Led by captain Harmanpreet Kaur, the Indian team won the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup on Sunday. By all contemporary measures, this is a remarkable — even historic — win. What makes this win all the more remarkable is the long and difficult history of women’s sportsmanship, athleticism, and competition in India, so often hidden from sight and sequestered away from male spaces.
In this regard, the national acclaim of our team’s win is a sign of how much attitudes have changed toward women’s sportsmanship over the centuries. From courtesans who mastered chess to Mughal empress Nur Jahan’s sharpshooting skills, here’s a brief history of Indian women in sports.
In the fields, in the pubs
Let’s look at the surviving evidence of ancient women’s games. Dice have been found dating to the Bronze Age (c. 2500 BCE) in various Harappan sites in present-day northwest India and throughout Pakistan. It’s very possible that some had female owners. While the Vedic texts (c. 1500–800 BCE) have only scattered references to women’s games, the Sangam literary corpus, composed in present-day Tamil Nadu between 300 BCE – 300 CE, is more illuminating.
References to women’s games are usually tangential to a broader theme of a king’s power, or the woman’s love, but we still hear of ball games and — intriguingly — of women taking part in poetic competitions. While this art form is very far from a popular ‘sport’ in India, in ancient India, poetry was competitive, public, and required great skill and training. In her influential paper Aspects of women and work in early South India, historian Vijaya Ramaswamy discusses female bards belonging to the Panar community, some of whose poems were collected into distinguished ancient anthologies. On one memorable occasion, we are told that a Chera king was so pleased with the Panar women that he gifted them liquor, jewels, even elephants.
As the civilisations of the subcontinent grew more urban and complex, our sources grew more cacophonous. In her paper Some Games in Ancient India, historian Jeannine Auboyer spends some time discussing dice games in the early centuries CE. By far the most popular game was chaturanga, Indian chess, which unlike today’s was partially a game of chance played with dice.
A repeated trope both in classical Sanskrit drama and the Buddhist Jatakas is the virtuous man, down on his luck after gambling his fortune away. But where did these men gamble, and with whom? The Kamasutra has this to say for courtesans searching for the ideal client: “… He is fond of crowds, salons, theatrical performances, parties, and all kinds of games.” Though elite courtesans did not rely on gambling for their income, this was not necessarily the case for all courtesans and their hangers-on. This brings up the intriguing possibility that the women of the courtesan’s district, often sneered at in the Brahminical literature, were some of India’s earliest chess grandmasters.
Indeed, recent feminist readings of Sanskrit literature are challenging the conventional wisdom on courtesans. In her paper Articulation, Dissent and Subversion: Voices of Women’s Emancipation in Sanskrit Literature, Sanskritist Shalini Shah points out that “in contrast to the kulavadhus of patriarchy who are described as mumbling (antaramukhabhasini) creatures, prostitutes were speaking subjects.” Which is to say, they were educated, erudite, and chose their partners. The sophistication of the courtesans’ literary salon is proverbial in Sanskrit literature, and private competitions between men and women happened there regularly. And in this sport, women could more than hold their own. Shah cites another scholar who notes that “in the presence of the king, among scholars, and on meeting with the courtesans, even an eloquent man is embarrassed, as fear intimidates his heart.” It is a shame that the outcomes of courtesans’ poetry competitions have not survived.
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In the courts, on the battlefield
From the late medieval period onward, we begin to see elite women excelling in more physical activities as well — especially in traditionally ‘male’ behaviours such as horse riding and sharpshooting. The evidence for working women’s sports and games, unfortunately, is as patchy in this period as ever.
In her book The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback, Yashaswini Chandra observes that while patriarchal norms prevented elite women from riding in public, there was nothing to prevent them from riding in private, most likely learning from each other within the zenana quarters. She provides a few intriguing examples to support her case. Early Mughal women, coming from the Turco-Mongol societies of Central Asia, were proficient riders. But, so, too, were their unrelated contemporaries to the South. Take the famous Deccan queen Chand Bibi of Ahmednagar, who, during her lifetime, was well-regarded for her erudition and strong will.
In many ways, Chand Bibi was the original Rani of Jhansi character, memorialised for defeating invaders and remembered as a figure on horseback. While Chand Bibi famously repelled a Mughal attack on Ahmednagar in 1596, she was not riding a horse on the battlefield. Yet about a century later, in the Mughal-dominated Deccan, Chand Bibi was depicted in the style of aristocratic Hyderabadi women “out hawking on horseback… either alone or accompanied by other women.”
Indeed, says Chandra, “Various court painting traditions [from the time] also portrayed women on horseback, hunting, hawking or playing polo.” Chandra also makes note of the English traveller Fanny Parkes, who observed Maratha women’s expert horsemanship some time later and added important context. Elite women still technically observed purdah while riding in public, simply by having guards keep away common men.
Perhaps the most prominent example of women’s sharpshooting in colonial India comes from Nur Jahan, the Mughal empress. In her book Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, historian Ruby Lal discusses an event in 1617 when Nur Jahan and her husband Jahangir set out on a hunt in present-day Madhya Pradesh. “For Mughals,” notes Lal, “hunting symbolised imperial dominance… [it] allowed a ruler to display his ability to tame the wild and to publicly assert his bravery in the open theatre of the hunting grounds.” This made the very fact of Nur Jahan’s participation a sign of her royal status, but she also made a virtuoso demonstration, taking six shots on elephant-back against four tigers, not missing a single one. How she developed such skill is difficult to say, but it must have involved long hours of practice in the zenana. In 1626, she would make further use of this skill in defeating a coup at Lahore.
Retaining the spotlight
The story of Indian women in sport is not a straight line of progress. Across the social hierarchy, from the Panar women of the early Tamil Nadu hills to the aristocrats of Mughal and Maratha courts, women have always found ways to play, compete, and excel. For centuries, women’s athleticism and proficiency was hidden in the zenana or dismissed in literature. Even today, cyberbullying of cricketers like Jemimah Rodrigues and sexual harassment of female athletes has faced little consequence.
As with so much else in Indian civilisation, every generation, every win pushes the boundary further and further. The hope for the future is that women will no longer need to fight for visibility or justice, but will be celebrated simply as athletes, competitors, and champions.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)