From nurse to India's first woman Major-General: How Gertrude Alice Ram made history
On August 27, 1976, Gertrude Alice Ram made history as the first woman in the Indian Army to become a Major-General. Her leadership in military nursing broke the glass ceiling an d opened doors for women across the defence forces.
Her rise was not accompanied by fanfare or theatrics. She waved a hand over her “un-ostentatious mess flat” and told Banerjee, “A soldier must be prepared for everything. We have enough to live and be comfortable.”
On a late August evening in 1976, the back door of a modest mess flat in Sangli burst open. Inside, a woman in an olive-green skirt, slippered feet, and shoulders glittering with crossed swords and a star stood calmly, almost unassuming. “We were face to face with General Ram,” wrote Mukul Banerjee in Women On The March.
It had been only three days since Gertrude Alice Ram became India’s first woman to rise to the rank of Major-General, the Director of Military Nursing Services, and a pioneer who placed the nation alongside the United States and France -- then the only other countries where women had breached flag rank.
Unlike many celebrated military leaders, Ram’s story did not begin in privilege.
“Brought up the hard way she lost her mother at one and father when she was six years old,” Banerjee wrote.
Dependent on relatives, she longed for independence. Nursing, she later admitted, offered a way to both serve and stand on her own feet: “I wanted to be independent of relatives burdened with bringing me up.”
In 1944, at just 19, she joined the Indian Military Nursing Service. Two years later, she found herself caring for soldiers evacuated from the battlefields of Italy, reports 'India Today'. It was relentless work—two nurses for every 150 patients, days that blurred into nights, boots kept on even while sleeping so they could jump to attention when the wounded kept pouring in.
“Yes, one did get irritated,” she confessed, “but you looked at the patient, saw his suffering and you forgot about yourself.”
THE FLIGHT TO KASHMIR
By 1948, India was barely a year old as a nation, and conflict in Kashmir was testing its fragile peace. When six flight nurses were needed to evacuate the wounded from the valley, Ram volunteered.
Initially, she admitted, it was because she “had a friend in the region.” But soon, the mission consumed her.
Soldiers frostbitten, shivering, and barely clinging to life needed rescue. Flights took off at dawn and returned past midnight, the nurses often camping in whatever space they found because the aircraft had been diverted.
“Often we heard the booming fire and managed to escape,” she recalled. Death was a constant companion. Sometimes she would ask after a pilot who had flown her only days before, only to be told he was gone.
Yet she carried on.
The nurse had become a soldier in white, navigating the frontlines of a young republic.
No comments:
Post a Comment