Trailblazer in a Saree: The Defiant Journey of Anandibai Joshee

Even in 2024, India’s female workforce participation is appallingly lower than it should be for an economy that claims to be zipping ahead of many others. It’s both instructive and salutary to read of forceful women from the nation’s past, who ripped open patriarchal boxes, modeling a progressive outlook that might have eluded their Victorian peers.

Anandibai Joshee, the first Indian woman to garner a medical degree in the West, is one such fiery icon whose wrangles with authority started early. Targeted at middle-grade readers, The Incredible Life of Anandibai Joshee by Swati Sengupta narrates her life story and the manner in which she thwarted social and personal hurdles.

Strength, Struggles and Studies

Born in 1865 in the Kalyan region near Bombay, Yamuna (Anandi’s name in her childhood home) stared, like many little girls, into mirrors. With wells of disappointment, wondering if she was ugly. At least her body had a redeeming strength. She could even out-wrestle her cousin brother.

But her mother seemed to abhor her with a violence that bordered on abuse, dragging her down corridors by her hair, beating her with sticks. Her grandmother was her succour. Yamuna also had a doting father, Ganpatrao Joshi, who organized for her to study. Though the Phules had started a school by then to educate the girls of Shudras and Ati-Shudras, it wasn’t really kosher for women in the upper castes to stick their noses inside books.

Progress Amidst Pain

Like many progressive men of his era, Ganpatrao was riddled with contradictions. While he wished for his daughter to study, he endorsed child marriages. Renamed Anandibai, Yamuna was just 9-years-old when married to Gopal Joshee, a 26-year-old widower. Who also, to her father’s delight, wished to educate her. Gopal moved into the Joshi household and became her teacher. But he also hit her if she made mistakes or didn’t heed his lessons. “Once he beat her up so mercilessly with a piece of wood that her back was swollen.”

He got transferred to Alibag and took Anandi with him. She became pregnant, and had a first child at 12. Though a child herself, she was rapturous at the sight of her infant, who felt like a new plaything. Except that the child died in 10 days.

Despondent, she returned to Gopalrao and his punitive lessons. He also took his wife out on walks, not a done thing in those days. Moving later to Kolhapur, he enrolled his wife in the Government Female School. When she had to stop going there, he sought other means to persist with her education. He even considered moving to the United States. But these progressive streaks were offset by an ongoing abuse, an aspect that sparky Anandi would both absorb and later repudiate.

They moved to Bombay in 1879, where she enrolled at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Aghast when the Principal insisted she read the Bible, she wanted to quit. But Gopalrao insisted she stay on, and she did. On the way to school, wearing a saree, shoes and stockings, carrying a knapsack of books she attracted the umbrage and contempt of the neighborhood. People even spat on her.

Finding a  Foreign Friend

Since Gopalrao had earlier corresponded with an American to explore other options for Anandi’s education, an American woman, Theodocia, encountered their exchange in a magazine. And wrote to Anandi, offering to help in any way she could. Like by sending her newspapers and magazines on American customs. By then, Anandi and Gopalrao were in Bhuj, where she was being taught at home by a tutor. Soon Anandi and Theodocia struck up an amazing correspondence, where they shared information about each other. “A deep bond was formed between them.”

Anandi’s Doctor Dreams

When Anandi herself fell sick, she started aspiring to study medicine and become a doctor. To help other Indian women, who often had to suffer inside domestic walls. Though the British had established Medical College Calcutta in 1835, only native men were admitted. Women’s ailments were hardly recognized and even masked from close family members.

A Historic Address

In 1881, Gopalrao was transferred to Calcutta. The couple decided that Anandi would travel alone to the US to study medicine – a radical decision in those days: “It was a daring decision – maybe even crazy by some measure.” Naturally such a move garnered vehement disapproval from relatives near and far. Most Indian women who had travelled abroad till then had been ayahs and maids. To dispel the talk about them, Anandi decided to publicly address folks about her plans. At Serampore College, she laid out six reasons for going to the US.

With the crisp flair of a modern TED talk, she defended her move as follows:

1.     India desperately needed native women doctors since Indian women couldn’t freely describe their conditions to foreign women or to Indian men.
2.     Contemporary Indian medical colleges were not set up to handle Indian women students with the respect they deserved.
3.     Her husband could not join her for financial and familial reasons.
4.     She did not fear excommunication when she returned because she planned to stick to her customs in the US. She also averred that, as a Maharashtrian living in Calcutta, none could tell if she currently observed her own customs or not.
5.     She was unafraid of misfortunes that might befall her.
6.     She was willing to fail, but unwilling to stop trying. “To desist from duty because we fear failure or suffering is not just. We must try.”

Her speech was reported in the Theosophist (1883) as “A Mahratta Lady’s Address.”

Anandi’s American Stint

On the ship’s journey which lasted 59 days, she mostly kept to herself, eating sparingly and reading voraciously.

In the US, she was treated as a rare curiosity, the first “hindoo” woman to travel such a vast distance to study medicine. She was visited by neighbors and friends, written about in newspapers. Anandibai was admitted to WMCP (Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania). Dean Rachel Bodley of WMCP, who had organized a scholarship for Anandi, was bowled over by the unpretentious Indian woman and organized a special reception for her.

At college, Anandi met women from places like Japan, Syria and Russia. Sticking to her vows, she wore sarees everyday, even during the harsh winters. “Bangles jingling in her hands, bindi on her forehead, mangalsutra in place, she was ready to attend classes.”

Illness and Early Death

She was also struck by diphtheria and was moved by how kind strangers were towards her. Quite unlike the way her own mother and husband had treated her. In letters to her husband, her responses grew pluckier. With her self-esteem bolstered, she was unwilling to submit to his diktats. In 1886, she graduated from WMCP. But even as she embarked on an internship in the US, she started becoming ill more frequently. She returned to Mumbai, still very sick. She died in 1887, three months later. She could not accept a special job that had been awaiting her.

Nonetheless she had charted a path that would inspire many women to tread on. Even in contemporary times, misogyny affects the way in which medicine is practiced, drugs are researched, or healthcare systems designed. World over, we need more Anandis to storm the field, to raise sensitive questions about racial, ethnic and gender biases.

References

Swati Sengupta, The Incredible Life of Anandibai Joshee: The Girl Who Fought To Be a Doctor, Talking Cub, Speaking Tiger, 2024