November 7, 2025 06:03 PM IST
First published on: Nov 7, 2025 at 06:05 AM IST
Of the many reels floating on the internet after the Indian women’s cricket team’s World Cup victory, one features Amanjot Kaur’s parents on the day of the final, watching the match on television in a room full of family. As Kaur holds on to the catch that dismisses South African captain Laura Wolvaardt and the room erupts in joy, the two go quiet, their eyes moist. Over a decade ago, Bhupinder Singh, a carpenter, had not baulked when his daughter declared she wanted to play cricket. When the neighbourhood boys wouldn’t take her because she didn’t own a bat, he had carved her one himself.
Then there’s 22-year-old Kranti Gaud from Madhya Pradesh’s tribal heartland of Ghuwada, whose father led her to a cricket academy too, brushing aside whispers about propriety and a woman’s purpose. The youngest of six siblings, Gaud’s dreams often felt larger than their resources. But her family embraced them nonetheless.
Stories such as these are scattered across the breadth of this victory — a mosaic of perseverance stitched by young women and their families who refused to stop at the threshold of what society thought they should be. It is tempting to compare this triumph with that of the men’s cricket team in 1983, as if the arc of history can only be traced in familiar symmetry. But to group the two moments together, or to measure one against the other, is to misunderstand the differences in both terrain and trajectory.
The 1983 men’s team were, by every yardstick, outsiders. They arrived in England as underdogs, burdened by few expectations even at home. Kapil Dev’s men came into their own in a world where professionalism was embryonic, exposure meagre, and where emotional audacity had to compensate for material scarcity. The catch that dismissed Vivian Richards, and the improbable, impossible victory, rewired India’s sporting imagination. That maiden win built a marketplace, birthed a commercial empire — television deals, sponsorships, celebrity status, and the eventual juggernaut that became the Indian Premier League.
Not a fairytale, but story of grit
The women’s 2025 victory, in contrast, did not arrive from the margins, even if many of its players did. This is a team that has had global exposure; some have played two World Cup finals and carry the weight of near-misses, including the 2017 World Cup final. Their success is not a fairy tale but the culmination of years of incremental progress. To understand that journey, one must look not to 1983 but to 1978, the year India’s women cricketers played their first World Cup. Led by the trailblazing Diana Edulji, and despite the Women’s Cricket Association of India (WCAI)’s limited support, it was a team that shaped the course of possibility. They travelled with borrowed kits, paid for their own travel, persevered through losses, gender bias, lack of infrastructure and institutional support — the WCAI only formally came under the BCCI in 2006 following the ICC’s mandate.
As the Indian women’s cricket team became World Champions for the first time, the generations of cricketers who pick up the bat now, will have 16 female role models to look up to. (Express Photo by Narendra Vaskar)
Every generation of women players since then has nudged the arc further. Each has walked an extra mile so that the ones after could run a little faster. Shanta Rangaswamy and Edulji made the sport visible. Anjum Chopra, Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami nurtured it through decades of apathy and handed it over to Harmanpreet Kaur, Deepti Sharma and others to forge a resilience that no longer needs justification, only direction.
The temptation to measure women’s cricket by the same metric as that of men is not just lazy, it is also limiting. For women players, progress has never been linear; it had to be wrested inch by difficult inch. To call 2025 another 1983 is to flatten this story into nostalgia, erasing the texture of stubborn endurance. Each moment of celebration in 2025 rests on countless invisible victories that came before — and will, hopefully, follow more frequently now: A father shrugging off patriarchal unease; a widowed mother standing up for a brave new dream; a coach taking on a player because he can see only ambition and talent, not gender; a system smoothening their path as it does for their male counterparts.
The yardstick of men’s cricket cannot contain this story. Theirs was a revolution that changed the game; this one has changed who gets to play it.
The writer is senior associate editor
