“What’s in a name?” they say. Ask Jhandu Kumar, who won India’s first medal at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
The para powerlifter, who contracted polio when he was four years old, lifted 190kg to win a bronze medal on Friday – a feat he hopes will define him, rather than his name.
Hailing from Harnaut village in Bihar’s Nalanda district, Jhandu’s name loosely translates to ‘incompetent person’ in Hindi. However, the 29-year-old, who has sold vegetables and driven e-rickshaws to fund his training, has defied every possible meaning attached to it.
“Naam me kya rakha hai (What’s in a name)? I embraced this name the moment I realised that identity comes from what you do, not what you are called,” Jhandu told The Indian Express from Glasgow after winning his medal. “People used to laugh at my name. Today, it was announced from the podium with the Indian flag around me. I can’t think of a better moment in my life.”
The son of vegetable vendor Ramanand Paswan, Jhandu got his name under unfortunate circumstances. “We are a poor family. He is the youngest in the family. When I was unable to get him proper treatment, I told everyone that I had become a Jhandu (an incompetent father). Somehow, everybody started calling him by that name, and it stuck,” Ramanand told The Indian Express. “But today he has shown that he is capable of anything — the complete opposite of what his name suggests.”
When Jhandu stood on the podium and the Indian flag went up, all he could think about was how far he had travelled from his village. “I had never imagined this. I only wanted to prove that I could do something, and that zidd has brought me here,” he said.
Apart from battling the stigma and bullying that came with his name, Jhandu also had to support his family. “I used to wake up at 4 am and travel to Bihar Sharif to buy vegetables for my shop. The journey wasn’t easy. I would travel 20 km in a shared van and then return home to open the shop,” he said. “Some days I would make a profit of Rs 300-400, and on others I would make a loss.”
After finishing work at the shop, Jhandu would head to a local gym to train. “I wanted an upper body like Salman Khan in Dabangg. Whatever I learnt was on my own, by watching videos of athletes online on a borrowed phone.”
Initially, he trained without any guidance until local coaches Gautam Singh and Kundan Pandey noticed him. “He was incredibly strong. We were surprised that someone could train himself like that. That’s when we realised he had real potential,” said Kundan, who is also part of the Bihar Para Powerlifting Organisation.
While his career as a para powerlifter began to take off, Jhandu’s livelihood came to an abrupt end after a government construction project forced his vegetable shop to shut down. “A powerlifter’s diet costs around Rs 1,000 a day, and I was barely earning Rs 500. When the shop closed, I borrowed money to buy a toto (an e-rickshaw). I started ferrying passengers,” he recalled.