A cricket world cup win does not materialise out of thin air. And when it is the Indian women’s team that achieves the feat for the first time, it points to their evolution as well as a shift in the societal tectonic plates beneath the feet. The socioeconomic and cultural changes making the steady growth of women’s cricket possible have been there; however, the pace has been glacial. If ever a big push was needed for a change of gear—for demanding more inclusivity, for more families to go against the grain in supporting women’s sports, and even for sports boards to provide bigger avenues to talented girls—then there could hardly be anything more epochal as winning a world cup in a sport that evokes religious fervour in India.
First came the Women’s Premier League. It’s not a perfect stage, yet it gave the Class of 2025 some of the raw materials needed to bring home the World Cup. During the tournament’s journey from Guwahati to Navi Mumbai, via Indore and Visakhapatnam—with a stopover in Colombo for good measure—the fans also started warming up to the team. Players like Jemimah, Deepti, and Harman started becoming household names in the same breath that Shubman, Bumrah, and Rishabh already are.
The numbers fortify the belief. Match viewership, which started at about 20 lakh, crossed 30 crore by the time the women lifted the cup—at least as good as at a men’s game. If fame, a powerful tool to catapult a sport’s growth, was lacking, it’s no longer so. This happened to the men’s team in 1983—when not just cricket fans, but the whole nation fell in love with them. This win should have the same effect for the women’s game, a point made by BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia.
At another level, the win could propel change under the feet, too. For example, in Harmanpreet Kaur’s state Punjab, where the sex ratio is below 900 and female foeticide is a societal malaise, the image of the world-beating captain may spur a change in a section’s attitude towards the girl child. Also off the table should be the misogynist abuse some women cricketers faced even while the World Cup was on, when their failures attracted much harsher scrutiny than their male counterparts’. Most importantly, this win will hopefully give courage to the girl who wants to tell the world, ‘I can.’
