Breaking out of 'zenana' medicine

While reading Lady Doctors, we are treated to a striking fact about India’s first woman doctor: “A crater on Venus is named after Anandibai (Joshi), but not a single road or school in India”. One could add — plenty of streets in Mumbai are named after those who made life difficult for Rukhmabai Raut, but Google Maps does not find one named after her.

It is hardly a coincidence that most stories in this book are not widely known. Many pioneering women doctors “did not keep diaries or write their autobiographies. The memoirs they did write were not thought worthy of preserving, and were lost or destroyed... Some... did write letters... translations were hard to come by. Often, the flamboyant husbands... monopolised the narrative”. But that was not the main reason: it was erasure. We are told, “[E]rasure has consequences. Men will argue that women have made no contributions to science. The truth is that often they were not allowed to. Those that were allowed to study have been forgotten or their achievements diminished.”

For this reason, the author says, she has “likely overlooked many”. I will add that these include pioneering female practitioners of ayurveda or unani. Perhaps, in those fields, the erasure is even more severe, who knows. But the author doesn’t say why these fields are excluded from the book. Of course, the author does not owe anyone an explanation. It’s just that many readers, who avail of both evidence-based and other medicine, might be left puzzled.

The author first gives a quick backgrounder about women doctors in other countries, who paved the way for the first women doctors from India. Then, we are told six real-life stories, from various parts of India: of Anandibai Joshi, Kadambini Ganguly, Rukhmabai Raut, Haimabati Sen, Muthulakshmi Reddy, and Mary Poonen Lukose.

Even a Marvel superhero is inspiring in a sense. But that inspiration ebbs away, because those feats are not human. What made this book ground me to earth was the three-dimensional humanity of these women doctors, who are shown as people whose door-opening achievements were wrought in our realities; whose resilience and bravery is within our reach; who have opponents even today; and whose hearts, like ours, (to paraphrase Faulkner) were often at war with themselves.

For instance, we are told of Anandibai Joshi, India’s first woman doctor: “Some saw Anandibai as a puppet of her husb­and Gopalrao Joshi; others saw in her let­ters a canny and intelligent woman who forged her own path. The truth perhaps lay somewhere in between.” How? We are told, “[E]ducating your wife was a double-edged sword. Many a reformer was taken aback when his wife would unexpectedly become successful in her own right. Reform, … was a male-dominated project, and the women had very little say in it.”

We are further told that Gopalrao would beat Anandibai brutally. And there’s more: “(Anandibai’s) idea of misery, interestingly, was to ‘follow one’s own will’, and yet her bete noire was ‘slavery and dependence’. The answer to the question ‘What is your most distinguishing characteristic?’ was ‘I have not yet found it’. That of her husband was ‘benevolence’, an odd choice of word for a man who beat her constantly”. Defying her society, Anandibai then went to Pennsylvania, USA, to study medicine, and returned to her husband. The author refers to Anandibai’s protean character. You notice the author does not use the word “contradiction”. Rightly so; the book, among other things, reminds us that people we look up to are not comic book figures with attributes mapped on an Excel sheet, but complex beings.

We are told of Kadambini Ganguly, the first Indian woman to practise medicine, who found support from the Brah­mos of Bengal, though it was patronising, and discriminatory in its own way. Moreover, Kadambini faced “deep prejudice from conservative Hindus”, as did all these women doctors. Here the author paints the society around Kadambini so deftly and with such nuance that I wanted to hurry to the nearest bookstore to read more about the currents then swirling in that society.

We realise that these women doctors were pioneers in many ways. Besides qualifying for medical practice, Rukhmabai Raut “argued that, as she was too young to give consent to the marriage, she could not be bound to it... It was one woman against the might of the Hindu sacrament”. Brahminical leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Kesari newspaper “urged (Rukhmabai) to return to her husband and try to change him, as millions of Indian women have been urged to do”. Moreover, “Rukhmabai was painted as a fallen woman of dubious morals”. Then Tilak and others held a public meeting to argue for the subjugation of women. Among those who supported Rukhmabai were Parsi poet and reformer Behramji Malabari, and scholar Max Mueller. (Even Rudyard Kipling did, but only to bolster his “white man’s burden” nonsense.)

Haimabati Sen was a child widow, who largely through her own efforts, became a medical practitioner, and among other things took in, at varying times, “an astonishing 485 children”. Muthulakshmi Reddy was “one of the main forces behind the long battle for universal franchise for Indian women”. She fought to abolish the devadasi system and set up medical institutions that stand to this day. Her stances, some of them conservative even for her time, are described with nuance. As for Mary Poonen Lukose, present-day Kerala’s “robust public health system”, we are told, owes a lot to “the foundations laid by Mary, and other rationalists like her”. Each story comes alive, and all the stories work together.

The commonalities of these six stories are brought out in the epilogue: that a few men supported these women, and that these women were from upper castes, barring Rukhmabai and Muthulakshmi. They helped pave relatively easier paths for women students to follow, “helped destroy colonial prejudice and dismantle the structure of ‘zenana medicine’”, and “helped popularise Western medicine”. They accelerated other social reforms, too.

The book addresses their erasure with a writerly voice that is impassioned and always in tune, telling meticulously nuanced stories that can be used as balm, blankets, amulets or Kevlar vests.