Love is a racket emotion.

On the tennis court, it signifies emptiness, loss, humiliation.

And, yet, it is love for the game that keeps the most tenacious players going.

Not to forget, love keeps them going long after their glorious fifteen seconds on grass or clay have evaporated into the mists of history.

Archana Venkataraman basked in that spotlight. She was a rising star.

It takes a family wedded to tennis to raise a star, and hers was no different. From age four, between school days and holidays in Bengaluru, she and her sister Arthi were ferried from one tournament to another, one coaching clinic to the next.

It paid off. Archana won her maiden title at age seventeen. Soon, she was crowned national champion.

The decade turned. The 1990’s brought Liberalisation. The national economy opened up. Sponsor money began to pour into sporting events. Yet, in a nation besotted with cricket, facilities and infrastructure for tennis were scant. Promising players paid their own way for the most part. Only those undaunted by the expenses remained in the fray.

In 1998, Archana and Arthi won an International Tennis Federation grant of $2000 to play tournaments in Europe. The trip was a revelation: every match the sisters lost counted for lessons learned. They brought their experience back home to India and had a productive run for the next three years.

The competition was getting fierce, but Archana Venkataraman held fort. Until, at the finals of the National Games in 2002, she came up against a younger, hungrier, grittier rival — 16-year-old Sania Mirza. Playing the newcomer on her home turf in Hyderabad and booed by a hostile crowd of spectators, Archana went down in a firestorm of deuces.

And thus began Sania’s decade.

History celebrates victors but their thrones are held aloft by the bruised arms of the vanquished. When her fortunes in competitive tennis faded, Archana threw everything into rearing the next generation of stars at her coaching academy in Bengaluru.

In over a century of competitive tennis, only four Indian women have made it to a Grand Slam event. Viewed in that sobering light, Archana Venkataraman’s story is one of pride, guts, and raging against the odds, shortchanged only on glory.

No love lost there.

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This show is produced by Confluence Media for Radio Azim Premji University.

Credits:

Achie Humtsoe, Anisa Draboo, Gautam Datt, Jasleen Bhalla, Josy Joseph, Omair Farooq, and Siddhartha Mishra

For a comprehensive list of acknowledgments and resources, please visit our website: https://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/almost-perfect-stories-of-forgotten-indian-women-athletes-2