People often ask why women “don’t just leave” when they are unhappy or unsafe in a marriage. But the question itself reveals a blindness to how marriage, as an institution, has historically functioned less as a union of equals and more as a contract where women often get the short end of the stick. As a social contract, marriage has been sold with the promise of security for women — it harkens back to a time where they weren't allowed to work and sustain themselves financially.

But this framework cannot be looked at as beneficial when the very condition of that security was dependence. The 'safety' marriage promised was inseparable from the subjugation it enforced. And within this unequal structure, divorce was treated as unthinkable. To step out of a marriage was to step out of respectability, often into social exile. For Hindu women in nineteenth-century India, it was barely a legal category at all. Which is why, when a young woman named Rukhmabai refused to live with the man she had been married to as a child, she was dragged into court and told to return to her husband or face prison, and she still chose the latter.

Born in Bombay in 1864, Rukhmabai’s childhood reflected the vulnerability of women’s lives under Hindu social custom. Her father died when she was a toddler, and her mother, Jayantibai, remarried a reform-minded physician, Dr. Sakharam Arjun. This household would shape her outlook: Dr. Arjun encouraged education, science, and independent thought. But before that support could bear fruit, her mother, adhering to the norm of early marriage, wed Rukhmabai at the age of eleven to a nineteen-year-old man named Dadaji Bhikaji. Like many child marriages of the period, the wedding was ceremonial and the girl remained at her maternal home. Yet as years passed, her husband began demanding conjugal rights.

In 1884, Dadaji filed a suit in the Bombay High Court for 'restitution of conjugal rights'. This doctrine, imported from English common law, was meant to compel spouses to live together. In practice it gave husbands the ability to drag wives into court and force them back into marital homes. But the case against Rukhmabai became a sensation. Justice Robert Pinhey, hearing the matter in 1885, delivered an unusual judgment: since the marriage had never been consummated, there was no question of 'restitution', and to compel a woman married off in childhood to cohabit against her will would be, in his words, “barbarous, cruel, and revolting". His stance, rare in the colonial judiciary, effectively dismissed the husband’s claim.

But Pinhey soon retired, and the legal tide shifted. The case was retried under Justice Farran, who in 1887 ruled in favour of Dadaji, ordering Rukhmabai to join her husband within a month or face six months of imprisonment. The ruling crystallised the stakes: it was not merely a domestic quarrel but a confrontation between an individual woman’s consent and entrenched law and custom. Rukhmabai, rather than submitting, declared she would choose prison over forced cohabitation.

Her defiance resonated far beyond the courtroom. Under the pseudonym 'A Hindu Lady', she wrote a series of powerful letters to the Times of India, insisting that no marriage performed without her consent could obligate her obedience. These writings gave voice to sentiments many women could not express openly. Reformers like Behramji Malabari and European supporters such as Dr. Edith Pechey championed her cause. Nationalist leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, however, denounced her stand as an assault on Hindu custom and an invitation to colonial interference in Indian society. The case was debated not only in Bombay newspapers but also in London journals. Rudyard Kipling, covering the trial, treated it as emblematic of the tensions between tradition and reform.

The outcome, however, was not a clear victory in court. Contrary to a popular but mistaken legend, Queen Victoria never issued a decree dissolving her marriage. Instead, in 1888, after years of public controversy, a settlement was reached: Rukhmabai agreed to pay Dadaji Rs 2,000 in compensation, and he withdrew his claim. He soon remarried, and she was free of the marriage contract. Though technically resolved by compromise, the case had the symbolic weight of a landmark divorce — the first time a Hindu woman had publicly fought to escape a child marriage and succeeded.

The reverberations were profound. Rukhmabai’s ordeal fuelled broader debates on the legal age of consent and the rights of women in marriage. Alongside the tragic 1888 case of Phulmoni Dasi in Bengal: the death of a 10-year-old girl after being raped by her 30-year-old husband, Rukhmabai's defiance helped galvanise support for the Age of Consent Act of 1891, which modestly raised the minimum age for consummation from ten to twelve years. While small by modern standards, it was a significant legislative acknowledgment.

Rukhmabai, freed from her unwanted marriage, chose a path that underscored her commitment to autonomy and service. Supported by reformers and women’s organisations, she sailed to England to study medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women and the Royal Free Hospital. Returning to India in 1894, she also became the country's first female practicing physician, working in Surat and Rajkot, particularly serving women who had little access to medical care. Her dedication earned her the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for public service, and after retiring in 1929, she continued to write, publishing a pamphlet arguing for the abolition of purdah.

Her life traced an arc from child bride to divorcee to doctor and reformer. At every stage she insisted on choice, whether it was rejecting a husband imposed in childhood or pursuing a profession that was at the time largely barred to women. When we look back and ask why women “don’t just leave”, Rukhmabai’s story reminds us that leaving was once tantamount to a revolution — one waged at the cost of public scandal, legal jeopardy, and the threat of prison. Her courage forced Indian society, however briefly and imperfectly, to acknowledge that marriage without consent was no marriage at all.

It is easy to read Rukhmabai’s ordeal as a barbaric relic from another century, but the distance is less than we imagine. The age of consent in India rose from 12 to 18 only as recently as 2012, and marital rape is still not criminalized in Indian law today. Rukhmabai’s story is a mirror reflecting how far we have come, what it took to get here, and how much further we still must go.

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