The 'vidrohi' spirit: How Sneh Rana rose from being unsold to lifting the World Cup

This is how 2025 began for Sneh Rana: She found herself, once more in her cricketing career, left out of the Indian team. It had been almost two years since she got the axe from the T20 squad after India’s exit at the 2023 World Cup semis, and more than a year since she was cut from the ODI team, despite being a prolific wicket-taker, to make way for a rising player. She had gone unsold at the auction for the 2025 Women’s Premier League (WPL), a rarity for an Indian international, and a major financial loss.

Things were not looking good.

This is how 2025 ended for Sneh Rana: Drafted late into the Royal Challengers Bengaluru squad as an injury replacement, she took six wickets in five matches, and, in one innings, smashed 26 runs off just six balls, one of the highest strike rates in women’s T20. She was picked again for the Indian ODI team, and with 15 wickets in five matches at a tri-nation tournament, including her first five-wicket haul, declared the player of the tournament. She was picked again for the Indian T20 side. She made it to the Indian World Cup squad. At the World Cup, she took seven wickets in six matches and scored 99 runs at an average just a shade under 50. As the Indian women made history with their first World Cup triumph, Rana held the cup aloft—she was part of the moment that promises to completely change the narrative of women’s cricket in India.

“Roller-coaster year!” Rana laughs. “Isn’t that what they say?”

This year, at 31, as she takes guard in a new season of the WPL, bought by Delhi Capitals for a ₹50-lakh contract, Rana is basking in cricketing glory like never before in her long career.

I meet Rana at her home in Dehradun, just a few weeks before the start of the ongoing WPL. Hers is a two-storeyed house with a pink façade featuring extensive lattice-work and bright blue doorways. Rana is in a Lincoln green hoodie and loose black denim, a cup of tea in hand, her shoulder-length hair open.

“When I was younger, a friend of mine named me ‘vidrohi’—rebel—because I would fight for any cause that moved me,” she said. “I got a tattoo of it…” She pulls up a sleeve to show it to me, lettered across her wrist. “That’s the attitude that I played with (in 2025). Fight, no matter what.”

Every single match she was involved in after her comeback was a moment waiting to be seized, a fight waiting to be fought without inhibition.

“Even at the World Cup, for many of us, it was like one last dance, right? I remember before the final, that every one of us had this conviction—this was our time, we will lift the cup,” she says.

Rana, like many of her teammates, believes that the World Cup victory will usher in a new era in women’s cricket in India, one where the neglect the game has faced for decades will finally become a narrative squarely belonging to the past. “That mindset that women’s cricket is not serious, not good enough, that crap, I think will totally change,” she says. “It has already started changing with the WPL which gets such a large viewership, all our matches are televised. This will change the mindset of the people watching, as well as parents whose daughters want to play cricket. Those girls will now get support and backing and they have a platform and a structure, because of the WPL, because there is more money and more matches in domestic cricket, many more tournaments to play, a clear pathway.”

Rana took to cricket as a child, playing with her sister and her cousins. “I never felt like ‘oh I’m a girl playing cricket’, because all of us were playing all kinds of sports all the time.” When she was a bit older, she realised that she was the only girl in the village playing with all the other boys in village tournaments. “But I was so good that the boys would come and call me to play every time there was a match.”

Then one day when she was nine, a cricket academy from Dehradun city—back then, the village she lives in, Sinaula, was a distinct entity demanding a long drive and some confused searching if someone was visiting from the “city”—came calling. All the boys turned up for trials. Then someone from the village told the coaches that there was also a girl who played well. Rana heard that and ran away to hide lest she be called on to bat or bowl. It took a few friends and family to find her and coax her out to bowl and bat a few overs. The coaches were so impressed that they went to meet Rana’s parents to ensure that she joins the academy.

A decade later, Rana was making her India debut.

“That was 2014, but even then, no one actually knew women’s cricket existed,” she says. “None of our matches were shown on TV. Entry to the stadium for all women’s games were free, yet no one showed up.”

Now the women’s game, especially the WPL, has packed stadiums even though people have to pay for tickets.

“It was hard to make a career out of cricket then,” Rana says. “There was very little money, like ₹1,000 per domestic match if you were in the playing XI (it’s 10 times more now). But even though my family was not rich, in fact we had a financial crisis, no one let me feel it. I was always allowed to play because that’s what gave me happiness.”

Back then, even getting picked for the Indian team did not guarantee matches. Till as recently as 2022, the Indian women’s team averaged one international series a year (as compared to the men’s team playing 10 or more, that’s 5-7 matches for the women’s team, and over 70 matches for the men’s). “Now we easily get to play 5-6 international series a year, plus a Test match in every series,” says Rana. “In 2021, I remember, we played a Test match after an eight-year gap!”

This was also the match, against England in Bristol, where Rana made her most remarkable “vidrohi” comeback. After suffering from an injury in 2016, Rana was out of the game for almost a year. “I was just doing rehab, didn’t even get to touch a bat,” she says. But even as she eased back into domestic cricket, it seemed like the national team selectors had forgotten her. It would take five years, and that England Test, for Rana to be called again. Just a month before her recall though, Rana had lost her father. “I was happy that I was once again back in the team, but the person who made it possible was not there anymore. I was so lost.”

It turned out to be a fantastic series for her as a player, including a four-wicket haul and a brilliant batting display to save India from losing the Bristol Test.

“I got a tattoo back then too, a year or so after my injury,” Rana says, lifting another sleeve to show me the phrase “I refuse to sink” inked on her forearm.

It’s a motto Rana has embodied perfectly.

Rudraneil Sengupta is the author of The Beast Within, a detective novel set in Delhi.