Radium Madonna
What does a Polish physicist from the early 20th century have in common with a character played by a Tamil actress from the 1960s? More than you might think. Both navigated love, loss, and the lab—and both challenged what women were allowed to do with knowledge.
Polish-born Marie Curie (1867–1934), a two-time Nobel Prize winner, is the only person to ever receive the award in two different fields of science. Her life was proof that a woman could contribute to modern science through original insight, not just through dull, relentless work. Marie and Pierre Curie, a happily married couple, jointly won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 for discovering the phenomenon of radioactivity. Following Pierre’s untimely death in a road accident, Marie took over the running of their lab and his physics professorship at Sorbonne University. She won her second Nobel Prize in 1911—this time solo, for Chemistry—for isolating the radioactive element radium and studying its properties. This remarkable element had the power to destroy tumors and found immediate application in medicine. This was no esoteric finding understood only by scientists—it had real-world impact.
Radium Madonna, as she has been called, also established that a woman could aspire to a loving marriage, motherhood, and a successful career in science. She is still an inspiration to young women interested in the sciences the world over. Surely, Indian women who were enrolling in college in large numbers in the 1960s would have seen her as a role model as well. But how did popular culture reflect this shift? In Tamil cinema, the educated woman was just beginning to make her entrance.
In the 1961 film Paalum Pazhamum, Dr. Ravi (Sivaji Ganesan), a star physician, joins the hospital where Shanti (Saroja Devi) is a well-liked and dutiful nurse. Seeing a young man in his care die of cancer, the doctor is moved to find a cure for the disease. In addition to his clinical duties, he begins to do cancer research in earnest. When Dr. Ravi tells Shanti that one of the patients—an otherwise hopeless case—might be a good candidate for a brand-new drug, she concurs. She has read the pathology report and has already taken all the preliminary steps needed to make No. 608 the trial case.
It turns out the nurse was a medical college student who had to drop out after the fourth year. Her uncle, a drunk, could not pay the fees for the final year, and she now makes a living as a nurse. She has, however, continued to follow research advances in cancer out of her own interest. The physician-researcher is impressed when he reads her notes from current literature. “What a pity! If only you had finished your medical training, you would have made a great doctor,” he says with feeling, Sivaji-style. He is an orphan too, but a rich family adopted him and paid for his medical education. No such luck for her.
Once Dr. Ravi and Shanti get married, she helps him in his research: watching as he runs experiments, conducting quick literature searches, fetching references, and cleaning the lab glassware. At one point, she even waits with a towel when he washes his hands at the sink. Despite the physician’s original pronouncement—that she knows as much about cancer as any qualified doctor—Shanti is depicted as a lab attendant, not a scientific collaborator.
Consumed by the idea of helping her husband succeed, the former nurse neglects her health and ends up contracting tuberculosis. Dr. Ravi now wants to care exclusively for his beloved wife. Dismayed by his change in focus, she leaves the house. Believing her to be dead and reluctantly marries Nalini (Sowcar Janaki). She speaks impeccable English but, alas, has no training in science. When Nalini tries to help him in the lab, she ends up causing an accident that blinds the good doctor—temporarily.
Given its conceit, the film was far less satisfying than it could have been. Among the movie’s few redeeming features is a lovely duet—“naan pesa nenaipadhellam,” which literally means “you should voice my thoughts.” If you’re thinking, like I did, I have my own ideas and opinions and can voice them very well, hold your fire. Both man and woman sing the same phrase. The husband wants his wife to experience all the wonders the world has to offer, same as him—a novel sentiment in a Tamil film.
In the end, Dr. Ravi gets his sight back, reunites with Shanti, and the couple re-dedicate themselves to finding a cure for cancer. Nalini, who is from a rich family, graciously files for divorce and goes to Switzerland, where she will train with the Red Cross and serve the sightless. Giving her a new purpose in life was so much better than killing off the suddenly extraneous character. For an educated woman, there is more to life than matrimony seems to have been the message.
Today, young people may well find this melodramatic black-and-white film overly long and unwatchable, but I fondly remember that segment—about 20 minutes into the film—when Sivaji Ganesan, who plays the physician, recognizes that the nurse Shanti could have been every bit as good a doctor as he is, and says so with conviction. Tangentially, there is a defense of the work female nurses must do as part of their duty but was frowned upon—physically tending to male patients, speaking to them cheerfully to keep up their spirits, and so on. It was not a bad beginning for educated women in Tamil movies.
And the cure for cancer? In real life, treating cancer has always been a matter of balancing potent tumor-killing therapies with how much of the therapy the patient’s body can tolerate. The cure, in some cases, could be as lethal as the disease. Radium-based irradiation treatment for cancer has been entirely replaced by artificial short-lived radionuclides—made possible by Marie’s elder daughter, Irène. In 1935, Irène won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with her husband, for her work on the synthesis of artificial radioactive elements. In laboratories worldwide, researchers continue to work on wresting truths from nature, finding more effective, benign ways of treating cancer and alleviating human suffering in general.
So, what binds a Polish physicist and a Tamil nurse across time and fiction? A refusal to let brilliance be dimmed by circumstance. Shanti, fictional though she is, represents the yearning of women who were denied formal credentials, but did not forsake curiosity.
