Cricket fans know Kavya Maran as the face at the Sunrisers Hyderabad auction table; Sun TV Network’s annual report knows her as Kaviya Kalanithi Maran, executive director, a job with rather fewer cameras.
Kavya Maran has spent the better part of a decade being looked at while she works. That is an unusual condition for an heir and a routine one for anybody seated at an IPL auction. She is chief executive of Sunrisers Hyderabad, a director of Sun TV Network and the daughter of its executive chairman. Since November 2026 she has also been the wife of the music composer Anirudh Ravichander. Our rule here is that where Sun TV’s own filings and the cricket coverage disagree, about a name, a title or a date, the filings win, because a stock exchange is less forgiving of a typo than a fan page.
Her legal name is Kaviya Kalanithi Maran
Sun TV Network’s annual report for 2025-26 lists her as Kaviya Kalanithi Maran, Executive Director, in the same pages that list Kalanithi Maran as Executive Chairman. The press has never quite chosen between Kavya and Kaviya and prints both, sometimes in the same story. The exchange filings have chosen, and they spell it with an i. The middle name is her father’s, and it appears on every board document she signs, the way his shareholding stands behind every document the company files. Kavya is the spelling cricket settled on, the one that turns up on the broadcast captions and the fan accounts. For anything with a signature at the bottom, she is Kaviya, and the two names belong to the same person doing two quite different jobs.
She married Anirudh Ravichander in Greece
Eastern Eye, in November 2026, reported that she married Anirudh Ravichander in a destination wedding in Greece, with celebrations on 10 and 11 November and the marriage itself on the 11th. The same report names 21 November for a reception in Chennai, which gives the people who did not go to Greece somewhere to be. He is a music composer and she is a cricket executive, so both earn their living from the noise a crowd makes, one by starting it and the other by paying the players who set it off. Any household where both partners take a professional interest in applause ought to have a lively breakfast table. By the standards of her working life, it was also an occasion with remarkably little bidding.
She is an executive director of Sun TV
Sun TV Network’s 2024-25 annual report records that she was re-appointed as a Whole Time Director, designated Executive Director, by postal ballot, for five years from 1 April 2024. A postal ballot is how a listed company puts a question to its shareholders without booking a hall, and the shareholders said yes. The same report describes her as the daughter of Kalanithi Maran and Kavery Kalanithi. It also names the other working directors around her: Mahesh Kumar Rajaraman as managing director and K. Vijaykumar as an executive director. DDW’s reading is that this is the job that matters more. The cricket is the part of her working life that gets watched; the board seat is the part with a fixed term, a vote and a filing behind it. Fans see her react to a wicket. Shareholders see her name on a resolution, which is the less photogenic form of fame and by some distance the more durable one.
Kalanithi Maran holds the promoter stake
The 2025-26 annual report’s board-attendance table labels her father “Promoter, Executive Chairman”. In Indian company filings, promoter is the word for the founder who controls the company. Trendlyne’s summary for the September 2026 quarter puts a figure on that control: it lists Kalanithi Maran as the promoter holding 75 per cent of Sun TV Network, unchanged on the quarter before. A holding of that size in a listed company keeps most boardroom arguments short and most shareholder meetings on schedule. It also explains the shape of the family’s arrangements without anybody needing to say a word about them. The daughter sits on the board as an executive. The stake sits with her father.
Both her parents stay on until 2032
At a meeting on 30 October 2026, Sun TV’s board approved re-appointing Kalanithi Maran as Executive Chairman for five more years, from 20 April 2027 to 19 April 2032, subject to shareholder approval. It approved the same renewal for Kavery Kalanithi as an executive director. The filing otherwise reads like any board resolution, yet it pauses to describe Kavery Kalanithi as his spouse and as the mother of Kaviya Kalanithi Maran. That is about as close to a family photograph as a stock-exchange disclosure gets. The result is a household on three overlapping contracts, with father, mother and daughter all holding executive seats at the same listed company. The parents’ renewals carry them well past the end of their daughter’s current term. Whatever the eventual handover looks like, nobody in the paperwork is in a hurry.
She runs Sunrisers Hyderabad as chief executive
Eastern Eye’s wedding report gives her title as chief executive of Sunrisers Hyderabad, the IPL franchise that made her face familiar well beyond Chennai boardrooms. India TV, in February 2022, dated that familiarity to 2018, when it says she first became an internet sensation by appearing at the team’s matches. That is an odd route into public life for an executive. Most chief executives become recognisable, if at all, through a results announcement or a difficult interview. She became recognisable by watching cricket, which in India is not a frivolous thing to be good at and which is at least partly the point of the job. A franchise lives on attention, and she has supplied a great deal of it without saying very much. The cost is an executive whose expressions are examined more closely than her accounts.
The auction table is her televised office
India TV places her at the Sunrisers table for the IPL 2022 mega auction in February that year, seated with Tom Moody and Muttiah Muralitharan. That is a considerable amount of cricket knowledge to have at one’s elbow when the bidding starts. The table travels. Sportskeeda, writing ahead of the IPL 2023 auction, says she also represented Sunrisers Eastern Cape at the auction for South Africa’s SA20 league. An auction is where a franchise spends its money in public, against its rivals, on live television, with every raised hand replayed and argued over afterwards. Most executives make their biggest decisions in a room with the door shut, and hers are made in the one room in Indian sport guaranteed to have the cameras on. She has become the person viewers associate with that spending, which is a fair description of a chief executive and an unusual one for an heir.
Marriage changes nothing in the filings. Her own term as a Sun TV executive director runs to the end of March 2029, and her father’s proposed term outlasts it by three years.
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