A straight pitch

A straight pitch

Free Hit is a tribute to those who initiated Indian women to play competitive cricket, be it Mahendra Kumar Sharma from Lucknow in the ’70s or Anuradha Dutt in early ’90s. Their flaws notwithstanding, women’s cricket in India is what it is today, still searching for a worthy trophy despite some brilliant individual performers. 

If the celebrated women cricketers are fighting over the selection of coach and finding enough space in newspaper columns, it is a sign that more than their talent the kind of money that is now flowing in, is playing its role.

In that backdrop, Suprita Das’ story of women’s cricket in India comes in as a refreshing read, dotted with some untold nuggets that sure keeps the reader glued. The narration is fast-paced, as it should be, but in a few chapters match description has crept in — such as ‘What on Earth’ and ‘Play, Pause, Play’! In her ‘Note’ Das has a shocking tale to tell, which in essence arouses interest in the book. In researching for this book, Das was to interview the former India women’s cricket captain and coach, Sreerupa Bose at her Kolkata residence, and what the author had to go through was shocking.

Forty-five minutes after waiting for Sreerupa Bose…when I found her dead body on her bathroom floor — she had suffered a massive cardiac arrest — I was in shock, says Das in her opening. She was at Bose’s house as the former captain and coach wanted to share her side of stories. “There are so many women’s cricket stories, where do I even begin?, Bose had told the author over telephone. Instead, the author found her lying in a pool of blood. Unfortunately Bose’s story disappeared with her. But Das has taken great efforts to reach out to scores of those who are connected with women’s cricket that enlivened some of the chapters, if not all.

This is a story written by a woman, on women, who play a sport that was for years never considered a sport meant for the distaff (female) side. Unlike many other sports, specially racket sports such as tennis, badminton or table tennis, women were always accepted as part of the structure and so the world governing bodies had been inclusive. But not the cash-rich International Cricket Council, which for long refused to have anything to do with women’s cricket. Nationally too, women’s cricket was like a pariah till the pressure from world body forced BCCI to include women into its fold. 

While Indian women were just getting noticed, thanks to the exploits of Jhulan Goswami and Mithali Raj, Anuradha Dutt’s Women’s Cricket Association of India, which had so far controlled women’s cricket and had successfully hosted 1997 World Cup, wasn’t too happy to let go off the control. The delay cost women dearly because the mandarins at BCCI were anyway not too happy to include women into the fold. Still, those who withstood those difficult days and took the ground when things got cleared and performed good enough to impress sponsors to put in money, deserve applause.

And, that is what Free Hit does in patches — telling stories of those individuals, their grit, patience and passion. In her quest, Das collected too much information, but putting all that down in one book made no sense. Statistics and cricket go hand in hand, but in a book, the narration need not have been sprinkled with too many numbers. Some incidences needed elaborate narration, like Basu mentions Diana Edulji’s encounter with the then BCCI president 

N Srinivasan, who plainly said that if he had his way he would not let women’s cricket to happen; he was only following the ICC rule though. Then, there is the story of the first women’s cricket senior Nationals in Pune in 1973. “It was more like two and a half teams, actually. As Uttar Pradesh didn’t have enough players to form a playing eleven, the reserves from Bombay and Maharashtra played for UP.”

As Bombay won the inaugural title at the Gymkhana Club and Young Cricketers Club, whoever turned up to watch were there to see whether women play in sarees or skirts or trousers? It was no different a few years ago when Lucknow hosted first competitive women’s cricket match — about 200 spectators, mostly college boys, were in attendance to watch women — some of them in white bell-bottomed trousers, the rest in white skirts.

It would be safe to say that the crowd had turned up to watch women play in skirts, writes Das, what otherwise would have been classified as sexist if a male author had penned these words.

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