Forgotten heroes: Veterans recall India's first women's world cup
(This story originally appeared in on Nov 16, 2023)
Kanyaon ki cricket hogi, zaroor aaiye". The year England hosted the world's first-ever women's cricket world cup, this was the sound Lucknow's bylanes heard blaring from a rickshaw. Microphone in hand, Mahendra Kumar Sharma aka Sharmaji, a softball coach in his 20s-was luring the locals to the Uttar Pradesh capital for the first all-women cricket match. Eager to watch players in white skirts, around two hundred, chiefly boys, turned up at a local girls' college in 1973. Five years later, around 30,000 would show up at stadiums in Calcutta, Patna, Delhi and Hyderabad to watch Indian kanyas compete with Australia, New Zealand and England.
Barely five years after Sharma registered the Women's Cricket Association of India (WCAI), an English player would watch her cricket whites being washed in Indian waters. Not many know that India not only took part participated in but also hosted the second women's WC. «It was decided that India was the best possible venue to host the tournament as no other country would be able to pull any sort of crowd,» writes Suprita Das in her book 'Free Hit: The Story of Women's Cricket in India' about the ODI world tournament which came two years after Indian women cricketers toured Australia and New Zealand in 1976.
By then, Bombay had long boasted its own kanyaon ki cricket and its own female version of Sharmaji. Aloo Bamjee-a hand fan-toting Cricket Club of India member-had acquainted the city's softball-playing young girls with the season ball in the late 1960s. The circulars she sent out to schools and colleges drew a motley of schoolgirls schoolgoing siblings and busy bankers aged 16-23. Trained under the hawk eye of legends such as
