🇮🇳 Harmanpreet Kaur

Harmanpreet Kaur was born on 8 March 1989 in Moga, Punjab — a small agricultural town. International Women's Day, which is the date of her birth, is a coincidence she has joked about often. Her father Harmandar Singh worked as a clerk in the state judicial services and was, in his spare time, a club-level volleyball and basketball player. He noticed his daughter, at age eight, hitting straight drives in the family courtyard with a wooden bat carved from a chair leg, and walked her three days later to the Gian Jyoti Academy in Moga, where the cricket coach, Kamaldeesh Singh Sodhi, accepted her on the spot. She was the only girl in the academy. She remained so for nine years.

She debuted for India in March 2009 in an ODI against Pakistan at the Senwes Park in Potchefstroom. She was 19, played all 50 overs in the field, and made 4 not out. The next two years she was, in her own words, 'mostly outside the side' — a 12th-woman who could field anywhere, including in the box from short midwicket. She was eventually fixed at number five and given the captaincy of India's T20 side in 2016. India had, at that point, won three ICC trophies in 35 years. Under Harmanpreet, they would win five in seven.

The 2017 Derby innings is the event that splits her career — and Indian women's cricket — into a before and an after. India needed to chase 281 in 42 overs after rain. The arithmetic was statistically a 9 per cent win probability. Kaur, instead of nursing her wicket, attacked. The first six, off Megan Schutt, cleared deep midwicket by ten yards. Her second six, off Ellyse Perry, was a slogged pull over square. By the time she reached 100 — off 90 balls — Australia had given up on containment. The remaining 71 came off 25 balls. She hit seven sixes in 22 deliveries between the 30th and 40th overs. By the end of the innings she was so dehydrated her teammates had to hold her at the boundary so she would not collapse. She refused to come off. 'I have waited eight years for an innings,' she said in the dressing room afterwards. 'I will not waste it by walking off.'

She received the Padma Shri — India's fourth-highest civilian honour — in 2017, the youngest woman cricketer to be awarded it. She was given the Khel Ratna in 2024. Her captaincy style is the opposite of Mithali Raj's: where Raj led by graceful example, Kaur leads by aggressive instinct. She rotates her bowlers in unconventional spells, attacks the powerplay, and routinely keeps two slips in for the new ball. She has, in the words of former England captain Charlotte Edwards, 'modernised the rhythm of the women's game by simply refusing to play the women's game.' The phrase is meant as a compliment. Kaur took it as one.

She captained India to the 2023 Women's Asia Cup title and the 2024 final. Most importantly, she captained the Mumbai Indians to victory in the inaugural Women's Premier League in 2023 — the league that Mithali Raj had spent twenty years arguing should exist. Kaur's central contract with the BCCI in 2024 — five crore rupees, plus IPL earnings of around two crore — is the first time a female Indian cricketer has been paid in a band that compares meaningfully to her male counterparts. The number was negotiated quietly. The principle had been argued, publicly, for decades.

She is, in May 2026, 37 years old. She continues to captain India. Her stated goal is the 2025 ICC Women's World Cup — to be hosted, finally, in India, in venues that include the renovated Wankhede. She has trained, by long custom, with her brother and her cousins in Moga every off-season; she trains in the open air, on a wicket prepared by hand, and she still hits the same lofted shot over deep midwicket that broke Australia at Derby. She has said, in multiple recent interviews, that she will retire when India wins a World Cup. India has not yet won one. The arithmetic, given her age and the BCCI's announced women's calendar through 2027, is finely poised.