Shubhangi Kulkarni
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A brief biography
Curated by Ketaki Desai, with inputs from Sharmila Ganesan Ram, Nov 26, 2023: The Times of India
➤ In place of the old standard of boys dragging their dads, Sunny Sports Boutique — a shop that has been chiefly selling cricket equipment inside Pune’s Deccan Gymkhana for four decades — has been increasingly watching fathers coming in with their daughters.
➤ The shop belongs to Shubhangi Kulkarni, whose metallurgist father bought her a bat at age 15 in an era “when passers-by would shout comments like, ‘Arrey, woh ladki kya karegi (Hey, what can that girl do)’” and “mothers feared the sun would darken the complexion of their daughters and the ball would harden their hands.”
➤ That’s how Kulkarni, in an interview, had remembered the mid-’70s when, as a teenaged leg-spinner, she took 23 wickets in five matches against West Indies, the joint-highest for most wickets in a women’s Test series.
➤ In a career spanning 19 Tests and 27 ODIs, Kulkarni claimed 60 wickets in Tests and 38 wickets in ODIs in the runup to bagging the Arjuna Award in 1985.
➤ “I always liked playing outdoor games,” Kulkarni tells us. “I would see the boys playing cricket and I would join them,” says the 63-year-old.
➤ “I was in Class IX when we talked to the principal about introducing cricket, and that’s when I started playing cricket,” recalled Kulkarni in an interview to a daily. “At that time, there were not many women playing so our coaches encouraged us to play with the boys. I think it helped me improve my game.”
➤ “We would hear remarks being passed like this is a man’s sport and women shouldn’t be playing cricket but we were fortunate to have our families support us and that was all that mattered,” says Kulkarni who bowled right-arm leg spin and batted right handed in 1978 when India hosted the second edition of the Women’s Cricket World Cup in which the nation competed against Australia, New Zealand and England.
➤ “It was the first time we were playing in a major event with so many teams,” recalls Kulkarni. “The other teams were more experienced since women’s cricket in those countries had begun much earlier and they had played more international cricket. They were also much stronger and fitter than us which gave them an advantage as far as running between the wickets and fielding was concerned. I thought we had better cricketing skills. But fitness and strength were the areas we needed to work on,” says Kulkarni.
➤ “At that time there was no TV coverage or social media. We relied on newspapers and magazines to cover the sport. The founder secretary of Women’s Cricket Association of India (WCAI) did an amazing job to create awareness and publicise the game. He would personally go and hand over score sheets and information regarding the game to the newspaper offices,” says Kulkarni recalling Mahendra Kumar Sharma, then a softball and handball coach who held all-women cricket matches on weekends at a local girls’ college for lack of permission to host them during the week at the boys’ college.
➤ Later, when she saw the dismal balance sheet of WCAI, Kulkarni knew “my work was cut out there.” Meagre financial and logistical resources meant stymied growth for the game as funds came from goodwill rather than sponsorship. So, in her role as secretary of WCAI, Kulkarni batted consistently for a merger with the BCCI — a dream that finally came to fruition in 2006.
➤ Acknowledging that the Women’s Premier League — formed earlier this year — will prove to be a game-changer, she says the sport has come a long way from the decades of matting wickets, college grounds and second-class train travel. Right now, as an entrepreneur, she is happy to see fathers bringing their daughters to her sports shop.
