Uncomfortable Truths of Patriarchy: The Life of Haimabati Sen

Haimabati Sen, born Haimabati Ghosh, was among the earliest female physicians in colonial India. A woman who transformed her unimaginable early trauma into a lifelong mission of healing and social change. Her life embodies resilience, quiet courage, and a refusal to accept the limitations imposed on women of her time.

Haimabati was born in 1866 in the Khulna district of the then Bengal Presidency, into a Kulin Kayastha zamindar family. Her father, a zamindar, was unusually liberal for his time — he allowed her to wear male attire and to study alongside her male cousins, a rare privilege for a girl in that era. Yet, societal norms prevailed. At the mere age of nine, she was married off to a 45-year-old widower and Deputy Magistrate with two daughters nearly her own age. Her husband’s behaviour exposed her, at a very young age, to unsettling and sexually abusive circumstances. He forced himself on her, leaving her frightened and still — “like a piece of wood,” she later wrote. After a few months, he died of pneumonia. Within a short span, she lost her father, mother, and mother-in-law. Bereft of family support, she was denied both her father's and husband’s property — cheated out of inheritance by relatives.

Left with no support, Haimabati moved to Varanasi (Benares), where she began teaching at a girls’ school—an attempt to carve out an independent life. The hardship she saw, especially the plight of widows and marginalised women without social support, deeply shaped her worldview. At around age 20, she returned to Bengal. Troubled by the systematic mistreatment of widows and women, she joined the Brahmo Samaj — a reformist social-religious movement that had supportive attitudes toward widows and women’s rights. At the age of 25, she remarried Kunjabihari Sen. She had three sons and a daughter. Haimabati decided to join the medical profession in order to sustain her family financially.

In 1891, she enrolled in the Campbell Medical College in Calcutta (now Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College), opting for the Vernacular Licentiate in Medicine and Surgery (VLMS) program. The VLMS had the advantage of being taught in vernacular (Bengali or translation), allowing her access despite not having a formal English education. Balancing her studies with household obligations and financial constraints, she persisted. In 1894, she graduated top of her class. All her male classmates were awarded gold medals — but when it came to her, the male students protested vehemently, the authorities yielded to pressure, and she was asked to surrender the gold medals. Instead, she accepted silver medals (for topping individual papers) and a modest monthly stipend — a compromise she accepted in order to simply continue attending lectures. This episode reveals the deeply tangled web of institutional gender discrimination she had to traverse.

After finishing her training in 1894, Haimabati began working at Lady Dufferin Women's Hospital in Hooghly, where she served from 1894 to 1910. But entry into the medical profession did not end her struggles. She faced discrimination, harassment, and structural obstacles at every turn. For instance — during one childbirth case in a European household — she was paid ₹50 for the delivery, while the male doctor got ₹1,500 and his midwife received ₹150. Her reflection on the incident was bitter: "Lady doctors and midwives are but pawns in the hands of the male doctors.” Moreover, she endured targeted harassment: when she complained about unwelcome advances by a male colleague, she was met not with support but with threats — including defecation in shared water storage vats. She was compelled to defend herself physically on one occasion just to secure her safety. Despite these adversities — a demanding workload, raising children, enduring social stigma, supporting abandoned or orphaned children — she never gave up.

In the 1920s — several decades after she first set out for medical training — Haimabati began writing her memoir. The resulting work, later published in English in 2000 as The Memoirs of Dr Haimabati Sen: From Child Widow to Lady Doctor, offers a searing account of her own life and an unflinching critique of the social structures that oppressed women. Through her narrative, she questioned the essential injustice of a society that treated women as second-class beings: “Do I have to suffer all this simply because I am a woman?’’ she asked.

Haimabati’s journey is not just about personal endurance — it highlights how the freedoms we now consider ordinary were shaped by earlier struggles. Her life compels us to confront the harsh realities of gender violence, systemic misogyny, and the silencing of women’s voices. Long before these issues were named or widely challenged, women like her were already resisting, insisting on their right to learn, to work, and to live with dignity. Their quiet defiance laid the groundwork for the rights and recognition that future generations of women would come to inherit.

Written by Parvathy Ramachandran and edited by Janaky S.

References:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haimabati_Sen

2. https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/child-bride-to-doctor-bengals-haimabati-sen-traded-her-gold-medals-for-a-monthly-stipend/1740191/

3. https://www.shethepeople.tv/women-in-stem/from-child-bride-to-trailblazing-doctor-the-unyielding-journey-of-haimabati-sen-9321746

4. https://ijellh.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/19._Anamika_Chakraborty_paper_finalreman-1.pdf

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Oga4jJRxw

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLlDOCexrN0