“For a girl to pick up a tennis racquet and to want to be a professional—it was unheard of,” Sania Mirza says. “People thought it was a joke.” PHOTOGRAPH BY GREG WOOD / AFP / Getty

On the last day of August, Sania Mirza, currently the No. 1 women’s doubles player in the world, was on one of the smaller side courts at the U.S. Open grounds, in Flushing Meadows, about to play her first match in this year’s tournament. She and her partner, Barbora Strýcová, of the Czech Republic, were squaring off against the Americans Jada Myii Hart and Ena Shibahara. The sun had begun to sneak behind the bleachers, where a few dozen fans had settled in. Occasionally, a roar from Arthur Ashe Stadium or the grandstands could be heard over their polite clapping. Mirza’s black hair was tied back in its usual businesslike bun, her dark eyes focussed beneath a neon-pink headband. Mirza’s gruelling summer had included her third Olympics, which had ended just a couple of weeks before, with a fourth-place finish in mixed doubles. Her longtime partnership with the tennis icon Martina Hingis was also coming to an end. Now she was gearing up again, knowing that millions were paying attention in her native India, even if only a handful were watching in New York.

Mirza, who will be thirty in November, is wildly famous in one hemisphere and virtually unknown in the other. She has nearly twelve million Facebook fans—more than double the number that Serena Williams has—plus four million followers on Twitter, and two million more on Instagram. She is, without hyperbole, one of the most popular athletes on Earth. She has, to date, earned $6.3 million in career prize money, a fraction of what Williams has made, but more than a thousand times the annual per-capita income in her home country.

She is also Muslim, and has sparked the ire of clerics for competing in tennis clothes that leave her arms and legs exposed. Though roughly one in twelve people on the planet is a woman from India, few Indian women have succeeded in professional sports, for reasons that are not hard to pinpoint. Last year, in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, India ranked No. 108, out of a hundred and forty-five countries listed. For years, women in India were largely discouraged from participating in high-level sports—and, unless the women were wealthy, good facilities were hard to come by, anyway.

Mirza is helping to change this. She’s an advocate for women’s rights, and has spoken up about ending the practice of female feticide in India. She has criticized government policies on domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as lopsided pay schemes, including in sports. She was the first South Asian woman to be appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations, and she often calls out reporters for asking her, and not her male counterparts, about her “family plans.” She told me that, after she and Hingis won Wimbledon last year, she was asked by a reporter when she’d be having a child. “I was, like, ‘I won Wimbledon two days ago!’ ”

Though Mirza makes light of her reputation, in India, for what some there see as arrogance, the truth is that her outspokenness has only made her more popular back home. Her stardom is an unlikely outcome, considering where she started. “For a girl to pick up a tennis racquet and to want to be a professional—it was unheard of,” she told me. “People thought it was a joke.”

Mirza grew up in Hyderabad, a city of nearly seven million. It was only half that size when she was a child, and, back then, sanitation, let alone access to a tennis court, was not a given—only a handful of courts existed, and many that did were riddled with potholes or made with cow dung (a surface that was thought to offer a middle ground between clay and hard courts). Today, as Mirza is well aware, the city center of Old Hyderabad is a hub for human trafficking, and domestic violence is an urgent problem. Though technically illegal, child marriage persists. Local police blotters in and around Hyderabad regularly carry gruesome stories: a woman who hanged herself by her sari when a dowry went sour, a husband setting his wife on fire. Just a few weeks after last year’s U.S. Open came news, from south of Hyderabad, in Bengaluru, that a woman had been raped by two security guards outside of tennis courts in Cubbon Park. It was the third such attack in the city in a month. According to local reports, the victim later told police, “I want to be like Sania Mirza.”

Mirza at her second wedding to the Pakistani cricket star Shoaib Malik, in his home country. His nationality drew criticisim of Mirza in India. PHOTOGRAPH BY FAISAL MAHMOOD / REUTERS PHOTOGRAPH BY FAISAL MAHMOOD / REUTERS

The Mirzas moved to Hyderabad, from Mumbai, when Sania was an infant, one of many families drawn to the burgeoning technology mecca. Mirza’s father, Imran, held a number of jobs, working mostly as a printer and, later, in construction. Mirza’s mother, Naseema, also had a mind for business, and she and her husband often worked together. They were ambitious, and forward-thinking in their attitude toward girls; still, they tried to avoid placing too much stress on their daughters. (Sania’s sister Anam is seven years younger.) It was on a whim that Imran signed up Sania, then six years old, for tennis lessons, at Hyderabad’s Nizam Club. There were cricketers in the Mirza family, but women’s cricket had not yet taken off in India. Tennis seemed like something she might enjoy.

A couple of months later, Sania’s coach suggested that Imran come to watch his daughter play. He put it off. When he finally saw her on the court, he immediately realized that she was a standout talent. Soon, the sport became as much a part of her childhood routine as brushing her teeth or doing her homework. Sania attended the Nasr School, a progressive all-girls private school, which adapted her academic schedule to accommodate her tennis travels. “Always in tracksuits, coming directly from practice straight to school!” Nirmal Gandhi, a teacher at Nasr who had Mirza as a student, said. “I don’t think I ever saw her serious. She was always laughing with her friends.” At the time, the Indian system for youth tennis was, Imran said, “nonexistent.” It’s not unheard of for the parents of tennis players to spend fifty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars, or more, annually on coaching, travel, and equipment, an expense that was far beyond the Mirza household budget at the time. So Imran began to coach his daughter, and set about researching local tournaments, learning what he could through word of mouth and follow-up phone calls. Sania’s mother stayed at home “to hold down the ranch,” tending to Mirza’s little sister and various pieces of family business, a pattern that would continue for twenty years—Sania’s tennis career becoming another joint family venture.

Mirza eventually won a berth in the 2003 Wimbledon junior girls’ competition, as a doubles player with Russia’s Alisa Kleybanova. They won the tournament. When Mirza stepped off the plane back in India, a mob of people greeted her and her family at the airport, fanfare that surprised them. Government dignitaries took photos with her and bestowed her with awards. The Indian press began to cover her every move, and it hasn’t stopped since. “At fifteen or sixteen, you’re still trying to get in touch with yourself as a person, as a teenager,” Sania Mirza said. “You have pimples. You have baby fat, in front of millions of people. You have to kind of grow up in front of the media, and you’re growing older and the following is getting larger and larger. You’re still getting in touch with who you are.”

“The Indian media, too, was just growing up,” Imran said. “They grew up along with Sania. They were really not geared or didn’t know how to handle a female sporting icon. They might have handled a film star, but here was the first sporting woman from India. It wasn’t easy for her, but it probably wasn’t easy for the media to deal with, either.” In 2005, as she was competing on the international circuit, a group of clerics issued a fatwa against Mirza, calling her skirts and T-shirts “un-Islamic” and “corrupting.” The cleric Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui told the Guardian that the clothing she wore on court “leaves nothing to the imagination.”