Kannur Lokesh Rahul (born 18 April 1992), known as KL Rahul, is an Indian international cricketer. A right-handed batter who has opened, batted in the middle order and kept wicket for India, he is one of the few players to have scored centuries in Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20 internationals. He has captained India in all three formats as a stand-in and has led two Indian Premier League teams.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Kannur Lokesh Rahul |
| Born | 18 April 1992, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India |
| Age | 34 |
| Role | Batter, wicketkeeper |
| Batting | Right-handed |
| International debut | Test: December 2014; ODI and T20I: June 2016 |
| Domestic team | Karnataka |
| IPL teams | Royal Challengers Bengaluru, Sunrisers Hyderabad, Punjab Kings, Lucknow Super Giants, Delhi Capitals |
| Spouse | Athiya Shetty (m. 2023) |
Early Life
Rahul was born in Bengaluru and grew up in Mangaluru, where both his parents were academics: his father, K. N. Lokesh, was a professor at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka in Surathkal, and his mother, Rajeshwari, taught history at Mangalore University. He went to the NITK English Medium School and St. Aloysius College. He began cricket coaching at about ten and at eighteen moved to Bengaluru to pursue the game while studying at Jain University. He played for India at the 2010 Under-19 World Cup and made his first-class debut for Karnataka the same year.
Career
In the 2013–14 season he scored more than 1,000 first-class runs as Karnataka won the Ranji Trophy. He made his Test debut in the Boxing Day match at Melbourne in December 2014 and scored 110 in his second Test, at Sydney. Centuries followed in Sri Lanka and the West Indies, and at Chennai in 2016 he was dismissed for 199 against England.
On his one-day debut against Zimbabwe at Harare in June 2016 he made an unbeaten 100, becoming the first Indian to score a century in his first ODI. Later that year he hit an unbeaten 110 in a T20 international against the West Indies in Florida. In January 2019 he and Hardik Pandya were briefly suspended over remarks made on a television chat show.
From 2020 he often kept wicket in white-ball cricket. At the 2023 World Cup in India he scored 452 runs as the first-choice wicketkeeper, including a 62-ball hundred against the Netherlands and a match-winning 97 not out against Australia, as India finished runners-up. He was part of the side that won the 2025 Champions Trophy. In Tests he has made centuries at Lord’s, Centurion and the Oval, and on the 2025 tour of England he scored 532 runs with two hundreds as an opener.
After early seasons with Bengaluru and Hyderabad, he joined Punjab in 2018 and that year hit a fifty in 14 balls, then the fastest in the league. He captained Punjab in 2020 and 2021, winning the Orange Cap in 2020 with 670 runs, and led the new Lucknow Super Giants from 2022 to 2024, taking them to the playoffs twice. He moved to Delhi Capitals in 2025 and was the team’s highest scorer in both 2025 and 2026, with 593 runs in the latter season.
Personal Life
He married the actor Athiya Shetty, daughter of the actor Suniel Shetty, on 23 January 2023, and their daughter was born in March 2025. He is close to several of his Karnataka team-mates, especially Mayank Agarwal, with whom he opened for state and country.
Records and Achievements
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was KL Rahul born?
KL Rahul was born on 18 April 1992 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India and is 34 years old.
What is KL Rahul’s role?
Role: Batter, wicketkeeper.
Featured image: KL Rahul at an Indian team training session at the Sydney Cricket Ground, January 2015. Photo by Naparazzi, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
