Mithali Raj’s impact went beyond cricket
When Mithali Raj made her debut in cricket in 1999, women role models in any field were hard to find. There was Indira Gandhi who remains an icon for political achievement, despite her tainted record for the Emergency. In the arts, Sonal Mansingh, the Mangeshkar sisters, Mira Nair. And then there was PT Usha, the golden girl who launched a million dreams, and Ashwini Nachappa, who continues to advocate for sport in schools.
I do not watch cricket, and I’m sorry that I have never seen Raj play. Yet, even I felt a sense of loss when she announced her retirement. She had carved out her identity; not a “Lady Sachin”, as she once told sports journalist Sharda Ugra, but her own person, with her own achievements and her own fan following.
Raj was lucky to play in a post-liberalised India where satellite TV beamed live sport into homes. Both Karnam Malleswari and Anju Bobby George played on the wings of that era. Television didn’t just make them stars. It made them role models for girls to distill their message of possibility and hope. It was heady and empowering. In the years that Raj played, many of the traditional bumps were flattened. In 2015, the Board of Control for Cricket in India drew up its first contracts for the women’s team. Two years later, when the team returned home after the ICC World Cup, they were mobbed at Mumbai airport. India had lost to England by nine runs, but Raj had become the first woman anywhere to make over 6,000 runs in one-day internationals.
She was the first modern superstar in Indian women’s cricket. Social media ensured her relevance. She was on the cover of Vogue and her autobiography was published by Penguin in 2018. Raj is a brand ambassador for Usha International and Jacob’s Creek (she has clarified that she will never endorse a sexist product).
But more than any other brand, Raj, and later Sania Mirza and Saina Nehwal, have been India’s best ambassadors for women’s sport. Today, if the daughter of a cart-puller or daily wage earner can and does play elite sport, they know who to thank.
She has had an “incredible impact”, says Deepthi Bopiah, CEO of Go Sports Foundation which nurtures young athletic talent. “She became the face not just of women’s cricket but sport in general.”
Raj normalised the idea of girls at play in a deeply patriarchal society where the sight of girls on the field is still rare. Kitted out or not, she told these girls and their parents that it was ok for them to kick a ball or twirl a racket.
In a slum in outer Delhi, I once met a cricket team of the daughters of daily wage earners and rickshaw pullers. Between schoolwork and household chores, they found the time to play, some barefoot, in a nearby park. Who inspires you, I asked one of them. Without hesitating, she replied, Mithali Raj.