“‘Men cannot, in the least, understand the wretchedness which we Hindu women have to endure. Because you cannot enter our feelings, do not...
“‘Men cannot, in the least, understand the wretchedness which we Hindu women have to endure. Because you cannot enter our feelings, do not think that we are satisfied with the life of drudgery that we live, and that we have no taste for an aspiration after a higher life.”
It is March 1887. A young woman stands in a Mumbai court room, facing the husband she despises. Shortly, a judge is going to pronounce on whether a Hindu wife can break the sacrament of a child marriage. She is twenty-two, but she has never lived with her husband, and never wants to.
The judge rules that the woman must live with her husband or go to jail for six months. But this is not the end. Instead, it is the start of a long, bitter battle by a woman who wanted to study to be a proud doctor, not an unwilling wife. She would become the first Hindu woman to do the unthinkable: leave her husband and seek a divorce.
The woman was Rukhmabai Raut (sometimes spelt Rakhmabai), a woman from a historically oppressed caste who was to smash every rule of Hindu society. If Anandibai was one facet of Indian women – the comforting...
