At the stroke of midnight, the Indian women’s cricket team changed Indian sports forever

Years ago, in Agra’s Awadhpuri Colony, a young Deepti Sharma would slip out of her home to watch her brother play cricket with the boys, hovering by the boundary rope like a girl pressing her face to a window she was never meant to look through. About 550 kilometres away, in Moga, Punjab, Harmanpreet Kaur once cut off her long hair because it came in the way of her batting. Not too far from there, in Rohtak, Haryana, a small but self-assured Shafali Verma tugged an oversized jersey over her frame, hid her hair beneath a cap and marched into a boys’ match she wasn’t meant to be a part of.

None of them knew it then, but these ruptures were the first cracks in the old order of cricket. And from these tiny mutinies emerged a generation that refused to shrink, carved space where there was an impenetrable wall and treated visibility not as privilege but as inevitability. India’s women walked into the 2025 ODI World Cup, carrying years of heartache like a stubborn zipper that gets stuck at the same place every time, refusing to pull through to the end, no matter how hard you try. Which is why, when victory arrived—poetically, at the stroke of midnight—it was a seismic cultural moment. A shift from the margins to the mainstream, from decades of taunts of “ladkiyon-wala cricket” to prime-time spotlight, confetti, viewership numbers at par with the men’s final and a record prize purse.

Two weeks later, the warm, fuzzy afterglow still hasn’t dimmed. Captain Harmanpreet Kaur, zipping through cities, studios and shoots, is taking it all in, one big sip of black coffee at a time. “Relieved,” she says, summing it all up, her feet up on the swivel chair in her vanity van. “I must find a way to get out of this bubble at some point, but for now, I think I want to stay in it a little longer.” On set, too, the mood is breezy. Diljit blares out from the speakers. Kaur grooves smoothly to ‘Naina’ and her teammates don’t have to be cajoled into joining her.

One leg in a cast and the other in a Jimmy Choo, all-rounder Pratika Rawal, who admits to reading Vogue since she was a child, dances along lightly. “I can’t let my leg cast come in the way of our celebrations,” she beams. Sharma tells me the streets of Agra are decked with balloons, posters and flowers. Crowds line up to catch a glimpse as their ‘beti’ waves at them from an open jeep. “Deepti Sharma itni busy? I’ve been playing for India for more than ten years aur aaj tak nahi hua yeh,” says the Player of the Tournament. Meanwhile, Shafali Verma now wants to impress India with her looks. “This is our time, yaar,” says the 21-year-old, who won Player of the Match in the finals. “I like fashion,” she continues. “Finally, so many people are watching us, I want them to see us in these different styles also.” No looks shall be repeated over the next few days, she is clear.