Meet the Captain of India’s Women’s Cricket Team

Courtesy of Board of Control for Cricket in India Mithali Raj.

When she was a child, Mithali Raj, the Indian women’s cricket team captain, trained in the art of Bharatanatyam, a genteel pastime for a proper young Indian girl. She loved performing and considered a career in dance.

But it was her father, a huge cricket fan, who steered her away from a field dominated by women and into another, where she would end up being a pioneer for women.

A right-handed batswoman in a somewhat classical mold, Raj, 30, is now one of the most successful female players in contemporary women’s cricket. She is one of the world’s top-ranked batswomen in One-Day Internationals, and in 2003, Raj received the Arjuna Award, Inia’s highest honor for excellence in sports.

Raj is also among the most prolific players when it comes to scoring runs in cricket’s three different formats.

In eight tests (between 2002 and 2006 as India’s women team has not played a single test in the last seven years), she has scored 572 runs at an average of 52.00, including 1 double century and 3 fifties. In 132 innings of 145 One-Day Internationals, she has scored 4,622 runs, highest by a female cricketer from Asia, at an average of 48.65 with 4 centuries and 36 half-centuries. In 37 Twenty20 international matches, she has made 885 runs at an average of 32.77 and hit three fifties.

“She is a world-class player,” Anjum Chopra, Raj’s former teammate and captain, told India Ink. “She is a brilliant batter with a large repertoire of shots. She is very confident of her ability. She has contributed immensely to women! ’s cricket, not only in India, over the years.”

Raj agreed that confidence was one of her strengths â€" or as she put it, one of her “few plus points.”

“I don’t know how talented I am, but I’ve full confidence in my ability,” she said. “You may be very talented, but if you lack in confidence, you might not do justice to your talent.”

Raj was born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, in a middle-class Hindu family, but grew up in Hyderabad. As a child, she learned classical dance for about eight years and even gave several stage performances.

But she was equally good at cricket and played it with other girls and boys when the mood seized her. She used to accompany her brother, Mithun, to St. John’s Coaching Foundation in Hyderabad, where she was first spotted by Sampath Kumar, a respected coach from Hyderabad, who taught her the rudiments of cricket.

She idolized Sachin Tendulkar and Ricky Ponting, the two modern greats of men’s cricket, and would practice vigorously nd enthusiastically at Keyes’s High School, often playing against league cricketers, who welcomed her.

Her grandparents were against her playing what they called a man’s sport, but her father, Dorai Raj, an Air Force officer, and mother, Leela Raj, were always very supportive.

“Whatever I’m today is thanks to my parents,” Raj said. “Despite being a girl in the traditional south Indian setup, they’ve always encouraged me to pursue my cricket. I know how difficult and often embarrassing it was for them to convince our relatives about what I had been doing, because even in the 1990s cricket in India was considered a man’s sport and not many girls were encouraged to play it.”

“The approach of the people, including relatives, towards me was understandably quite different, strange even, those days. But I didn’t allow that to discourage me or affect my game.”

Her father, in fact, encouraged her to abandon dance to pursue cricket, but in the end, the decision w! as hers, ! she said..

“I was a good Bharatanatyam dancer, but my parents never forced me to pursue it and give up cricket,” she said. “But there was a time when I had to make a choice between the Bharatanatyam and cricket. Of course, it’s many years now, but whenever I look back, I feel that I didn’t make a wrong choice.”

By the time she was 12, she had moved into the highly competitive league run by Andhra Pradesh Women’s Cricket Association and started plundering runs. At 14, Raj was considered talented enough to play in the Senior Nationals, in 1995, alongside India players like Rajni Venugopal, Vanita Viola and Purnima Rau, among others. She was not yet 15 when chosen as one of the probable Indian players for the 1997 World Cup played in India.

She made her India debut in June 1999 at a One-Day International against Ireland at Campbell Park in Milton Keynes, scoring an impressive 114 not out and sharing an unfinished 258-run partnership for the first wicket with Reshma Gandhi (104 nt out). Raj has been the mainstay of Indian team’s batting since.

Though she did not get to play a single international match on India’s 1999 tour of England, she got good exposure in other matches. She made waves in international cricket when she averaged nearly 75 runs per innings in the 2000 World Cup in New Zealand, though she could play in just three matches as she was afflicted with jaundice.

She may have failed to score a single run in her very first test, against England at Lucknow in January 2002, but she had a strong 214 in the second and final test at Taunton on India’s tour of England later that year. She was just 19 and the team’s vice captain.

She added 144 runs for the fourth wicket with Hemalata Kala and 148 for the seventh with Jhulan Goswami and in the process broke the world record for the highest individual score (209), then held by Karen Rolton of Australia. (Two years later, the record would be broken by Kiran Baluch of Pakistan.)

“I wasn’t a! ware until! our team manager sent a message through the 12th player that I had broken the world record,” she recalled. “I was actually very tired after batting for so long. But it was a very special feeling, and I was humbly proud about it.”

As a captain, Raj has also been quite successful, considering that the women’s national teams have had few world-class bowlers and batters. She led India to its maiden World Cup final, in South Africa in 2005, which it lost to Australia. In August 2006, she led India to its first test and series win in England and wrapped up the year winning the Asia Cup without losing a single match.

Though India placed seventh out of eighth in the Women’s World Cup last month, Raj said she was confident that the country can become a powerhouse in women’s international cricket.

“We have a good team and many talented players keep emerging. But it will take us some years to become a major force in women’s cricket in the world,” she said. “Unlike in Australia an England, women’s cricket in India has merged with men’s cricket only a few years ago, when the Board of Control for Cricket in India took it under its wings.” Since then, “things are fast improving in women’s cricket in India,” she said.

She would like to see more international competition for the Indian women’s team, which hasn’t played any test series since 2006.

“We need to play three to four international series every year.” Raj said. “It should be good for the youngsters, who are new to the system, and it will help senior players like us to keep the momentum going.”