Mithali Raj retires, leaving behind an unmatchable legacy

It’s the 2000s. The fervour around cricket in India has increased manifold and has been amped up to such an extent that cricketers are now being considered demigods. In almost every street of every city, cricket is the dominant theme and when anyone says they don’t like the sport, they are woken up from their slumber.

In that same period, there is a young girl who has completely embraced the sport. Like most kids, she has several posters of cricketers on her wall. Sachin Tendulkar, arguably the best batter India has ever produced, finds a place. Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly aren’t too far behind. Among them, though, there is also a wallpaper of Mithali Raj.

At the time, not many have heard about Mithali. They know that she’s been single-handedly shouldering responsibility for the Indian women’s cricket team but they aren’t aware enough to make her a household presence in cricketing conversations.

There is also a general attitude around the country that cricket is intended for one particular gender and that any girl playing the sport is only doing so to fall flat on her face one day. There is, to an extent, a mindset problem – a problem no one really wants to solve but also, rather damningly, an issue no one wants to hear about.

So much so that that young girl, who idolized Mithali and thought she was the beacon of inspiration she needed in her life, would get scoffed at when she exclaimed that being a cricketer for India was her dream. There were some who would buy into that narrative but playing cricket for a living, that too being a girl and living in the country? Ah, probably not.

Cut to 2022. The landscape, in terms of the interest cricket generates, isn’t much different. The IPL still manages to bring people out in numbers and there is hardly an Indian cricket team game that goes untelevised. There are pre-shows for every match India features in too, indicating how cricket has become as money-minting an endeavour as any in the country.

But there is one massive change. It’s not about how India have moved on from being just another component in the ecosystem to becoming the nation that calls the shots. It’s not even about how the BCCI feels the IPL has become big enough to have two editions of the tournament each year. It’s that the sport, which felt very exclusive for generations, has become as inclusive as it has ever been – much of which is down to Mithali.

Mithali Raj announced her retirement from international cricket

The moment she announced her retirement from international cricket, thousands of hearts across India sank. She was, for at least a generation, the cricketer they looked up to. She would walk into perilous situations and tackle them unfazed, almost making the opposition wonder if she was superhuman.

More vitally, though, she would do so while telling the rest of the country that this was achievable. That this was a dream even they could seek to chase. That this sport, which had long been viewed as only playable by men, could be conquered by women too.

This article, as you might have guessed by now, is not about how many runs Mithali scored, how much she averaged in ODI cricket and how many Women’s World Cups she played in. It’s not even about how she competes in a very short list to be crowned the greatest female cricketer to have ever emerged from India. It is about how she, through her immense powers of concentration and extraordinary belief, ensured that thousands of young girls lived every moment of her historic cricketing career.

For context, Mithali made her debut in 1999 – more than two decades ago. Women’s cricket in India was an afterthought back then. But she still found ways to keep the Indian women’s cricket team relevant. It was, more often than not, because of the sheer mountain of runs she piled up. It was also because her exploits, alongside those of Jhulan Goswami, told India that even the sky was not the limit when talking about women’s cricket.

Ironically, Mithali, who began this whole women’s cricket revolution in India, fell behind as a new wave engulfed white-ball cricket. At the 2022 Women’s Cricket World Cup, her approach, which was pristine for most parts of her career, didn’t quite yield the expected results. But that isn’t a crime. A lot of sportspeople go through phases where they just can’t adapt to something new – partly because age starts catching up but largely because all of their innate principles have to be abandoned.

What’s important is that Mithali is remembered as the person who changed women’s cricket in India forever, rather than being a cricketer whose methods divided opinion towards the end of her career. It is tough, considering the most recent memory often ends up being the most lasting. But the fact that India is having this conversation is down to the hard yards Mithali had been putting in since the beginning of the century.

At a time when women’s cricket wasn’t in vogue in India, she taught people that it was fashionable. At a time when making up the numbers was the norm for the Indian women’s cricket team, she dared to compete against the world’s best. At a time when men’s cricket was looked upon as the sole recipient of the sport, she illustrated that women could stand shoulder to shoulder and bring as much glory and joy to their nation as their male counterparts.

Not many (if any) can say they rivalled Mithali on that count. Oh, there, her feats are almost unmatchable – feats that have made almost every young girl in the country believe that she can make it big. That she too can don the famous blue and be an inspiration for generations to come.

Till a few years ago, that idea would still have been scoffed at. It would still have been ridiculed and would’ve been shot down. Not anymore. And that, more than the runs Mithali scored for India, will be her lasting legacy – a legacy not even the ravages of time can take away from her.