Esmie Kripal Singh.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Late Indian cricketer A.G. Kripal Singh is a widespread name in the annals of Chennai’s cricketing historical past. His ancestors migrated to erstwhile Madras from Amritsar again in the nineteenth century and have since gone on to cement their place amongst the metropolis’s cricketing elites. A name oft-forgotten in the household’s fabled historical past is that of his spouse Esmie Kripal Singh.
Esmie, together with others like Comala Gopinath, spouse of former India cricketer C.D. Gopinath, late politician Visalakshi Nedunchezhiyan and J.B. Shah, former India captain Sudha Shah’s father, was one of the founding members and vice-president of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Cricket Association (TNWCA) in 1973. Esmie handed away on May 29, after battling early onset of Alzheimer’s, aged 88.
“My mother’s interest in the sport probably came about after she married dad. She would attend every game religiously and kept tabs on what was happening in the sport thereafter. She never played cricket though,” her son Arjan Kripal Singh, a former First-Class cricketer and BCCI match referee, remembers.
“We never had to ask her why she decided to get involved with the TNWCA. Cricket was so automatic in our household and so it was natural for us to see her do what she did,” says Malvika Mehra, Esmie’s daughter. Malvika was herself a junior stage cricketer, a left arm spinner, till the pressures of employment pressured her away from the sport.
Esmie Kripal Singh.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
“Back then, women taking up cricket would often be offered alternatives — table tennis, carrom — and told that we might get dark, not find a husband. At this time, we heard that the Women’s Cricket Association was formed and they were looking for state bodies to affiliate to. That’s when the Tamil Nadu Women’s Cricket Association was formed,” Sudha, one of the pioneers of ladies’s cricket in India, remembers.
Due to her Alzheimer’s prognosis, Esmie’s reminiscence struggled in direction of the finish, however Malvika factors out that cricket by no means actually left her mom.
“Sometimes, we used to ask mum if she wanted music or we should turn on the cricket. She loved music, but when asked, she would pick cricket,” she says.
