Mumbai: Ayhika Mukherjee smiled as she talked about the last time she was in China. She recalled being greeted and followed by her very own fan group, who would approach her autographs and photographs wherever she went, as she competed at the WTT China Smash in Beijing in October.
“In India, I’m not that well recognised,” Mukherjee said to HT, on the sidelines of the 86th Senior National Championship in Surat last month. “But in China, people seemed to know exactly who I am. Table tennis is their national sport and they knew what I had done.”
What Mukherjee had managed to do was shake the Chinese table tennis fraternity with an unexpected win over world No.1 Sun Yingsha at the World Team Championships last year.
“That was a big hit for China. Everyone there keeps talking about it,” India’s head coach Massimo Costantini had said to this publication.
Mukherjee is now back in China, this time in Shenzhen as she and the rest of the Indian contingent get set to compete at the 34th Asian Cup that starts on Wednesday.
The 27-year-old will be competing in women’s singles along with compatriots Sreeja Akula and Yashaswini Ghorpade, while Achanta Sharath Kamal, Manav Thakkar and Harmeet Desai will compete in men’s singles.
But the win over Sun was not the first time Mukherjee had managed to upset the Chinese. At the deferred Asian Games in 2023, she paired up with Sutirtha Mukherjee in the women’s doubles event. They went on to win bronze after beating the Chinese team of Wang Yidi and reigning Olympic champion Chen Meng, then ranked No.4 and No.2 in the world respectively, in the quarterfinal. It was a win that ensured China would not have a women’s doubles medal in an edition of the Asiad for the first time.
“I had visualised the win even before we played our first match,” said Mukherjee. “When I saw the draw, I said that the quarter-final will be against China and we have nothing to lose. No harm in visualising that we have won. It played out just like that.”
It was something similar when she was to play Sun at the World Championships last year.
“I told the team that I wanted to play the world No.1,” she recalled. “I didn’t know when I would ever get a chance to play against such a big player next. I wanted to play that day. You only play your best against the best. I think I did just that.”
It was the biggest win of her career. It was just another piece of evidence for her family that she is indeed doing what she was destined to do.
Always into sports
Born and raised in Naihati, West Bengal, Mukherjee explained that her parents had initially pushed her into art.
“I did not like it one bit. I used to deliberately draw outside the lines just so I could be removed from the class,” she added with a laugh.
What her parents had noticed about her when she was a child was that she would be happy “when she was watching a football match” but “not interested in playing with toys.”
Naihati though, had a good table tennis culture and her parents eventually got her enrolled in the sport when she was five. She started by hitting against a wall to develop her hand-eye coordination. The next step was playing on the table, but she needed a stool to stand on early on since she was not tall enough.
It was only in 2008 that she realised that she wanted to pursue the sport.
“I competed in 22 events in the U-12 and U-15 categories at local tournaments around Bengal. I won in all 22 of them, including the state championship,” she said.
The medals have continued even till today. With Sutirtha, she became the first Indian to win an Asian Games medal in the women’s doubles event. The duo won another bronze at the 2024 Asian Championship in Kazakhstan, where Mukherjee was also a part of the women’s team to have won bronze in the team event.
In the Mukherjee household though, it is her win against Sun that is still fondly remembered.
“One day, I was asleep beside my mother and had woken up suddenly. I looked over and my mother was watching a replay of the match on her phone,” Mukherjee said.
Now in Shenzhen, she will look to add a few more memorable wins to her collection.
