Purists and sexists may laugh at them but women cricketers are determined to ensure that the sport no longer remains just a gentleman's game.

By V K Santosh Kumar

Cricket is a gentleman's game. Women may watch, demand autographs, turn hysterical. They may never play. Some women are either deaf or stubborn. For last week gaggles of flannel wearing, willow bearing girls -- Kiwis, Proteas, Lankans and eight other teams -- descended on India to hold their very own World Cup of cricket. The gentlemen are unimpressed. Who does that girl in the skirt diving for a catch think she is? Janice Rhodes?

The women must be wearing ear plugs for the disdain is unending. Only 50 people (okay it was raining) turned up for the inaugural match in Delhi (the record is 10,000 when India played England in Patna in 1995) while the men's first game against Kenya last year drew 35,000 in Cuttack. The matches are being played in centres like Gurgaon, on grounds the men would refuse to practice on, and attract less attention -- even from satta operators -- than league matches on Mumbai weekdays. And forget lobster thermidor for dinner and five-star accommodation that Tendulkar & friends demand: the Indian women's team were huddled in the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium dormitory in Delhi and had to send out to a dhaba for food.

Disrespect should be dustbined. The cricketing ladies have stomached the sneering and are fighting relentlessly to give a fledgling sport some wings. It is an admirable resilience. Take their budget. If Rs 4 crore was spent on the laser show alone in Calcutta last year, the total budget of the Sixth Women's World Cup is Rs 1.5 crore. Honda played Hero by rescuing them with about Rs 75 lakh on inauguration eve, but last heard the organisers were still knocking hopefully on other sponsors' doors. And organisers don't mean a multi-member, heavyweight council (i.e. Wills World Cup 1996) with foreign bank accounts and slick deal-makers like Jagmohan Dalmiya. Here the entire show was coordinated by five women in Delhi operating from the three-room first-floor law firm office of the Women's Cricket Association of India (WCAI) Secretary Anuradha Dutt. "Yes, we can't compete with men's cricket," admits Dutt. "But remember that it evolved over 100 years. Women's cricket in India is 24 years old and it's in the evolutionary process."

It's why hangers on at practice still pose impertinent questions. Do they bowl underarm? Are the boundaries shorter for them? "Apart from the fact that we play with a five-ounce ball, the rules are the same as men's cricket," points out selector Sunita Vazirani. "It's popular to ridicule women's cricket. But don't forget that it was a woman who discovered overarm bowling!" Don't go home flustered to check dusty record books. She's right. What's more, once the girls have finished tying their pigtails, it would take a foolish spectator to spar with them at the nets. Bowl to Belinda Clark (Australia), Janette Brittin (England) and India's Poornima Rau and the ball may disappear in an embarrassing arc over the 75-yard boundary; get ready to face bowlers like Zoe Goss (Australia), Katrina Withers (New Zealand) and Alta Kotze (South Africa) and forgetting your abdominal guard can be a critical mistake. "The public's perception of women's cricket is that it is uninteresting stuff. But in the last few years it's become more aggressive," says Diana Goodall, cricket correspondent of Wellington's Evening Post.

The calibre of the Indian women's cricket team -- average age 23 -- might be akin to an under 19 boys' team. No need to blush. They're improving, more than can be said of the men. In 1993, when Dutt took over, India finished fourth (its best-ever result) in the World Cup in England. In 1994, it won a one-day series against the world's best women's team, Australia, at home. In 1995, it won the New Zealand Cricket Board Centenary Cup (involving India, Australia and New Zealand). And in 1995-96, won the one-day series against England (the reigning world champion) at home. Says peeved coach Srirupa Bose: "The irony is that the Indian men's team were playing at the same time in New Zealand and failed to qualify for the final of the men's Centenary Cup. But newspapers here gave more space to them."

There is an obstacle everywhere. Though the WCAI has 22 affiliated units and conducts sub-junior, junior and senior tournaments, there are barely 2,000 serious players in the country. More men can be found on Mumbai's Shivaji Park any morning. Wearing a skirt and doing Waqar Younis impersonations is not always socially acceptable. "Upper class women have other forms of entertainment," says Dutt. "Only women from lower- and middle-income groups play cricket as sports is a form of self-expression for them." Here too it gets complicated: just when women cricketers reach their peak they're expected to be researching not their technique but the matrimonial columns. "In most cases husbands and in-laws don't allow them to continue because they have to start a family," says Vazirani.

Parents too take convincing. Captain Pramila Bhat, for instance, began playing when she was an 18-year-old studying at R.V. College in Bangalore. Hailing from a Brahmin family of Mangalore, her conservative father wanted her to become a doctor and was alarmed by her ambitions. "Why cricket? What will you get?" was her father's reaction, she says. "But from 1991 when I started playing for India he was very happy." She was also lucky to have found a man willing to marry her. Lucky is an apt word. Says Vazirani, still single herself: "Playing cricket and being successful at it make women independent. Also many men don't want to marry cricket players." Money too is expectedly elusive. With only the Indian Railways and Air India regularly offering steady jobs and sponsor magnanimity stretching only to a free kit, women's cricket is yet to be classified as a career alternative.

For these women though passion wins over pragmatism. "It's not the money that matters. The love for the game eggs us on," says Rau. Teams echo that feeling. Except for New Zealand and South Africa, which are backed by their respective men's boards, it remains an unstructured amateur sport teeming with students, teachers, secretaries, farm hands and truck drivers.

It's a spirit that has driven some of the teams to turn up for the World Cup. Pakistan, where female athletes are expected to compete wearing burqas, have arrived with a scratch team (in trousers) led by Shaiza Khan, an industrialist's daughter. Sri Lanka formed a team three months ago and played its first international match against the Netherlands just two weeks ago. "After the success of the men's team all want to be Jayasuriyas," says coach Guy de Alwis, former Sri Lankan wicket-keeper.

But a Ms Jayasuriya or a Sushila Tendulkar is useless without marketing. The International Women's Cricket Council (IWCC), which meets in late December in Calcutta, should seduce Dalmiya to be their patron: support from the men's council could be the magical elixir they require. When Jeanne Malthus, IWCC secretary, rises to make her sales pitch, she should start with this: "Countries like the US, Japan, Sweden and Zimbabwe want to play in the next World Cup." Cricket, she will be saying, is no longer going to remain a gentleman's game.

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