Shruthi Rao’s new book on Indian women pioneers will be published in August 2019.
This book contains the stories of ten remarkable Indian women who were pioneers in their fields.
We usually encounter many of their names in answer sheets of general knowledge test banks, or as passing paragraphs in magazine articles (of course, Indira Gandhi is the clear exception here). But often, when we view their stories through the lens of the twenty-first century, without an idea of the society they lived in, we do not realise the full measure of their achievements. In this book, I have tried to describe the historical setting in which they lived and worked, and I hope the reader will be able to fathom the magnitude of the journey these women took, and imagine what it must have been like to take that first step—like stepping off a cliff into the unknown!
When I talk about these women as being the first women to do what they did, it is in the context of the modern world, where it became socially acceptable for women to do what men had always done. A large part of the contribution of these women is that they made it normal for women to do anything they wanted to.
The ten women in this book are from diverse fields, and their stories are different, and so are the challenges they overcame. It is interesting to note that most of these women are clustered around the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This coincides with the evolution of awareness of women’s rights all over the world, in what is called first-wave feminism, an international movement mostly dealing with women’s suffrage.
It was difficult to zero in on these ten women; there were so many contenders at the same period. Sometimes, within the span of a few years, a particular field would have multiple women entrants. Some of these women were pathbreakers not only in India but in a larger context. Take Anna Chandy–she was the first woman judge not just in India but in the whole Anglo-Saxon world, decades before Britain got its first woman judge, Elizabeth Allen. But the stories of these ten were just too compelling not to include.
Many of the trailblazers in this book were born into privilege—and were from educated, rich or forward-thinking families. This gave them a head-start over less privileged women as the financial challenges were less, and frequently, there was support at home. It was only after they stepped out into the world that patriarchy slammed doors on their faces. But others had to beat oppression, social ostracisation and poverty to do what they wanted to do.
It is interesting though that the first major sportswoman (since all definitions are by their nature arbitrary, major sportswoman is the first woman to make it to an Olympic final) is someone who was winning accolades when your parents were kids. Many believed (and some still do) that women are inherently weak, unable to withstand the rigors of physical training, and that menstruation and pregnancy are obstacles to sporting achievements. And so, it took much longer for Indian women to take large strides in sports.
During the research for this book, I “met” awe-inspiring women from all over the world, each of them deserving of an entire book to herself. We have these women to thank for opening up the way for all of us to achieve our dreams. And I hope you’ll read the stories of their struggles and realise how good we have it, and to not let our privileges go to waste.
The Plog 