This book recovers the stories of India’s first women doctors, often ignored by history
In this excerpt from Kavitha Rao’s ‘Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine’, the story of Rukhmabai Raut. Rukhmabai Raut. | Public domain
“‘Men cannot, in the least, understand the wretchedness which we Hindu women have to endure. Because you cannot enter our feelings, do not think that we are satisfied with the life of drudgery that we live, and that we have no taste for an aspiration after a higher life.”
It is March 1887. A young woman stands in a Mumbai court room, facing the husband she despises. Shortly, a judge is going to pronounce on whether a Hindu wife can break the sacrament of a child marriage. She is twenty-two, but she has never lived with her husband, and never wants to.