A pioneer who danced to her own tune

V R Devika's biography of Muthulakshmi Reddy brings to life not just the story of India's first female student in a medical college. She was a trailblazer in many other ways

Muthulakshmi Reddy: A Trailblazer in Surgery & Women’s Rights

Author: V R Devika

Publisher:  Niyogi Books

Pages: 203

Price: Rs 299

The Pioneers of Modern India is a series from Niyogi Books that includes biographies of trailblazing Indians and their stories. Muthulakshmi Reddy’s accomplishments make her eminently qualified for a place in this series.

Muthulakshmi was a pioneer in almost every sense of the word. She was the first woman member of the legislature of Madras Presidency, the first woman deputy speaker, and the first alderwoman of the Madras Corporation. In 1907, she became the first — and the only female — candidate in a medical college in the country. She graduated to become the first woman house surgeon in the state’s Government Maternity and Ophthalmic Hospital. Much later, she founded the world-class Adyar Cancer Institute in Chennai.

Amongst all her achievements, however, Muthulakshmi’s support for women’s rights and rehabilitation remains her most prominent. She went ahead with the idea of giving women a better future through education and changing the laws through bold and controversial steps. As biographer V R Devika writes, Muthulakshmi Reddy’s life story lies here.

Born in the princely state of Pudukkottai, south of the capital Chennai, Muthulakshmi was one of the children of S Narayanasami Iyer, a tutor both in the local college and the royal family of Pudukkottai, and his common-law wife Chandrammal, a descendent of the Devadasi community. Ms Devika writes that despite the responsibilities of his “official” family, Iyer took great interest in the family of Chandrammal and the children he had with her and was keen on homeschooling Muthulakshmi, whose intelligence was evident early on. Breaking Devadasi conventions of carrying only the mother’s name, Iyer ensured that Muthulakshmi carried the initials of both her parents; made sure she was home-schooled and deflected her mother’s attempts to get her a patron at a young age, “a first for those times”. He was determined that she would avoid the Dasi professional lineage, though he was fond of music and dance, and broke conventional social norms to put her through medical school. She scored a centum in surgery, the first for women in India.

Breaking conventions further, Muthulakshmi continued her medical studies in Madras and adopted an orphaned baby girl whose 16-year-old mother died in childbirth. Soon, she set up a successful practice as a gynecologist and surgeon in Madras. With the encouragement of benefactors and friends of her father and teachers she took a keen interest in the conversations surrounding the nationalist struggle, welfare of women and social changes. Her interactions with nationalist poet Subramania Bharati, Sarojini Naidu and the theosophists in Madras fired her passion for reform, especially for the uplift of women.

Even as she resisted marriage as a social construct to control women, she finally relented to a firm and ardent suitor, a fellow doctor, Sudaram Reddy and consented to marry him but not before she elicited a promise from her groom that she would be his equal and would pursue her many projects after marriage.    

Ms Devika devotes an entire chapter to the controversial social changes for which Muthulakshmi fought — the Devadasi Abolition Bill. The system of the common-law husbands to which many of the Devadasis were tied and the social stigma that Devadasis and their progeny suffered troubled Muthulakshmi. Ms Devika traces the history of Devadasis being employed in temples by kings to work in the performing arts, principally dance and music.  The practice had changed by the 15th century with the loosening control of monarchy over temple orders. Rich men taking on dasis as mistresses became the norm and their progeny were not allowed to take the father’s name or leave the hereditary business to pursue education. Muthulakshmi’s zeal to reform the status of the Devadasi system met with the blessings of Gandhi when she tabled the Devadasi Abolition Bill in the Assembly in 1927.

Muthulakshmi said that the Devadasis were victims because, while some were economically prosperous and maintained well by their common-law husbands, most lived in penury, and prostitution was forced upon many for economic reasons. 

Ms Devika acknowledges the current liberal feminist discourse that the performing art of the Devadasi was appropriated following the Bill. Yet Muthulakshmi’s pioneering efforts to effect change and offer Devadasis better venues of occupation and social status deserve our support, she concludes.

Ms Devika writes in simple prose and narrates the life history of Muthulakshmi with a level gaze that does not allow the biography to descend into sentimental hagiography. In doing so, she enhances the story of a fascinating and hugely under-rated woman in Indian public life.