Dr. Haimabati Sen (c. 1866–1932) was among the early Indian women to practice medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her life reflects the social realities faced by women in colonial India, especially the harsh realities of child marriage, widowhood, and restricted access to education and wealth. Despite these challenges, she obtained medical training and worked as a physician in Bengal, fighting the patriarchy and contributing to healthcare services for women during a period when female doctors were extremely rare.
Her personal memoir, written in Bengali in the early 20th century and published decades later, provides a detailed historical account of women’s lives, medical education, and social reform movements in colonial India.
Haimabati Ghosh was born in 1866 in Khulna district of East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) into a relatively affluent Kulin Kayastha Zamindar family. She was the eldest daughter and was known to be fond of learning from an early age. Since formal education for girls was limited during that period, she was allowed to learn reading and writing from her cousin brothers at home by her father.
But child marriage was so common at that time in Bengal and she was supposed to be married off before puberty. The age of consummation was legalised as 10 during that time in Bengal, but girls were married off before that.
See also: Dr. Hilda Lazarus: Pioneer of Indian Medical Education From Colonial India
At the age of nine and a half, Haimabati was married to a 45-year-old man, twice widowed. But since he was a deputy magistrate in the colonial administration and from the same caste, he was an appropriate match according to social norms. He already had two daughters from previous marriages.
Her stepdaughters were close to her in age, and they often played together. However, Haimabati’s husband struggled with alcohol use, and was known to be a womaniser. She often shared her marital bed with prostitutes, and the marriage often exposed her to situations that were frightening for a young child.
Within a few months of the marriage, her husband fell ill and died from pneumonia and liver abscess, leaving Haimabati widowed at around 10 years old.
Following prevailing Bengali customs of the time, she was subjected to strict widowhood practices, including:
Shaving of her hair
Wearing only plain white sarees
Removal of jewellery
A restricted vegetarian diet without spices
These practices were part of broader social expectations placed on widows in many parts of India during the 19th century.
After the death of her husband, Haimabati initially found support from her mother-in-law, who allowed her to continue living relatively normally. However, after the deaths of both her parents and mother-in-law, her situation worsened.
She later discovered that she had been denied her rightful share of family property by her husband’s relatives. With limited financial support, she sought refuge with her brother, but she reportedly faced ill-treatment there as well and eventually left.
During this period, she travelled to Banaras (Varanasi), which had long served as a place where widows from different parts of India lived in religious communities. According to her memoir, many widows in the city survived through begging or singing bhajans (devotional songs), and she realised that women were not safe from abuse even there.
While seeking stability, Haimabati came into contact with members of the Brahmo Samaj, a social and religious reform movement in Bengal that supported women’s education and widow remarriage. The movement was started by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarakanath Tagore and played an important role in Bengal Renaissance and India's freedom struggle later.
With support from reformers and friends, she began working as a school teacher and resumed her education.
Eventually she returned to Calcutta (Kolkata) and formally associated herself with the Brahmo community.
At the age of 25, she remarried Kunjabehari Sen, a Brahmo Samaj worker, since she had realised how difficult life was for an unmarried young woman in India at that time. However, the marriage did not significantly improve her financial situation because her husband was struggling to maintain steady employment and make ends meet.
In 1891, at around 26 years of age, Haimabati enrolled in the Campbell Medical School in Sealdah (Calcutta), (now Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College and Hospital) one of the institutions training medical practitioners in colonial India.
At the time, the colonial government provided a monthly scholarship of seven rupees to women medical students under Dufferin Fund. This stipend helped support her household while she studied medicine, especially as she had a young child to care for.
The National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, commonly known as the Dufferin Fund, was established in 1885 to expand medical care for women in colonial India.¹
Medical education for women in India was still in its early stages, largely driven by efforts to improve healthcare access for women who preferred female physicians due to social and cultural norms. The number of women physicians in colonial India remained extremely small during this period, reflecting the broader challenges faced in the history of women in medicine in India.
Haimabati completed her medical training in 1894, standing first in her class, outperforming her male classmates.
She was to be awarded the Gold Medal for academic excellence, but protests from male students led to a strike opposing the award being given to a woman. Public pressure from the college community and sections of the press resulted in the medal being reassigned to the male student who had ranked second.
Haimabati was instead awarded a Silver Medal and continued to receive the stipend to complete the education.
Even though she passed in flying colors, finding a job in a male dominated field was not an easy task. Many male doctors had well-established private practice and getting clientele was difficult. Her husband initially forbade her to take up jobs from hospitals where she would have to stay in the hospital quarters initially.
She recalls in her memoir that, once she went for a delivery call in an English household. After the procedure, she got 50 Rs, but the male doctor got 150 Rs and the midwife got paid more than her.
After a period, Haimabati Sen joined the Dufferin Hospital in Hooghly district in 1894, where she worked until 1910.
The Dufferin Fund hospitals had been established in colonial India to improve healthcare access for women, particularly in communities where cultural norms discouraged women from consulting male doctors.
In 1910, she began private medical practice in Chinsurah, continuing her work as a physician for many years. Female doctors were becoming increasingly in demand at the time because many women preferred medical consultations with female practitioners.
High-status families often requested home medical visits, particularly for women’s health and childbirth-related care. She managed to earn a good income to support her family of 5 children and help women and children in need at times.
In the 1920s, Haimabati wrote a detailed memoir in Bengali describing her life experiences, education, and medical career.
The manuscript remained largely unknown for 8 decades until it was discovered by her grandchildren and later translated into English. The memoir was later translated into English and published in 2000 as Because I Am a Woman: A Child Widow’s Memoir from Colonial India.² She describes the women’s lives in colonial Bengal, social customs such as child marriage and widowhood, medical education for women and oppression women faced during that time.
Dr. Haimabati Sen continued practicing medicine in Bengal until the later years of her life. She died in 1932.
Her life story remains an important historical example of how women navigated social restrictions to pursue education and professional careers in medicine during colonial India.
Reference:
Haimabati Sen, Because I Am a Woman: A Child Widow’s Memoir from Colonial India, ed. and trans. Geraldine Forbes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000),
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295979154/because-i-am-a-woman/
Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/women-in-modern-india/3C0A2E6A9DCC4C7D1F0E4B5F4B8C4E0A
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520082956/colonizing-the-body
Geraldine Forbes, “Medical Careers and Health Care for Indian Women: Patterns of Control,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 515–530,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612029400200065
Anjana Chattopadhyay, Women Scientists in India: Lives, Struggles and Achievements (New Delhi: National Book Trust, India, 2018),
https://nbtindia.gov.in/publications/women-scientists-in-india-lives-struggles-and-achievements
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