A cartoon published in the Hindustan Standard newspaper during the India– England Test match at the Eden Gardens in 1961–62 featured two women. They were seated on the back rows and enjoying themselves, chatting and knitting sweaters, with visible disregard to the innings in progress. The rest of the spectators, all men, were shown absorbed in the game. The caption, speculating what one of the women might have asked her companion, was, ‘One sweater and two mufflers. Yours?’ The cartoon captured the general attitude to female cricket spectators in Calcutta at the time. Male spectators and journalists, and sometimes female writers too, reproached female spectators for their inadequate knowledge of the sport. Many women challenged the stereotype. One of them reprimanded the author Sankariprasad Basu for considering ‘women as ignorant fools when it [came] to cricket’, claiming that in her experience ‘quite a few women [understood] what cricket [was]’. Women’s cricket has since gained in popularity, women have taken to commentary and anchoring shows about men’s cricket, and the number of female spectators has multiplied. Yet the conventional understanding of female fandom remains so invested in the familiar stereotype that a historian writing in 2005 characterised female spectators as little more than ‘consumers of nationalism and modernity, designer clothes and television advertisements, martinis and the sex appeal of Rahul Dravid’. While the observation may have been valid for a particular company of strangers, no mention is made of any alternative, informed grade of spectatorship, which reveals the persistence of the female fan’s negative image.

For a long time, men considered women trespassers in sporting spaces. The opinion on women’s unsuitability to sport as athlete and spectator has not radically changed over the twentieth century, as many societies continue to set androgenic boundaries in sports, segregating women from men. The gendered compartmentalisation of the society is conspicuous in stadiums and sport in general. Scholars have drawn our attention to the power and provenance of the transgression of gender and sexual boundaries, usually constituted by acts of women breaching male preserves, that reshapes the gender order in sport and society.