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Exploring the life of Anandibai Joshee through Shikha Malaviya's poems
Updated On: 09 July, 2023 09:09 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
A new collection of poems takes creative licenses while adhering to biographical facts to enable India’s first female physician Anandibai Joshi to tell her own story
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Anandi Gopal Joshi, Japanese doctor Kei Okami and Syrian doctor Sabat Islambooly, each in native dress, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1886. All three graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and were the first women from their respective countries to graduate from a western university. In her book, Malaviya writes that despite echoing exoticism, the photograph exudes a power “that seemed to turn the notion of empire on its head” and hints at “an allyship and sisterhood that went beyond the church and state”. Pic/Getty Images
One might find this silly, but each time I started a poem in this collection, I would look up at the sky and take Anandibai’s permission, asking her ‘what would you like me to say?’” poet and writer Shikha Malaviya tells us in an email interview about her new collection of persona poems Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems (HarperCollins India, R399). The book, on India’s first female physician and the first Indian woman to travel to the United States in 1883 to study medicine, tells Anandibai’s story through her own imagined voice, setting it apart from previous work on her life, which has often viewed her through the limiting narrative of her husband as her saviour and guide. As Malaviya writes in her preface to the book, “[by] telling Anandibai’s story through poems in her own voice, my hope is to not only restore Anandibai’s agency and give her story back to her, but to also highlight her inner strength, determination, sharp intellect, and desire to help other women”.
Malaviya also writes in her preface about the racism she experienced as a child growing up in Minnesota in the early ’80s and her need to find her history reflected in her surroundings. It was this search for a foremother that ultimately led her to Anandibai. “The writing of this book has made me realise that we can heal our own lack of history and roots by excavating life stories and bringing them to the forefront,” she tells us.
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