The First Woman Engineer of India

It was the International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists in New York in the year of 1964.

An Indian lady attired in a simple saree, confidently walked up to the podium. She began her speech with a sentence that immediately caught the audience’s attention. She said, “If I had been born a hundred and fifty years ago in my country, I would have been burned at the funeral pyre with my husband’s body.”

The woman was Ayyalasomayajula Lalitha. She was speaking from a place, few women in India had ever reached before her. She was India’s first woman engineer.

But Lalitha’s story was not simply about becoming an engineer. It began much earlier, with a young old girl whose education was expected to end with marriage, but continued as a widow of eighteen years and who also had the responsibility of raising a daughter of four months with dignity.

Lalitha was born on August 27, 1919 in Chennai, formerly called Madras. She was the fifth of seven children in a middle-class Telugu family. Her father, Pappu Subba Rao, was a professor of electrical engineering at the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG). She had limited access to basic teaching as the girls in those days were not expected to study far in the field of education and was married in 1934, when she was fifteen years of age.

Her parents, however, believed marriage should not hinder in the way of education. They insisted on her to continue studying and ensured that she completed Class 10 level.

In September, 1937, Lalitha gave birth to her daughter, Syamala and four months later her husband passed away. It was a strange moment for the young woman. Life’s cruel turn of events made her a young widow and also a single mother at a tender age of eighteen years.

Widows in India at that time faced severe restrictions and were expected to live isolated lives of mourning. However, Lalitha defied these social norms. She did not see widowhood as the end of her life. She wanted an education and, more importantly, she wanted to be financially independent to carve out a meaningful life for her and her daughter. She pondered on becoming a doctor, as many women were doing so at that time, but decided that the untimely hours of the profession would prevent her from effectively taking care of her child.

In those days, engineering was strictly a male-dominated discipline. Like her father, her brothers also went on to became engineers. Inspired by her domestic ambience, Lalitha decided to become an engineer and thus began, her journey towards becoming India’s first woman engineer.

With the support of her family, she enrolled at Queen Mary's College in Madras and cleared her intermediate examination. Lalitha wanted to study electrical engineering in her father’s college, the College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG). However, no woman had previously enrolled in an engineering course at CEG, Guindy.

Her father refused to accept that as a reason and approached the Principal, CEG, Dr KC Chacko to request that Lalitha be allowed to join the engineering course. Dr Chacko was unsure about how to respond to this unique request and referred the request to Sir RM Statham, the then Director of Public Instruction. Sir Statham was more open to the idea of women empowerment and gave Lalitha permission to enrol. In 1940, Lalitha joined the CEG, Guindy, to study electrical engineering.

As there was no other woman student in the college, her enthusiastic father put up an advertisement in a newspaper, inviting women to take up engineering courses. Responding to this advertisement, two more women joined CEG, Guindy. They were PK Thressia and Leelamma George, both taking up civil engineering branch while Lalitha continued with the electrical engineering branch. Her love for electric engineering was so great that she often said, “electrical engineering runs through the blood in my arteries and veins”. These groundbreaking trio studied together and graduated around the same time during World War II, breaking rigid gender barriers in India’s technical education.

Lalitha's daughter later recollected in an interview that while her mother attended college, she lived with her uncle, and that her mother would visit her every weekend.

In September 1943 Lalitha received her Bachelor of Engineering degree. The completion of her education marked the beginning of her new life. At that time there was a government ruling for electrical engineers to study for four years on campus and one year on practical training. As the final requirement for the degree, Lalitha underwent a one-year apprenticeship at the Jamalpur Railway Workshop, a major repair and overhaul facility of Indian Railways.

Later she joined the Central Standards Organisation, Simla, in 1944 as a research associate. She then returned to Madras and spent some time assisting her father with his electrical engineering research innovations, i.e. Jelectromonium which is an electrical musical instrument, electric flame producer, smokeless ovens etc. She had to leave this job because of paucity in research funds.

She then joined the Associated Electrical Industries (AEI), later taken over by the General Electric Company (GEC), contributing to key national projects like the Bhakra Nangal Dam by designing transmission lines and substation layouts. She worked at AEI for nearly three decades until her retirement in 1977.

Lalitha was a brilliant engineer with a relentless spirit, and organisations began to acknowledge that. In 1953, the Council of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in London elected her as an associate member. She was promoted to full membership in 1966.

The most celebrated and documented achievement of her career was being invited to the First International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES) held in New York in 1964.

Subsequently, Lalitha became involved in international organisations for women engineers. She also became a member of the Women’s Engineering Society of London in 1965.

Lalitha served as the Indian representative on the Organizing Committee for the Second International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists (ICWES) held in Cambridge in July 1967. She played a key role in facilitating the attendance of five women engineers from India at the conference.

Lalitha also continued to speak up for women; underprivileged and widows. She travelled extensively in her later years, pursuing a passion she had little opportunity to indulge in during her working years until she passed away from a brain aneurysm in 1979, when she was only 60 years old.

Lalitha lived most of her life with her sister-in-law who helped to bring up her daughter Syamala. Shymala took degrees in mathematics and became a mathematics teacher.

Later, in an interview to a magazine Shymola recalled, “My aunt lived in Kolkata and had a son about my age. We were very close and so, amma used to go to work leaving me with my cousin and aunt. That’s how I grew up. Although, today, I can understand how important my mother is in the history of women’s education in India as well as in the history of engineering. Back then, all I knew was that my mom is an engineer,”

This may depict the exact truth in Lalitha's life. To the world, she was a pioneer, an embodiment in women’s empowerment. To her daughter, she was simply her mother. She never remarried and, according to Syamala, never made her daughter feel that she was missing a father.

(With various sources from the internet)

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