Sudhir Chandra’s ‘Rukhmabai’: Child bride who wrote own script

As I begin to read Sudhir Chandra’s new book on Rukhmabai — an extraordinary woman from Bombay who acquired the courage to defy the tyranny of Hindu orthodoxy even in the 1880s, questioned the ugly practice of ‘infant marriage and enforced widowhood’, went to England, came back as a ‘rebel-doctor’, and dedicated her life to the service of people — it absorbs me completely. Indeed, Rukhmabai’s was a ‘radical notion of women’s freedom’, which, to quote the author, ‘even our vaunted age of individual freedom and dignity has not realised wholly’.

Life was not easy for Rukhmabai as she lost her father at the age of two-and-a-half. Moreover, her stepfather, Dr Sakharam, despite his ‘reformist’ orientation, married her off when she was merely 11 years old. And her husband Dadaji Bhikaji, as Chandra reminds us, was a ‘frail, weak-willed 19-year-old good-for-nothing school dropout’. No wonder, this custom of early marriage, as Rukhmabai herself said, led to ‘unnameable miseries’. Yet, what distinguished her was her ability to transform this sadness into an art of creative resistance. Far from accepting her destiny as an ‘enslaved daughter’, she began to learn English at home after leaving school. In fact, it was the intellectual environment prevalent in Sakharam’s household which, as we are told, ‘offered her the privilege of European lady visitors’ like Nora Scott and Edith Pechey. They sharpened her awareness and expanded her mental/intellectual horizon. But more than anything else, ‘Rukhmabai’s own will and determinism’, Chandra stresses, ‘made her what she became’.

Chandra’s nuanced text traces the seeds of Rukhmabai’s creative rebelliousness in a long letter she wrote in The Times of India on June 26, 1885. The letter appealed to the Viceroy to abolish the ‘wicked system’ of infant marriage, or a system that is designed to make the poor woman ‘timid, languid, melancholy, sickly and devoid of cheerfulness’. And in her submission to the Bombay High Court in July 1884, she argued that ‘she could not be considered bound to the marriage under which Dadaji was claiming the restitution of his conjugal rights because the marriage was solemnised before she was capable of giving intelligent consent to it’.

This ‘epochal defiance’, to use Chandra’s own words, ‘elevated Rukhmabai’s defence to one of high principle’. It was like her refusal to recognise the marriage itself. But then, Dadaji’s claim stressed on the ‘sacramental nature of Hindu marriage’. However, Justice Pinhey delivered a revolutionary judgment in September 1885. The ruling stated categorically that ‘it would be a barbarous… thing to compel a young lady… to go to a young man whom she dislikes, in order that he may cohabit with her against her will’.

However, the proponents of Hindu orthodoxy could not accept a judgment of this kind. There was an appeal against Pinhey’s judgment. It led to some kind of ‘judicial farce to deliver Rukhmabai to Dadaji’. However, Rukhmabai demonstrated her courage once again as she refused to obey the order of the court, and stated that ‘she would rather submit herself to the maximum penalty under the law — six months’ imprisonment and/or forfeiture of property’. Finally, there was a compromise on March 5, 1888. Rukhmabai became a free woman and Dadaji received Rs 2,000 from her ‘in satisfaction of all costs’.

Eventually, as Chandra informs us, it was because of Edith Pechey’s inspiration, training and support that a young Rukhmabai could cross the seas, come to England and take admission in the London School of Medicine for Women. It was indeed a turning point in her life. She experienced a new world and became an expert in ‘preventive medicine’. Finally, when she returned to India in 1895, she ‘eschewed public activities, and dedicated herself to service as a doctor’. Her reputation as a doctor was remarkable. From Bombay to Surat to Rajkot, she dedicated ‘all her qualities of head and heart’ to heal her patients, and passed through a spectrum of experiences — from being seen as the ‘best-loved and most respected person’ in Surat to the pain of encountering an ‘unwelcoming’ environment in Rajkot. After her retirement in 1929, she decided to ‘turn her back on public life’, and began to stay in Bombay.

Incidentally, after Dadaji Bhikaji’s death in 1904, Rukhmabai got into a widow’s garb, and stayed in it till her last breath. This gesture from an otherwise liberated woman might have shocked many, but then, as a gifted historian, Chandra is empathic enough to understand this ambivalence — the fact that she too could be subject to ‘conflicting feelings’.

— The former JNU professor writes on culture, politics and education