The Better India · 13 hours ago

The Story of Dr Sarladevi Khot, Who Treated Communities in India & Africa in the 1900s

Dr. Sarladevi Khot delivered her own baby in 1932 in a Tanzanian village while her husband, also a doctor, tended to malaria patients elsewhere -- instructing a teenage girl to boil water and prepare scissors, then burying the afterbirth so jungle cats wouldn't come. Born in 1897, married at nine, widowed at ten during India's cholera pandemic, she defied every constraint of her time to become a physician who would spend a decade treating disease across Africa and decades more building trust for institutional childbirth in rural India, often paid just "25 paise, along with the gift of a coconut and a metre of cloth." Her granddaughter, Dr. Nilima Kadambi, a fifth-generation doctor now 63, grew up on these stories instead of fairy tales -- tales of a woman barely four and a half feet tall who seemed to her family like "a living legend." When Nilima faced her own moment of doubt during medical school, recovering from jaundice with exams looming, her grandmother's unwavering belief gave her no choice but to believe in herself too. The stories, now preserved in Nilima's book, reveal how courage can be passed down like an heirloom, quietly shaping who we become.