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Homes for the homeless
S. MUTHIAH
Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy
Speaking to a group the other day about Ice House, now Vivekananda Illam, the ice trade it nurtured and what happened to it after the import of ice from the U.S. came to an end, I mentioned that for a while the w
arehouse had been used as a Widows’ Home. Back came a question wondering whether it had been run by the Government or an NGO. And I was stumped. So back I went to look it up. And found not one story but two that shared some remarkable coincidences.
The Widows’ Home, I discovered, had been started in July 1912 as the Sarada Ashram and provided a home for 35 child widows. It had been founded by the Sarada Ladies’ Union, which itself had been started a few months earlier by Sister Subbalakshmi, who had been egged on to do so by a Miss Lynch, the Inspectress of Women’s Education in Madras. Lynch had noted that there were 22,000 child widows in Madras at the time, an ostracised lot. She had also noted that Subbalakshmi was a woman out of the ordinary. A child widow herself, Subbalakshmi had overcome the odds with the help of Mother Patrick of the Presentation Convent, George Town, who called her ‘Sybil’, then ‘Sister Subbalakshmi’, and got her to join Presidency College in 1908. When she graduated with a First Class in Honours in April 1911, Sister Subbalakshmi was the first Brahmin woman to get a degree in the South. Noting the problem and a child widow who had overcome it, Lynch was sure she had found a part of the solution. And so she quietly got Sister Subbalakshmi to found the Sarada Union and, thereafter, the Ashram towards which the Union went on a collection drive.
With widows above 18 not allowed to reside in the Ashram, Sister Subbalakshmi in 1926 started the Sarada Vidyalaya, a girls’ high school offering boarding. Two years later the two institutions were merged and, then, in 1938 transferred to the Ramakrishna Mission.
Subbalakshmi was born in 1886, the same year as another Lakshmi who founded a home for disadvantaged women, Muthulakshmi. After providing a home for two runaway girls bent on escaping the life of devadasis (they were to become a doctor and a teacher respectively), she founded the Avvai Home in 1930. Just as Subbalakshmi was the first Brahmin to enter Presidency College, Muthulakshmi was the first Indian woman to get, in 1912, the MB & CM, topping her Madras Medical College class in surgery and becoming the first woman surgeon in India. She was to go on to become the first woman legislator in India and the first Woman Deputy President of a Legislative Council, presiding over its proceedings many a time. Subbalakshmi for her part was to join the teaching staff of the Lady Willingdon Training College when it was founded in 1923 and, before long, became its Principal. She too served in the Madras Legislative Council (1952-56) but did not receive the same honours as Muthulakshmi, getting a Padma Shri to the latter’s Padma Bhushan. They died within a year of each other, Muthulakshmi in 1968, Subbalakshmi the next year.
To have two women born in the same year, make their path-breaking marks in college at the same time, and do so much for disadvantaged women during the same period was a remarkable coincidence. But it was also a remarkable fight and, later, contribution against all odds. Who remembers it all today?
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