Exploring India's First-Woman Physician's Life Through Verse

Anandibai Joshee (1865-87) was not only India's first female physician but also the first Indian woman to travel across the forbidden 'black waters' and pursue an education in the United States - with the help of a kind American ally.

The poems in Shikha Malaviya's Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems are a chronological rendering of Anandibai's life-from her birth and childhood in the bustling town of Kalyan in Maharashtra and her marriage to an eccentric man sixteen years older, to early childbirth and the loss of her infant, from which her desire to become a doctor was born.

With elegance and stark beauty, these poems bring to life the struggles and accomplishments of a woman who travelled across the seas to pursue a medical education before her return to India as a doctor. While her adventures were cut short by tragedy, her story lives on through these poems that thunder from across the decades with a voice that cannot be silenced.

Here's an excerpt from Shikha Malaviya's Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems 

Cutting Through Stone



As if a rogue kite dancing in the wind  

we move from Kalyan to Alibaug to Kolhapur  

to Bhuj to Bombay to Serampore 

letters on sifaarish by white men  

that this brown girl’s learning is not mere whim  

and the locals visit the post office to gawk  

at this postmaster’s wife who chooses words 

over the hearth, and though lonely we are never alone their eyes upon us waiting for the fall  

my husband’s love, tough like the leather of my shoes  books become my closest friends, and water, a companion following me everywhere—rivers, marshes, the sea  

teach me to take the shape of what holds 

to be both vessel & its contents within 

to be a river that cuts through stone



 

EBONY, IVORY & SILK 

1884

 

Over my doctor’s white coat 

and the black-beaded mangalsutra 

that lays snugly against my chest 

as proof of marriage—  

tips of ivory in each ear 

connected by tubes wrapped in fine silk forming a parabola, a conduit of sound from which hangs an ebony medallion  

confirming proof of life through the steady gallop of beating heart and burbling lungs 

And I wonder how this is not considered a type of precious jewelry as well 

the stethoscope worn by a rare few of my sex

Extracted with permission from Shikha Malaviya's Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems; published by 

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