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Time of India
22-07-2025
- General
- Time of India
Meet Kadambini Ganguly: The woman who rewrote the rules of Indian medicine
Born in a Brahmo family in Chandsi, in Bengal's Barisal district (now in Bangladesh) on July 18, 1861 Kadambini Basu along with Chandramukhi Basu, became the first female graduates in India, from Bethune College in Kolkata. Not only that, she was the first female doctor in South Asia to get three bachelor's degrees in medicine! Let's look back at the greatness of this inflexible woman. Dating back to a time when women were confined within abodes, expected to remain invisible, unheard, and unquestioning, Kadambini Ganguly's voice reverberated through the male-dominated corridors of medical college. The doors of Calcutta Medical College had echoed with a thousand footsteps, but never once those of a woman, until Ganguly knocked, not with hesitation, but with resolve. Yes, it is a story that not only swells our chests with pride, but also upholds a legacy worth cherishing. The same eyes that had once seen shuttered schoolrooms, male-only lecture halls, and a society terrified by the simple sight of a woman carrying books, those very eyes now led a battle India had never before witnessed. No garlands. No applause. Just a quiet resolve. She did not come to be welcomed. She came to rewrite the rules in ink and scalpels, where women were never meant to leave a mark. A childhood lit by rebellion Born on 18 July 1861 in Bhagalpur, Bengal Presidency, now Bihar, Kadambini Basu entered the world as a contradiction. She belonged to the Kulin Kayastha caste, a socially elevated group that paradoxically resisted female education. But her father, Braja Kishore Basu, who had a different lens for society, became the cornerstone of a history in making. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like This Could Be the Best Time to Trade Gold in 5 Years IC Markets Learn More Undo In a world where educating girls was considered blasphemous, he initiated the first women's organization in India, the Bhagalpur Mahila Samiti, when his daughter was just two. In 1878, she shattered a glass ceiling and inscribed her name into the annals of history: Kadambini Ganguly became the first woman to pass the University of Calcutta's entrance examination. By 1883, alongside Chandramukhi Basu, she graduated from Bethune College, becoming one of the first two female graduates in India. But for Kadambini, education was never the destination; it was only the beginning. Her path did not end with a degree; it pressed forward, with firm determination, toward a profession the world insisted was not meant for women: Medicine. Did success feel like a celebration? Alas, no. It felt like isolation. She had to outthink, outwork, and outlast everyone around her, not because she wanted to prove herself better, but only to prove that she was 'equal.' A doctor against the odds Her decision to pursue medicine was not only courageous but unthinkable at that time. She was among the few Indian women to seek higher education, and she did so in a world brimming, and reeking, of patriarchy. As she stepped into the medical college, a different battle began altogether. She was ostracised, mocked, and pushed aside for being a female. The professors never knew how to talk to a female student. Females, if present at all, were just bodies to be examined, not the ones doing the examining. She passed her exams in 1888 and was appointed assistant physician at the Lady Dufferin Hospital in Calcutta, a rare post for an Indian woman. Yet even within those walls, her skin and gender placed her beneath her European counterparts. When she was denied senior positions simply because she was Indian, she wrote a public letter to the press. With scalpel in hand, she was peeling off every layer of patriarchy. Frustrated by this institutional discrimination, she set her sights abroad. A trailblazer in the West In 1893, she traveled alone to the United Kingdom to advance her medical training. In that particular year, she earned three prestigious qualifcations: the Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (LRCP) in Edinburgh, the Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons (LRCS) in Glasgow, and the Graduate of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons (GFPS) in Dublin. Equipped with accolades, she made her way back to India and established her private practice, specialising in gynecology and women's health. Patients from across social strata, including the Nepalese royal family, sought her care. She treated ailments cloaked in silence, subjects Indian society refused to name. The fight for equality But Kadambini's commitment to healing was not restricted to medicine alone. She was a fervent reformer, she was active in the Brahmo Samaj, working to abolish child marriage, the dowry system, and the marginalisation of widows. She joined the Bengal Ladies' Association, championing girls' education and women's spiritual and intellectual growth. When the British contemplated raising the age of consent for girls from 10 to 12, Kadambini's counsel was sought. Her voice helped shape the Age of Consent Act of 1891—an early legislative strike against child marriage. She also investigated the brutal conditions faced by women workers in the coal mines of Bihar and Orissa, serving on a committee that documented their suffering. These were not symbolic gestures; her activism had teeth and consequence. A living legacy Her legacy is not only glorified in textbooks alone. It dwells in the first girl in a village who dares to challenge patriarchal norms and picks up a biology book. It is in every woman doctor who walks into a hospital and is not called a miracle, but a colleague. It breathes in the hearts of women who carry dreams heavier than the burdens society places on their shoulders. It flickers in the eyes of every girl who chooses courage over silence, and belief over fear. Kadambini Ganguly is not just a name we remember; she is a feeling we carry. A whisper in moments of doubts. A fire in moments of resolve. She did not want to be honoured. She wanted to be echoed. And in every girl who dares, she is. Ready to navigate global policies? 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News18
27-06-2025
- Politics
- News18
The Symbolism Of Sindoor: Analysing The Operation That Checkmated Pakistan
Last Updated: The beauty, the splendour, the glory, the auspiciousness: the symbol has spoken from our collective psyche Every symbol has three layers of interpretation, said Roland Barthes. I think I have found at least five for Operation Sindoor. Let us see. The first one, or primary interpretation, is simple and straightforward: the colour of blood. It was a message that we would be kicking butt. We were ticked. They killed our men and left their young wives widowed. It left our blood boiling and turned it into hot Sindoor. We had to show them who the real man was, aka 56. But what is the hidden or secondary message? That too seems obvious, I think. Sindoor is the paste applied by Hanuman over all his body to express how much he loved Sri Rama. For Sindoor on her forehead was a mark of her love for Sri Rama, said Sita. No one will mess with her. I get this too. This is the in-your-face finger that is being shown to the Asura. They came and killed wantonly and spared the women only to use them as tools, as messengers to go tell Modi. Well, he heard, and he responded. And we heard too as the ear of his ears and saw as the eye of his eyes. That is the mythological, the religious, hidden behind the Brahmo, and the arrow of the sky, the Akashteer, another symbol and message. What is the third level, then? The ensconced one. I think it is the BJP, plain and simple. For, if you remember, the colour of Sindoor is both red and orange. And subtly, the puratana prateeka, the chinha of our civilisation, of security and dedication, is the party of nationalists. Sindoor and Bhagwa flow together. There is nothing wrong with it. It is an inspired choice, and I am duly impressed. Just because I prefer to eat Amul, not for its taste (which is excellent, by the way) but for its advertising. I will always stand by Prime Minister Modi for his marketing genius. The tertiary level, or the Tritiya Stara, here, is a subtle link with the party. This is why Mamata Didi did not acknowledge the Sindoor of her sisters that had been so unceremoniously wiped off their foreheads. She praised and mentioned only the military. But Modi, the modern Gipper, has scored a big one. With a symbol that, to most of us, was a Ritual. There was an ulterior motive behind all the advertising and the marketing, and it was the political. But wait, there is more. And I did not see it until more than a month later. There is here a new myth being built, the myth of a central figure, filled with fire in his bloodstreams, even though his mind is calm and still. The yogi who is invoking the flame. And I was instantly reminded of the first rik of the Veda, 'Agnimile purohitam yajnasya devam ritvijam Hotaram ratna dhatamam." Translated loosely, it implies, 'I adore the flame, the priest of the Sacrifice, the shining lover of Truth, the invoker of opulence and Light." What a genius! Did he actually know that he was turning himself into a tapasvi, a Rishi, with this flagrant symbol that hides so much more than it reveals? If he did, give him ten more years as poetic justice. For the man who picks the right metaphor gets the drone. If he did not, then the man is an artist of a high order. He is a master builder of narratives, and he has built it, Kubrick by Kubrick. We need narratives, in the land of Bollywood. We need the dialogues of Sholay and Mother India. They fill our national desire for drama. If someone understands this, then he understands our collective psyche. So now we have figured out the fourth level, that of movie-making, the quaternary, the chatvari. But wait! There is something more to this than mere symbolism. Something that transcends the representative and the metaphorical, the mythological and the cultural, the political and the historical. Sri Aurobindo says that the entire Veda is three layers of interpretation, trayortha sarva Vedeshu. The highest layer is bhadram, the good, the adhyatmik, the spiritual. For it is the colour of our collective aspiration. We are royally PO'd. We have borne enough bouncers on our helmets and our chests. We have been quiet all along and have smiled back every time they come hurtling at us with the red ball. I think the fifth level is our collective need burning a hole through us. We have had enough of having been played. We will be redder than Red China. We will be like Draupadi, who wiped away the Sindoor from her forehead when she was violated and her husbands did not stand up for her. We are done. We need a symbol we can cling to and hold. Where, as Sri Aurobindo says, the real is the symbol and the symbol is the real. Where our operation, surgical and clinical will never be over. We will keep cutting delicately with our scalpel. We will watch you bleed a thousand times and will not flinch. We do not care. A wounded civilisation needs to be healed. And the price of its healing is blood. It is the thousand years of humiliation that need to be punched in the nose. Wash the wound with blood! But whose blood and why? Is it our reverse of Jihad? Isn't this what it was about? The dog whistle of Munir being answered by our own. And I am very comfortable with it. All that I would like is, while we admire it, we put its explosion to good use too. For the true value of Sindoor is not in its look of blood but in its ancient evocation of Sringara. The beauty, the splendour, the glory, the auspiciousness. The symbol has spoken from our collective psyche. But we must remember to remember this too. top videos View all We need to turn it into the real that it was meant for. Someday. For red is also the colour of transformation. Pariksith Singh is author, poet, philosopher and medical practitioner based in Florida. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views. First Published:
News18
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Satyajit Ray Through Hindu Lens: The Brahmo Who Never Gave Up Brahman
Last Updated: This May 3, Satyajit Ray's cinema turns 70. The maestro, incidentally, would have turned 104 on May 2 On May 3, 1955, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, at its Textiles and Ornamental Arts of India exhibition, screened a film titled The Story of Apu and Durga, later to be titled Pather Panchali or Song of the Little Road. It was well received, although it ran without subtitles. This May 3, Satyajit Ray's cinema turns 70. The maestro, incidentally, would have turned 104 on May 2. If he were alive and still making movies, the most pressing question he would have faced could very likely be about his faith and spirituality. We live in a time of resurgent, assertive Hindutva and a highly reactive Islam. It is a time, ironically, like many of his movies, of black and white. The maestro would be pressed to take a side. It is not that he did not face that question during his lifetime. There had been a shrill crescendo of protests after his Devi (The Goddess) released in 1960. The movie is about a young woman who is tragically and almost forcibly elevated to divinity after her father-in-law dreams about her being the incarnation of the goddess. Hindu conservatives were also furious when Ray's Ganashatru (Enemy of the People) portrayed how the holy water or 'charanamrita" got contaminated because of official corruption and apathy, endangering thousands of lives. The narrative that Ray was unfairly critical of Hinduness got traction because of his Brahmo faith, a reformist and so-called 'progressive" tributary of Sanatan Dharma, pioneered by Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Ray, ironically, was one of the harshest critics of Bengal's communist regime, and never hesitated to speak the blunt truth even to the towering CPM patriarch and then chief minister, Jyoti Basu. His Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and Hirak Rajar Deshe are trenchant critiques of totalitarian regimes. If one looks holistically at Satyajit Ray's entire body of work, a different picture emerges. By his own admission, he was against religious dogma and superstition. He was also questioning about organised religion, as we find him articulate in his last movie, Agantuk. But he was not against religion, spirituality, and mysticism. In fact, the social setting of almost all Ray movies is noticeably Hindu. Except for Shatranj Ke Khilari, there is not even one major Muslim character in his films, even in those set in pre-Partition, Muslim-dominant Bengal. He made an entire, dazzlingly successful detective movie, Sonar Kella, based on his own Feluda series on reincarnation and rebirth. His fascination and curiosity with 'jatishwar", or those who claim to remember their previous birth, finds its way even in films like Nayak. He portrays the impoverished village priest Harihar in the Apu trilogy with no malice but almost a tragic-nostalgic fondness. Portrayal of Apu's childhood has evoked comparisons with little Krishna's carefree, playful ways. Ray shunned the long, sermon-filled Brahmo services. His cinematic depiction of the good-intentioned but boring husband in Charulata, although made after Rabindranath Tagore's novel Nashto Neer, captures the character's lack of emotional and sexual vitality. The roots of Ray's spiritual vision lie in his childhood. In his essay Through Agnostic Eyes: Representations of Hinduism in the Cinema of Satyajit Ray, Chandok Sengoopta of Birkbeck College, London, writes: But first, we need to outline just what kind of Brahmo upbringing Ray had and how he reacted to it. Ray's father Sukumar Ray (1887–1923), who has long been iconic in Bengali literary history for his nonsense verse and other works for children, also distinguished himself as a printing technologist, a photographer, a publisher and magazine editor. Although a committed Brahmo, he and his young associates nearly brought about a split in the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj with their demands for sweeping reforms in structure, administration and ethical code. For Sukumar Ray, the Brahmo movement, despite commencing within orthodox Hinduism as a reform initiative, had diverged so greatly from the parent since then that it had become a sovereign faith, and he did not shy away from a public (and sharply polemical) debate with his close friend Rabindranath Tagore, who, belonging to the conservative Adi Brahmo Samaj, held that Brahmos, in spite of their rejection of many orthodox beliefs and practices, were still members of the larger Hindu family. Sukumar Ray, of course, died at an early age and Satyajit was brought up by his mother Suprabha, whose understanding of the Brahmo-Hindu relationship was interestingly different from her late husband's. Diligent as she was in attending Brahmo services and shunning festivals such as the 'idolatrous" Durga Puja, she wore the iron bangle and vermilion like all Hindu married women. Apart from giving them up after losing her husband, she never dressed again in anything other than the orthodox Hindu widow's plain white sari (than), despite being reminded by no less a Brahmo luminary than Dr Kadambini Ganguli that her own father-in-law Upendrakishore Ray had decried this custom. It is perhaps this confluence of childhood strains that makes Ray grey. While he captures the riverbanks and temples of Banaras mesmerisingly in Aparajito (1956) and Joi Baba Felunath (1979), in his Abhijan (1962), a Christian convert feels uncomfortable serving food to the upper-caste hero because she had belonged to an 'untouchable" caste before her conversion. But the clincher that he never snapped away from his Sanatan roots is there in his last movie, Agantuk. Unlike an Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, or Manoj Night Shyamalan, Ray was not a director who did cameos in his own films. But in Agantuk, a film he shot in his final days, he made an exception. He sang the iconic ode to Shri Krishna in his own quivering yet baritone voice: 'Hari Haray namah Krishna Yadavay namah…" top videos View all A final clue to his spiritual self before moving on from the mortal. Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views. tags : Cinema hindu satyajit ray Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: May 03, 2025, 07:00 IST News opinion Opinion | Satyajit Ray Through Hindu Lens: The Brahmo Who Never Gave Up Brahman
