Anandibai Joshee : A Life in Poems

by Shikha Malaviya

on Jul 14, 2023

Anandibai Joshee (1865-87) was not only India's first female physician, but also the first Indian woman to travel across the forbidden 'black waters' and pursue an education in the United States - with the help of a kind American ally.

The poems in Shikha Malaviya's Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems are a chronological rendering of Anandibai's life-from her birth and childhood in the bustling town of Kalyan in Maharashtra and her marriage to an eccentric man sixteen years older, to early childbirth and the loss of her infant, from which her desire to become a doctor was born.

With elegance and a stark beauty, these poems bring to life the struggles and accomplishments of a woman who travelled across the seas to pursue a medical education before her return to India as a doctor. While her adventures were cut short by tragedy, her story lives on through these poems that thunder from across the decades with a voice that cannot be silenced.