In Their Own Words

The year 1876 provided the site for Dosebai Cowasjee Jessawalla’s little rebellion also. Governor-General Lytton had announced a grand Durbar to be held in Delhi, and she was determined to make the journey from Bombay. No little matter in those days, as various possible escorts voiced the same objection: “Is it a Parsee female’s business to mix in such demonstrations?” Pat came her reply in the piece The First Empress of India: “It is quite unaccountable to me why native ladies in affluent circumstances should be backward in taking their legitimate place in grand state ceremonials.” And off she hurried to Delhi, with the local press reporting the journey to stir up something of a scandal.

They blazed ahead, and they wrote. Krupabai Sattianadhan (1862-94) became one of the first Indian women to study medicine and penned Saguna, the first autobiographical novel in English by an Indian woman. Cornelia Sorabji (1864-1954) was not just the first Indian woman barrister, she practised law and she wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

Male reformers helped them lay the foundation, but the rest was up to them. They fought for franchise with a stridency that stunned even progressive nationalists and fellow feminists. To agitate for the right to vote, Herabai Tata and her daughter left for England in 1919. Never mind that Gandhiji felt the timing was not quite right and Sorabji concurred. A lively account is given in her A Short Sketch of Indian Women’s Franchise Work.

S. Muthulakshmi Reddy benefited. The first woman to study medicine in Madras (despite objections from college authorities that her presence would demoralise male students), she then became the first woman member of the Legislative Council in 1927. Sucheta Kriplani in turn felt intimidated by her male counterparts at St Stephen’s College, and dealt with it the only way she knew, by outscoring each of them in an exam. You could see she was on her way to becoming the first woman chief minister.

Their accounts are included here, along with those of

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Aruna Asaf Ali, Santha Rama Rau, Amrita Sher-Gil and many, many others. Also included are extracts from some of the early fiction writers, like Zeenuth Futehally.

Women’s Voices is not exactly a page-turner, it will certainly provoke those familiar with some of these writers to hearty criticism of the writing samples chosen, the biographical sketches may often appear half-hearted — but it effectively corrects many an imbalance. Every other day Indian writing in English is presented to us as a spectacular, recent trend. Ha, shout these women from India’s past.