The end came the modern way, in an Instagram post. On 6 October 2026 Harmanpreet Kaur, 37, gave up the captaincy of India’s women’s cricket team in every format, with immediate effect. “This is not an easy decision,” she wrote. She will go on playing. Her post closed, as Business Today reported, with a line that fits a whole career: “Captaincy ends. The journey continues.”

Like most changes of power, this one had been settled in a meeting first. Writing for Al Jazeera, Annesha Ghosh reports that the decision followed talks the day before with Smriti Mandhana, head coach Amol Muzumdar and Devajit Saikia, honorary secretary of the BCCI, the board that runs Indian cricket. Mandhana, her deputy for four years, takes over. In her post Kaur admitted that some of her choices “sometimes came at a personal cost”. She did not say which ones.

The years of almost

For nine years her captaincy was a record of nearly winning, and of the arguments that followed each time. A first world title was the one thing the job demanded, and the last step to it kept giving way.

2017: the ODI World Cup final, lost. 2020: India’s first T20 World Cup final, lost to Australia in front of more than 86,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. 2022: silver at the Commonwealth Games. 2023: beaten in the T20 World Cup semi-final. 2024 and 2026: out in the group stage.

A list like that can wear down a captain. Countries are seldom patient with the people who carry their hopes, and they tend to remember the defeats in finals long after they have forgotten how the team got there.

A question about the rope

She became the full-time T20 captain in 2016, after India went out in the group stage of a T20 World Cup it was hosting. In the same period she became the first Indian signed to Australia’s Big Bash League. Her authority, though, came less from the appointment than from one innings.

In the 2017 World Cup semi-final against Australia she scored 171 not out. It made people rethink what Indian women could do with a bat. She remembered being asked, early on, a question that sums up how the game was once run:

Why do you need to attempt big hits when you know girls do not have power to clear the rope?

Her answer came the next year. At the 2018 T20 World Cup she made 103 from 51 balls against New Zealand, India’s first T20 international century, and took the team to its first semi-final in eight years. The Australian Alyssa Healy later credited her with leading a “new generation of Indian women into the modern game.”

Temper and command

She did not start out calm. “I used to lose my temper very quickly, but things have been changing within me,” she said in 2020. WV Raman, then India’s coach, said she had coped “brilliantly” with a young side. After losses in a 2018 tri-series she asked for “fit players who can run all across the ground”, which was blunt about where the team fell short.

When Mithali Raj retired in 2022, Kaur took over the 50-over side too, and the International Cricket Council notes that by 2023 she led India in all three formats. In England that year India won an ODI series 3-0, their first series win there in 23 years. She scored 221 runs, more than anyone else in the series, including 143 not out from 111 balls. When Deepti Sharma ran out Charlie Dean at the non-striker’s end at Lord’s and the English cricket establishment objected, her reply was short: “I will back my player.”

November

The title came at home, in November 2025. In the semi-final India came from behind to beat Australia, the defending champions, with Kaur making 89 and Jemimah Rodrigues 127 not out. In the final they beat South Africa, and Kaur took the catch off Nadine de Klerk that won it. According to the ICC, that makes her only the third Indian captain to win a 50-over World Cup, after Kapil Dev and MS Dhoni.

The ledger

She led India in five Tests, 51 ODIs and 155 T20 internationals, winning 80 percent, 58.82 percent and 59.35 percent of them. That comes to four Tests, 30 ODIs and 92 T20s. The ICC says she is the first player, man or woman, to captain a side in more than 150 T20 internationals, and no Indian captain has won more T20 matches. She is also India’s most capped woman cricketer.

Her last weeks in charge brought two more trophies. India won the Asia Cup in the UAE, and nine days later took gold at the Asian Games in Japan, their second in a row after 2023.

The succession

As her own scores fell away, more people wanted Mandhana, now 30 and recently the holder of the record for most runs in women’s cricket. The handover was agreed before the pressure turned into a public fight, and the departing captain keeps her place in the side.

Shafali Verma, whom Kaur backed when Verma was 16 and who was player of the match in the 2025 final, thanked her publicly: “you’ve always been there for me, on and off the field.”

Mandhana’s first targets are the inaugural Women’s Champions Trophy in early 2027 and the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. Kaur will be playing in the team she used to lead, and the job of turning near-misses into titles is now someone else’s.