Abstract
This chapter focuses on a landmark event: the making of an Indian lady doctor in nineteenth-century America. Many were the local actors and forces in British India and the United States—caste, social reform, anti-colonial nationalism, global evangelical networks, to name a few—whose synergy produced the conditions for the transnational emergence of Dr. Anandibai Joshi as the first Hindu-Brahmin woman to earn an M.D. degree. Joshi’s story dramatizes the complex and equivocal negotiations entailed by a high-caste woman’s aspiration to become a doctor in this era. The experiences she underwent before and after her passage to America illuminate how, against the greatest odds, she navigated gendered, racial, cultural, and geopolitical barriers to emerge as that then unheard of new being: “the high-caste Hindu lady doctor.”
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Shetty, S. (2017). Anandibai Joshi’s Passage to America (and More): The Making of a Hindu Lady Doctor. In: Hilger, S. (eds) New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51988-7_16
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