Pioneers: Rukhmabai, one of India's first women doctors, encouraged women to seek medical help, socialise

In this excerpt from the book, from the section titled "Quiet Making of a Rebel", Chandra writes about her first job upon returning from London, her efforts to reduce the loneliness she felt was imposed on Indian women from good families by hosting friends from time to time and her spirit of service during the plague of 1897 in Surat:

Though it (the Seth Morarbhai Vrijbhukhandas Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children in Surat) was opened to the public on 30 November 1896, Rukhmabai took charge a year earlier in October 1895. Edith Pechey, we may recall, had assumed charge of the Cama Hospital more than two years before it started functioning. The arrangement enabled Rukhmabai to fine-tune the building in keeping with the peculiar requirements of a hospital, and also furnish and equip it accordingly. She also chose the skeletal support staff of three with whom she, as the hospital’s sole doctor, would serve the city’s ailing women and children.

Rukhmabai, characteristically, did not wait for the hospital’s completion to commence her medical work. Put up in a house belonging to the Kalabhais, she converted part of it into a makeshift dispensary and started treating patients.

The Morarbhai Vrijbhukhandas Hospital was a handsome twostoreyed stone structure in the busy city’s noisy centre. The ground floor consisted of an outdoor dispensary, waiting room, consulting room, wards with accommodation for twenty indoor patients, and an office. On the first floor was the medical officer’s modest apartment. In that apartment would be spent the rest of Rukhmabai’s twenty-two years in Surat.

While coming to Surat, she was, naturally, apprehensive that the city’s Hindus, remembering her as a disgrace to their society, might not take kindly to her. But the Surtis, true to their traditional liberal ethos, did not take long to accept her as a friend and benefactress. She – soon to become Bai to the locals – could not have asked for more.

Rukhmabai was already thirty. Having lived in two stepfamilies, an English home and a boarding house, she had not yet had a home of her own. Surat gave her that. She set it up with great love and care. It carried the same appearance of simplicity that marked her sartorial elegance. Further, it was unlike the typical Indian household where anyone claiming to be a relative or friend could descend and depart at will. Growing up in two stepfamilies had taught her what family life should not be. As against that, the memorable year at the McLarens and four years at the College Hall had given her certain clarity about how she would organize her family life. She would not accept unwanted guests.

There is a tantalizing cryptic description of Rukhmabai’s home in Surat. This comes from Dr Margaret Ida Balfour. Visiting the city in her capacity as Secretary to the Dufferin Fund, she wrote that Rukhmabai ‘lives over the hospital but quite in European style’. It is possible that Balfour’s observation related to aspects of Rukhmabai’s social life. It is also possible that Balfour saw something European in the setting up of the house, say, for dining, toilet and bathroom, etc. But in one respect, which Balfour could not have seen, her observation holds absolutely true. Rukhmabai made her home her castle.

She decided whom she would host inside the castle. Those she accepted were welcomed most warmly. She made them feel wanted and even organized entertainment for them. For example, when her old friend, women’s rights activist and suffragist Louisa Martindale, and her two daughters were staying with Rukhmabai, she organized for them a mesmerizing performance by four jugglers. The jugglers brought with them snakes, including cobras and a mongoose. The many acts they performed included swallowing fire and the finale came by way of a fight between a cobra and the mongoose. Though this was part of the jugglers’ normal repertoire, something abnormal happened that night, to the ladies’ consternation. Carried away by the occasion and the lure of a fat bakshish, the jugglers let the fight continue until the mongoose had killed the cobra.

Hosting old friends like the Martindales made Rukhmabai supremely happy. However, they did not come frequently enough to mitigate the loneliness of her life. That was rather done by Rukhmabai’s willingness to host some of her half-blood kin from her maternal grandfather and stepfather. The ones she particularly welcomed were the children of her siblings from her mother’s marriage with Sakharam Arjun and the children of her mother’s siblings from Harishchandra Yadavji’s second marriage. Some of these kids came regularly and spent their vacations with Rukhmabai. She even took them to Dumas, a beach resort for rich Surtis at the mouth of the river Tapti, where she had rented a small house.

In 1897, within months of the hospital’s formal opening, the plague epidemic broke out in Surat. Rukhmabai was given charge of the women patients at the Civil Hospital. As the pestilence raged on, she also had to undertake house-to-house visitation in the sprawling city to look for women and children affected by the disease. For nine gruelling months she knew no rest or respite. She was, during those trying days, sustained by the spirit of ‘female professionalism’ she had imbibed at the London School of Medicine for Women. What helped her professionally in coping with the pestilence was the knowledge she had acquired while doing that optional course on preventive medicine.

For her services during the plague, Rukhmabai was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Silver Medal by the British Indian government.

Excerpted from the chapter Quiet Service in Rukhmabai: The Life and Times of a Child Bride Turned Rebel-Doctor by Sudhir Chandra, with permission from Pan Macmillan India.