THE MEMOIRS OF DR. HAIMABATI SEN: FROM CHILD WIDOW TO LADY DOCTOR

Tapan Raychaudhuri, one of the best-known historians of modern India, achieved the rare distinctions of an Oxford D. Litt. and an ad hominem chair at Oxford and was an Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony’s College. He also held the Chair in Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics, taught as a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, Australian National University and El Colegio de Mexico. His publications span many areas of social and economic history. Geraldine Forbes is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History and Director of Women’s Studies at the State University of New York, Oswego. Her publications include Women in Modern India and Positivism in Bengal. She is Series Editor of FOREMOTHER LEGACIES: Autobiographies and Memoirs of Women from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.This intimate autobiography, rich in details of a society in transition, was written by one of India’s earliest women doctors. Though a child widow, driven from pillar to post, Haimabati nourished an ambition for higher education, eventually trained as a medical practitioner, and became the ‘Lady Doctor’ in charge of Hughli Dufferin Hospital for Women. Haimabati’s memoir illustrates the predicament of a woman determined to earn an honourable living in a man’s world. This extraordinary account, the longest and most detailed memoir yet discovered by an Indian woman born in the nineteenth century, was originally written in lined school notebooks in Haimabati’s native language, Bengali.