On 29 May, at the Galaxy Arena in Macau, the Chinese fighter, Shi Ming, took Puja Tomar's back and won a victory through an arm-triangle choke. Since then, the clip has been circulating all over social media with the title “the woman who submitted India's UFC pioneer is a practicing doctor.”
However, what has captured people even more than the dynamic move is the equally enchanting history of the fighters. Apart from being an MMA fighter, Shi also works full-time at a hospital in Kunming in what people have dubbed as the perfect career for an Asian child. While for her parents she might spend her days taking pulses, writing prescriptions and performing acupuncture her own time is spent knocking people out in fighting rings. The MMA fighter who is dubbed Dr Sleep uses her medical salary for her fight camps. Ming is not the output of some vast state machine rather she has improvised her career to work around her life. Shi came up through Road to UFC, a tournament the promotion built to convert Asian talent into contracted fighters, and the doctor has worked hard to fight in Macau and Shanghai in front of crowds who chant her name. However, despite the unusual structure the MMA infrastructure and her own country met her halfway to help in her journey.
Tomar on the other hand has walked the whole distance herself.
Tomorrow therefore deserve to be evaluated on more than just her fighting stats. She is 1–2 in the UFC and 9–6 as a professional, and her loss against Ming was her second consecutive submission defeat. But her match records are a poor instrument for measuring what she has actually managed to achieve, which is to arrive first, repeatedly, in rooms no Indian woman had entered yet.
Tomar grew up in Budhana, in western Uttar Pradesh, and made her name in wushu, a Chinese martial art, which is its own small irony, and one of the few disciplines in India with enough competitive structure to produce serious combat athletes. Although while Wushu gave her the required skills it could not give her a professional MMA career, because in the early 2010s there was barely one to be had, especially in India.
However Tomar decided to turn professional anyway. Although her stint with ONE Championship between 2017 and 2020 went badly, it was not exactly surprising. Unlike spirts movies, such stints tend to go badly when a fighter from a developing scene is matched against Asia's established one. But Tomar is a hindered spirit who came home and rebuilt at Matrix Fight Night, India's premier promotion, taking the strawweight title in 2022.
In October 2023, she became the first Indian-born woman signed by the UFC. In June 2024 she beat Brazil's Rayanne dos Santos by split decision, becoming the first Indian fighter of any gender to win a bout in the promotion. And though it was a narrow win it was remarkable nonetheless.
The wins have been harder to come by since. In March 2025, she lost to Ireland's Shauna Bannon, and fourteen months later, she finished her in a round. Both defeats came at strawweight, one of the deepest and most technically punishing divisions in women's MMA. In a division where opponents have been taking hard rounds against elite training partners since they were teenagers, Tomar does not have similar privileges and these infrastructure shortcomings are reflected in her stats. Tomar does not have access to coaches who have cornered world-title fights, training partners who can imitate an opponent's style, a domestic circuit dense enough that a fighter reaches the UFC having already had her education. Brazil, the United States, Russia and increasingly China have all of it. On the other hand India has Matrix Fight Night, which despite growing quickly, is severely lacking in the larger context. Tomar now trains at Soma Fight Club in Bali, and her journey reflects that of nearly every serious Indian fighter who is struggling through similar circumstances.
There is a version of this piece that calls her a trailblazer and stops there. The trouble is that it converts a structural cost into a personal virtue. Tomar has absorbed, in her own body and her own record, the losses a functioning system absorbs on a fighter's behalf, like the learning years, the mismatches, the schooling that should happen before the biggest stage rather than on it.
The record book will say 1–2. What it will not say is that the next Indian woman to sign a UFC contract will do so knowing that there is space for her because Tomar has made that space.
Sources:
- Fight result, choke, time — ufc.com
- Records (Shi 18–6, 2–1 UFC; Tomar 9–6, 1–2 UFC (Tapology) ) — MMA Junkie via Yahoo Sports, 29 May 2026
- Bannon loss: armbar at 3:22 of round two, 22 March 2025 (Fightomic) — ufc.com
- Debut win: split decision, 30–27, 27–30, 29–28, opening bout of the card (UFC) — Khel Now, June 2024
- Soma Fight Club as her camp — ESPN fighter page