Excerpted with permission from Rukhmabai: The Life and Times of a Child Bride Turned Rebel-Doctor by Sudhir Chandra, published by Pan MacMillan India.
Rukhmabai’s name takes us reflexively to her epochal defiance. That defiance is why we remember her today. It was a defiance that caught everyone off guard. It had to come about for people to believe that it was possible. It may as well have not come about. For years Rukhmabai had vacillated between fear and determination, despair and hope, uncertainty and clarity. She could have chosen either way. A different choice, and the world would not have heard her name.
For years, like the other girls, she was docile and diffident. She did dream of getting educated and carving out a different kind of life; so would have many other girls of the day. She differed in that she made her life radically different. But there was nothing pre-ordained about it. Till very late it seemed that she might end up like the other girls. To recognize this is not to belittle Rukhmabai’s resolve which was, without doubt, out of the ordinary. It is, rather, to avoid futile romanticizing. Nothing is easier, and more tempting, than to make Rukhmabai larger than the objective forces around her. But individual successes are never entirely independent of historical constraints.
Rukhmabai grew up in a world that was astir with new ideas. These new ideas were in clash with traditional beliefs and institutions. Reform and orthodoxy were locked in a bitter unending wrangle. It was a very complex, confusing and dynamic world. Orthodoxy and reform, old and new, progressive and reactionary, tradition and change were, of course, words employed to describe that world. They were, no less, also weapons that the rival groups hurled at one another.
Sudhir Chandra
Rukhmabai: The Life and Times of a Child Bride Turned Rebel-Doctor
Pan MacMillan India, 2024
As descriptive terms, they concealed as much as they revealed of that world. We have seen in the last chapter that both Sakharam and Ranade were proponents of reform. But, as real flesh-and-blood human beings, neither of them was exclusively new or old, reformer or reactionary. They were both. To further complicate things, there were varying ways in which individuals were both new and old, reformer and reactionary. Ranade was more new with regard to women’s education; Sakharam was more new in supporting widow remarriage. We have also seen that Rukhmabai was impacted more by Sakharam’s real-life ambivalences than by his categorical progressive precepts.
Similarly, her ideas were also shaped by what she saw of the emerging world of social reform. This was not a distant, impersonal world. She was, for better and worse, located in the thick of it and felt simultaneously enthused and disillusioned about it.
The details of what she studied at home are not known. We have no idea of the books, newspapers and magazines she read. Her readings, probably, were random and miscellaneous, not organized along some kind of a private syllabus. She used to struggle to make sense of her father’s books, lectures and newspaper writings. Mohini Varde quotes Rukhmabai as saying: ‘I tried to read my father’s books and lecture notes but could understand very little.’1 This struggle was not confined to her father’s writings. She would also go through other texts that were above her level of comprehension.
These random readings apart, she and her half-sister, Rani, were often taken along by Sakharam to his public lectures. In addition to providing new information, the lectures and ensuing discussions would instil in Rukhmabai a sense of the culture and significance of public debate. And, of course, she had access to that unique source of learning and reflection: frequent meetings at her place of public men, writers and reformers. She would secretly imagine being like them one day.
Unlike formal schooling, on which Rukhmabai had lost out and which spoon-fed its beneficiaries, her otherwise cumbersome selfeducation brought her a special advantage. It obliged her to sift and organize the bits and fragments of miscellaneous information, values and ideas that she tirelessly kept accumulating. And this exercise, in turn, helped her forge her own ways of seeing, questioning, arguing and thinking.
Growing up in cheerless isolation was an endless internal polylogue for this inquisitive girl. She was quick to realize that the cheerlessness of her existence was socially ordained. It was the cheerlessness of all her Indian sisters. She was human enough to permit herself the comfort of self-pity and paranoia. But she never permitted herself the delusion that her suffering as a girl-woman was uniquely her own. Every time she provided an account of her life, she framed it within the larger context of the sisterhood. She saw in her own predicament a community of suffering, and in that suffering a larger cause and duty.
Far and near, all around she saw girls inflicted by variations of her own unwarranted and needless suffering. Living next door was her best friend, Shanta. Daughter of the eminent Sanskrit scholar R. G. Bhandarkar, Shanta was eleven when she was married to the son of another prominent public figure of western India, Dr Bhau Daji. Two years later she lost her husband, and came to live with her father. Sorrowing Shanta and Rukhmabai began confiding in each other their intimate thoughts and feelings.
Shanta’s case showed Rukhmabai that subtle working of orthodoxy which virtually neutralized the possibility of resistance by its victims. Widow Shanta was fortunate that she was Bhandarkar’s daughter and Bhau Daji’s daughter-in-law, both stalwart reformers. In 1869, when Bombay’s first widow marriage was organized in the wake of the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1855, Bhandarkar was among those who defied organized Hindu orthodoxy and attended the wedding.
Bhau Daji did something remarkable even earlier. In 1862 a public debate was organized to resolve the question of widow marriage. Among the representatives of the reform party in the debate was Karsandas Mulji (1832–71), one of western India’s pioneering social reformers. The orthodox party was led by Brijratanji Maharaja, the chief of a Vaishnava sect. The debate, predictably, ended in a deadlock. Thereupon, writing in his Satya Prakash, Karsandas charged that the Vaishnava Maharajas had ‘wilfully altered to their own advantage the fundamental rules and practices of their religion’ and ‘systematically perverted their actual position (which in the eyes of their bigoted followers is that of deified humanity) to the most gross and infamous debauchery’.
