Women's international cricket returned to Visakhapatnam last week, after over a decade away. It is a shame that it was away this long, writes Rahul Iyer, given the city's near-unknown significance in the history of the sport.
As a city, Visakhapatnam tends to go under the radar. It is a strange thing to say about one that has an estimated population of around 2.5 million, but it is true especially in a cricketing sense.
The location of the Dr YS Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Stadium is a contributing factor. Situated in the Pothinamallayya Palem neighbourhood, the ground is just off the Chennai-Kolkata highway that runs through Visakhapatnam, some 15 km from the more centrally-located Indira Priyadarshini Stadium, which hosted five men’s ODIs between 1988 & 2001.
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Slightly less literally, the venue itself went unnoticed for over a decade when it comes to women’s cricket; it hosted two ODIs in February 2010, five T20Is in March 2012, and three ODIs and a T20I in January 2014.
After that, radio silence.
The return of the women’s game only came 11 years later, when Visakhapatnam was announced as a venue for the ongoing World Cup. In the interim period, 13 men’s internationals and 15 IPL matches were held here, including a Test match against England in 2024.
Andhra Pradesh has an impressive history of women’s cricket, considering that outside of Hyderabad (the city is now in the state of Telangana), it is not a traditional cricketing powerhouse.
Purnima Rau hails from Secunderabad. Raavi Kalpana was born in Krishna and current India international N Shree Charani in Kadapa. Visakhapatnam boasts of two own current cricketers in Sneha Deepthi and teenage pace sensation Shabnam Shakil. The two are almost intertwined with the city’s development as a shipbuilding hub, as children to employees at the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant and the Indian Navy respectively.
It is unfortunate that Visakhapatnam went over a decade without a game. After all, it has a tryst with women’s cricket that goes back nearly a century and a half.
Karunya Keshav and Sidhanta Patnaik, in The Fire Burns Blue: A History of Women’s Cricket in India, make note of Lucy Ada Jervis, the wife of then-Governor General of Bombay, Lord Harris, as being at the forefront of women’s cricket in the colonial era, around 1890.
Jervis’s team of thirteen women took on her husband’s XI in the hill station of Mahabaleshwar in present-day Maharashtra, but little remains of that match save for a news reporter’s letter patronisingly describing the women’s struggles with the game.
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Such mixed-gender matches were not unheard of. In fact, even Indian women had taken up the sport by then. “Apparently, she was good at cricket,” goes a line in Radha Kumar’s The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990, ‘she’ referring to Madam Bhikaiji Cama, an early figure in the Indian independence movement. Born in 1861, Cama would most likely have been playing the sport in the 1870s/early 1880s.
Visakhapatnam becomes significant in 1888.
The Sporting section of the issue of The Madras Weekly Mail dated October 24, 1888, carried the following column, under the headline ‘Cricket at Waltair’ (a colonial-era name of a section of today’s Visakhapatnam).
“The following is the score of a cricket match, played at Waltair on October 11th, between eight ladies and eight gentlemen, the latter batting left-handed with broom-sticks, and using only the left hand in fielding and bowling. The match was not finished, but was much in favour of the ladies:–”
The column went on to display the scorecard of the match. Batting first, ‘Ladies’ had scored 50, before ‘Gentlemen’ were bowled out for 27. In their second innings, Ladies had made it to 61 without loss, thanks in part to 21 extras. A Miss Stuart and Miss Cameron were at the crease, unbeaten on 23 and 17 respectively. Miss Cameron had also taken five of the seven Gentlemen’s wickets to fall.
“The European women were most likely members of the Waltair Club founded in 1883,” Visakhapatnam historian John Castellas tells Wisden.com. Now settled in Australia, he belongs to a family that traces their lineage in the city five generations back.
Castellas also notes that any mixed-gender matches of the time were a social activity, rather than a competitive one – men’s cricket itself was hardly professional outside England at the time – but that the one reported on above was enough of a novelty to be considered worth mentioning.
The Waltair Club was established by British troops, mainly those stationed in the East Coast Battalion, and counted the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram (Vizzy) among its members in the early 20th century.
Roads in the area still bear names such as “Waltair Main Road” and “Chinna Waltair Main Road”. The club continues to exist today, and, according to its website, “caters to the elite of Visakhapatnam.
“Its prestigious members include top officials, business entrepreneurs, executives of corporate houses and defence service officers. With its old-world charm, world-class infrastructure and affiliation with other elite clubs around India, there is always a demand for membership at our club.”
For some, it is a charming remnant of a simpler time. For others, little more than a vestige of colonial excess, and segregation of society under the British.
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The origins of the club and the match aside, what makes this particular game relevant is that it is one of the earliest cricket matches involving women in India, for which a scorecard of this detail remains available.
At any rate, it must be the oldest in Southern India; there is certainly one older in the entire country. On October 29, 1886, the Times of India carried a full scorecard and match report of a mixed-gender match between ‘Mrs Webster’s Team’ and ‘Mr Tufnell’s Team’ in the northern hill-station of Shimla, modern-day Himachal Pradesh. That was played with the same rules, and the men fared much better.
Further instances of women playing cricket in other parts of South India come later. Castellas shares with Wisden.com a photo from the 1912 Times of India Illustrated Weekly Supplement, titled “Mixed Cricket: ‘Ladies vs Men’ at the M.C.C. Ground, Chepauk”, in modern-day Chennai.
Kashyap and Patnaik also cite Netta Rheinberg and Rachael Heyhoe Flint’s 1976 book, Fair Play, as mentioning how in 1913, an Australian teacher introduced cricket at the Baker Memorial School in present-day Kerala and made it compulsory for girls.
“Trailblazing” would be too strong a sentiment for the significance of this match. But it is not the first time, or first area, in which Visakhapatnam has been discovered to be more significant than initially thought.
The Indian sepoy mutiny of 1857 in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, is largely considered the first major uprising among Indian troops in the British armed forces. But 77 years earlier, in 1780 (curiously also in October), Vizagapatnam, as it was then known, saw its own sepoy uprising in defiance of orders to join the Carnatic War against Hyder Ali of Mysore. The sepoys even overpowered their superiors and briefly took back control of the town, but were ultimately defeated.
As an aside, the Seringapatnam (now Srirangapatna) Cricket Club was established in 1799 after British forces defeated Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu Sultan. The leader of that military campaign was one General George Harris, great-grandfather of the aforementioned Lord Harris, Lucy Ada Jervis’s husband.
Between the Octobers of 1888 and 2025, much has changed. Miss Cameron is no longer the star of the show. Instead, the return of top-level women’s cricket to Visakhapatnam comes with its own fanfare.
Following a suggestion from India vice-captain Smriti Mandhana to Andhra Pradesh IT minister Nara Lokesh, a ceremony ahead of the second game of the tournament at the venue on October 12 saw the unveiling of the Mithali Raj Stand and the Raavi Kalpana Gate in an act of long-overdue recognition for women’s cricket in the state.
The sports are almost violently different in the 137-year span (naturally). No longer is it eight ladies taking on benevolently handicapped gentlemen, but 22 professional cricketers, all women, hoping to make a living out of the sport.
The cricket itself is exhilarating. In Visakhapatnam’s first match back, Richa Ghosh and Nadine de Klerk light up the ground with some fearsome back-end hitting. In the second, Mandhana sets a world record in front of the Mithali Raj Stand, Annabel Sutherland delivers a stunning display of death bowling and Alyssa Healy is clinical as can be in a world-record run chase. In the third, 18-year-old Shorna Akter hits the fastest ODI half-century by a woman from Bangladesh (not even close to being a country in 1888).
It is virtually impossible to draw an unbroken line between October 11, 1888 and October 12, 2025, simply for the dearth of resources. But one can hope that the culture of cricket that began here all those years ago, is rekindled ever stronger.
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