NATIONAL
SANIA MIRZA-THE NEW ARCHETYPE
By V M Gokuldas
Sania Mirza bid adieu to her childhood and her anonymity on her 18th birthday
last year. She has not looked back since then. On 15th of this month, the whole
of India seemed to celebrate the celebrity's birthday.
When asked prior to third round match at the 2005 Australian Open, Serena
Williams said, she knew nothing about her opponent. By the time the hour-long
match was over, the Indian's whiplash and ground strokes and movie-star poise
ensured that Serena and a global audience could sense who Sania Mirza was and
what was her worth.
With a carefree mix of ambition and aggression, she moved up from 206th rank to
explode on to 31 with a tour title at home, a final at Forest Hills, New York
and a fourth round appearance at the US Open, during the year.
This lass from Hyderabad, a four century-old city that combines the most
conservative culture, nurtured during the Nizams' rule, with its just-acquired
IT power, is going places.
In hockey, we used to get champions earlier. We were content with a few awards
in some wrestling and a bit of athletics, but nothing for a billion-plus people.
Our record is limited to only stray individual performances. Like shooting that
brought a Silver at the Athens Olympics. The country otherwise lives in cricket.
Millions are invested and multiplied. For this, even matches, it is alleged, are
fixed.
But tennis has remained clean, partly because of less money than cricket. There
have been Ramanathan Krishnan, Jaideep Mukherjee, Premjit Lal, the Amrithraj
brothers and now, Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathy. Tennis has produced more
stars than cricket, despite the near-absence of a craze. Sania's advent
threatens to make hockey glamorous and may be, profitable.
As an attractive teenager who plays with abandon and carries herself with
unmistakable spunk and confidence, she is a veritable mix of symbols. She wears
short skirts, and is a devout Muslim. She is aware of her sexual power, but does
not use it overtly. She plays tennis with savage ferocity on the court without
losing an air of innocent playfulness off it.
Sania's appeal lies in the effortlessness with which so many facets coalesce;
and yet she stays beyond the pale of definition by any one of them.
The nose ring that she sports sets her apart from other tennis players, and
other sportspersons across the world. The ring is both an assertion of ethnic
Indian identity and a fashion statement. It makes her unique, in person and in
photographs, on or off the field. It is something distinct that gets captured in
each photograph, even if she is not playing.
Her large wardrobe includes numerous T- shirts with messages that provoke, tease
and challenge our notions of who she is and what she represents, says top Indian
adman Santosh Desai. They communicate a certain knowing innocence that allows
Sania to retain her individuality.
On the other hand, Gabriella Sabatini and Anna Kournikova have become better
known for their pretty faces, supple bodies, their glamorous persona and their
boyfriends. Sania seems a wholesome product of a well-knit educated Muslim
family. She has, so far, retained an image that is intensely sporty and
delectably glamorous, while constantly climbing up the rating chart with her
on-the-court-performances.
Since it is always possible for a sportsperson to lose form and do badly, when
she goes through such a phase, she should not be belittled and discarded by the
media that is only looking for success stories.
Sania belongs to a generation that instinctively understands how images get
distributed and consumed by the masses. Her skimpy tennis attire is a compelling
visual across the world. Sania accepts this without excessive defensiveness or
coyness. In any case, she is a product of the media notwithstanding her superb
talent.
But straddling two worlds has not been easy. A Muslim clergy publicly demanded
that she dress "modestly". Last week, she tersely told an international
audience: "What I do and what I wear is nobody else's business."
Retaliation from the conservatives came a day later. Her effigies and posters
were burnt, forcing her to tender an apology and refute an alleged remark on
what she thought of pre-marital sex. "It is the worst crime in Islam," she
clarified.
This shows that she is at once a modern-outside-but-conventional-inside woman,
like most successful women of any era claim to be. The other Indian examples,
like entrepreneurs Anu Agha and Kiran Shaw Mazumdar and Chennai-born Pepsico's
international executive Indira Nuyi, belong to a previous generation. In Sania's
case, modernity and tradition are both integral part of her - being more of one
does not imply that she is less of the other. She is simultaneously more
'Indian" and more "modern."
She is the new archetype. Of upper middle class of a Muslim family, hers is not
a rags-to-riches story seeking sympathy. She is not a loser-turned winner
seeking accolade. She is a winner all he way, something the family has worked
for too. Hers is a positive story all along.
In sum, Sania is a celebration of a modern girl, who happens to be a Muslim, for
the new-century India. There is a positivity about her that everyone wants to be
part of. Her be-yourself-and-go-for-it message is an attitude many young Indians
are waking up to.
Great. But she is carrying far too many labels, each carrying heavy
responsibility. It would be naïve to look at India, Indian womanhood, Indian
Muslims or even Indian Muslim women solely through Sania's image. The fact is
that unlike Sania, all the rest are ill-educated and suffer from want and
disease. In an indepth study (Hasan and Menon) it has been observed that the
state of the Muslim women is dismal. As Hasan puts it: "Overall, Muslim women
are triply disadvantaged as members of a minority, as women and most of
minority, as women and most of all, as poor women." -CNF