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Rukhmabai
Rukhmabai, also known as Rakhmabai, was an Indian woman who is known for being the first practising woman doctor in colonial India. She is also known for the 1885 case surrounding her child marriage to Dadaji Bhikaji, which was at the centre of debates leading to the passage of the Age of Consent Act, 1891, which raised the age of consent for marriage for girls in India from 10 to 12.

Early life
Rukhmabai was born in 1865 in present day Maharashtra. She was the daughter of Jayantibai (mother) and Janardan Pandurang (father). She belonged to a low carpenter caste (suthar) family. Her father died when she was two and a half years old, and six years later her mother married Dr. Sakharam Arjun, a widower. Janardan had willed property to Jayantibai, which she transferred in Rukhmabai's name after her remarriage.

In 1876, when Rukhmabai was eleven years old, she was married to nineteen year old Dadaji Bhikaji, a distant relative of her stepfather Sakharam Arjun. However, she continued to live with her family after her marriage. In March 1884 Dadaji filed a petition to the Bombay High Court for the 'restitution of conjugal rights' to consummate their marriage. Rukhmabai refused to do so stating that he was unable 'to provide her lodging, maintenance and clothing' because of his poverty and illiteracy. Additionally, she stated that his 'state of health' was such that she could not 'safely live with him'. Following this, charges from both sides escalated with Dadaji attributing ulterior motives to Rukhmabai's mother and maternal grandfather claiming that they were afraid of Rukhmabai asserting claim over her property once she started living with her husband.

Court case
The case was before Justice Robert Hill Pinhey and he ruled in favour of Rukhmabai on September 21, 1885. He stated that since conjugality had not been instituted to begin with, the petition to 'restitute' conjugal rights did not stand. In his judgement, he said: "The parties to the present suit went through the religious ceremony of marriage eleven years ago when the defendant was a child of eleven years of age. They have never cohabited. And now that the defendant is a woman of twenty-two, the plaintiff asks the Court to compel her to go to his house, that he may complete his contract with her by consummating the marriage, The defendant, being now of full age, objects to going to live with the plaintiff, objects to allowing him to consummate the marriage, objects to ratifying and completing the contract entered into on her behalf by her guardians while she was yet of tender age. It seems to me that it would be a barbarous, a cruel, a revolting thing to do to compel a young lady under those circumstances to go to a man whom she dislikes, in order that he may cohabit with her against her will ..."

Further, in his judgement, he said: "the practice of allowing suits for the restitution of conjugal rights (and that is what is asked for in the plaint) originated in England under peculiar circumstances, and was transplanted from England into India. It has no foundation in Hindu law-the religious law of the parties to the suit. Under the Hindu law such a suit would not be cognizable by a Civil- Court. For many years after I came to India such suits were not allowed. It is only of late years the practice of allowing such suits has been introduced into this country from England ..."After the legal defeat, Dadaji was unsuccessful in recovering case costs. Subsequently, he appealed Pinhey's judgement. In March 1887, the case was heard again before Justice Farran. He ruled in favour of Dadaji on the grounds that while Hindu law did not mandate restitution, it did not disallow it either. He gave Rukhmabai the ultimatum of either going and living with Dadaji within a month or facing six months' imprisonment. Rukhmabai said that she would rather be imprisoned than have a man she detested impose conjugality on her.

However, the civil courts did not have the power to physically enforce conjugality unlike the ecclesiastical courts in Europe. This led to a stalemate until the matter was settled outside the court by Rukhmabai paying monetary compensation to Dadaji. However, till the end of her life, the status of their marriage remained uncertain due to the indissoluble nature of infant marriage.

Writings
In order to gain public support for her cause, Rukhmabai began writing letters criticizing infant and early marriage, enforced widowhood and the plight of child brides to The Times of India under the byline "A Hindoo Lady". These were also published in the London Times under the same pseudonym. These letters generated public interest in India and abroad. While these letters received support from Indian reformers like Behramji Malabari and British liberals like barrister MacGregor, members of the Hindu orthodoxy viewed them as a conspiracy to influence the High Court's decision. According to historian Antoinette Burton: "The gendered critique of both imperial rule and indigenous patriarchy that Rukhmabai produced for the English reading public from this peculiarly valenced position meant that, in this debate about the fate of empires and civilizations at least, the speech of an Indian woman had to be reckoned with."Rukhmabai wrote about the disparate impact of early marriage on men and women, the link between reforming the custom and empowering women through education and the need for government intervention through reform. Commenting on the radical nature of her writing, historian Sudhir Chandra writes: "The contemporary debate on social reform invested considerable passion in the distinction between infant and early marriage. There were many who condemned infant marriage but considered early marriage shastric and essential to the Hindu domestic economy. Even Malabari was constrained to propose twelve as the minimum age of consent for girls. Rukhmabai, in contrast, wanted no marriage to be 'legal unless the bride is fifteen and the bridegroom is twenty years old'."

Debates triggered
Historian Tanika Sarkar discusses the role that this case played in bringing attention to the issue of consent and indissolubility in Hindu marriage. From the time of Pinhey's judgement, reactions to the case within the Indian public were strong and sharply opposed to each other. Anglo-Indian newspapers like the Times of India and Bombay Guardian celebrated Pinhey's judgement on grounds of moral superiority. Sections of Hindus opposed this judgement fearing that such a questioning of traditional marriage customs would undermine the foundations of Hindu society.

Some Indian reformers supported Rukhmabai, most vocal amongst whom was Malabari. He advocated her cause through his writings in his newspaper Indian Spectator and helped raise a defence fund to try and take Rukhmabai's case to the Privy Council to reverse Farran's judgement. Historians like Tanika Sarkar have seen Rukhmabai's trial as forming the backdrop to the passage of the Age of Consent Act in 1891, in which Malabari's efforts played a central role.

According to historian Antoinette Burton, in Britain, the debates that the case initiated moved from the question of child marriage to the broader question of the condition of women in India and 'its relationship - both practical and symbolic - to the projects of empire.'

Medical career
Two years after her settlement with Dadaji, Rukhmabai went to England to study medicine where she was trained at the London School of Medicine for Women and qualified as a doctor in 1894. She did so with the support of Edith Pechey-Phipson, a British doctor practising in India and was patronized by some English feminists in London. After her return to India, she worked at Cama Hospital in Bombay as a house surgeon for eight years thus becoming the first practising female Indian doctor. After that she worked at Morarbhai Vajrabhushandas hospital in Surat from 1895 to 1917, and was the chief doctor to the princely states of Saurashtra from 1918 to 1930.

She was made a member of the Association of Medical Women of India (AMWI) in 1912 and was one of the founders of the Red Cross Movement in India. She was awarded the Kaiser-e-Hind medal.

She used her connections with princely families of Kathiawar to start a fund to encourage women to take up nursing. She also donated all personal gifts she had received from patients to this fund.

In popular culture
In response to the Rukhmabai case, Rudyard Kipling wrote a satirical poem entitled "In the Case of Rukhmibhaio" poking fun at the opposition of Indian nationalists to her cause.

In 2016, Indian director Anant Mahadevan announced that he will be directing a Marathi biopic on Rukhmabai. The film is based on Mohini Varde's 2001 book Dr. Rakhmabai: An Odyssey features Tannishtha Chatterjee as Rukhmabai.