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In February 2024, a staggering 103 million viewers watched the second season of India’s Women’s Premier League. The new league is the counterpart of the men’s Indian Premier League, the country’s biggest and most popular cricket league, featuring cricketers from all over the world. Thousands turned up to watch the women’s games, and nearly 30,000 spectators were present at the final in Delhi. Sponsored by some of the biggest Indian companies like Tata, Ceat and Dream11, it is now the second most valuable women’s sports league in the world after the Women’s National Basketball Association in the United States.
This was not the case even a decade ago. Only a handful of spectators would come out to watch women’s games. The Indian women’s cricket team itself was struggling to get by. Early legends of the game who played in the 1980s had no resources at their disposal. With next to no budget, the players traveled ticketless on trains and sat in luggage vans to make their way to different tournaments. There was no question of staying at hotels, so they slept at railway stations or in school classrooms. Women’s cricket faced decades of institutional indifference and a lack of sponsorship.
It was only in 2006 that the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the world’s wealthiest cricket governing body, took over the administration of women’s cricket in the country. Slowly things began to change. Women were able to access better facilities to train. In 2015, women were offered annual contracts, and in 2022, equal pay for men and women was announced. The national team started to perform better, and their meteoric rise culminated in a dream run at the 2017 World Cup. Against all odds, the Indian team beat heavyweights like England, South Africa and New Zealand to reach the semifinals, which ushered in a sea change in people’s perception of women’s cricket.
Since then, success has come in leaps and bounds. Former captain Mithali Raj, popular bowler Jhulan Goswami, current captain Harmanpreet Kaur, batter Smriti Mandhana and many others have now become household names, appearing in advertisements for top brands. The Indian national team is immensely popular, with the “Women in Blue” (India’s jersey is blue in color) garnering substantial television viewership and in-stadium support during international tournaments and bilateral games. At long last, the world of women’s cricket seems to be pulling in more people with every passing game.
Yet if you took a walk around any neighborhood in India, you’d find groups of five or six boys in the middle of the road playing cricket with makeshift wickets and leather balls. Infamous for smashing people’s windows with their shots, these “gully” (street) cricketers can be found playing anywhere and everywhere — roads, parks, backyards, beaches and even parking lots.
What you won’t find at these gully cricket games is girls.
By and large girls and women are absent from these informal and casual games of cricket played in public spaces, which to many seems odd given how popular and visible women’s international cricket has become in the last decade or so. If women are playing cricket at the highest levels, why are they still invisible in the subcontinent’s parks, streets and playing grounds? The answer to this question, like everything else to do with cricket, is a long and complicated one that ultimately boils down to whom the game of cricket belongs.
In India, while cricket has largely been the exclusive domain of men, it is also considered more than just a game. Its inextricable connection to nationalism means that spectators derive national pride, honor and global status for themselves from cricketing results, and cricket is also a terrain where a national masculinity takes shape. It helps men define themselves and display traits that are held to be their natural characteristics, such as strength, endurance and competitiveness.
While growing up, young boys define themselves around cricket. Whether it’s copying a favorite batter’s hairstyle or imitating another’s personality, cricket has a huge impact on how boys and men see themselves. Inculcating cricketing skills, athleticism and physical strength become core features of their masculine identity.
At cricket coaching academies and in recreational spaces, playing the game with their peer group creates foundational experiences for young boys where they learn about teamwork and comradeship. At the same time, with the girls and women absent from such spaces, these team sports often develop a locker room culture where boys pick up negative stereotypes about women.
In the Indian context, the dominant masculinity in cricket is typically elite, privileged-caste and upper-class. In the years since the introduction of the Twenty20 or T20 format of the game, which is shorter and faster paced, this masculinity has also come to incorporate a muscular bodily aesthetic characterized by gym-based training and diet management.
Every cricket fan is familiar with popular cricketer and former captain Virat Kohli’s obsession with chole-bhature (Indian chickpea curry with flatbread), which is the subject of many a reel on Instagram. But this obsession only makes sense because Kohli denies himself the pleasure of the dish thanks to his highly regimented workout and diet plans. This self-denying, disciplined, six-pack-baring cricketer is the ideal in cricket today.
Cricket might have begun as an extravagant sport of leisure and loafing, but its future is being shaped in the sweaty and heavily scheduled realm of the modern gym.
Often, this conception of masculinity also incorporates notions of superiority, intimidation, sexism, homophobia and racism that result in gross displays of bullying and harassment.
For instance, in an interview on the popular celebrity chat show “Koffee With Karan” in 2019, cricketer Hardik Pandya boasted about his “sexual conquests,” described how he and his fellow cricketers decide who “gets the girl” based on “talent” and said things like, “I like to watch and observe how they [women] move.” His comments were immediately slammed in the media, earning him a suspension from the governing body.
Women aren’t the only victims of this toxic masculinity. Yuzvendra Chahal, a popular bowler who has always had a lanky build, recently opened up in a podcast about experiencing bullying and physical harassment as a young player. In one instance, in 2011, cricketers Andrew Symonds and James Franklin — his teammates in Mumbai Indians (an Indian Premier League team) — taped his mouth, hands and legs and left him in a room, forgetting about him for the rest of the night. Another teammate dangled him off the balcony of the 15th floor while completely drunk.
Interestingly, even as cricket produces a dominant masculinity, it also serves as fertile ground for competing alternative masculinities. Abhinava Srivastava, a doctoral student at the Shiv Nadar University in Delhi, explores this idea of masculinity as a negotiated category along class and caste lines in his work. He argues that working-class men from smaller towns and villages in India employed fast bowling as a “mode of upward mobility, and class and caste-based resistance against the predominantly upper-caste Maharashtrian social base of Indian cricket.”
Often, inclusion and participation at cricket grounds and clubs is impossible if you don’t belong to privileged groups, so working-class men use their fast bowling skills to access these same spaces. They embody a different form of masculinity that is aggressive, nonconformist, less gentlemanly and not tethered to the idealized lean and muscular bodily aesthetic.
“The journey of Mohammed Siraj, the son of an auto rickshaw driver, from the streets of Mehdipatnam in Hyderabad to the Indian cricket dressing room is a telling example of how fast bowling has been instrumental in providing working-class players upward mobility,” Srivastava told New Lines.
Just as such alternative masculinities open up new spaces, the presence of women in cricket creates its own tensions, anxieties and ruptures.
Indians have a contentious relationship with women’s sport. Even as they have (reluctantly) learned to appreciate women’s sporting achievements, they don’t quite know what to do with societal anxieties around femininity and masculinity in the sporting arena. Such anxieties are often only settled when sportswomen emphasize their femininity and heterosexuality off the field.
For instance, nearly every story about Mandhana features comments on her pretty smile or her boyfriend of five years. Last year, when she participated in the popular TV show “Kaun Banega Crorepati” (the Indian adaptation of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire),” an audience member asked her about the qualities she’d look for in her future husband, a question she said was “unexpected.” Similarly, Harleen Deol is often dubbed the “beauty queen” of women’s cricket in the media.
Conversely, if a woman in sports doesn’t fit this idealized version of femininity, she is likely to be ridiculed and rejected. Perhaps most illustrative of this bias is Indian sprinter Dutee Chand’s story. As a woman who is openly gay and whose testosterone levels were found to be higher than “normal,” her gender was questioned. Her sexuality and anatomy were held against her as she was seen not to qualify for the category of “woman” itself.
Parents’ concerns about their daughters playing cricket in public spaces reveal similar anxieties. Some of the common questions they ask include: What if playing sports makes them more masculine, rough and bold? What if they choose their career over marriage? Who will marry them if their complexion becomes dark after spending hours training in the sun?
“When I started playing cricket as a kid in Agra, I used to play with boys,” Hemlata Kala, former Indian cricketer and former chairperson of the selection committee for the Indian national women’s team, told New Lines. “Countless people from my neighborhood would go up to my parents to complain about ‘this girl who plays in public with so many boys.’ My parents too were concerned about my marriage and such social pressures.”
Many of the current and former national team players’ stories are no different from Kala’s. Retired cricketer Jhulan Goswami first started playing cricket with the boys in her neighborhood. Current captain Kaur, too, played with the boys in her hometown of Moga, Punjab. She would hit huge sixes, catching the eye of a local coach who then trained her to hit with precision. Anjum Chopra, who made her debut in 1995, began playing at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi, batting against boys and even bowling to them. She credits her mother for encouraging her to play cricket despite reservations from relatives.
In such a context, women and girls who play cricket are outsiders, attempting to break into a largely male-dominated game. “Public spaces in the subcontinent are dominated by men,” said Aayush Puthran, cricket journalist and author of the book “Unveiling Jazbaa: A History of Pakistan Women’s Cricket.” “Even when it comes to cricket, you’ll see a lot more men playing the game than women. Women play other sports — you’ll see them play badminton, basketball, etc., but not cricket. In my research for my book, I found that most parents were okay with their daughters playing other sports outside but not cricket because only boys seem to play it.”
Up until recently, there has been little space within cricket’s massive cultural and economic ambit for women. Souvik Saha, senior lecturer in imperial and postcolonial history at the University of Glasgow, has written about how the media in the 1950s and 1960s would often publish columns and cartoons lampooning women “for occupying seats as cricket spectators while knowing nothing about the sport.” While former cricketer Chandra Nayudu became the first woman commentator on All India Radio in 1977, it was only in the late 2000s and early 2010s that women cricketers like Anjum Chopra and Isa Guha began to comment on the game again.
Yet men are reluctant to take women’s analysis seriously and their association with the game must be earned by displaying appropriate cricketing knowledge. In recent interviews, actor and TV presenter Mandira Bedi recalled her time hosting the World Cup 2003 television program “Extraaa Innings” as a miserable experience where “nobody accepted me to begin with, certainly not the people sitting on the panel.” “I’m friends with all the ex-cricketers now who I worked with back then as well but they didn’t like that either. They didn’t like that there was a woman wearing a saree, dressed up, talking cricket,” she said.
“She was a woman; therefore, she had no right to comment on the game … Outside the studio, too, viewers and trolls did not spare her: calling her ‘Bimbo,’ ‘airhead,’ the ‘extra in ‘Extraaa Innings’,” wrote Suprita Das in her book “Free Hit: The Story of Women’s Cricket in India.”
Even Anushka Sharma, a leading Indian actor who is married to Kohli, is often at the receiving end of public hate and vitriol. If she happens to be in the stadium as Kohli fails to score runs, fans fill her social media posts with comments threatening violence. Just a year ago, their 3-year-old daughter Vamika was threatened with rape.
In fact, Kohli’s efforts to show appreciation and involve his family in his career have been met with hostility. For instance, his decision to take paternity leave and return home after the first test against Australia in 2020 for the birth of his child was seen as a sign of emasculation. Predictably, his banter and aggression on the field are taken to be signs of peak masculinity, with a plethora of reels and YouTube videos dedicated solely to his belligerence during matches.
Puthran added that as well as television presenters, “TV cameras tend to see women spectators as eye candy too. They always turn to men in order to show displays of cricketing passion.” Shots of women spectators often go viral on social media, having served the purpose of appealing to the male gaze.
Women are often considered interlopers in cricket stadiums and instances of women being harassed while watching cricket are common. During recent seasons of the Indian Premier League, cases of abuse and harassment by drunk fans and lewd comments directed at professional dancers and cheerleaders have been reported. Last year, special units were deployed to prevent sexual harassment at all venues of the World Cup in India.
However, in tandem with the rise of women’s cricket, leadership roles are now opening up for women in journalism, broadcasting, commentary, coaching, fitness, selection, umpiring and marketing.
In numerous interviews, senior sports journalist Sharda Ugra has spoken about her early years in the field when she was often the only woman at cricket press conferences, and older male journalists would treat her as if she weren’t there.
But Puthran believes this kind of sexism is on its way out. “There used to be male echo chambers where many journalists would say unpleasant things about women. I have heard senior male journalists say that women can’t play cricket and that they’d rather watch 16-year-old boys play. The major difference now is that you simply can’t say such things openly anymore. With more commentators, presenters, groundswomen, umpires and match referees around, a lot of the old stereotypes are being countered.”
Commentators no longer use the term “batsman,” replacing it with the gender-neutral alternative “batter.” Inappropriate comments about women are more likely to be flagged these days, now that more women are involved in the background. When cricketers-turned-commentators such as Harbhajan Singh or Dinesh Karthik make sexist comments on air, they have to apologize. And with women also involved in commentary now, men are careful about what they say and the tacit “bro code” between them and their male listeners is being shattered.
While professional cricket seems to be embracing gender equality in different aspects of the game, the idea of young women playing cricket in public spaces just for fun is still anathema to the subcontinent’s social ethos. The seeming feminization of activities like badminton, cycling and skating has made it more acceptable for girls to play these sports in public. But not cricket. Cricket only becomes accessible to them in formal cricket academies and schools, or if they see it as more than just a game.
Women are unwelcome in this sphere except when sports enable them to perform their nationalism. As Sohini Chattopadhyay writes in her book “The Day I Became a Runner,” “It offers women a solid, respectable reason to put themselves and their bodies out in the world: for national service.” Parents are less likely to stand in the way of their daughters playing cricket if they’ve got the hallowed national jersey on.
As long as cricket remains so entwined with the mythology of masculinity, the cricket-frenzied byways of the subcontinent will be devoid of young girls, who will continue to be on the peripheries, relegated to jobs like retrieving wayward balls and cheering their brothers.
However, with new role models emerging within women’s cricket, perhaps it is only a matter of time before social attitudes shift and women are able to claim both the biggest cricket grounds in the world and the most unremarkable side streets for themselves. After all, why should boys have all the fun?
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