their daughters at the competition venue for losing to daughters of lesser socially important mothers. Lawsuits have repeatedly been threatened and filed against the swimming associations over malpractice. 

Even within KWASA, there have been undercurrents of catty behaviour and power struggles. Tempers have flared, and members have left over messy politics. Some are obsessed with clinging to the upper echelons of the hierarchy they created. 

COMING UP FOR AIR

But all said and done, these were “healthy arguments” that simmered down. “We’re all friends at the end of it,” Firouzeh says. These mothers raised and nurtured women’s swimming in Pakistan for 30-plus years the way you would a child.

“We never thought it would get this big,” an ever-optimistic Ronak admitted. Now synonymous with the success of Special Olympics Pakistan, she was the one who ushered in inclusivity with the special needs race in 2004. That Sindh Open was the first time children with disabilities were included in a mainstream sports competition, and they have continued to be a part of it 20 years on. 

“People should see the impact sports has in empowering women,” Veena says. “It breaks down barriers and opens so many doors for them.” 

The million dollar question remains: was there ever a need for men in the organising committees? “If men got over their egos, it would be great to work with them,” Veena muses. 

The writer is a member of staff and a former member of the Pakistan swimming team. X: @yes_itsEngineer

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 2nd, 2025