At ₹3.4 crore, Smriti Mandhana has emerged as the most expensive retention in the 2025 edition of the Women’s Premier League. (That’s ₹1.6 crore more than the contract for Harmanpreet Kaur, who came in at No 2 on this list). The sum, in fact, is more than 22% of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru total purse of ₹15 crore.

Meanwhile, last month, Mandhana streaked past Mithali Raj, with an 8th ODI hundred (Raj had seven), a record she set with a series-winning knock against New Zealand.

Mandhana is turning into the de facto role model for Gen-Z girls aiming to take up the sport. The 28-year-old has style, grace and a silken touch typical as a left-hander. She has been making heads turn with her batting for more than a decade.

She was nine, in fact, when she was selected for the Maharashtra Under-15 team; by 11, she was playing at the U-19 level. By 16, she was captain of the U-19 team; that year, 2012, she made her international debut too.

As a young player, she has said, she admired Diana Edulji, now 68, and Shanta Rangaswamy, 70, Jhulan Goswami, 41, and Harmanpreet Kaur, 35.

It helps that she now plays alongside some of these icons. It helps that, unlike Edulji and Rangaswamy, she hasn’t had to go door to door to raise funds; or fight a lonely, often-unsuccessful battle for visibility.

It has taken far too long, but women’s cricket is finally being given room to blossom, and Mandhana’s rise is proof of what is possible when sports administration stops ignoring women’s sports.

A key shift came in 2014, when India’s women’s Test cricket calendar was revived, after eight long years of neglect. As the women played at Wormsley, an hour’s drive from Lord’s in London, you wouldn’t have known it was their first such outing in nearly a decade.

And there again was Mandhana, now 18, scoring a 50 along with Raj, to complete a historic chase of 181.

In 2016, another door opened. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) cleared the participation of women in global franchise leagues.

Harmanpreet became the first Indian woman to sign such a contract. She would play in the Big Bash League (BBL) in Australia, for the Sydney Thunder T20 franchise. Mandhana became the second, also signing up for BBL, playing for the team Brisbane Heat.

In 2017, Mandhana scored 90 at the ODI World Cup that triggered another revolution, as over 200 million Indians tuned in to watch their women’s team play in the final.

In 2019, she became India’s youngest-ever T20I captain, at 22, after Kaur was ruled out of the home series against England following an ankle injury.

India lost, but the captain was earnest about learning from defeat. “As captain, I have to learn from the mistakes I made today, or else I won’t learn, I won’t be able to improve as a captain,” she said then.

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Today, Mandhana is a leading face of the change in women’s cricket in India.

She is India’s top batter, vice-captain of the national team (Harmanpreet is captain), the face of the Women’s Premier League.

With vital hurdles overcome in 2014, 2016 and 2017, there is room now for more play, more overseas participation and, of course, the Women’s Premier League (WPL).

This year, in fact, six Indian women will also participate in BBL in December-January: Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, Jemimah Rodrigues, Shafali Verma, Radha Yadav and Richa Ghosh.

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Mandhana grew up between Mumbai and Sangli, the daughter of a chemical distributor and a homemaker. Maharashtra is obviously home ground, but Bengaluru, interestingly, plays a vital role in her story too.

A half-century (52 off 42 balls) in a 16-run victory against South Africa in 2014 was the earliest indicator of Mandhana’s T20 prowess. This June, it was in Bengaluru again that she hit 117, 136 and 90 against South Africa in WODIs.

This will be her third year as captain of Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB). Captaincy here has been a trial by fire: in the 2023 inaugural season of WPL, RCB lost their first five matches on the trot. The manner in which she kept the team fighting as a unit, while keeping up her end of the deal as frontline batter, proved she was a force to be reckoned with. The following year, RCB won.

What kind of leader is Mandhana? When Asha Sobhana took a five-wicket haul against UP Warriorz, the captain gifted the leg-spinner her bat. In her journey from obscurity to winning the Purple Cap (the award for most wickets taken) in this year’s edition of WPL in February-March, Shreyanka Patil credited Mandhana with playing a crucial role.

When the senior women’s inter-zonal multi-day tournament returned after six years in April, Mandhana, captaining West Zone, dropped to No 8 in the batting order to allow younger, less-experienced players to get a feel of the red-ball format.

She is a player to watch.

“Whenever we came up against India, we used to talk about Smriti and how we could get her out early. Because we knew how dangerous she could be. She is a proven match-winner in any conditions,” Australia’s multiple World-Cup winner Meg Lanning said, speaking during this year’s WPL. “She’s on her own leadership journey.”

Thankfully (and finally), so is women’s cricket in India.

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