Women Achievers and Reformers in Indian History

Savitribai Phule: stones on the road to school

• Savitribai Phule opened one of India’s first girls’ schools on 1 January 1848, at Bhide Wada in Pune.
• She founded it with her husband, Jyotirao Phule. It began with nine girls.
• Sagunabai Kshirsagar was a third co-founder and also taught there. Fatima Sheikh, who gave shelter and helped teach, is remembered beside them.
• By 1851 the Phules ran three girls’ schools in Pune with about 150 students. In all, the couple opened 18 schools. Source: Wikipedia, Savitribai Phule.
• Some schools took in Dalit and lower-caste girls.
• The opposition was fierce. People reportedly threw stones and cow dung at her on the way to school.
• She carried a spare sari, changed, and kept teaching.
• She was also one of the earliest Marathi poets to argue for reform.
• Why it matters: she combined direct action, running a school despite the risk, with public argument through poetry. That double role was rare for a 19th-century reformer.
• Her partner in this work is profiled in Jyotirao Phule.

Anandibai Joshi: a loss that became a calling

• Anandibai was married at nine.
• At fourteen she lost her baby, who lived only ten days. No suitable doctor was at hand to treat mother and child.
• That loss pushed her towards medicine.
• In 1886 she graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
• She was the first Indian woman to complete a Western medical degree.
• Her thesis was “Obstetrics among the Aryan Hindoos”. It drew on her own community’s practices.
• She was named physician-in-charge of the women’s ward at Albert Edward Hospital, Kolhapur.
• She died of tuberculosis on 26 February 1887, aged 21, before she could practise for long.

Rukhmabai: a court case that moved the law

• Rukhmabai was married at eleven.
• As an adult she refused to live with her husband. She said a child could never truly consent to marriage.
• He sued for “restitution of conjugal rights”. The case ran through the 1880s.
• It helped push the Age of Consent Act, 1891. The age of consent rose from ten to twelve.
• With help from British physician Edith Pechey, she trained in London.
• She began practising as a doctor in 1894 and served as a medical officer in India for over three decades.
• The full case is in Rukhmabai: The Court Case That Helped Change India’s Marriage Law.

Kadambini Ganguly: practising where others only qualified

• Kadambini Ganguly entered Calcutta Medical College in 1883, its first woman student.
• In 1886 she earned the Graduate of Bengal Medical College qualification.
• In 1892 she went to Britain and earned licences from Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin. Each was a real qualification in its own right.
• She then joined the Lady Dufferin Hospital in Calcutta.
• Anandibai held a degree around the same time, but died early. So Ganguly is credited as one of the first Indian women to actually practise Western medicine.
• She was also active in the Indian National Congress and in women’s education.
• Her husband, the reformer Dwarkanath Ganguly, backed her studies. That was rare then.

Cornelia Sorabji: law for secluded women

• Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman to practise law in India.
• In 1892 she was the first woman allowed to sit Oxford’s Bachelor of Civil Law exam.
• Oxford gave women degrees only from 1920. Her qualification came decades before that rule changed.
• From 1904 she was Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards in Bengal. Later she worked in Bihar, Odisha and Assam.
• Purdahnashin women lived in strict seclusion and could not meet male lawyers. She advised them.
• Over about two decades she helped more than 600 women, often without a fee.
• She was a barrister and adviser, not a judge.

Sarojini Naidu: poet, president, governor

• Sarojini Naidu entered the University of Madras at twelve and later studied in England.
• Gandhi called her the “Nightingale of India” for her poetry.
• Around the 1916 Lucknow Pact, she called Jinnah the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity”. The title honoured his part in bringing the Congress and Muslim League together.
• Jinnah later led the demand for Partition, the opposite outcome.
• In 1925 she became the first Indian woman to preside over the Congress, at Kanpur.
• In 1930 she led the Dharasana salt protest after Gandhi was arrested.
• She was jailed several times, including about 21 months after the 1942 Quit India call.
• In 1947 she became Governor of the United Provinces, independent India’s first woman governor. She held the post until her death in 1949.

Kamala Sohonie: a lab that first said no

• Kamala Sohonie was the first Indian woman to earn a doctorate in science.
• C.V. Raman first refused to admit women to his lab at the Indian Institute of Science.
• He relented only after she accepted strict conditions and proved her ability under pressure.
• She later worked at Cambridge in Nobel laureate Frederick Hopkins’s lab.
• There she helped find cytochrome c, an enzyme in all plant cells, central to how cells release energy.
• Back in India she studied Neera, a nutrient-rich palm nectar, as cheap nutrition against malnutrition.
• Her work on pulses also fed into diet policy.
• Read more: Kamala Sohonie.

Kalpana Chawla: a first and a tragedy

• Kalpana Chawla trained as an aerospace engineer before joining NASA, a field with very few women.
• She was the first woman of Indian origin in space, on STS-87 in 1997.
• Her second flight was STS-107 in 2003.
• Columbia broke up on re-entry on 1 February 2003. All seven crew died.
• Investigators traced it to launch debris that had damaged the wing weeks earlier, and fatally weakened the heat shield.
• She remains a touchstone for Indian students in STEM.
• Read more: Kalpana Chawla.

Who said no?

• Each woman entered a field that had formally or informally shut women out.
• Their work spans education, medicine, law, politics, science and space.
• Several stories share a gatekeeper who first said no: a professor, a colonial court, a society.
• The gate opened only after sustained pressure or public argument.
• Many of these women are far less known than their male contemporaries, despite comparable achievements.
• Documenting them is how they stay visible.

The wider story

• The movement they helped build: The Women’s Movement in India.
• The backdrop: Status of Women in India.
• Another barrier-breaker, on Syrian Christian inheritance law: Mary Roy.

The real traps

• Kadambini Ganguly is often called India’s first woman doctor outright. Anandibai Joshi qualified around the same time but died shortly after.
• That is why Ganguly is usually described as one of the first to practise, not the only claimant.
• Cornelia Sorabji is sometimes confused with a judge. She was a barrister and legal adviser for purdahnashin women.
• Exams on “firsts” test the exact qualifier. First to qualify, first to practise and first to hold a post are different claims.
• Likely angle: match each woman to her “first” and her field.