Dr Ansuyah Singh – an unusual woman of talent and beauty
For large periods of our history in this country, Indian women were largely invisible. In comparison to their counterparts in other communities, Indian women were the most occupationally stagnant group under apartheid rule. And although they fought alongside their men in the Satyagraha struggles, the taboos of culture, religion and other societal norms kept them locked in the restrictive duties of domesticity. Post-apartheid freedom has allowed for a renaissance among women achievers in the Indian community, in all walks of life, from medicine to sport. But the story goes back a long time ago, to when our mothers and grandmothers played a pivotal role in laying a foundation for us – the younger generation of women – to lean on. Who were these pioneers, stalwarts and frontrunners that we know so little about? Lest we forget,
Ralph Ellison reminds us of the condition of “historical amnesia” prevalent among a people wishing to forget their origins in their desperate need to be “assimilated into the country of their adoption”. This condition often results in people either filing away or forgetting aspects of their past, and reconstructing new identities without a clue of their indigenous heritage. POST is embarking on a project to resuscitate the memories of our early women pioneers and each week Devi Rajab will be covering the stories of women portrayed in her book, Indian Women From Indenture to Democracy. Our first profile is on Dr Ansuyah Singh
ANSUYAH Singh was an unusual woman of great beauty and talent. She was educated in Edinburgh at a time when few girls were educated let alone sent abroad to study. She trained as a medical doctor and returned to South Africa to live and work among her people.
She was born in Durban in 1917 and died at an early age of 61 in 1978.
Besides being a pioneer in the medical field who trained a generation of doctors, Ansuyah Singh was the first South African Indian woman to write a novel in English, Behold the Earth Mourns, in 1960.
Symbolically, 2016 marks the 56th anniversary of the novel’s publication.
Her beauty was legendary and the story goes that she was the model for the stately bronze statue of an Indian woman perched on a plinth in a pond outside the Tongaat Town Hall which was commissioned by the Saunders family in commemoration of Indian workers on the sugar estates.
It is alarming that there has never been any formal acknowledgement of Indian stalwarts, from Valiamma to Gandhi, in public places in South Africa and yet, some three and a half decades after her death, the memory of Ansuyah Singh lives on through this bronze depiction.
Ansuyah was a lady in the true sense of the word. She was a classic beauty who projected a natural elegance equal to nobility in any context.
I remember as a little girl being in awe of this combination of beauty and brains and I may add, charm.
When she wore western clothes she wore them with panache, sporting neatly coiffured French hairdos and classic suits with elegant court shoes.
And when she wore the sari she carried it off so well that she could easily have been mistaken for an Indian actress.
Ansuyah was very much a romantic and her writings reflect this.
One may almost say that she was trapped in the colonial era of the British Raj, where parties and a lavish lifestyle were the order of the day.
In a small way she recreated this world among friends of all hues whom she entertained into the wee hours of the morning with music, dancing, drinking and lively conversations at her Spanish-style villa on Winchester Drive, high up in the Reservoir Hills area of Durban.
Ansuyah was born at a time when the girl child was not valued as much as sons.
For Rathipal Chathrapal and Rani Singh, however, their three daughters were received with great pride and treated like sons.
Ansuyah was the eldest, followed by her sisters Rathi and Piryiam.
One was a medical doctor, the next an attorney and the third a school teacher, a rather unusual accomplishment for girls in those days.
The story goes that when Rathipal was pitied for having had the ill fortune of producing three daughters and no sons, he was determined to treat his daughters like sons.
The first thing he did was to give each daughter his name and so they all adopted the middle name of Rathipal.
The second thing he did was to ensure that they each had a profession and also inherited his wealth.
The paternal side of the family hailed from Sultanpur in India where they were zamindari, or feudal landowners.
Rathipal’s father left India to settle in the South African colony as he was the second son, who was invariably bypassed in the line of inheritance and had to seek his fortunes elsewhere.
The maternal side of the family were from Peshawar in modern-day Pakistan.
In their new country, the family enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle.
Their home was set on five acres of land fully equipped with tennis courts and lush gardens where they entertained the likes of Sarojini Naidoo and other dignitaries who visited the country from India.
However, the Group Areas Act soon reared its ugly head to forcibly remove them to an area designated for Indians.
Educationally, Ansuyah was privileged.
At a time when girls were not encouraged to study, the Singh family placed a great emphasis on education.
The parents would drive their daughters to school and follow their progress with hawkish interest, not allowing the girls to lag in their educational achievements.
Although many other students may have been more gifted than the Singh girls, they were not afforded the same opportunities to achieve beyond their limitations.
Ansuyah attended the Durban Indian Girls’ High School and was a part of the first group to matriculate in 1935.
The girls were encouraged to study music and literature and Ansuyah became an accomplished pianist, while Rathi played the violin and Piryiam took singing lessons.
Rathi Singh became one of the earliest Indian woman attorneys to practise law in South Africa and was involved intimately in protest politics with her husband, the late JN Singh.
As the eldest child, Ansuyah was sent overseas to study medicine, since medical training facilities were not open to Indians in South Africa in those days.
Moreover, for the more privileged classes bestowed with some wealth, a British education was highly sought after.
Perhaps this thinking was a remnant of the influence of the British Raj, where the aristocracy and much of the economic elite, such as Nehru and Jinnah, were trained at British institutions.
Ironically, although they fought against the colonialists, they coveted their education institutions and lifestyles.
Accordingly, Ansuyah went to the University of Edinburgh and completed her medical degree in 1944.
She returned to South Africa after 10 years with Urvashi Sangamithra, an infant child from her marriage to an eminent Polish brain surgeon.
Unfortunately the pressures of family allegiances broke the marriage and Ansuyah remained in Durban to start her own practice.
She soon met Ashwin Chowdree, a businessman involved in the Natal Indian Congress, and married him.
Ansuyah was a trailblazer for South African Indian women, though she extended herself to embrace her broader South African identity, working closely with black communities in the semi-rural areas, where she established the Happy Valley Clinic, together with her colleague and close friend, Professor Crichton.
In 1954 she was the first Indian woman to receive a bursary from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to continue with her research at the clinic.
She was also responsible for training medical students who served their internships at the clinic.
Before this, in 1956, she was appointed to the Natal Provincial Administration, the first Indian woman in this position, where she served in the Department of Social Preventative and Family Medicine at the University of Natal’s Medical School as well as at the Institute of Family and Community Health.
Above and beyond her calling as a medical doctor, Ansuyah was a talented pianist, poet and writer.
She published Behold the Earth Mourns (1960), the first Indian novel in South Africa, which is now being unearthed after a long hibernation and heralded as a part of struggle literature by the American historian, Antoinette Burton.
The novel is set in the 1940s and tells of the hardships of the racist laws that inhibited marriage between Indians from the motherland and those of their adopted country, South Africa.
In a romantic setting, Ansuyah dramatically highlights how the Asiatic Land Tenure Act and the passive resistance movements came together to affect the lives of Indians.
Later she wrote Cobwebs in the Garden and a book of poems, Summer Moonbeams on the Lake (1970).
Ansuyah’s language style is reflective of her personality, which is flowery and romantic, and in some ways out of sync with the harsh realities of everyday life in South Africa.
Perhaps the lines in her poem written to Mahatma Gandhi to celebrate the centenary of his birth epitomise her life’s dreams:
“If men could throw the shades of subjugation “And build a new world upon truth’s intention “The songs of summer would fill the sky “Children and lovers in a new country would lie” – Ansuyah Singh