Böcker av Susmita Mukherjee

The expansionist policy of the colonial power necessitated official involvement with medical education in Bengal from the early nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, Western medicine permeated various levels of society, thereby making medicine a remunerative profession. A handful of women receiving higher education aspired for a professional career and medicine became their obvious choice, as women patients refused to consult male doctors during pregnancy or childbirth, or for diseases specific to women. In this context, both indigenous and white women doctors working in Bengal emerged as dedicated caregivers for women patients specifically. The Dufferin Fund set up in 1885 further reinforced gender segregation through its objective of treating women patients by women doctors only. As a result, other skilled and complicated branches of medicine became the domain of male doctors. Interestingly, this legacy of separation between 'masculine' and 'feminine' branches of medicine continues even today. Women and Medical Profession in Colonial Bengal, 1883-1947 studies the origin of women's entry into medicine in colonial Bengal and thereby unfurls the layers within these thought-provoking questions about its legacy, providing some answers and leading to new questions, the effects of which abound and govern our present.

'[Mukherjee] captures with sensitivity and humour the fragile equations in a marriage, between mothers and daughters, friends and lovers-and equally, the world of Hindi cinema. This is also the tale of four cities-Benares, New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. A rich and engrossing saga.'-Shabana AzmiMee's mother, Juhibaby, is the unwanted child of constantly travelling jatra artistes in rural Bengal. Growing into a ravishing sixteen-year-old, she is married off to a family in distant New Delhi, where Mee is born. Mee's life is a far cry from Juhibaby's, as she grows up in a respectable middle-class family and goes to an upmarket convent school. But what she inherits from her mother is a love of acting. She follows her star to Mumbai, where she becomes a successful Bollywood actress. But a failed marriage and a bruising rejection by a movie mogul derails her into a world of alcohol and promiscuity.As she struggles to make a living as a TV writer, Mee gets to know that the mother from whom she has long been estranged is now blind and ailing, in an old age home. Mee rescues her, and mother and daughter find it in their hearts to forgive each other and forge a sort of bond before Juhibaby's days come to an end. In this accomplished debut novel, Susmita Mukherjee gives her characters a startling reality in prose that is vivid, compelling and immensely readable.