There is a certain irony in the fact that Indian women's cricket owes its official birth not to a boardroom decision or a benevolent grant, but to a man riding around Lucknow in an auto-rickshaw with a hand-held microphone, hollering an invitation that must have sounded, in 1973, like a fairly outlandish joke: "Kanyaon ki cricket hogi, zaroor aaiye" — girls will play cricket, do come. That man was Mahendra Kumar Sharma, who had been organizing softball and handball tournaments for schoolgirls in Lucknow, and who noticed at a softball meet in Hyderabad that the girls, having watched some boys play, had started swinging the softball bats at an imaginary cricket ball instead. thebetterindia
That small, almost accidental spark is where this story really begins — not with Harmanpreet Kaur lifting a trophy in Navi Mumbai fifty-two years later, though we will get there, but with a man nobody remembers organizing a tournament that almost nobody attended. Sharma's Women's Cricket Association of India was formally registered under the Societies Act in Lucknow in 1973, with around 200 curious onlookers showing up for the first tournament at Queen's Anglo Sanskrit College. Two hundred people. For context, more than that will show up for a decent under-14 school match today. But that gathering — half novelty show, half genuine sporting ambition — was the seed of everything that has followed: the Test caps, the World Cup final heartbreaks, the eventual, thunderous triumph, and the crores now changing hands at a glittering annual auction in a Mumbai convention centre. Wikipedia
This is an attempt to tell that fuller story — not just the highlight reel everyone already knows, but the parts that tend to get left out of the montage: the women who played for nothing, the administrators who mattered more than history gave them credit for, and the quietly extraordinary depth Indian cricket has built that now allows it to genuinely stand toe to toe with cricket's oldest women's powers.
The Prehistory: Before the softball bats
Sharma's WCAI is usually cited as the true starting gun, but women's cricket in India didn't spring from nothing in 1973. There was already a women's cricket club in Bombay — the Albees Cricket Club, started in 1969 by Aloo Bamjee and her husband — a lonely outpost of the sport in a country where a girl holding a cricket bat was, at best, an eccentricity and, at worst, a scandal. This detail rarely makes it into the popular telling, perhaps because Bombay's Albees never grew into a movement the way Lucknow's initiative eventually did. But it matters, because it tells you something the folklore glosses over: the appetite for the game among Indian women predates any organization by years, possibly decades. The administrators didn't create the desire to play. They just finally noticed it. greenportfolio
Once the WCAI existed, the growth was almost startling in its speed — the first Women's Inter-State Nationals in Pune in April 1973 had just three teams (Bombay, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh); by the end of that same year, the Varanasi edition had eight; soon after, fourteen. Two women, Chandra Tripathi and Pramilabai Chavan, took over as chairperson and president in this period and, alongside Sharma, effectively willed a domestic structure into existence out of pure administrative stubbornness. Railways and Air India began fielding their own women's teams, offering players something almost nobody else could: a salary, and by extension, permission from their families to keep playing. shethepeopleshethepeople
That last point deserves lingering on, because it is the quietest and most consequential thread running through the entire early history of the sport. A government job with Indian Railways or Air India wasn't just an income. For a young woman in the 1970s and '80s wanting to play a sport her own society considered faintly improper, a stable job was often the only argument that could out-shout a disapproving father or a skeptical mother-in-law. Cricket didn't just need bats and grounds. It needed employers willing to gamble a payroll slot on a girl who could bowl leg-spin.
India's first official Test cricket came in 1975, when an Australian under-25 team toured for a three-match series — one at Pune, one at Delhi, one at Calcutta — with the captaincy split, unusually, across three different women for the three matches: Ujwala Nikam, Sudha Shah, and Shreeroopa Bose. India's own first international fixture is generally recorded as 31 October 1976, a Test against the West Indies at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, which ended in a draw. There was no television coverage worth the name. There was barely a paragraph in the papers the next morning. But it happened, and it happened only because a handful of people had spent three years building the scaffolding for it to be possible at all. espncricinfoWikipedia
The torchbearers: Playing for love, Paying from pocket
Every retelling of Indian women's cricket eventually arrives at the same names — Shantha Rangaswamy, Diana Edulji, Sudha Shah, and a little later, Anjum Chopra — and rightly so. But it's worth resisting the urge to simply list their achievements and move on, because the more interesting truth is what those achievements cost them, in an era when the word "professional" didn't remotely apply to a woman cricketer.
Shantha Rangaswamy captained the Indian team in that historic 1976 debut, taking guard as the first captain in the country's Test history at a time when women's cricket had precisely zero commercial value and roughly the same amount of institutional respect. Diana Edulji — a left-arm spinner whose numbers would embarrass plenty of contemporary bowlers — toured, trained, and represented her country for years in conditions that would be unthinkable for any cricketer, male or female, today: no sponsorship, patchy kit, minimal medical support, and tours that were often self-funded or funded on threadbare board budgets that had clearly been drawn up as an afterthought. These weren't women chasing fame or fortune, because there was almost none of either on offer. They played because they loved the game more than the game, at that point, deserved to be loved.
Anjum Chopra, who would go on to become one of the most recognizable faces of the sport in the 1990s and 2000s, effectively grew up inside this same austere ecosystem — one where a national call-up meant pride, certainly, but rarely any material change in your life. Mithali Raj, who debuted as a teenager in the late 1990s, spent the best part of two decades as the face of the sport, quietly compiling the kind of numbers — the most international runs by any woman in the game's history, at the time of her retirement — that should have made her a household name on the scale of any male cricketer, and yet spent large stretches of her career playing in front of sparse stands and even sparser headlines. Jhulan Goswami, meanwhile, was out on grounds in Chakdaha, West Bengal, dreaming of playing for India while balancing school and train journeys to Kolkata for coaching, before going on to become the leading wicket-taker in the history of women's ODI cricket — a genuine fast-bowling great who, for a large chunk of her career, trained and toured with barely a fraction of the recognition a moderately useful male domestic cricketer might expect.
None of these women had a WPL contract to look forward to. None of them had brand endorsements queued up. What they had was a stubborn, almost irrational belief that the sport was worth their best years regardless of what it gave back. That belief is the actual foundation stone of everything Indian cricket fans now get to enjoy — not a strategy document, not a five-year plan, just a chain of individually courageous decisions by women who kept showing up.
The stories nobody tells at dinner parties
If you ask a casual cricket fan to name a landmark moment in Indian women's cricket, you'll likely get one of two answers: the 2017 World Cup final loss to England at Lord's, or the 2025 World Cup win at home. Both are fair answers. But there is a whole substrate of smaller, stranger, more human stories sitting underneath the headline history that almost never get told, and they're arguably more revealing of what this sport actually took to build.
There's Mahendra Kumar Sharma himself, a man who, by most accounts, never sought credit for what he built and has largely gone unrecognized for pioneering the very structure that produced Diana Edulji, Shantha Rangaswamy, and everyone who followed. He isn't on any stamp. There's no stadium named after him. He is, at best, a footnote in most retellings of a sport he effectively invented in this country as an organized pursuit. thebetterindia
There's the fact that the WCAI received official government recognition only in 1978 — five full years after it had already registered itself, run multiple national tournaments, and joined the International Women's Cricket Council. The state took half a decade to catch up to what a handful of committed volunteers had already built. shethepeople
There's the deeply underappreciated 2005 story: India's first-ever World Cup final appearance, where they ran into an Australian juggernaut and lost by 98 runs. It's remembered, when it's remembered at all, as a defeat. What gets lost is that reaching that final at all — with a fraction of the board's attention, budget, or media appetite pointed their way — was itself a small miracle of talent surviving despite the system rather than because of it.
There's the 2017 final against England, which does get talked about, but usually just as "the one where they lost by nine runs." What deserves more airtime is what that near-miss actually did: it was arguably the single biggest catalyst for public and commercial interest in Indian women's cricket, a defeat so gripping and so widely watched that it did more for the sport's visibility than a decade of quiet Test-match grinding ever had. Sometimes the most transformative result in a sport's history is a loss.
And there's a story from 2022, easily lost in the ocean of India's cricketing content: at the Commonwealth Games, India reached the final and, in the semi-final against England, Sneh Rana defended fourteen off the last over, dismissing Katherine Brunt to seal victory by four runs and send India into their first-ever Commonwealth Games cricket final. It's a two-line entry in most record books. It deserves to be a chapter.
These aren't the stories that trend. They're the connective tissue.
The WPL: When money also respects the game
Every sport eventually needs an economic engine, and for a long time Indian women's cricket simply didn't have one. That changed, decisively, in February 2023, when the BCCI staged the inaugural Women's Premier League auction at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai. Of the 1,525 players who had registered for the auction, the list was pruned to 409, split between 246 Indians and 163 overseas players, competing for a maximum of 90 slots across five franchises. businesstoday
The numbers alone tell a story that would have been unimaginable to Diana Edulji's generation. The five franchise owners — among them Adani Sportsline, Reliance's Indiawin Sports, and the operators behind Royal Challengers Bangalore — collectively bid INR 4,669.99 crore for ownership rights, a figure BCCI secretary Jay Shah called proof that stakeholders "thoroughly believe in the concept." Smriti Mandhana became the first player ever auctioned in WPL history, sold to Royal Challengers Bangalore for INR 3.4 crore — a sum that, adjusted for what women cricketers had historically earned in this country, might as well have been a rounding error turned into a small fortune. bcci wisden
The real magic of the WPL, though, isn't the marquee prices. It's what happens two or three rungs below the marquee names — the domestic players from Baroda or Vidarbha or the Railways sides who spend a fortnight sharing a dressing room with Ellyse Perry or Alyssa Healy or Sophie Ecclestone and absorb, almost by osmosis, habits and standards that used to take a decade of international exposure to pick up. Uncapped young Indian cricketers who might otherwise have spent their entire careers in the relative obscurity of domestic cricket are now getting bid on, coached by World Cup winners, and given a stage in front of full stadiums and national broadcast audiences before they've even played for their country. That is the multiplier effect nobody quite predicted when the tournament was announced: the WPL isn't just paying stars, it's manufacturing the next generation faster and better than any academy could on its own.
The on-field payoff: No longer the plucky underdog
For decades, the honest, uncomfortable truth about Indian women's cricket was that it was talented but fragile — capable of a spectacular one-off performance, but rarely of sustained dominance against the game's genuine aristocracy: Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa. That framing has quietly, decisively stopped being true.
In 2022, India won their first bilateral series on English soil in 23 years — a statement result that suggested the gap to the game's traditional powerhouse was closing. Three years later, in the summer of 2025, that gap looked to have closed further still. India won their first-ever T20I series against England, taking an unassailable 3-1 lead, with the series-clinching fourth match in Worcester built on India's spinners — Radha Yadav, Deepti Sharma, and newcomer Shree Charani — restricting England to a modest total that Shafali Verma and Smriti Mandhana chased down comfortably. India also won the accompanying ODI series 2-1, with Harmanpreet Kaur named player of the series. India women's national cricket team
Then came the World Cup, hosted on home soil, and it turned into the defining sporting story of the year. India reached the final for a third time, having previously fallen agonizingly short in both 2005 and 2017. The road there wasn't tidy — three successive defeats in the group phase had reopened every familiar doubt about India's ability to handle pressure on the biggest stage — but the semi-final against seven-time champions Australia produced arguably the signature statement of the entire tournament. Chasing 339, a genuinely enormous target, India got there — one of the highest successful run-chases in the history of Women's ODIs. Harmanpreet Kaur battled cramps to score a defiant 89, but the innings that will be replayed for years belonged to Jemimah Rodrigues — dropped from the side earlier in the tournament, recalled, and responding with an unbeaten 127 that has been called one of the greatest knocks in the competition's history.
The final itself, against South Africa at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, was almost anticlimactic by comparison, in the way that a well-earned coronation often is. Shafali Verma — recalled to the squad only as injury cover — top-scored with a career-best 87 as India posted 298 for 7, then chipped in with the ball too, before Deepti Sharma sealed it with 5 for 39, taking the final wicket to confirm a 52-run win and India's maiden Women's World Cup title. Verma had been drafted into the squad barely a week earlier as cover for the injured Pratika Rawal, and walked away as player of the match in a World Cup final. Deepti Sharma finished the tournament as player of the tournament, having contributed 22 wickets and 215 runs across nine matches. Somewhere in South Africa's chase, Laura Wolvaardt made a genuinely magnificent century of her own — becoming the first captain ever to score a hundred in a Women's World Cup final — and still finished on the losing side, which tells you plenty about how far India had to climb, and how completely they'd climbed it. India Win ICC Women's World Cup 2025
It is worth stating plainly what that result means in the context of the SENA countries — South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia — that have historically formed cricket's power bloc, men's and women's game alike. India didn't sneak past a weakened Australian side or exploit a fluke pitch. They chased down 339 against the most decorated team in the format's history, in a knockout match, at a World Cup, and then beat South Africa in the final. That is not the profile of a plucky team that occasionally punches above its weight. That is the profile of a genuine top-two or top-three side in world cricket, and results across 2025 back that up rather than isolating it as a one-off.
The Pipeline: Why this isn't a peak but a base camp
The most reassuring part of India's current position isn't the senior team's results — it's what's coming up behind them. India's under-19 women's team has won back-to-back Under-19 World Cups, in 2023 and 2025, alongside an Under-19 Asia Cup title in 2024. That is not a fluke generation. That is a system now reliably manufacturing champions at the age-group level, which is precisely the leading indicator any serious cricketing nation should want. Wikipedia
Consider the names now filtering through: Shafali Verma, a genuine six-hitting phenomenon who was a teenage sensation before she was old enough to vote, walking into a World Cup final as injury cover and playing the innings of her career. Jemimah Rodrigues, dropped mid-tournament and returning to play one of the great World Cup knockout innings ever recorded. Richa Ghosh, a fearsome hitter behind the stumps still barely into her twenties. Deepti Sharma, an all-rounder whose value to the side — bat, ball, and clearly, temperament — is now arguably comparable to any all-rounder in the men's game. Pratika Rawal, described by multiple observers as one of the breakout stars of the World Cup before injury intervened. Shreyanka Patil, Titas Sadhu, Kranti Goud — names that would have meant nothing outside hardcore domestic-cricket circles five years ago, now genuine international performers with WPL contracts and national caps to their name.
The infrastructure behind them has changed just as sharply as the visibility. The WPL means domestic-level Indian cricketers are now training and competing alongside the very best in the world every year, not once every few years on a rare overseas tour. Central contracts and improved match fees mean fewer players have to choose between cricket and a stable career — the same dilemma that quietly ended so many promising careers in the Rangaswamy and Edulji era. State associations have visibly increased investment in girls' age-group cricket, partly because the WPL auction has turned unearthed domestic talent into a genuinely marketable commodity, which is its own quietly brilliant incentive structure: scouting is no longer charity, it's good business.
None of this guarantees perpetual dominance — sport doesn't work that way, and Australia in particular remain a fearsomely deep, ruthlessly professional outfit that won't simply hand over their supremacy. But the honest assessment, based on what's visible right now — a World Cup title, back-to-back age-group world titles, a thriving domestic league, a deepening pool of genuine match-winners, and results against every SENA nation in the last two years — is that India isn't at a peak. It's closer to base camp for what could be a genuinely extended period near the summit of the women's game.
A closing word — Including one for those in suits (for a change)
It would be easy to end this piece purely on the players, and they deserve every word of praise that's been written here and plenty more. But there's a group that rarely gets acknowledged warmly in Indian cricket writing, and this feels like the rare, fair occasion to do it: the administrators.
Indian cricket administration has, over the decades, earned no shortage of its criticism — for opacity, for politics, for priorities that too often seemed to favor spectacle over substance. But on women's cricket specifically, something has genuinely gone right in the last several years. The decision to launch the WPL with serious financial backing rather than a token, underfunded gesture; the willingness to give the team consistent central contracts and match fees closer to parity with the men's setup; the choice to host and heavily promote the 2025 World Cup on home soil rather than treat it as a scheduling obligation — these were real decisions, made by real people in real boardrooms, and they mattered. It is entirely possible to hold administrators accountable for their many historical failures while still crediting them for getting this particular, important thing largely right. Credit, in this case, is due — and it's rare enough that it's worth actually saying.
From a rickshaw and a microphone in 1973, to two hundred curious spectators in Lucknow, to Diana Edulji touring on threadbare budgets, to Mithali Raj quietly amassing a mountain of runs in front of empty stands, to Jhulan Goswami redefining what fast bowling could look like in the women's game, to a nine-run heartbreak at Lord's that somehow did more good than a dozen quiet wins — every part of that chain led here: to a home World Cup, a stadium full of thirty thousand people, and an Indian team that beat Australia and South Africa in the space of a week to become, undeniably, world champions.
The trophy is real. But it isn't really the point. The point is that Indian women's cricket no longer needs anyone's permission to be taken seriously — not from a skeptical relative, not from an underfunded board, not from the game's old aristocracy. It has simply, patiently, brilliantly earned its seat at the top table, and on current evidence, it isn't planning on giving it up anytime soon.
After all, Mhaari chhoriyan chhoron se kam hain key?!
Jai Ho!
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