THE MEMOIRS OF DR. HAIMABATI SEN: FROM CHILD WIDOW TO LADY DOCTOR

Geraldine Forbes, Tapan Raychaudhuri

Description

This intimate autobiography, rich in details of a society in transition, was written by one of India’s earliest women doctors. Though a child widow, driven from pillar to post, Haimabati nourished an ambition for higher education, eventually trained as a medical practitioner, and became the ‘Lady Doctor’ in charge of Hughli Dufferin Hospital for Women. Haimabati’s memoir illustrates the predicament of a woman determined to earn an honourable living in a man’s world. This extraordinary account, the longest and most detailed memoir yet discovered by an Indian woman born in the nineteenth century, was originally written in lined school notebooks in Haimabati’s native language, Bengali.

Sujets

• Juvenile Nonfiction
• Women
• Idioma bengalí
• 19th century
• Tapan Raychaudhuri
• Doctor
• Child marriage
• Memoir
• Higher education
• Historian
• Autobiography
• HIStory
• Bengali
• Éducation
• Médecine

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2000
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788194597339
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

TAPAN RAYCHAUDHURI, one of the best-known historians of modern India, achieved the rare distinctions of an Oxford D. Litt. and an ad hominem chair at Oxford and was an Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony’s College. He also held the Chair in Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics, taught as a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, Australian National University and El Colegio de Mexico. His publications span many areas of social and economic history.
GERALDINE FORBES is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History and Director of Women’s Studies at the State University of New York, Oswego. Her publications include Women in Modern India and Positivism in Bengal . She is Series Editor of FOREMOTHER LEGACIES: Autobiographies and Memoirs of Women from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
 
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ROLI BOOKS
This digital edition published in 2020
First published in 2020 by
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Copyright © Geraldine Forbes, Tapan Raychaudhuri, and S.K. Sen, 2020
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In memory of
Nomita De (1928–1991)
granddaughter of Haimabati Sen
 
Contents

Translator’s Note
Introduction to the Memoirs
Om Tat Sat
Family and Ancestors
Childhood
Married Life
Life as a Widow
Benares
Calcutta
Wanderings in East Bengal
Wanderings in East Bengal—II
Return to Calcutta and Remarriage
Pilgrimage
Medical School
Chinsurah
Householder
Old Age
Glossary
Appendix A
Appendix B
Index
 

Haimabati Sen (c. 1966–1933)
 
Translator’s Note

T ranslating Haimabati’s memoir proved to be much more difficult than I had expected. Her racy style, folksy dialogues, details of domesticity, including long lists of utensils and items of food, all presented problems of their own. Especially difficult was her habit of forming putative relationships and referring to sundry people in terms of the minutae of Bengali kinship terminology. In all this I have tried to stick to the original as far as possible without making the English text entirely unreadable.
Transliteration presented another age-old problem. The dilemma was whether to fall back on conventional practice, that is, transliterate as if the Bengali words were really Sanskrit or stick as closely as possible to the Bengali pronunciation. I have chosen a middle path. Where the words are obviously Sanskrit [for example, Siva, Sakti, and so on,] or people have spelled their name in English in the Sanskritic way [such as Sivnath], I have, by and large, stuck to the Sanskritic convention, but not gone the whole length. For instance, I have written Sivnath following the writer himself, but not Sivanatha. Elsewhere, I have tried to reproduce the Bengali pronunciation [such as Haimabati, not Haimavati].
We have tried not to deviate from the text as far as possible, except to avoid tedious repetition.
I am grateful to friends and colleagues who have read the translation and offered helpful suggestions. My special thanks to Dr. Theodor Zeldin who encouraged me to publish the volume and to Professor Mushirul Hasan for help with finding a publisher.
Tapan Raychaudhuri


The Silver Medal for Midwifery awarded to Haimabati Sen in 1893 by Campbell Medical School
 
Introduction to the Memoirs

I n 1933 Haimabati Sen, a medical doctor and prominent citizen of the district town Chinsurah in Bengal, died at home surrounded by her family. Haimabati had been ill for at least two months but patients kept coming, hoping the “lady doctor” would be well enough to see them. At the time of her death only a few people knew of the hurdles she had overcome during the course of her career. Married and widowed by age ten, she married a second time, struggled through a special programme for medical assistants, and developed her practice in a hostile environment.
The Memoir
Haimabati Sen wrote her memoirs in Bengali during the last decade of her life. After her death these notebooks became the property of her second son, also a doctor, with whom she shared a practice. He read the memoir, showed it to his children, and put it away with his private papers. When he died, it went to his eldest son, Colonel S.K. Sen. It was more than half a century later that Nomita De, Colonel Sen’s younger sister and Haimabati’s granddaughter, was introduced to me by my friend and colleague Jaya Chaliha and talked about her grandmother’s life. Some time later Nomita asked her brother for the manuscript, showed it to me, and I discussed it with Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri. He was excited by the document and committed himself to a joint project to translate, edit, and contextualize the memoir.
This manuscript is a unique document for a number of reasons. First and at the most obvious level, this is the most detailed personal narrative, so far uncovered, which has a bearing on the lives of Indian women born in the nineteenth century. This narrative contains an account of marital intimacy in child marriage and documents the sexual and economic exploitation of women within the middle-class Bengali Hindu family. Second, this life story of an unknown woman is a history of rare courage and persistence. It is the autobiography of a child widow, who, driven from pillar to post, still nourished an ambition for higher education and eventually trained as a medical practitioner. It also illustrates, in great detail, the hurdles she encountered to earn an honourable living in a man’s world, and the impossibility of freedom even for one as spirited as she. Haimabati’s account causes the reader to focus on the structure of the institutions that shaped her career and governed her life—for example, the purdah hospital that employed her elevated gender above race, and made gender a new form of authority in the delivery of Western medicine. While women’s roles were undergoing redefinition and change, the family structure remained patriarchal. Those women who, like Haimabati, were gaining an education, marrying later, and pursuing careers, remained subject to its authority. As we looked closely at Dr. Sen and her times, Professor Raychaudhuri and I concluded that this was, indeed, a valuable historical document.
The Context
Haimabati Ghosh was born c. 1866 in what became Khulna district of Eastern Bengal. Her family traced its lineage to the illustrious hero of Bengal, Maharaj Pratapaditya, and owned extensive land but by the time “Hem” was born, it was in straitened circumstances.
The memoir describes the impact of colonial domination on rural Bengal. When the British encouraged the cultivation of indigo, entrepreneurs seized the opportunity, acquired land and forced peasants to cultivate the crop. Hem learned about foreign domination through family history: her grandfather’s war against Rainy, a rapacious indigo cultivator. Historians corroborate the evil deeds of Rainy and portray Hem’s grandfather, Sibnath Ghosh, as a friend of the peasants. The war was financially devastating and H