What does the future of women's tennis in India look like?

As Sania Mirza prepares to hang up her boots, we delve deep into the ground-level scenario of women’s tennis in the country

1 August 2024, Roland Garros, Paris: The Indian tricolour has taken over the entire stadium as Karman Thandi and Rutuja Bhosale walk on to Court Philippe Chatrier. It is the semi-final of the Olympics doubles event, and the hopes of a billion-and-a-half people rest on their proud young shoulders. No pressure.

Reality check: This is 2022, and yes, it is an Olympic dream that, in two years, will have a binary outcome. But tennis dreams do come true, as Leander Paes proved in Atlanta in 1996. If our dream scenario plays out, Thandi and Bhosale can draw strength from the fact that two young Indian women tried to fulfill that dream in the very city, exactly a hundred years before Nora Polley and Mehri Tata (Lady Meherbai Tata) did.

In 1924, the last time the Olympics were held in Paris, Polley lost in the singles round of 16 to future multiple-Grand Slam-winner Lili Alvarez of Spain, and partnering Indian Davis Cup captain Sydney Jacob, she also lost the mixed doubles at the same stage. Polley and Tata (the wife of Dorab Tata, and daughter-in-law of Jamsetji Tata) may not have won India’s first Olympic tennis medal, but by competing at Paris, they paved the way for Indian women to play competitively at the highest level of the sport in the decades that followed.

Over the next decades, there was Jenny Sandison, the first Indian woman to appear at a Grand Slam event (Wimbledon); Leela Row, the first to go beyond the first round at the same tournament; Rita Davar, the first (and last till date) finalist at a Wimbledon singles (Junior) event, in 1952; Nirupama Mankad, twice Asian Champion; and Nirupama Vaidyanathan, the first to move into the second round of a Grand Slam in the Open Era. The nine decades that elapsed between Polley’s appearance at Paris and Sania Mirza’s triumph at Charleston brought to the fore some remarkable women in Indian tennis. There was also Rajkumari Amrit Kaur–the first Indian woman to win a tennis title in any format–who also went on to do a lot of meaningful work beyond the tennis court. She was a health minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s first cabinet and the founder of AIIMS in New Delhi. Meanwhile, Kiran (Peshawaria) Bedi, who spent her childhood innocently playing on the very patch of notorious Indian history where the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre had taken place, went on to become India’s first female Indian Police Service officer, a year after she dethroned Mankad to win the National tennis title in 1971.

The journey started by Polley would eventually culminate at Charleston, South Carolina in 2015 when Mirza, as a young Indian woman from Hyderabad, burst the shackles of gender perception and religious conservatism to become the number one tennis player in the world.

Women’s tennis after Sania

Mirza, not to mince words, is a once-in-a-generation sportsperson. In 2005, when she was voted WTA Newcomer of the Year, Sportstar had written: ’’What was the real deal was Indian, a ball-thrashing teenager with the devil-may-care attitude once associated with a fellow named Lochinvar.” That ‘ball-thrashing teenager’ would go on to appear in seven Grand Slam doubles and mixed-doubles finals, winning six of them. She would also pick up two WTA tour final doubles titles on the way to multiple reigns as World No. 1. In early 2022, when Mirza announced that this year would be her last on the circuit, is when the realisation hit us all: What will life as an Indian tennis lover be like, after her?

While a far cry from the days of Ramanathan Krishnan, Vijay Amritraj, Ramesh Krishnan and Paes-Bhupathi, in men’s tennis, Indian fans continue to have days of cheer when the likes of Sumit Nagal, Ramkumar Ramanathan and Prajnesh Gunneswaran appear in ATP tournaments and the initial rounds of a Grand Slam.

The situation in women’s tennis is far more dire. Other than in India’s sole WTA 250 tournament in Chennai when local players enter with wildcards, or when Mirza has her few last hurrahs in doubles, it is rare that one finds an Indian name on a WTA scoreboard.

Calendar conflicts

Ankita Raina is India’s highest ranked singles player at 273; in doubles she is ranked 132, and has a sole WTA doubles title against her name. Bhosale–who won the National Games doubles title earlier this month–is ranked 405 in singles and 220 in doubles. Thandi reached the 2022 Chennai Open Round of 16 before losing to Eugenie Bouchard of Canada. But as her ranking of 320 suggests, such successes have been hard to come by. Beyond these three, there is a gaping chasm.

One of the biggest blockers of success for Indian players is a lack of exposure to international competition. There are three ITF tournaments typically arranged at the end of the year, but the top players don’t always make it. As Bhosale explains: “All I want to do is take a short rest after a long year and before the Australian season starts. I am just too exhausted to play.

”Spacing them out through the year may, one suspects, be a pragmatic move. It should help that the new UTR Pro Tennis Tour designed for players ranked between 200 and 2000, is coming to India next month.

Financial conundrums

In a recent chat on the challenges that surround development of Indian players for the highest level, Amritraj threw this gem of a one-liner: “Investing in the development of a tennis player is the highest risk start-up venture in the world.” It may sound like a hyperbole, but the statement is far from being one. A top-50 player, to maintain their place in the rankings, will have annual expenses anywhere between $175,000- $500,000 and a top-100 player will need around $100,000. These are numbers well beyond the affordability spectrum of 99.9 per cent of tennis parents in India. If a daughter eventually becomes a World No. 1 and multiple-Grand Slam-winner like Mirza, she can earn the $7 million+ over the course of a career (besides endorsements). It would suffice to say that India has had only one Mirza in the 80-year history of women’s tennis in the country. To add even more perspective, the publicly available numbers suggest that the combined career earnings of India’s top three women players–Raina, Thandi and Bhonsle–is less than $750k. It is an uphill battle, whichever way one spins it.

Bhosale’s example is a typical one when it comes to a middle-class family. Her father was a national-level javelin thrower, but she is the first to play tennis. When her parents encouraged her to pick up the game seeing her talent for it, “they had no idea how expensive a sport it is,” Bhosale says. “I often think that one solution is perhaps for the Association to pick up the top five players and invest in their development. It might bring a sea change in how far Indian women and men can go at the highest level,” she adds.

I spoke to Mirza some time ago about the issue of money and lack of a system in India that develops tennis players. This is what she had to say: “Whoever has made it until now, whether it’s Ramesh or Vijay or Krishnan or Leander, Mahesh or myself, has made it by themselves. They have not come out of a system. There has not been a system in place to help these players financially or mentally or just coaching-wise to give them someone they can go to. Unfortunately, that is the truth of it.”

Private initiatives

Is it possible for private entities to step in? The Britannia Amritraj Tennis (BAT) Foundation did exactly this in the 1990s. It gave to the world not just Paes, but a generation of Davis Cup players and multiple Asian champions. Bizarrely, no one has sought to replicate its success in the past three decades. Instead, an academy built on the same model has revolutionised Indian cricket. “The MRF Pace Academy was modelled on BAT, and went through several rounds of consultation with us to understand what elements made us such a success,” Amritraj says.

One look at the impact and depth of Indian pace bowling resources today should be enough to get corporates and tennis academies salivating at the prospect of replicating its success. Meanwhile, if two women can bring back India’s first tennis medal in 25 years against all the odds that the tennis ecosystem–or the lack thereof–has stacked against them, it might just fast-track the process, awake sleeping sponsors and spark off a revolution that gives birth to a long line of Mirzas in the decades to come.

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