‘Nahi, kaise karegi; ye toh ladki hai’: Sania Mirza on how she dealt with societal pressure at the peak of her tennis career

What shone through in her reflection was the courage to be a little mad, as she put it. “It takes a little bit of crazy to do that… most successful people will tell you they were a little crazy to believe in themselves.”

She acknowledged that her parents shielded her from much of the societal negativity—so much so that she only understood the extent of it later in life, when she was already strong enough to withstand it. “They protected me so well from it that I only understood and heard it much later, when it didn’t bother me anymore.”

In a poignant moment, Sania recalled a gathering with other elite athletes—Nikhat Zareen, Saina Nehwal, and Joshna Chinappa—where they all realised something striking: despite coming from different religions, cultures, and social backgrounds, the questions and the doubts they were asked growing up were exactly the same.

That’s the story of so many women in sport in India. Regardless of where they come from, the message society sends is often rooted in the same disbelief: “The amount of times that I’ve heard ‘you can’t do this’—Nahi, kaise karegi? Ye toh ladki hai—like, you know how many times have we heard that in our lives, right? As young girls we’ve heard ‘no’ many more times than we’ve heard ‘yes’.

But Sania Mirza didn’t just prove these people wrong—she threw the whole rulebook out of the window.

According to counselling psychologist Srishti Vatsa, from a psychological standpoint, “this kind of prolonged stress impacts the nervous system. There is severe anxiety, sleep is disrupted, and the body begins to carry the trauma. There’s often a deep sense of isolation and a loss of narrative control.”