In terms of historical time periods, there is in India an unhealthy obsession with the ancient and the Mughal, in that we obsessively glorify the former and denigrate the latter. Frankly, and to our huge collective intellectual loss, we are not talking enough about other times: like, say, the 1800s. In fact if there is any past century the events and ideas from which continue to shape Indian and South Asian lives to this day, and fuel conversations even today, that is arguably the 19th century. A rich illustration of the continuing influence of that period is seen in a brilliant article by the renowned scholar of gender studies and Maharashtra studies, Meera Kosambi, titled The Meeting of the Twain: The Cultural Confrontation of Three Women in Nineteenth Century Maharashtra (1994).The overarching theme of this article is so extraordinary it would make for quite a sweeping historical drama. Around the 1880s, three young women from Maharashtra with different family backgrounds and vastly different personal contexts all voyaged to the “West” – a significant and highly uncommon thing for women from the subcontinent during this time – and then returned to India, to the “East”, to lead very different lives. One of them passed away soon after return, struck by tuberculosis – an ancient ailment that the West was about to vanquish even as its policies were making people in the East highly vulnerable to it. Another became a successful medical doctor and would go on to practice “Western” medicine for decades. The third converted to Christianity and immersed herself fully in social work and advocacy after toying with the idea of becoming a doctor. And all of the core East-West encounters in their lives occurred before India’s most feted East-West encounter of that time: the 1893 US visit of Narendranath Datta (aka Swami Vivekananda). [The terms East and West are imperfect terms, but they are used in Kosambi’s essay in a conventional, and not strictly academic, sense.]The three stars of Kosambi’s article are Rama-bai Dongre aka Pandita Rama-bai, Rakhma-bai Raut and Anandi-bai Joshi (the name her parents gave was Yamuna), all born within a decade of the 1857 Uprising. [I am adopting Nandini Patwardhan’s style in putting the hyphen before bai, which is absent in Kosambi’s article]. Kosambi writes that in 19th-century India, the East-West “interaction was inevitable, though neither voluntary nor friendly.” In Maharashtra, as in the larger subcontinent and in other parts of the globe, the reaction to the intrusion of European ideas “spanned the entire spectrum from hostility and resistance to admiration and emulation”. Still, when Kosambi was writing this circa 1994, not much was widely known about how women in India responded to the intellectual assault of colonialism. By a fantastic stroke of scholarly luck, there were in Maharashtra these three well-known women whose responses to Western influence had not only been preserved in the historical record, but were also highly different from each other. No wonder Kosambi was able to weave a deeply engaging historical analysis around their lives.To me, the essay’s fundamental plotline – three women from late nineteenth century India going to the US and UK and coming back with very different perspectives on what Indians should take and not take from them – is the fascinating stuff that makes historical research so rewarding. Kosambi lays out the women’s personal contexts first. Anandi-bai typified “orthodox Brahmin womanhood”; Rama-bai was also Brahman but not exposed to “the full force of a well-knit Brahmin community with its own pressures and compulsions”; and Rakhma-bai was from a Shudra caste, and “had the benefit of a more liberal non-Brahmin but upper class atmosphere of Bombay.”The trajectories of the lives of these three women are fascinating, and pour cold water on many mischaracterisations and stereotypes that we have inherited as received wisdom. For example, it was Christian missionaries in India and abroad who were extremely sympathetic to Anandi-bai’s plan to travel to the United States for medical studies, and who sponsored her travel and stay there. When in the US, at Philadelphia’s Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, the college faculty made several concessions so Anandi-bai could carry out her intentions to “make no change in my customs and manners, food or dress”. Kosambi writes that though Anandi-bai once spoke at a missionary event in Philadelphia on child marriage and “surprised her great audience by defending the national [Indian] custom”, the College Dean Rachel Bodley later reminisced that incident not with shock or mockery, but with empathy. Through the consistent support of missionaries, Anandi-bai lived there for three years, graduated, and then went back to India, still as much an “unconverted” Hindu as she was prior to her departure for America.Kosambi shows how all three women were in close agreement on the then-still-nascent demand for encouraging education for women in Hindu society, and they specifically championed modern professional (more specifically, medical) education. But beyond this commonality, their ideas and approaches diverged. Anandi-bai “stopped short of institutional social change, while both Rakhma-bai and Rama-bai were vocal and even militant in advocating such change”. In Rama-bai’s opinion, conversion to Christianity was an important personal step. Her book, The High Caste Hindu Woman, is a “heavily caustic indictment” of Hindu society and the inferior status of women in it. That she was highly disillusioned with her experiences and with the poor prospects of making radical changes as a Hindu, is evident from the claim in her book that the birth of a girl in Hindu households is tolerated only because “it is necessary for the continuance of the race that some girls should be born into the world”.Rakhma-bai was the only one among the three to live into post-independence, but is nevertheless the least represented in the archives, showing once again how one’s caste background shapes the relative abundance and paucity of one’s voice in the historical record. Most of what people know about Rakhma-bai pertains to her prolonged and unprecedented legal battle with her husband through child marriage, but that battle was effectively over by 1887, while she went on to live till 1955. Unfortunately, we know very little about her life and medical practice in her later years. Kosambi writes that after returning from the United Kingdom in 1895 (where she received her medical degree), she worked first in Bombay and then in Surat, where she would be till 1917, after which she joined a hospital in Rajkot. In fact Anandi-bai had also spent some time in Gujarat (and then the Bengal Presidency) accompanying her husband and his government job postings. This is yet another remarkable aspect of the lives of all the three women, in that they travelled extensively both within India and abroad at a time when most women in the subcontinent lived extremely restricted lives.Moreover, an astonishing coincidence that makes the combined stories of these 1890s women quite cinema-worthy, is that all three crossed paths with one other multiple times, in person and through correspondence. Both Rama-bai and Anandi-bai lived in the Calcutta region at about the same time in the early 1880s, and it so happened that when Rama-bai’s husband died, Anandi-bai invited her to stay at the latter’s home (Rama-bai couldn’t honour that invite.) Later in 1886 for her graduation ceremony in Philadelphia, Anandi-bai requested the college to invite Rama-bai who was then in England, and that request was granted. Rama-bai won many friends during her US visit, and indeed the Dean of Anandi-bai’s medical college, Rachel Bodley, ended up writing a thoughtful introduction to Rama-bai’s important book The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Rama-bai also engaged in correspondence with Rakhma-bai, and Kosambi writes that she “was a source of considerable moral support for [Rakhma-bai] during the entire ordeal of her prolonged court trial”. While Anandi-bai and Rakhma-bai do not seem to have had any direct correspondence – the former was in the US when the latter was going through the ordeal of her legal battles – an 1888 biography of Anandi-bai mentions a letter that her husband wrote to a US magazine in which he “insanely denies the plain facts” of Rakhma-bai’s court case (in other words, he was siding with her husband and with restrictive patriarchal ideas).Kosambi writes that beneath the general camaraderie and kinship between them lay at least a few “deep ideological chasms”. Anandi-bai had cultivated a public image which “valorised the patriarchal ideal and reinforced the belief that even a highly educated and capable woman must not cross conventional boundaries”, though she did “carve out a new space for women within the patriarchal framework”. If Anandi-bai had lived longer, Kosambi surmises that she would have been socially accepted in Maharashtra as a doctor, contrasting that possibility with the fact that Rakhma-bai, who had earned notoriety for her “rebellion” against patriarchy, was unwelcome in Maharashtrian society and had to move to Gujarat. As for Rama-bai, her work was informed by a “radical and feminist perspective” but she was marginalised by Maharashtrian society due to her acceptance of Christianity which made her vulnerable to “suspicions” of missionary activity (something that Indian Christians continue to face to this day).In elaborating the life trajectories, ideas, and beliefs of these three contemporaneous women who were similar in many ways but also extremely different in other others, Kosambi reaffirms some of the long-standing central arguments of humanities scholars: that people, even from the same country or province or caste group or family are complex, and that there is no single way of defining a nation or a culture (or even that hopelessly misused entity “civilisation”). It might now be trendy to denigrate ideas from the humanities disciplines as “woke”, but we ignore the fundamental facts about human nature that these disciplines illuminate, at our own risk. The beautifully interlacing stories of Rama-bai, Rakhma-bai, and Anandi-bai show us that humans and human societies are inherently diverse and complex, and this fact will always put a spoke in the wheels of the aggressive urge of demagogues and supremacists to control and homogenize them into singular identities.Kiran Kumbhar is a historian, teacher and former physician, currently affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.In his column ‘Past Forward’, Kumbhar provides us with a rear-view mirror that ensures we drive straight ahead.