Before Sania Mirza (tennis), Saina Nehwal (badminton), Joshna Chinappa and Deepika Pallikal (both squash), there was Nirupama Vaidyanathan (now Nirupama Sanjeev), a trailblazer, the first Indian woman travelling sports pro.

Here is the remarkable story of a young woman who broke away from the stifling confines of a highly conservative small town in Tamil Nadu to make her mark on the international tennis scene.
It is a story of grit, determination, a never-say-die spirit, a fight against narrow patriarchal stereotypes and the appalling indifference of Indian sporting officialdom, all for the love of tennis.
Nirupama was never a headline-grabber like Mirza. But in her own quiet, determined way she laid down the path along which her fellow Indian sportswomen would follow a few years later. Even if never acknowledged as such, one suspects her achievements on the pro circuit were an inspiration to many others who followed.
Coimbatore has a tradition of being the motor sports capital of India (India’s first F-1 driver Narain Karthikeyan was a neighbour of the Vaidyanathans).
In the ’80s it was her cousins K.G. Ramesh and K.G. Suresh who made an impact on the domestic tennis circuit. They were also an inspiration for her brother Ganesh and little Niru herself who started playing in tournaments against the boys (and regularly beating them) when she was just eight years old.
It was father K.S. Vaidyanathan who was their first coach. He represented the Madras team (now Tamil Nadu) in the Ranji Trophy as a left arm spinner in the ’60s but received a raw deal from the selectors and was thus determined for his children to take up an individual sport. A self-made coach, he instilled in Niru the motto of “Live, breathe, eat and sleep tennis”, which was to become an obsession for the youngster. Her love for and gratitude to her father runs like a golden thread through the book.
In traditional TamBrahm (Tamil Brahmin) culture, “boys played sport and girls learnt music and dance”. And of course, girls are expected to get “married off” and dutifully tend to husband, hearth and home.
Nirupama broke the mould and for this she deserves immense credit for fighting against not only her opponents across the net, but also the entrenched ways of Indian society which always strives to box in women and stifle their ambitions.
Niru won her first national senior title at the age of 14 in Hyderabad in 1990 and within four years was travelling the foreign circuit.
In pre-Internet/mobile phone days, life was a struggle as each player had to make their own bookings and visa and stay arrangements. The culture shock felt by a teenage girl travelling to Europe and the US often on her own is wonderfully narrated, some incidents being hilarious, others quite harrowing.
Nirupama’s special moment in Indian sports history happened at the Australian Open in Melbourne in 1998 when she beat her first round opponent to become the first Indian woman to win a match at a Grand Slam event. That moment was the culmination of years of struggle — playing, being coached and living abroad, mainly in Luxembourg where she felt the bitter sting of racism. The words “loneliness was my constant companion” are haunting and just goes to prove that the life of a travelling tennis pro, unless ranked in the top 50, is devoid of glamour.
The tennis authorities were of no help whatsoever; in fact they were a hindrance. Approaching the late R.K. Khanna when he was president of the All-India Tennis Association for financial assistance, Niru was met with the blunt question: “Why don’t you just get married?” Years later, nothing much had changed.
It should be noted here that every word in this book is written by the author herself; there is no ghost writer as in the case of the majority of sports autobiographies. Having done a stint as a TV commentator, I am convinced the author has a great future as a writer too and her next book, Parenting a Wimbledon Champ, should be a treat.
Some of the passages are lyrical, particularly the picture she paints of her childhood and early family life in and around Tamil Nadu. But my favourite is where Nirupama describes the ritual where the bride has to sit on her father’s lap at the time the groom ties the mangalsutra during a traditional wedding.
“I was scared to sit on my father’s lap as I wasn’t sure he could handle my weight. He replied sweetly. ‘You are like a petal in my lap.’ Those words and the enormity of that moment brought tears to my eyes.” Mine too.
The description of the complications she went through during pregnancy and childbirth, on the other hand, is perhaps a tad too graphic and personal, perhaps more so for a single male like me.
Marriage and motherhood meant Nirupama quit tennis in 2003. But then when New Delhi hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2010, followed a month later by the Asian Games in China, the joy of once again representing the nation saw her make a comeback before finally settling down to run her coaching academy in Santa Clara, California.
American coach David O’Meara has a lovely sentence in his foreword: “Niru became the shining example for Indian women to travel internationally without losing their Indian traditions.” How apt!
This is not a book that is likely to be a bestseller, though it deserves to be. Yet, to support a retired Indian woman tennis player to tell her story is something the publisher deserves full credit for. The scope of the narrative, in fact, goes beyond tennis — the author’s views on the state of women in India is surely worth noting.
My hats off to both the publisher and the author for a truly wonderful book, one of the finest sports autobiographies it has been my privilege to read.

Gulu Ezekiel is the author of over a dozen sports books, including three cricket biographies