Kadambini Ganguly

In news- The 160th birth anniversary of Kadambini Ganguly is observed on 18 July.

About Kadambini Ganguly-

She was born on 18th July 1861 at Bhagalpur, Bengal Presidency (modern day Bihar) in British India, raised in Barisal.
She received English education – first at the Brahmo Eden Female School, Dacca, and then at Hindu Mahila Vidyalaya, Ballygunj, Calcutta.
She got married with Brahmo reformer Dwarkanath Ganguly.
After her husband’s death in 1898, she practiced medicine in Kolkata till her death in 1923.
Ganguly was also the first woman to get admission to Calcutta Medical College(1884), from which she graduated in 1886.
Along with Anandi Joshi, Ganguly became the first woman in colonial India to study medicine.
Her graduation even attracted the attention of Florence Nightingale who enquired about Ganguly from a friend in a letter in 1888.
Annie Besant also hailed Kadambini as a “symbol that India’s freedom would uplift India’s womanhood” in her book ‘How India Wrought For Freedom’.
Ganguly, along with Chandramukhi Basu, became the first female graduates in India, from Bethune College in Kolkata.
She went on to pursue three additional doctoral certifications with a specialization in gynecology, a rarity for women in that era.
She got trained in Scotland and returned to India in the 1890s to start her own private clinic.

Political & Social life

Ganguly was also one of the six women to form the first all-women delegation of the 1889 Indian National Congress.
After the Bengal Partition, Kadambini organized the Women’s Conference in Calcutta in 1906.
In 1908, she formed an association to help the Satyagraha workers in Transvaal, South Africa.
When a meeting was arranged at the Sadharan Brahma Samaj in 1914, in honour of Gandhi during his visit to Calcutta, she presided over it.
She assisted her husband Dwarakanath in condemning the exploitation of the tea garden workers in Assam, and in 1922, looked into the condition of female coal mine workers in Bihar and Odisha along with poet Kamini Roy on behalf of a government enquiry commission.