Meet Ishitta Malaviya, India’s 1st Female Surfer

Despite an abundance of coastline, long stretches of beach and swell on both sides of the country, India has traditionally been a surf-shy nation. But over the past decade, the tide has gradually started to turn.

Ishita Malaviya, India’s first professional female surfer and one of the early pioneers of the sport in her country, remembers googling “surfing in India” back in 2007, only for nothing to show up.

When she took up the sport at university on the advice of a German exchange student, Malaviya estimates that there were only 13 professional surfers in India — a drop in the ocean amid what was then a population of 1.2 billion.

Hooked by the sport from the moment she caught her first wave, she and her partner Tushar Pathiyan started the Shaka Surf Club while studying at university in Manipal.

In the early days, she and Pathiyan shared one board between them before they started to fix up broken boards from traveling surfers passing through the country.

“I remember smiling on my first wave, all the way to shore and all the way back home from the beach,” – Says Malaviya.

Malaviya finished her degree in journalism and moved to the coast to focus her efforts on expanding the Shaka Surf Club, which provides lessons, board rentals and accommodation for people of all ages.

Over the years, she has not only seen the sport grow in India estimating there are now a couple hundred people surfing competitively but has also witnessed a shift in attitude towards the ocean, particularly among the fishing communities that have taken up surfing.

Malaviya has gained recognition beyond India’s shores and last year featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list, alongside the likes of tennis star Naomi Osaka and Chelsea soccer star Samantha Kerr. “It’s all pretty surreal,” she says.

“I live a very unglamorous life, I live in a village, a very simple, peaceful life. But I’m really grateful doing what I do with the story that I have.”

Surfing will take an historic leap next year as it makes its Olympic debut on the Pacific coast of Chiba, Japan. For competitive surfers, it will be a chance to showcase their sport on a global stage. But it will come with challenges, too.

The introduction of wave pools that produce regular, predictable waves away from the ocean have been part of a drive to make surfing easier to schedule. As the sport seeks to evolve competitively, for someone like Hill it is the simple impulse of deriving enjoyment from nature that will always be surfing’s greatest pull.