India’s trailblazer judoka, Rohit Majgul, has a grievance. “People think I am African,” he says.
One episode from his teenage years still lingers. At a national-level U-17 championship in Gujarat’s Nadiad in 2019, Majgul had reached the final. “While he was preparing,” says his cousin and former judoka Afarudin Chovat, “a few people started calling him African” and other racist slurs.
It wasn’t the first time Majgul was subject to such comments. “I have been called names — sometimes as abuse, sometimes teasingly — all my life because of my looks, the curly hair,” he says. But that day, he got overwhelmed. “I was disturbed and felt very bad. However, I have surrounded myself with good people, good friends. They told me to ignore the noise and focus on my game.”
Majgul went on to be named the championship’s best judoka and then made himself a promise. “He told us, ‘There will be a day when people will want to take a photo with me’,” says Chovat.
Seven years later, the 21-year-old became the first athlete from the Siddi community to qualify for this year’s Commonwealth and Asian Games. In a thrilling best-of-three final of the selection trials last week in New Delhi, Majgul defeated Haryana’s Garvit Hooda in the -66kg category.
He didn’t waste any time celebrating, though. Soon after sealing his spot, Majgul — also the national champion — left for Georgia’s Tbilisi for training and exposure. There, in the bitter cold, he finds himself these days craving a simple plate of dal, rice, and kachumbar, followed by chaas. The thought carries him thousands of miles home, stirring a sharp pang of homesickness. Yet, there is nowhere else he would rather be. “This place reminds me how far I have come,” he says, before adding softly, “Very far.”
And far indeed it is. Jambur — a village in the heart of the Gir forest, dubbed ‘mini-Africa’ — is barely a speck on India’s sporting map. Home to the Siddi community, which traces its roots to Africa, it is a place where most men spend their days doing manual labour and their evenings performing traditional dances for tourists at nearby hotels. That is how Majgul’s father, Bashir, supports the family; his cousins do the same.
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Since the late 1980s, however, India has been trying to tap into the athletic potential of the Siddis — who were brought to India by the Portuguese to work for the King of Junagadh around 300 years ago — through the Special Area Games project. Aimed at leveraging their physical attributes, especially in athletics and martial arts, the scheme produced athletes like Kamala Siddi, who represented India at the 1993 Dhaka South Asian Games in the 100m hurdles.
The programme failed to produce a breakthrough athlete. Undeterred, Hedubhai, Majgul’s uncle, encouraged his nephew to take up athletics. “He had no future in this village,” Hedubhai says. “At home, they didn’t even have a proper bed or clean water to drink. He grew up in such poverty. I was an athlete myself, and my sons benefited from government sports programmes and secured jobs through the sports quota. So I decided to push Rohit into sports too.”
Majgul approached it with uncommon seriousness, believing it could change his life. He dropped out of school when he was in Class 9. “I wasn’t good at studies,” he laughs. “But there were better chances of me achieving something through sport.”
He first gave the 400m a shot. But on a coach’s advice, he pivoted to judo, which is now among the most sought-after sports among the Siddis residing in Gujarat. Thus began the nomadic life of an athlete — living in hostels in Dahod, Junagadh, Nadiad, and now Ahmedabad, benefitting from the Gujarat government’s District Level Sports School scheme.
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Judo coach Aakash Thakor, who has trained Majgul for the last five years at the Vijayi Bharat foundation in Ahmedabad, says, “Athletes from the Siddi community are naturally gifted in endurance and raw strength. They also have a lot of fighting spirit. Those attributes come in handy in combat sports.”
At every step, Majgul was reminded that he was “different”, especially in the early days: the curiosity, the whispers, the stares that lingered a second too long, and the slurs. Every obstacle, however, only strengthened his resolve.
But he kept his promise.
Majgul has gone on to win a medal at the Asia-Pacific Youth Games, the Commonwealth Youth Championship, and, after moving to the senior level, has begun to dominate domestically, winning the national championship gold in December 2025.
His qualification for the Commonwealth and Asian Games carries weight beyond sport. Majgul knows he will not just be fighting for medals; he will be carrying with him a village, a community. “I never dreamt about this. When I started playing judo, I imagined competing in these big events,” he says. “Now that I am here, I hope to raise awareness about our community, about my people.”
