Pandita Ramabai

At the end of the nineteenth century, famine swept through India once again. An Indian woman of almost forty went herself to the stricken areas in Central India and Gujarat. She was hard of hearing, a widow and a Christian. She came back with oxcarts full of starving girls, and a few boys as well. She went once more, and again she came back with children.

Historian Robert Frykenberg describes those journeys in the magazine Christian History. The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia speaks of hundreds of girls and women whom she rescued in the famine years between 1896 and 1900. Neither source gives an exact number, and I am not going to make one up.

The woman’s name was Ramabai. When she was twenty, scholars in Calcutta had given her the honorary title Pandita, scholar, for her knowledge of Sanskrit. She had founded a school for young widows, written books that were read in America, and lost the support of the Indian reformers who had first applauded her. On a bare plain near the village of Kedgaon she built a community that she called Mukti: salvation, freedom. There, in 1905, a revival began that was written about as far away as America. And there she translated the whole Bible into the language of ordinary women.

It began in a forest in the mountains, with a father who did something he was not allowed to do.

EIGHTEEN THOUSAND VERSES

Ramabai Dongre was born on April 23, 1858. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, had an ashram, a place for study and prayer, on the wooded slopes of the Western Ghats, near Karkal. That is in present-day Karnataka, in the southwest of India. The family belonged to the Chitpavan Brahmins, a high caste from the Marathi-speaking region around Pune.

To follow her story you need to know something about caste. Indian society was divided into groups you were born into, and they determined whom you ate with, married and mixed with. The Brahmins stood at the top. They were the priests and scholars, and they guarded Sanskrit, the sacred language of the ancient Hindu scriptures. Women were not supposed to learn that language.

Anant Shastri paid no attention to that. He taught his wife Lakshmi Sanskrit, and she later taught it to her youngest daughter. According to Frykenberg, other Brahmins shut him out for it. When the family lost the ashram for financial reasons, they took to the road. They became puranikas: reciters of the Puranas, long religious narratives, at pilgrimage sites all over India. They lived on what their listeners gave.

Ramabai grew up on the road. Several sources mention that she knew eighteen thousand verses of the Bhagavata Purana by heart. That number keeps coming back and probably goes back to Ramabai herself. I have not been able to check it anywhere else.

THE FAMINE OF THE 1870S

In the 1870s a great famine struck the south of India. The sources do not agree on the exact year: some give 1874, others 1876 or 1876 to 1878. What is certain is that Ramabai lost her father, her mother and her sister to it. They died of hunger. The Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia writes that her parents died within about six weeks of each other.

She was a teenager. With her older brother she travelled on, as the family had always done, and together they recited the ancient texts.

What does a beginning like that do to a person? In her later work Ramabai went looking for women and children who were dying on the streets. I do not want to turn that into psychology. But anyone who reads her story can see that she knew hunger from the inside.

PANDITA AND SARASVATI

In 1878 Ramabai and her brother arrived in Calcutta, today’s Kolkata, then the capital of British India. Great Britain governed most of the country, and Calcutta was the center of the colonial administration and of a new Indian elite that was thinking about reform.

The city’s scholars heard about a young woman who spoke Sanskrit and knew the ancient texts. They had her speak in the senate hall of the university. Afterwards she received two honorary titles: Pandita, scholar, and Sarasvati, after the Hindu goddess of knowledge. Frykenberg writes that she became famous throughout the country. She kept the title Pandita all her life, even after she had become a Christian.

In Bengal she also came into contact with Christians for the first time. A copy of the Gospel of Luke came into her hands. What she understood of it at the time, we do not know. Later she wrote that she had lost her old faith and was searching for something better with a hungry heart.

A LAWYER FROM A LOWER CASTE

In 1880 her brother died as well. That same year Ramabai married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer. He came from a lower caste, the Kayasthas. A marriage between a Brahmin woman and a man of a lower caste could not take place according to Hindu rites, so they married under civil law. In those days that was highly unusual.

On April 16, 1881, their daughter Manorama was born. Less than two years after the wedding, in February 1882, Bipin died of cholera.

Ramabai was now a widow herself, with a baby. In the India of her day that meant a great deal. Girls were married off young, sometimes as children. If the husband died, Frykenberg writes, what was often left behind was a homeless child widow, with no place in the family and no future.

She moved to Pune, then called Poona, at the invitation of the reformer M.G. Ranade. Within a few months she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, an association that stood up for the education of women and against child marriage. Before a British education commission led by William Wilson Hunter she pleaded for the education of girls. Hunter had her statement translated, and in this way made her known in Great Britain.

In Pune she also often talked with Nehemiah Goreh. He was a Brahmin like her, and had become an Anglican Christian. Anglican means: connected to the Church of England.

A WOMAN AT THE WELL

In 1883 Ramabai travelled to England. She wanted to become a doctor. Anglican sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage, a religious community near Oxford, helped her with the journey and gave her a place to stay. She learned English and taught Sanskrit herself. The medical training did not go ahead: she was turned down because her hearing was getting steadily worse.

With the sisters she came to know the Christian faith up close. According to an American church commemoration text, she worked in London alongside sisters who cared for women coming out of prostitution. She herself later said that the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John convinced her. There Jesus talks at a well with a Samaritan woman, an outsider with a past. Ramabai wrote that after reading it she realized “that Christ was truly the Divine Saviour he claimed to be”.

At the end of that chapter the people from that woman’s village say to her: for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world. (John 4:42)

In September 1883 Ramabai and Manorama were baptized in Wantage. Her baptismal name was Mary Rama. The news reached India too. The newspaper The Mahratta, on November 4, 1883, dismissed her conversion as something she had done for money.

“A CONSCIENCE OF MY OWN”

Ramabai was a woman who kept asking questions. She did not want to accept everything the Anglican church taught. She placed the Bible above church doctrine. She was also critical of British colonial rule. For years that caused tension with the sisters of Wantage.

In a letter of May 12, 1885, to one of them, she wrote: “I have a conscience, and a mind and judgment of my own.”

I find this one of the most beautiful sides of her story. Ramabai would not let herself be absorbed. She had become a Christian because she had come to know Christ, and she refused to trade that faith for an English package. Western church leaders found her difficult because of it. Indian critics, on the other hand, found her too Western. She stood in between, her whole life long.

From 1884 to 1886 she taught Sanskrit at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. The principal, Dorothea Beale, became a friend who later also supported her work with money.

A SCHOOL IN BOMBAY, MARCH 1889

In 1886 Ramabai crossed to America. In Philadelphia she saw her cousin Anandibai Joshi graduate, the first Indian woman to earn a medical degree. She stayed for two years. She travelled, spoke in churches and halls, and in 1887 wrote The High-Caste Hindu Woman, about the lives of women in the high castes. From December 1887 Ramabai Associations sprang up in the United States, from Boston to San Francisco. They pledged ten years of money for a school for Indian widows.

In March 1889 Ramabai opened the Sharada Sadan in Bombay, now Mumbai. It was a boarding school for widows and girls from high castes, and the school was explicitly neutral. She had promised not to convert the pupils. Hindu reformers such as Ranade and the scholar R.G. Bhandarkar sat on the advisory board. Shortly afterwards the school moved to Pune.

That same year she spoke in Bombay at the National Social Conference, according to Christian History as the first woman to do so. There she told the men in the hall that her voice was small, “for you have never given a woman the chance to make her voice strong!”

A few pupils wanted to become Christians. Ramabai sent them to a Christian mission for that. When this became known, the advisory board resigned and parents took their daughters away. The American Ramabai Association had an inquiry carried out and cleared her of trying to convert her pupils. The support of the Indian reformers was gone.

I am not going to decide who was right here. The reformers had entrusted her with a neutral school. Ramabai believed that a girl who wanted to follow Jesus should be allowed to. Both sides had something to lose, and both sides lost it.

A BURDEN THAT FELL AWAY

In 1891 something happened inside Ramabai herself. She had been baptized for eight years. Then she read the book From Death unto Life by the English preacher Haslam. She later described how a great burden fell away from her as she read. Historians speak of a second, evangelical conversion. From that moment she also became an evangelist: she wanted others to come to know Jesus the way she now knew Him.

We know this from her own testimony, the booklet A Testimony. Historians accept the year. What happened in her heart, we know only from her.

Did you also sit in church for years before the faith truly became your own? Ramabai was a scholar. She knew the Bible better than most people around her. And she described reading a book by an English preacher as the moment it really began.

BARE, STONY, TREELESS

Ramabai bought land near the village of Kedgaon, a few dozen kilometers from Pune, on the railway line. She herself described it as bare, stony, treeless and without water.

In 1895, according to Frykenberg, she went into the country on foot disguised as a sannyasini, a wandering Hindu ascetic, to rescue destitute women. Her first attempt to rescue seven women nearly cost her her life. I have found this story only in Frykenberg.

Then came the famine years with which this chapter began. Around 1896 and 1897 famine struck western and central India, and plague broke out in Pune. Ramabai brought the children she rescued from the famine areas to Kedgaon. In 1898 the American support for the Sharada Sadan came to an end. The work now became openly Christian and was given the name Mukti Mission.

Around 1900, according to various sources, roughly fifteen hundred to two thousand people lived there. Those numbers come from the mission itself. There were schools, a kindergarten, a hospital, looms, a printing press and farmland. A shelter was set up for women coming out of prostitution, Kripa Sadan. Mukti took in girls and women of every caste, including women with disabilities.

Not everyone saw it that way. The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak attacked her in his newspaper. He wrote about widows “caught in Ramabai’s net” during the famine years. Even today there are Indian writers who see her work as the conversion of vulnerable children. Christians see above all the lives that were saved. Both pictures belong to her history. A child who dies of hunger can no longer choose. And a child who is rescued grows up in the faith of the one who rescued it.

FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY WOMEN IN PRAYER

Around 1904, according to an account by the Christian History Institute, Ramabai sent her daughter Manorama and another woman to Australia, where a revival was under way. She hoped they would come back with spiritual power.

In January 1905 Ramabai called on the residents of Mukti to pray for revival: a time in which God brings people to repentance in great numbers. According to the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church that preserves this history, five hundred and fifty women began to pray together twice a day. Other accounts speak of just over five hundred. Ramabai also asked who was willing to set their studies aside for a while and go and preach in the villages. Thirty young women came forward. They met daily to pray for the Holy Spirit.

JUNE 30, 1905

What happened at the end of June we know from accounts by the mission itself and by visitors. On June 29, 1905, early in the morning, a girl saw another girl on fire. She wanted to fetch water to put it out, but then saw that the girl was not burning. A teacher found her praying. That is how the accounts tell it. Whether anyone really saw flames, or described an experience in that way, no one can verify anymore.

The next evening, June 30, Ramabai spoke quietly to the women. According to one account, about a thousand women began at the same time to confess their sins out loud. Ramabai stopped speaking and let it happen. There was weeping and praying, some prayed for hours, others made up songs on the spot.

The revival continued in waves until 1907. Teams of women from Mukti went out to other mission stations, and revivals came there too, among other places in Pune, Dhond, Allahabad and Bangalore. Minnie Abrams, a teacher at Mukti, invited the missionary Albert Norton to attend a prayer group. Norton wrote that a Marathi-speaking woman prayed fluently in English, a language she did not know, and that other women prayed in languages that no one in Kedgaon understood. According to the Assemblies of God, there was speaking in tongues in 1906.

In this way Mukti became a name in the young Pentecostal movement, the stream that emphasizes baptism in the Holy Spirit and gifts such as speaking in tongues. American Pentecostals came to see it. Historian Edith Blumhofer writes that Ramabai valued their support but would not let herself be tied to their doctrine. She herself did not speak in tongues. She said that she did not “make a special point of the gift of tongues.” When the revival died down, Mukti and the Pentecostals went their separate ways. The Mukti Mission still exists, without a Pentecostal identity.

A BIBLE FOR THE WOMEN OF PUNE

The Marathi Bibles that already existed were too difficult for many women in the villages. Ramabai wanted a Bible in Marathi as the women around Pune spoke it. She learned Hebrew and Greek, so that she could translate from the original languages. According to one source she began in 1904. The sources speak of roughly twelve to eighteen years of work.

She did this work together with others. Her pupils helped, and women from Mukti printed and bound the books. Clementina Butler, an American missionary writer, called it “the only Bible in the world produced entirely by women”.

In 1919 Ramabai received the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal from the British government for her social work.

A WOODEN CROSS IN KEDGAON

Ramabai had hoped that Manorama would take over the work. Manorama had studied in America, had come back and stood beside her mother at Mukti. She died in 1921, according to one source already in 1920, after hard work for a mission school.

Ramabai kept working on the Bible. On April 5, 1922, she died at Mukti, sixty-three years old. According to Christian History, a few hours earlier she had checked the last proofs of her translation.

Amritlal B. Shah later called her the greatest woman modern India had produced. In 1989 the Indian state issued a postage stamp bearing her portrait. The Church of England commemorates her on April 30.

She died on the land she had once called bare, stony and without water. Her grave is marked by a wooden cross.