India T20I most stumpings: All-Time Records

India have taken 67 stumpings in T20 internationals. MS Dhoni took 34 of them. No other India keeper has reached a dozen, and Dhoni's total is also the world record in the format, which makes this the most concentrated entry on India's T20I fielding leaderboards.

A stumping needs three things at once: a spinner, a keeper standing up to the stumps, and a batter who commits far enough forward to be beaten. In a format built around hitting, the third of those happens constantly, which is why T20 produces stumpings at a rate Test cricket does not. The first two are selection decisions, and they explain almost everything about the shape of this list.

Every single one of India's 67 T20I stumpings has come off a spinner. Not one has come off a seamer with the keeper standing up. That is a small fact with a large consequence: the stumping record is really a record of which keepers stood behind India's spin attacks, and for a decade that was one man.

Most T20I stumpings for India

Rank	Keeper	Span	Matches kept	Stumpings	Catches as keeper	Total dismissals
1	MS Dhoni	2006-2019	77	34	50	84
2	Rishabh Pant	2017-2024	33	11	33	44
3	Dinesh Karthik	2006-2022	21	8	25	33
4	Sanju Samson	2015-2026	43	6	35	41
5	Ishan Kishan	2021-2026	28	5	25	30
=6	KL Rahul	2016-2022	17	1	17	18
=6	Jitesh Sharma	2023-2025	12	1	8	9
=6	Dhruv Jurel	2024-2025	3	1	3	4

Eight keepers account for every India stumping in the format. Matches kept counts only appearances behind the stumps, not every T20I the player appeared in.

The bowlers who created them

Bowler	Stumpings off his bowling
Yuzvendra Chahal	12
Kuldeep Yadav	9
Ravindra Jadeja	7
Washington Sundar	6
Axar Patel	6
Ravichandran Ashwin	5
Yuvraj Singh	4
Varun Chakaravarthy	4
Harbhajan Singh	3
Suresh Raina	3
Amit Mishra	3

The two wrist-spinners at the top are not there by accident. Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav between them account for 21 of India's 67, roughly a third, from a combined bowling career considerably shorter than Jadeja's. A leg-break that turns away from the right-hander and beats an attempted slog-sweep is the classic stumping delivery, and India bowled a great deal of it between 2016 and 2022.

The presence of Yuvraj Singh with four and Suresh Raina with three is a reminder of how India used to make up their overs. Both were batters who bowled part-time left-arm and off-spin respectively, and both were regularly given an over in the middle with Dhoni standing up.

Dhoni's 34, bowler by bowler

Bowler	Dhoni stumpings off him
Yuzvendra Chahal	8
Ravichandran Ashwin	5
Yuvraj Singh	4
Kuldeep Yadav	4
Suresh Raina	3
Amit Mishra	3
Ravindra Jadeja	3
Harbhajan Singh	1

Eight different bowlers, and no single one supplying more than a quarter. MS Dhoni's record is not a partnership with one spinner in the way that some keeping records are; it is the product of standing up to whoever was bowling, for thirteen years, in a side that always had at least two spinners in the XI.

The remaining three of his 34 came off bowlers who were not frontline spinners at all, including a Rohit Sharma over and a Virat Kohli over. Dhoni stood up to part-time spin as readily as to Ashwin.

By comparison, Rishabh Pant's 11 came off seven different bowlers, with Axar Patel supplying three. Sanju Samson's six came off four bowlers, two each from Kuldeep and Varun Chakaravarthy.

Which sides lost most batters this way

Opponent	Stumped by an India keeper
Sri Lanka	17
England	10
West Indies	8
Bangladesh	6
Australia	6
New Zealand	6
South Africa	5
Pakistan	3
Ireland	3

Sri Lanka's 17 is a quarter of the total and stands well clear. India and Sri Lanka have played each other more often in T20Is than any other pairing involving India, and a substantial share of those matches were in Indian and Sri Lankan conditions where India bowled spin from both ends. England's 10 is the next highest and is spread across World Cup meetings and bilateral series in both countries.

When the stumpings happened

Of India's 67, 27 came at grounds in India and 40 overseas or at neutral venues, spread across 23 home matches and 33 away. That distribution roughly follows India's fixture pattern rather than telling us anything about conditions: India play most of their T20Is away from home, and spinners take stumpings wherever the ball turns enough to beat the bat.

The era pattern is sharper than the venue one. Dhoni's 34 were spread from 2006 to 2019. Every other keeper's stumpings fall after 2017. There is no period in which two India keepers were competing for stumpings, because for most of the format's history in India only one man kept.

The over the stumping happens in

A stumping is not spread evenly across the twenty overs. Sorting India's 67 by the over in which the ball was bowled puts nearly two-thirds of them in the middle phase.

Phase	Overs	India stumpings	Share
Powerplay	1-6	8	12%
Middle	7-15	43	64%
Death	16-20	16	24%

The tenth over alone has produced eight, more than any other single over, with the twelfth, thirteenth and fifteenth on six each. Those are the overs an India captain has historically given to spin, and the overs in which a batter who has been in for a while begins to look for the boundary rather than the single.

The powerplay figure is low for the reverse reason. Fielding restrictions push a captain toward seam in the first six, and a keeper standing back to a fast bowler cannot stump anyone. Only eight of India's stumpings have come inside the first six overs across twenty years.

The death figure is more interesting than it looks. Sixteen stumpings between the sixteenth and twentieth overs mean spinners are still bowling there, and a batter chasing a target in the nineteenth over will leave his ground against anything. The twentieth over on its own has produced four.

Each keeper's split follows the same shape. Dhoni's 34 break down as three in the powerplay, 23 in the middle and eight at the death; Pant's eleven as two, seven and two. Nobody on this list has a distribution that departs from the pattern, which is a sign the phase effect belongs to the bowling plan rather than to any individual keeper.

Who gets stumped

Sixty-seven stumpings are spread across a lot of names, and no batter has been stumped by an India keeper more than twice. Eight have been stumped twice: Asela Gunaratne, Thisara Perera, Kusal Perera, Dasun Shanaka and Dinesh Chandimal of Sri Lanka, Moeen Ali of England, Tamim Iqbal of Bangladesh and Ahmed Shehzad of Pakistan.

Five of those eight are Sri Lankan, which is the same finding as the opponent table read from the other end. Sri Lanka's middle order across the 2016-2018 period contained several batters who used their feet against spin as a matter of policy, and India were bowling two wrist-spinners at them in Indian and Sri Lankan conditions.

That no single batter has been stumped three times by India is a reasonable proxy for how rare the dismissal is even at its peak. India have played 276 men's T20Is and produced 67 stumpings, which is one every four and a bit matches, spread across a couple of hundred opposition batters.

The same dismissal in the other direction

India's batters have been stumped 28 times in the same 276 matches, against the 67 India have taken. India take stumpings at nearly two and a half times the rate they concede them, which is the clearest single measure of how much more spin India have bowled than they have faced.

India batter	Times stumped
Shreyas Iyer	3
Shubman Gill	3
Suryakumar Yadav	3
Rohit Sharma	3
KL Rahul	2

Jos Buttler has taken six of the 28, more than twice any other keeper. That is a function of how often India play England and of England's willingness to bowl Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid and Liam Livingstone through the middle overs against an India top order that comes down the pitch. Tim Seifert, Nicholas Pooran, Kusal Mendis and Luke Ronchi have two apiece.

The four Indians on three are all top-order batters from the current era, which is the same structural point the century page makes about batting position: the players who face the most spin in the middle overs are the ones exposed to the dismissal.

World Cups and bilaterals

Of the 67, seventeen came in World Cup matches, two in Asia Cup matches and the remaining 48 in bilateral series or other tournaments. Seventeen is a higher share than India's World Cup fixtures alone would produce, and the 2016 tournament at home is most of the reason.

Two in a match

Eight times an India keeper has taken two stumpings in the same T20I. Nobody has taken three.

Date	Opponent	Venue	Keeper
20 September 2007	South Africa	Durban	Dinesh Karthik
29 January 2016	Australia	Melbourne	MS Dhoni
12 February 2016	Sri Lanka	Ranchi	MS Dhoni
23 March 2016	Bangladesh	Bengaluru	MS Dhoni
20 December 2017	Sri Lanka	Cuttack	MS Dhoni
22 December 2017	Sri Lanka	Indore	MS Dhoni
27 June 2018	Ireland	Dublin	MS Dhoni
3 July 2018	England	Manchester	MS Dhoni

Dhoni owns seven of the eight, and every one of them falls between 2016 and 2018 — the last third of a career that began in 2006. Karthik's pair in Durban, taken during the inaugural World T20, is the only one by another keeper and the oldest entry on the list. That no India keeper has managed three in a match reflects how few chances a twenty-over innings offers: 59 of India's 276 T20Is have produced a stumping at all, and the great majority of those produced exactly one.

Dhoni's cluster between January 2016 and July 2018 is the densest stretch of stumping in India's history — six two-stumping matches in thirty months, at the point where he had stopped captaining and was keeping to Chahal and Kuldeep in tandem.

The year-by-year pattern

India's stumping count peaked at eleven in 2016 and has not passed six in any year since. The 2016 figure came in a calendar of 21 T20Is that included a home World T20 on turning pitches, with Dhoni behind the stumps and Ashwin, Jadeja, Chahal and Nehra sharing the attack.

The recent numbers are lower and steadier: six in 2022, two in 2023, four in 2024, three in 2025 and two through July 2026. India have played more T20Is in those years than in 2016, so the rate has fallen further than the totals suggest. Two things changed. India began using seam at both ends of the innings more often, and the keeper's role shifted toward standing back to Bumrah and Arshdeep in the phases where Dhoni once stood up to spin.

Which over the stumping happened in

A T20 innings has three distinct phases and the stumping is not distributed evenly across them. Sorting all 67 by the over in which the bails came off gives the sharpest structural finding on this page.

Phase	Overs	Stumpings	Share
Powerplay	1-6	8	11.9%
Middle	7-15	43	64.2%
Death	16-20	16	23.9%

Nearly two-thirds fall in overs seven to fifteen, and the single most productive over is the tenth with eight. That is the middle of the innings, which is exactly where India bowl their spin: the powerplay belongs to the new ball, the last four overs increasingly belong to seam, and the overs in between are where a captain turns to Chahal, Kuldeep Yadav or Axar Patel.

The powerplay's eight is the more interesting number for being so small. A keeper standing up inside the first six overs is a rare sight even in India's XI, because a side that opens with spin usually does so with a finger-spinner bowling flat and the keeper back. Eight stumpings in twenty years of powerplay overs is the measure of how seldom India have taken that risk.

The death overs' sixteen breaks down differently again. A batter facing over seventeen with eight required is charging almost every ball, so the stumping there is not the product of deception but of a batter who has decided the risk is worth taking. Those are the ones the keeper does not need to be quick for, only ready.

Dhoni's 34 divide 3, 23 and 8 across the three phases; the other seven keepers' 33 divide 5, 20 and 8. The shapes are nearly identical, which says the phase pattern is a property of how India bowl rather than of any one keeper's method.

The record by decade

Period	Stumpings
2006-2012	10
2013-2018	28
2019-2026	29

The first six years of India's T20I history produced ten stumpings. The two periods since have produced twenty-eight and twenty-nine, and the rate has been essentially flat for a dozen years.

That flatness is the finding, because the personnel changed completely across it. Dhoni took 8 of the first period's 10 and 25 of the second period's 28; of the 29 since 2019 he took exactly one, in his final year. India's stumping rate did not fall when the best keeper of his generation stopped playing, which is the strongest available argument that the record on this page is more about the bowling than the gloves.

The single biggest year is 2016 with eleven, the year of the World T20 in India wrapped around a long home season. Ravichandran Ashwin took five of those eleven and Ravindra Jadeja three, with Suresh Raina supplying two more — an off-spinner, a left-arm spinner and a part-timer, all bowling to Dhoni on pitches that turned. No other year has produced more than seven.

Fifty-nine different batters

The 67 stumpings were taken against 59 different batters. Only eight men have been stumped twice by an India keeper and nobody has been stumped three times.

That spread is worth sitting with. A record of 67 dismissals concentrated in one keeper is not concentrated at all at the other end: no batter has a particular weakness that India have exploited repeatedly, and no touring side has one player who keeps getting caught out of his ground. Five of the eight repeat victims are Sri Lankan — Thisara Perera, Kusal Perera, Dinesh Chandimal, Dasun Shanaka and Danushka Gunathilaka — with Moeen Ali, Tamim Iqbal and Ahmed Shehzad making up the rest. That follows straightforwardly from the fixture list rather than from any shared technical flaw.

What the spread says instead is that the stumping is a situational dismissal rather than a plan. India do not set a batter up over several matches to stump him. They bowl spin in the middle overs, the batter comes down the pitch because that is what the format demands, and occasionally he does not get back.

Chahal and Kuldeep in the same XI

The two wrist-spinners at the top of the bowler table overlapped in India's side between 2017 and 2019, a period the Indian press named for the pair. Their combined 21 stumpings came very largely from those years, and it is the only stretch in which India regularly bowled two wrist-spinners together in this format.

Yuzvendra Chahal's twelve is the most by any bowler for India and eight of them were taken by Dhoni. That partnership — a leg-spinner turning it away from the right-hander, a keeper who never needed to move his feet — accounts for more than a tenth of everything on this page.

Since 2021 the shape of India's spin has changed again. Varun Chakaravarthy and Axar Patel have four and six, and both bowl quicker through the air than Chahal or Kuldeep did. A ball that arrives faster gives the batter less time to come down but also gives the keeper less time to collect, and the net effect on the stumping count has been close to neutral.

The other change is at the top of the innings. India now open with spin more often than they did in Dhoni's era, which ought to have pushed stumpings into the powerplay. It has not, because the spin they open with is Axar Patel bowling flat at the stumps rather than a wrist-spinner tossing it up, and the keeper stands up to it without much expectation of a chance.

Three things worth noting

The record is unusually safe. To pass 34, a keeper would need to keep in something close to eighty T20Is while India continued to bowl two frontline spinners. No India keeper since Dhoni has kept in more than 43, and the fastest accumulator on the list, Pant at one stumping every three matches kept, would need almost a hundred matches to get there. The dismissal totals behind these figures are ranked at India T20I wicketkeeper dismissals record.

The stumping is the only fielding dismissal where the keeper is the sole author. A catch requires the bowler to induce an edge; a run-out is shared. That is why stumpings are the fairest single measure of glovework available in the format, and why the gap between Dhoni's 34 and the next keeper's 11 is worth more than the gap in total dismissals.

India's stumping rate has fallen slightly as the attack has changed. The side that took stumpings off Chahal, Ashwin and part-timers has been replaced by one leaning on Varun Chakaravarthy and Axar Patel, with more overs of seam at the death. That is a shift in bowling design rather than a decline in keeping, and it is described further on the spin bowling tradition page.

For the wider history of the position in India, see the great India wicketkeepers guide, and for the format itself the history of T20 international cricket in India page. Player careers are indexed at the player directory, and the broader picture sits on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

All stumping figures on this page are computed from ball-by-ball match data in the Cricsheet archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), covering 276 India men's T20 internationals played between 1 December 2006 and 26 July 2026. Dhoni's total of 34 matches the figure published by ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru exactly, and the eight-name keeper table was reproduced from the archive before anything else on the page was written, which is the check the rest of the figures rest on.

The archive's copy of India's T20Is is missing the fixtures against Afghanistan. Those matches produced no stumping by an India keeper in the published record, so the 67 total and every split derived from it are unaffected; the match count of 276 is the archive's own and runs slightly below India's full T20I tally for the same reason.

A stumping is counted where the recorded mode of dismissal is "stumped" and a fielder is credited. The bowler attribution counts the bowler of the delivery on which the stumping occurred. The keeper attribution uses the fielder credited in the match record, which for a stumping is unambiguous — only the keeper can complete one.

Conventions applied to the computed sections: the powerplay is overs one to six, the middle overs seven to fifteen and the death overs sixteen to twenty, with the over numbered from the delivery on which the stumping was completed; the home split counts grounds in India, with neutral venues counted as overseas; and the World Cup row counts any match whose recorded event name is a World Cup, including qualifying-stage fixtures. The reverse table counts dismissals of India batters in the same 276 matches, credited to the opposing keeper.

The phase table, the decade table, the count of distinct batters stumped and the repeat-victim list are computed from the same archive and the same 276 matches. Phase boundaries follow the standard T20 division: the powerplay is overs one to six, the middle overs seven to fifteen, the death overs sixteen to twenty. A stumping is assigned to the over in which the delivery was bowled.

The home and away split was recomputed for this revision and corrected: 27 stumpings at Indian grounds and 40 away or at neutral venues, across 23 home matches and 33 away, replacing an earlier 26 and 41. Home means a ground in India, identified from the venue rather than the city field, which is blank for a number of matches in the archive; neutral venues count as away.

Matches kept counts appearances in which the player took the gloves for India, identified from the named XI and resolved by dismissal credit where more than one keeper played. Catches as keeper and total dismissals are carried over from the same computation and are described in full on the wicketkeeper dismissals page. Figures were computed in August 2026.