Women’s tennis occupies a niche within the niche that’s tennis in the universe of sports in India. In the past decade, Sania Mirza has been instrumental in ensuring that the women’s game hasn’t entirely faded from the lexicon of Indian tennis. In doing so, she haas also established a blueprint of sorts for others to bring about continuity to her efforts.

Even earlier, Nirupama Vaidyanathan (now Nirupama Sanjeev) and Shikha Uberoi had raised Indian hopes when they became the first two Indian tennis players to win main draw matches in the Majors. Vaidyanathan won her first round match at the 1998 Australian Open against Italian Gloria Pizzichini, and eight years later, in 2004, Uberoi won her first round match at the US Open against Japanese Saori Obata.

It wasn’t however until 2005, again at the US Open, when Mirza reached the fourth round, that Indian women’s tennis acquired a real international footprint. With Mirza’s success came the understanding back home that there could be more to Indian tennis than Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi, who were then the mainstays.

As it stands even today, Mirza is still the lynchpin of women's tennis in India. Importantly, she continues to push the boundaries of her success further. For players like Ankita Raina, Prarthana Thombare, and youngsters like Karman Kaur Thandi and Pranjala Yadlapalli amongst others, it's this latter quality that may prove to the most inspiring.

Ankita Raina's successes

Raina has done reasonably well for herself in the past few months. In September 2016, she teamed up with Briton Emily Webley-Smith to win the $50,000 ITF tournament in Zhuhai, China.

Soon afterwards, in the same month, she reached the final qualifying round in the WTA Tashkent Open, notching an upset over the second seed (in the qualifying draw) Ekaterina Alexandrova of Russia, who, then ranked 138th in the world, was 178 places higher than the 302nd ranked Indian. Raina lost the final qualifier to the seventh seed Turkish player Ipek Soylu, who was then ranked 177th in the world, in three sets.

Both of these matches were three setters. Coincidentally, the eventual winner in each match lost the first set, by the same score-line 6-1, before winning the latter two sets.

It was the third time in 2016 that Raina had come close to making it to the main draw of a WTA event. She reached the second qualifying round in Stuttgart in April, where she was defeated in straight sets by Kristyna Pliskova, 6-1, 6-0. In the first week of September, before Zhuhai and Tashkent, she’d reached the final round of qualification in Dalian before being beaten in straight sets by Taipei’s Kai-Chen Chang.

Raina, who won the gold medal in the South Asian Games in February 2016 defeating fellow Indian Prerna Bhambri in the final, had attributed her momentum to playing more frequently in the WTA circuit. She’d stated: “I am trying to get my service right and am attacking with more power. I am playing the WTA circuit more frequently and that is helping me better my game.”

If Raina does continue to play as consistently, cracking the top 200 of the singles rankings looks probable. The best she's done so far is 222, in April 2015.

Catching up will be a long journey

Sadly, though, there have also been some setbacks. One of these was the whitewash of the Indian junior Fed Cup team in September 2016. India, comprising Sathwika Sama, Mahak Jain and Shivani Amineni, was placed in Group B along with Poland, Canada and Hungary. But the Indian women lost all nine rubbers they played, managing to win only one set while losing 18.

The other was the criticism that came Prarthana Thombare’s way after Mirza and she lost in the first round of the women’s doubles at the Rio Olympics. Mirza was quick to react, however, saying: “As athletes we can fight our hearts out. That is what we did. You come up short on some days but I am happy that we are able to share this experience, especially for her. We tried our best. Stop attacking her guys, she is 190 in the world. She has just played against the guys who are in top 50. Don’t be so hard on her. We just played a two-hour 44 minutes match against the people who are the best in the world.”

The World No. 1 doubles player wasn’t overstating the case. The Indians went down fighting to the Chinese team of Shuai Peng and Shuai Zhang, who won 7-6 (6), 5-7, 7-5. Somewhere, however, the manner of the result was lost in the expectations that govern most Indian viewing of sports.

One crucial takeaway, then, is that it isn't enough for India's women tennis players to be committed and motivated. Fans must have patience too. Just as they did while an Indian woman earned her place as the world’s best doubles player only after a long, forceful transition from singles.