Growing up, Kumar Kushagra’s father had one recurring piece of advice: always keep your bow loaded with arrows. Practice more than what’s needed, is how Kumar Kushagra explains it, because “if you don’t keep the bow loaded, how are you going to shoot the arrows when it’s time?”
For most of his career, Kushagra has taken that seriously. In 2022, having just scored a double century in the Ranji Trophy, the youngest to reach 250 in first-class cricket at the time, he stood at the crease and mimed drawing a bow, the arrow aimed at something only he could see.
Four years later, Kushagra reached a century in the Duleep Trophy final in Chennai and did something very different. He held his bat up like a violin and mimed playing it.
A bow and a violin, it turns out, are built from the same idea: a string, pulled taut enough that tension becomes the point of the instrument. Kushagra’s two career-defining celebrations have reached for that same string and asked two very different things.
He was fourteen when he qualified for Jharkhand’s U16s, barely fifteen at the U19 World Cup, seventeen with that Ranji double hundred and still into his teens when he was picked for his first Duleep Trophy squad. Everything in his career has arrived early. The one exception was the format that is supposed to reward all that early promise the quickest.
In 2024, DC paid INR 7.2 crore for an 18-year-old wicketkeeper-batter few outside domestic cricket had much reason to know. But the scouts had clearly seen enough, with bids coming from three teams. What they observed was a wicketkeeper with sharp reflexes and a batter who seems to pick lengths early, matching them with a diverse range of strokes. Without the need for a fancy release-hit, he could unfurl five shots to the same ball. And against spinners, he pranced out with little doubt and shuffled around in his crease rapidly, manufacturing angles brilliantly.
All of those good bits have remained, and were visible at Chepauk in the 2026 Duleep final. But IPL viewers have barely seen any of that.
In his first season, he played three innings and scored three runs. DC let him go. GT signed him for a fraction of the price, and across two full seasons, handed him one cap.
It’s the kind of stall that tends to swallow careers before they’ve properly begun, but Kushagra has spent the time since trying to ensure it doesn’t happen to him. “It’s good to have the experience of the last two years. Having the right mindset is important. Until you play 3-4 games on the trot, doubts do start creeping up in your mind,” Kushagra told Cricbuzz on the sidelines of IPL 2026. “If you keep thinking, I am not getting a game, and go easy on yourself, it becomes a big demotivating factor, even for a big player. Whether I get a game or not, I need to keep continuing my processes.”
The processes, as he describes them, are mostly the unglamorous parts nobody sees. “I shouldn’t be in a position asking myself, ‘Did I do well over the last month, did I eat well, did I work out well?’ That will show in your game. Those things matter more when you’re not playing than when you are.”
Kushagra’s mother’s words still echo in his ears whenever he looks to improve every aspect of his fitness and gameplay. ©BCCI
As you interact with Kushagra, you can see how his sharp gazes and crisp answers are much like his batting: clear, uncomplicated, purposeful. Ask Kushagra where the discipline comes from and he will tell you, unprompted, that it isn’t only from his father’s side. His mother, he adds, has never asked him for anything. Her instructions to Kushagra were different. “She always says, whatever money you earn from cricket, you should not spend it on me. You should invest it in your own cricket and training,” he had told Cricbuzz in an interview while he was at Delhi Capitals, back in 2024.
“Buy the best bats, get the best facilities and coaches in place for yourself. That money is for you, not for me.”
His mother’s words still echo in his ears whenever he looks to improve every aspect of his fitness and gameplay. “Everywhere I go, I remember what she’s told me, and I try and think how I can invest in myself, what are the steps that I take today that will benefit my future. I buy myself the best shoes, get myself acquainted with the best sleep technique.
“I feel a lot of calm after speaking to my mother, like I guess a lot of us must feel. With dad, it’s a stricter coach-pupil relationship alongside a father-son one.”
By his own account, he is not a particularly complicated young man outside of cricket. He grew up idolising MS Dhoni, the paragon to any wicketkeeping aspirant from Jharkhand, but had no other heroes outside the cricketing remit. He knew only two things growing up: “to study and to play cricket.”
Not too long ago, his Instagram bio read “infinity being,” a phrase he picked up from a self-help book The Greatest Secret. “It said there’s no limit to who and what you can be. I liked it, it resonated with me,” he explains. It is a small, slightly earnest detail, but it sits close to everything else he says about himself: a young man organising his whole personality around the idea of unfinished potential, always having more to load into his bow.
That patience was tested early, and sometimes by forces outside cricket entirely. At the U19 World Cup in 2020, Kushagra was an understudy to Dhruv Jurel, buddying up with fellow Jharkhand boy Sushant Mishra. Even around a loud bunch, all elder to him, Kushagra kept his own quiet space. He made a single, low-key appearance in a one-sided game against Japan, mostly spending his time between Bloemfontein and Potchefstroom quietly practising his glovework, even as the senior keeper earned plaudits.
Having spent most of the time on the bench, Kushagra returned to India only to see the entire country shut down in a few weeks.
His father rigged up the terrace in their Jamshedpur flat into makeshift nets, and the two of them trained morning and evening until neighbours complained about the noise. “I honestly felt that my two years got wasted,” Kushagra says about the Covid-19 disruption. “It was a creamy time for me right after the U19 World Cup, and that tournament has always been a great platform for the IPL. I didn’t get that, and I felt I needed to put in more effort.”
But Kushagra didn’t let that time go to waste. He worked on an aspect that didn’t show up on the scorecard. “I was working on myself mentally during the lockdown. I knew that once cricket restarted, a lot of eyes were going to be on me, and I didn’t want to let that opportunity go.”
Within a year of the U19 World Cup final, a Jharkhand senior call-up came his way. By his second year, a Ranji double century and the bow-and-arrow celebration announced to the world exactly what he had developed into.
That version didn’t survive contact with the IPL. Ever since that windfall, Kushagra has played just five IPL matches across three seasons, and all of them have been challenging, makeshift gigs: twice at No. 8, once at five, and the last one as an opener.
His auction value has fallen by nearly ninety percent since that first DC deal, and he says the number doesn’t unsettle him the way it might have at nineteen. “When I was sold, I was just very happy. I didn’t know it would be this much. It gives me confidence, even if I don’t go that high next year, because the coaches and selectors are watching you. They’ve kept you at that benchmark. You have to produce performances to that level.”
But as he grew up in the Jharkhand setup, Kushagra has been awarded a switch from middle to the top-order. It has changed the way he trains, even in the IPL. “Now I bat a little higher. If I’m getting the Powerplay or coming in at one-down or two-down, I’m facing seam-up deliveries. That’s one thing I’ve worked on: how to hit fast bowlers for sixes. Once you hit a fast bowler, hitting a spinner becomes a little easier, because the pace is a little less there. You just watch the ball till the end, and woh lag jaata hai (it gets hit).”
He credits Vikram Solanki, GT’s director of cricket, and more recently Matthew Hayden, for adjusting to that shift. Kushagra is now wedded to the idea of letting bowlers make mistakes and play the ball late. “Fast bowlers anyway already have a lot of things going in their heads: bowl here, beware of that batter, and so on. In that scenario, if we overthink as well, it won’t work.”
But as he grew up in the Jharkhand setup, Kushagra has been awarded a switch from middle to the top order. It has changed the way he trains, even in the IPL ©BCCI
At 21, Kushagra is already a reliable senior batter for Jharkhand, much of that time spent as vice-captain to Ishan Kishan. Together they steered a title-winning Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy campaign last season, and a year on, the pairing produced something bigger. At the Duleep Trophy final, playing for East Zone, Kishan compiled a double hundred at one end of a 230-run stand while Kushagra reeled off a century at the other.
The senior tag has changed Kushagra’s batting as much as his standing in the dressing room. “I have tried to be a little more sensible,” he says. “Because I have been playing for my state for the past 2-3 years. So, you can’t just go and hit, both here and in the IPL. You must be a little more sensible.”
Kushagra, though, has waited enough to know domestic form isn’t a guaranteed entry key to the higher levels. Competition in India is brutal enough that even Kishan hasn’t locked down all three formats yet. In the IPL, Jos Buttler keeps wicket, while Shubman Gill and Sai Sudharsan are immovable from the top.
The future is no more settled today than it was a week ago, but something has shifted. Two years after DC quietly wrote him off, Kushagra came back in the news for a century at No. 6 in a marquee final. As he would know better than anyone, that guarantees nothing. It just means people are watching again. Hours after that Duleep ton, he found himself in the ‘A’ squads for both formats against Australia A.
His father’s instruction still holds. Kushagra has not stopped loading the bow. He has not stopped practising more than what’s needed. But it’s taken him four years to relearn what to do with all the readiness.
That answer, perhaps, was found in Chennai. Kushagra spent his childhood drawing back the string, aiming at targets that could reveal at any moment. Targets often bigger for his age. But no arrow left the bow when he made a century this time. The same string, held taut by four years of waiting, made music instead. He now waits for the melody to reach the ears that matter.
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