ThinkHer

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. Y et, 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....