From travelling in unreserved train compartments to getting mobbed: How the treatment of women cricketers has changed

Mumbai Indians skipper Harmanpreet Kaur along with her teammates, team staff and team owner Nita Ambani with the Women’s Premier League 2023 trophy at Brabourne Stadium, in Mumbai.
| Photo Credit: ANI

I came across a group of young women — a French translator, a make-up artist and a home-maker — at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in Mumbai shortly after the final of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) last month. They were happy: their team, Mumbai Indians, had just won the inaugural edition of the WPL. Though they follow cricket, it was the first time that they were watching women’s cricket. They aren’t alone. The WPL has created a fan base of millions for women’s cricket in India, going by the eyeballs that the WPL attracted for over three weeks in March.

Not that women’s cricket wasn’t popular in India before the WPL. I remember reporting on an India-Australia Women’s ODI series before a full house at the Reliance Cricket Stadium in Vadodara five years ago. The Hindu had published the full scoreboard along with the match report at a time when women’s cricket got little space in the media. But the WPL has transformed women’s cricket. By the time the WPL player auction was conducted in Mumbai in February, the Indian media had woken up to women’s cricket. Like the venues — the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai and the D.Y. Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai — the press boxes too were crowded for the WPL matches, which was not the case earlier.

It is indeed nice to see our female cricketers getting their due. Listening to their life stories has been a fascinating experience over the last few years. They are not just wonderful cricketers, but wonderful women as well. For instance, one is unlikely to meet a more humble star in any field than Ellyse Perry, the Australian all-rounder who has won eight cricket World Cups and scored a goal in a football World Cup. New Zealand’s Sophie Devine has an excellent sense of humour. Her popularity rose sharply in India after her stunning knock (99 off 36 balls) against Royal Challengers Bangalore. When I asked the women at the CCI about their highlights of the WPL, they referred to that innings. They also told me about the Indian players they admired, such as Harleen Deol. The conversation reminded me of my interview with Smriti Mandhana. The goddess of the off-side — to borrow and slightly change an expression that Rahul Dravid used to describe Sourav Ganguly — had told me that she was happy to find that people had begun to give a name to the Indian female cricketer: earlier, it was the girl who bowled left-arm spin, now it was Radha Yadav. Our female cricketers are now mobbed, have a massive following on social media and appeared constantly in advertisements during the WPL.

Shubhangi Kulkarni, the former Indian captain whose leg-spin helped the Indian women score their first ever Test victory (against the West Indies in 1976), never had experiences like these. Not that she complains. Last year, when I went to Pune to cover the Women’s T20 Challenge — the precursor to the WPL —I met her. We have been talking on the phone for years; she is articulate and friendly. We met at her shop, Sunny’s Sports Boutique, which she set up along with Sunil Gavaskar and former Baroda cricketer Jairaj Mehta. Sitting at the cash counter, she told me at length about the early days of women’s cricket in India, when players like her travelled on unreserved train compartments and spent from their own pockets. The customers who came there to buy cricket equipment probably had no idea that they were interacting with a former India captain. A little later, we were joined by her India teammate, Nilima Jogalekar, who told me about the first prize she got from cricket. It was a glucose biscuit.

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