“Sania Mirza” can change the world.
Sania Mirza is on her way to becoming a global icon. After featuring on the Time Asia cover, she’s now on the UK-based New Statesman magazine’s list of ‘Ten People Who Will Change the World’. The 93-year-old NS is among the most respected political-literary-cultural weeklies in the UK: “an essential read for bright thinkers everywhere”.
Its October 17 edition carries a cover story on men and women who will transform the world. According to one of the editors, the aim was to “identify people who would have a profound impact on the world in the next decade or so”.
In a 742-word article by Jason Cowley (editor of the Observer Sport Monthly and Booker judge in the year Arundhati Roy won the award) , the weekly says it is difficult to believe that “a slender 18-year-old Muslim tennis player from India has the potential to change the world, but it is equally difficult to overestimate the effect Mumbai-born Sania Mirza, currently No.37 in the WTA singles rankings, is having on millions of young men and women, and especially women. She is seen as someone who can “inspire a whole new generation of Indian girls to express their hopes and ambitions through sport”.
“She is the first female Indian tennis player to be ranked in the world’s top 40, indeed, she is the first significant female athlete of any kind, in a country where women have been typically discouraged from taking up sport,” the article says. It notes that Sania has the discipline, tenacity, flamboyance and, above all, the talent to go much higher in the rankings and, in so doing, inspire a whole new generation of Indian girls to express their hopes and ambitions through sport.
Recalling her recent tiff with Muslim clerics over her dress code, the article says, “at home, in India, Mirza is a role model and an icon, her fame locating her somewhere between Bollywood and the mass adulation that surrounds the Indian cricket team. She is celebrated as much for her attitude and fashion sense (she wears a nose-ring and librarian glasses) as she is for her talent.
At Wimbledon, she wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan: ‘Well-behaved women rarely make history’; at the US Open in September, where she lost in the quarter-final to the Russian sensation Maria Sharapova, her T-shirt read: ‘You can either agree with me, or be wrong’.
“All this means that Mirza is in ceaseless demand for interviews, billboard advertising, endorsements (her fee is reported to be second only to the great batsman Sachin Tendulkar’s) and television appearances.
“Muhammad Ali, Pele, Evonne Goolagong, Viv Richards, the so-called ghetto Cinderellas Venus and Serena Williams and the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming — these sporting icons, because of their fame, achievement and corporate power, have helped to transform the way mainstream sporting audiences think about race, gender and the old political structures that once controlled the games we play. “Can Mirza have a similarly transformative effect, not only in India but also throughout the world? She may not have won a major tournament, yet already she occupies a role through which flow many of the most significant intellectual and cultural currents of our times: the clash between secularism and political Islam, the emancipation of women in the Muslim world, the dominance of celebrity, the tyranny of the image, the emergence of India as a world power,” Cowley writes.
Referring to her recent complaint that “every word I speak, every skirt I wear, is discussed and analysed,” on return to India from the United States, Cowley concludes: “If she continues to improve as rapidly as she has
over the past six months, Sania Mirza will simply have to get used to such obsessive scrutiny. There is no turning back now.”
