Bhikaiji Cama

Date of birth: 24 September 1861

Place of birth: Bombay, British India

Date of death: 13 August 1936

Place of death: Bombay, British India

Movement: Indian independence movement

Major
organizations: India House,
Paris Indian Society,
Indian National Congress

Biography

Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama was born Bhikai Sorab Patel on 24 September 1861 in Bombay (now Mumbai) into a large, well-off Parsi family. Her parents, Sorabji Framji Patel and Jaijibai Sorabji Patel, were well-known in the city, where her father Sorabji – a lawyer by training and a merchant by profession – was an influential member of the Parsi community.
Like many Parsi girls of the time, Bhikhaiji attended Alexandra Native Girl’s English Institution.[1] Bhikhaiji was by all accounts a diligent, disciplined child with a flair for languages.
On 3 August 1885, she married Rustom Cama, a wealthy, pro-British lawyer with a desire to enter politics. It was not a happy marriage, and Bhikhaiji spent most of her time and energy in philanthropic activities and social work.
In October 1896, the Bombay Presidency was first hit by famine, and shortly thereafter by bubonic plague. Bhikhaiji joined one of the many teams working out of Grant Medical College (which would subsequently become Haffkine’s plague vaccine research center), in an effort to provide care for the afflicted, and (later) to inoculate the healthy. Cama subsequently contracted the plague herself, but survived. Severely weakened, she was sent to Britain for medical care in 1901.