Of gavels, stethoscopes and resilience

I’ve always loved stories, the kind that live in your head, rent-free, making you realize that we do indeed stand on the shoulder's of giants. One such story is that of Dr. Rukhmabai, an Indian woman who dismantled the rules of her time and rewrote them. A recent conversation with a friend inspired me to write about this absolute legend.

Most people, might vaguely recall the “first Indian woman to study Western medicine” from a GK class: Dr. Anandi Gopal Joshi. That's a fact, but she died tragically young and never got the chance to practise as a physician. What almost never gets mentioned in the same breath is another woman who refused to accept the script life handed her: Dr. Rukhmabai.

Rukhmabai was born in 1864 in Bombay (now Mumbai) to Jayantibai and Janardhan Pandurang. By the time she turned 2, her father had passed away and her mother remarried, making Dr. Sakharam Arjun - a physician with reformist ideas and a strong spine - her step-father. Her childhood however was set against a cultural and religious landscape where girls were married off before they were old enough to decide what they wanted for dinner, let alone for life.

As was customary at the time, her maternal grandfather betrothed her young. She was around 11, and the groom, Dadaji Bhikaji, was about 19. Every time I am reminded of that fact I try to think back to what I was doing at that point in my life, the only worry-some thought I must've had would be about pending assignments, imagine suddenly being someone's "wife", yikes.

But no need to worry just yet because, even though they were married Sakharam refused permission for the consummation of the marriage. So Rukhmabai never actually went to live with her husband. She was, however, still legally bound in the marriage.

Fast forward a few years. Dadaji decided it was time his wife finally moved in with him and his family. By now, Rukhmabai was older, more aware, and very clear about one thing: that was not the life she wanted.

By the age of about 20, she had firmly decided she would never live with him. His household, including an uncle who was a bad influence and the overall environment she was expected to submit to, felt stifling and unsafe to her. So, she did something radical for her time, something that would be considered 'gutsy' even today.

She simply said, “No.”

No to moving in.

No to forced conjugal rights.

No to submitting to a marriage and life that she did not choose.

Dadaji didn’t take that “no” for an answer. He dragged her to court, filing a suit for “restitution of conjugal rights”, a charming little legal tool allowing a husband to demand his wife be forced by law to live with him.

What followed was much bigger than a simple court case; it was a national spectacle. Newspapers took sides. Reformers and conservatives argued over the fate of a 20-year-old woman. People who had never met her debated whether this young woman should be compelled to go live with a man she did not want.

At one point, the court even ordered that she must either go live with her husband or face imprisonment. Rukhmabai, mighty and calm as she was, declared that she would rather go to jail than be forced into that marriage. Imagine the audacity of that statement in the 1880s, when “good women” were supposed to be obedient and accommodating, even at their own expense.

Eventually, the case reached such a fever pitch that Queen Victoria herself intervened. Rukhmabai's marriage was effectively dissolved, making her the first Hindu woman in India to obtain a legal divorce under the British Raj. The public debate around her case also helped influence the Age of Consent Act of 1891, which raised the age of consent for girls in British India from 10 to 12. However, she believed that wasn't enough and the age of consent should've been 15.

Now here’s where most people would have stopped, emerging victorious from an uphill legal battle is no small feat. But Rukhmabai was just getting started. With the support of Edith Pechey, a senior doctor working in India, she took on the mammoth task of studying and practicing medicine.

Her mother and stepfather supported her fiercely and with the encouragement of reformers and allies, in 1889, she sailed to England to study at the London School of Medicine for Women. She trained in London and other European centres, and by the mid-1890s she had qualified in medicine, joining the rare ranks of Indian women who were doctors.

When she came back to India, she practised. She worked as a medical officer in women’s hospitals in Surat and later in Rajkot, serving women who, like her younger self, had grown up with more expectations placed on their obedience than their education.

Medicine wasn’t her only arena. Even before leaving for England, she had been writing in The Times of India under the pseudonym “A Hindoo Lady,” publishing sharp, thoughtful pieces about child marriage, widow remarriage, and women’s education. Her words travelled where she could not, giving voice to girls and women whose stories stayed buried under “tradition.”

She never remarried. She never went back on her stand. And she never stopped pushing for a world where girls could choose their own futures.

So yes, history will tell you that Dr. Anandi Gopal Joshi was among the first Indian women to earn a degree in Western medicine. But just outside the lime-light is Dr. Rukhmabai – child bride, divorce pioneer, physician, writer, and architect of legal reform.

And that, kids, is the story of Dr. Rukhmabai who refused to be a footnote in someone else’s life but the author of her own fate.