Married at eleven, she told a British court she would take the prison sentence instead. Then she went and became a doctor.
In March 1887 a judge of the Bombay High Court gave a twenty-two-year-old woman a choice: go and live with the husband she had been married to at the age of eleven, or serve six months in jail. Rukhmabai chose jail. She had never lived with Dadaji Bhikaji, never consented to anything, and had spent the years since the wedding doing the one thing the marriage was designed to end — reading. Her answer to the court was not a plea. It was a refusal.
She had already been arguing the case in public, anonymously, in the pages of The Times of India, over the signature "A Hindu Lady." The scandal that followed helped push Parliament toward the Age of Consent Act of 1891. And when it was over, she did the thing nobody had asked of her: she sailed for London, qualified in medicine, came home, and spent the next thirty-five years as a hospital doctor to women who had almost no other kind.
Nine decades, two lives
The lifeline
1864
Born 22 November in Bombay; her father dies when she is two
c.1876
Married at eleven to Dadaji Bhikaji, nineteen — but stays in her mother's house, and at her books
1884
Dadaji sues for "restitution of conjugal rights"; the case will run four years
1887
Ordered to her husband or six months in jail — she tells the court she will take the jail
1894
Qualifies in medicine in Britain, after five years of study in London
1955
Dies in Bombay on 25 September, aged 90
By the numbers
The measure of her
11
Her age at a marriage she had no part in agreeing to
6
Months' imprisonment she told the court she would serve rather than obey it
12
The age of consent across British India after 1891 — raised from ten
35
Years she practised medicine in Surat and Rajkot before retiring
What she wrote, refused, and built
The work
1885
"A Hindu Lady" — two unsigned letters in The Times of India, on 26 June and 19 September, attacking infant marriage and enforced widowhood, and calling for a legal minimum age of marriage.
1885
The Pinhey judgment — Justice Robert Hill Pinhey declines to compel a woman married as a child into a marriage she never consented to. Nothing like it had been said from that bench.
1887
The refusal — after Justice Farran reverses Pinhey on 4 March, she informs the court she will not comply, and will take the maximum penalty the law allows instead.
1888
Settlement — in July, Dadaji accepts 2,000 rupees and gives up all claim on her. She is free, and 23 years old.
1891
The Age of Consent Act — passed after years of agitation her case had made unavoidable, raising the age of consent throughout British India from ten to twelve.
1894–95
Qualified — the Scottish Triple Qualification at Edinburgh and Glasgow, then a Doctor of Medicine from Brussels; entered on the British Medical Register.
1895–1930
Chief medical officer — the Women's Hospital at Surat, then the Zenana Hospital at Rajkot. At Surat the wards were at first empty: people believed hospitals were where you went to die.
1929
Purdah — The Need for Its Abolition, a pamphlet published in the last year of her working life, arguing the case she had been making since she was twenty.
Condemned, then commemorated
Recognition
In her lifetime
Wrote anonymously — her own name attached to those arguments was not safe
Denounced across the vernacular press as a rebel against Hindu custom
Held up in Britain as evidence for empire, an argument she never made herself
Left India in 1889 needing her grandfather's permission and her supporters' money to go
Since
Dadaji Bhikaji v. Rukhmabai is a landmark of Indian legal history
Awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for her work during plague
Google marked her 153rd birthday with a doodle in 2017
Sudhir Chandra's Enslaved Daughters (1998) restored the case to the record
The city that argued back
Bombay
Her mother Jayantibai had been married at fourteen and widowed at seventeen — and then, against the custom Rukhmabai would spend her life attacking, married again. Her second husband was Dr Sakharam Arjun, a physician and botanist at Grant Medical College, and it was in his house that a married girl was left alone with books. Bombay gave her the rest: an English-language press to write to, a High Court to lose in, and a circle of reformers and women doctors who would not let the case go quiet.
17
Her mother's age at widowhood, before a remarriage custom forbade
2
Letters in 1885 that turned a private suit into a national argument
1889
The year she sailed from Bombay for London to study medicine
"This wicked practice has destroyed the happiness of my life. It comes between me and that thing which I prize above all others — study and mental cultivation."
— Rukhmabai, writing as "A Hindu Lady" The Times of India, 26 June 1885
