On February 12, 1932*, 25-year-old R. Sivabhogam reached Rattan Bazaar in George Town, in then Madras, and started picketing a textile shop that sold foreign cloth. Her act was in response to the nationwide calls to boycott foreign goods as part of the Indian freedom struggle.
Defying the prohibitory orders and warnings by the police to leave the place, she continued to dissuade the customers from purchasing foreign cloth from the shop. She was arrested and presented the next day before a magistrate, who sentenced her to one-year imprisonment.
When the magistrate asked her whether she pleaded guilty or not, she said, “I did that deliberately,” unfazed by the prospect of imprisonment and in a display of unwavering commitment to the cause she espoused. She was taken to the Vellore prison the same night.
It was therefore no surprise when Sivabhogam later decided to pursue a career as an accountant, a profession that had only men until then. She etched her name in history by becoming the first woman accountant in India.
Her struggle was not just with entering a male-dominated field. After clearing the Graduate Diploma in Accountancy (GDA) examination, she had to fight a fairly protracted legal battle against a rule made by the British Raj, which barred anyone with a history of prison sentence from registering themselves as an accountant.
To place Sivabhogam’s pioneering achievement in context, one can notice the fact that when the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) was formed more than a decade later in 1949, there were only three women members in the country, including her. Even when she became the first woman president of the Southern India Regional Council (SIRC) of ICAI, she was the only woman among the 700 members in the region at that time, according to History of SIRC, a book brought out by SIRC in 2013.
Today, roughly 25% of the practising chartered accountants are women and 40%-45% of students studying to become chartered accountants are women. Sripriya Kumar, a Chennai-based chartered accountant, says it was because of the path laid by Sivabhogam that women of later generations were able to enter the profession with relative ease.
According to the book, Nightingales-How Eleven Women Overcame Obstacles On The Road Of Life, which was co-written by R. Sivakumar, a chartered accountant and the grandnephew of Sivabhogam, she was born on July 23, 1907, as the seventh and last child of her parents.
She went to Lady Willingdon School and Queen Mary’s College in Chennai and came under the influence of women who were active in the freedom struggle and working towards social reforms.
Citing the biography of freedom fighter S. Ambujammal, historian, writer and entrepreneur V. Sriram wrote in his article for The Hindu in 2016 that Sivabhogam was an active member of the Youth League in the 1920s. The organisation was headed by freedom fighter Rukmini Lakshmipathi and acted as a propaganda vehicle for the Congress.
He says Sister R.S. Subbalakshmi, the social reformer who did pioneering work for women empowerment, had a deep influence on Sivabhogam.
Historian and writer Nivedita Louis says Sivabhogam exemplified many such women leaders of that era, who were brought together by the principles of Mahatma Gandhi. Many came from a fairly privileged background, led a simple life, were fiercely independent, chose to remain single and were strongly committed to the freedom struggle and other larger social causes, she adds. Sivabhogam herself never married.
In an article penned for The Hindu in 2006, coinciding with her birth centenary celebrations, Mr. Sivakumar says she wore khadi and travelled only by bus throughout her life. In his book, he points out how she excelled in her profession and discharged her duties as an auditor with great integrity. She took a particular interest in helping out charitable organisations with their audits.
She encouraged and helped more students to take up the chartered accountancy course. An award instituted by her for the best woman candidate in the final chartered accountancy examination is presented even today as the R. Sivabhogam prize.
She died on June 14, 1966, at the age of 59. ICAI and SIRC celebrated her birth centenary in 2006. Last Saturday marked her 115 th birth anniversary.
( * While information available in the public domain places her picketing struggle and subsequent imprisonment inconsistently in the 1929-1931 period, this article has relied on information from The Hindu archives for the date.)
