| Kamala Nimbkar | |
| Birth Name: | Elizabeth Lundy |
| Birth Date: | 5 January 1900 |
| Birth Place: | Mount Holly, New Jersey |
| Death Date: | 29 August 1979 |
| Death Place: | India |
| Occupation: | Occupational therapist, educator |
| Children: | B. V. Nimbkar (son) |
| Relatives: | Nandini Nimbkar (granddaughter) |
Kamala Vishnu Nimbkar (January 5, 1900 – August 29, 1979), born Elizabeth Lundy, was an American-born occupational therapist in India.
Elizabeth Lundy was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey the daughter of Joseph Wilmer Lundy and Bessie Morris Roberts Lundy. Her father was a Quaker businessman.[1] She attended the Quaker George School, and earned a bachelor's degree in economics at Barnard College in 1926.[2] She returned to the United States later in her forties, to study occupational therapy at the Philadelphia School of Occupational Therapy.[3] [4]
Before college, Lundy worked as a secretary on a statistical study of coal miners, for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mines.[5] In India after she married, Nimbkar taught kindergarten by the Froebel method, and started several schools in that tradition.[6] She is credited as founding the first school for occupational therapy (OT) in India in 1948, when she started the OT department at KEM Hospital.[7] [8] In 1958 she founded a second school for OT in Nagpur. She was also founder of the All India Occupational Therapists Association (AIOTA) in 1952, and served as the association's president until 1959.[9] In 1960 she founded the Indian Society for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped, and was its secretary-general until the 1970s.[10]
In 1957 she represented India at an international conference on rehabilitation, held in Indonesia. She visited Baltimore therapy programs in 1959.[11] In 1965, she attended a reunion of patients and therapists from the Toomey Pavilion, a respiratory clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, hosted by Gini Laurie.[12] At a conference in Australia in 1972, she was honored with the Lasker Award by the International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled.[13] [14]
She edited and published AIOTA's journal, Indian Journal of Occupational Therapy from 1955, and The Journal of Rehabilitation in Asia from 1959. She also wrote articles for other scholarly journals.[15] Her book, A New Life for the Handicapped: A History of Rehabilitation and Occupational Therapy in India, was published posthumously in 1980.[16]
She talked about her life and work in an oral interview given to University of Cambridge[17]
Lundy met her husband Vishnu Nimbkar, an Indian businessman, in New York, converted to Hinduism, and moved with him to India in 1930.[17] She lived at the Sabarmati Ashram, the residence of Mahatma Gandhi, for several months upon arrival. She died in 1979, aged 79 years, in India.[18] Some of her letters are in her father's papers at Swarthmore College. Her son was B. V. Nimbkar, and one of her granddaughters is Nandini Nimbkar, both noted agricultural scientists. A secular, Marathi medium school in Phaltan, Kamala Nimbkar Balbhavan, is named after her.[19]