A Mother Runs First, So Her Daughter Can Start Further Ahead

A 47-year-old woman, dressed in a sari and running barefoot, has won a marathon. The story could have ended there. But the image raises a different question for me: Where are we accustomed to seeing a middle-aged South Asian woman in a sari?

In the kitchen? At home? Beside her children? At a religious or family gathering?

On a running track, overtaking other competitors to finish first? Probably not very often.

Ramabai Ranbir, 47, from Beed district in Maharashtra, works as a cook at an academy to support the higher education of her two daughters after the death of her husband. She entered a local marathon hoping to win the 3,000-rupee prize.

When her sandals began slipping as she ran, she took them off, carried them in her hands and continued barefoot in her sari. She finished first.

She has said she will use the prize money to buy books for her daughters. Her daughter Pooja competed in the same race and came second.

The mother came first. The daughter came second.

It is at this point that the story stops being, for me, simply a sentimental tale of an “extraordinary mother’s sacrifice”. In South Asian societies, we revere the word “mother."  We write poems about maternal sacrifice, make films about it and become emotional in its presence.

What we calculate far less often is how much of that “sacrifice” is actually labour.

A mother cooks. She gets children to school. She stays awake when they are ill. She buys books, finds money for fees and keeps track of the household.

If she works outside the home, she earns a wage and then returns home to work again. We gather all of this under one beautiful word: Motherhood.

But love and labour are not the same thing. Raising children is emotional work, certainly, but it is also material work. Food requires labour; education requires money; sustaining a child’s future requires time, planning and care.

Historically, a disproportionate share of both paid and unpaid work within families has fallen on women. When a husband is absent, the same woman may have to carry the responsibilities of caregiving and breadwinning at once.

Ramabai’s widowhood therefore matters too. In our social imagination, a husband’s death has often been written as a kind of ending in the woman’s own life.

This is particularly true in South Asia, where women’s social identities have long been closely tied to marital status. A man whose wife dies becomes a widower, but widowhood rarely consumes his entire social identity. Remarriage, too, has generally carried far less stigma or social scrutiny for him.

For women, the word “widow” has historically carried a much heavier burden: regulating clothing, sociability, pleasure, remarriage, mobility and economic security. It is as though part of a woman’s own life is expected to end socially when her husband’s life ends.

Ramabai’s story is a quiet but powerful refusal of that idea. Her husband’s death brought grief, economic uncertainty and greater responsibility, but it did not send her life into the past tense.

She works. She earns. She educates her daughters. She enters a race. She wins. She is not the passive character in a tragedy; she remains the active subject of her own life.

That is also why I resist reducing her to the familiar figure of the “sacrificing mother.” When we glorify motherhood too easily, we often make maternal labour disappear. Ramabai’s story makes that invisible economic structure visible.

It asks us to notice how many social roles can be made to rest on one woman’s body at the same time.

Yet while I admire her determination, I do not want to romanticise her hardship. Turning women’s suffering into inspirational content is one of society’s most familiar habits. My own social-media feed is already full of versions of this story.

A woman raises children through extreme adversity and we say, “Look at a mother’s strength.” A widow runs a household alone and we say, “Women can do anything if they want to.” A woman works ten hours, comes home and assumes responsibility for the household, and we call her a “superwoman”.

But how often do we ask why she had to become superhuman in the first place?

A working-class widow having to run a marathon barefoot to buy books for her daughters is evidence of remarkable determination. It is also evidence of the limits of the social arrangements around her. We should be careful that, in celebrating resilience, we do not end up forgiving inequality.

Then there is the sari.

For me, one of the most powerful aspects of the image is precisely that Ramabai ran in one. Our thinking still contains a peculiar binary: tradition on one side, the modern woman on the other.

A woman in traditional clothing is easily imagined as less liberated, while Western clothing is too readily read as evidence of emancipation.

Is feminism really that simple? A woman’s freedom cannot be measured by the distance between a sari and a pair of trousers. More important questions are whether she can decide where she goes, what work she does, how she uses her income, what happens to her body and what future she chooses for herself.

In the South Asian social imagination, the sari is often associated with femininity, respectability, domesticity and tradition. We are accustomed to seeing a woman in a sari in a kitchen. We are less accustomed to seeing her in the same sari on a competitive track, overtaking others.

Ramabai did not change the sari. She changed the meaning we habitually attach to the woman inside it.

She did not have to discard tradition in order to challenge it. More precisely, she did not reject her culture; she unsettled the position that culture has often assigned to women within it.

Pierre Bourdieu used the concept of habitus to explain how social worlds become embodied in our dispositions, tastes, movements and sense of what appears natural.

Where we expect particular bodies to belong is socially learned too. A woman in a sari standing in a kitchen produces no contradiction in our minds. The same woman, barefoot in a sari and racing towards a finish line, suddenly appears striking.

Why? The woman has not changed. The scene has collided with our expectations.

And then there is Pooja. She finished second, behind her own mother. Yet mother and daughter are not really competitors in this story. One is crossing the boundaries of her generation so that the other does not have to begin her life from the same boundary.

It is difficult to imagine a more powerful feminist lesson.

We give endless speeches about empowering girls. We say they need confidence, role models and permission to dream bigger. But how many role models can be more powerful to a girl than her own mother?

Ramabai did not lecture her daughter about what women can do. She demonstrated it: that 47 is not an expiry date for a woman’s ambition; widowhood need not become her final identity; motherhood is not the opposite of public achievement; and cultural rootedness need not prevent movement.

The most beautiful part is that the mother’s victory does not diminish the daughter. It moves her starting point forward. This is intergenerational mobility in its most human form. One generation does not pass on only money.

It passes on confidence, alters expectations and changes the boundaries of what the next generation understands to be possible.

The mother is running for survival. Her hope, perhaps, is that one day her daughter will be able to run for choice. That distinction matters.

I do not want Ramabai’s daughters to spend their lives being told: “Be as strong as your mother.” I want them to have the education, income, social security and freedom that mean they do not have to be as strong as she had to be simply to survive. For me, that is where the deepest feminist meaning of this image lies.

Ramabai’s sandals came off. She did not stop. I do not want to turn that into a beautiful metaphor for poverty. Poverty is not beautiful, and there is nothing beautiful about a social order in which a mother must struggle this hard to buy her daughters’ books.

But there is something powerful in her decision. She refused the proposition that losing her footwear meant ending the race. The history of women contains many versions of the same refusal. Society did not smooth the road for them; often, they had to make the road by moving through it.

That is why Ramabai’s image tells us more than the story of a “great mother.” It shows a woman who is simultaneously rooted in her culture and rewriting some of the boundaries that culture has drawn around women.

A mother came first. Her daughter came second. But the real achievement is not the distance between first and second place. It is the distance between their starting lines.

Dr. Lubna Ferdowsi is an academic and researcher based in England.