Sept 29, 1959 Arati Saha becomes the first Asian woman to swim the Channel
Arati Saha, the first Asian woman to swim the Channel, was only 11 years old when she represented India at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Swimming the 200metres, the only event in the breaststroke, her best discipline but double her favoured distance, she finished last in qualification, but it did not disappoint or discourage her.
And why would it? She had been competing since the age of five, following her mother’s death in Kolkata. As the middle child of a man working for the Indian Army during the Second World War, she went to live with her grandmother in the north of the city and it was there that she learnt to swim, accompanying her uncle to Champatala Ghat on the east bank of the Hooghly. Within a few months of taking her initial plunge, she won the first of 22 state-level adult competitions in West Bengal.
Her career in the pool was prodigious enough. Aged only eight and while Kolkata was mired in sectarian riots following Partition, she won two silvers and a bronze at the national championships in Mumbai, and in 1951 set her maiden all-india record in the 100m breaststroke. During the early years of independence and, indeed, throughout British rule, Indian women rarely worked outside the home, let alone participated in sport.
In Britain and France, a revival of interest in swimming the Channel, which was sparked by the inauguration of the Daily Mail International Cross-channel Race in 1950, mushroomed into a global phenomenon throughout the decade.
Gertrude Ederle had become the first woman to swim the Channel successfully in 1926, 51 years after Matthew Webb had completed the first crossing. She broke the world record and was greeted by two million New Yorkers in a ticker-tape parade through Manhattan when she was welcomed home.
Saha had begun endurance swimming training with long-distance races in the Ganges and, inspired by the examples of Brojen Das from
East Pakistan, who became the first Asian man to swim it in 1958, and Mihir Sen, the first Indian in the same year, she resolved to make her own attempt. The fundraising efforts of the Hatkhola Swimming Club fell short, but with the financial help of the chief minister of her home state, and the prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, she departed for England in August 1959.
Her first attempt was thwarted when her pilot boat was late leaving Pas-de-calais and, while she made 40 miles in good time, the current was so strong that she managed merely a further two of the five miles left to the Kent coast before being forced to abandon. A month later she made a second bid and, after 16 hours and 20 minutes battling “very cold”, choppy seas, she staggered up
the beach at Sandgate and unfurled the flag of India.
When news of her success was broadcast the following day she was congratulated by Nehru and a year later awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian honour in the land.
She died aged 53 in 1994 from encephalitis, but she has never been forgotten. On the 80th anniversary of her birth last September, a Google doodle commemorated her achievement and the story of the woman, once feted as “Jalpari”, the water nymph come to life, captivated a new, mass audience.