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Pandita Ramabai
A Stream of Living Water
Weak, emaciated, and literally starving to death, the five members of the Ramabai family were faced with a dire decision: retreat into the nearby forest to die, or disgrace themselves by begging for food. They chose death.
As famine raged across India, Anant Shastri Dongre and his wife, Laxmibai, had donated the family’s entire savings to the Hindu gods in the hope that they would be relieved of their suffering. At last the day came when they had spent every cent and eaten the last of their rice. The family stayed eleven days and nights in the forest, where they subsisted on water, leaves, and a handful of dates. Both Anant and Laxmibai succumbed to starvation, along with their eldest daughter.
For more than three years after the deaths of their parents and sister, Pandita Ramabai and her brother wandered more than four thousand miles on foot. The siblings survived by eating wild berries and the occasional handful of grain soaked in salted water. They walked barefoot and slept under bridges. Once, in an attempt to find refuge from the cold, they dug two grave-like pits in a riverbank and buried themselves in sand, leaving only their heads exposed. They visited sacred places and temples; bathed in sacred rivers; fasted and performed penance; and worshiped gods, trees, animals, and Brahmans. “We had fulfilled all the conditions laid down in the sacred books, and kept all the rules as far as our knowledge went, but the gods were not pleased with us, and did not appear to us,” Pandita wrote.1 Finally, their faith extinguished, they settled in Calcutta.
Unanswered Prayers
Born in her father’s ashram, a religious community four thousand feet above sea level on the forested slopes of the Western Ghats, Pandita Ramabai was raised in an atypical Hindu household. Her father was a renowned Brahman scholar, orthodox in all his beliefs and practices but one: Anant believed that women should be educated in Sanskrit and have access to the Hindu holy texts. He taught Pandita’s mother, who then educated her own children, including her two daughters. Anant’s ideas about the education of women were nothing short of radical for the time.
Pandita, her parents, and her siblings traveled the countryside as pilgrims, reading the Puranas (the Hindu religious texts) in public. By the time she was twenty, Pandita had memorized eighteen thousand verses of the Bhagavata Purana. These readings served two purposes: they absolved the reader and listeners of sin, and they provided the reader with an honest living. People who gathered to listen to the Puranas were obligated to present gifts to the reader, including food, flowers, sweets, money, and clothing.
The system worked well for many years, until Pandita’s elderly father became too feeble to withstand the constant travel. Because the family members had, as Pandita described, “grown up in perfect ignorance of anything outside the sacred literature of the Hindus,”2 they were unfit for work and unable to earn a living. Their high caste prohibited them from doing menial labor or begging. “In short, we had no common sense,” said Pandita, “and foolishly spent all the money we had in hand in giving alms to Brahmans to please the gods, who, we thought, would . . . make us rich and happy. . . . But nothing came of this futile effort to please the gods—the stone images remained as hard as ever, and never answered our prayers.”3 Their savings spent or donated, Pandita’s family succumbed to the famine that swept through India between 1874 and 1876.
Converted and Baptized but Still Wandering
Pandita experienced her first taste of Christianity in Calcutta, where she finally settled after three years of wandering the Indian countryside. While curious and puzzled—she later wrote that when the Christians knelt to pray with their eyes closed, she assumed they were paying homage to the chairs they knelt in front of—she was not impressed. Pandita received her first copy of the Bible from these curious Christians, but she found the stories and language inaccessible and considered it a waste of time.
While in Calcutta, Pandita also delved more deeply into the sacred Hindu texts and was shocked to discover how women were viewed:
Women of high- and low-caste, as a class were bad, very bad, worse than demons, unholy as untruth. . . . The only hope of their getting this much-desired liberation from Karma . . . was the worship of their husbands. The husband is said to be the woman’s god; there is no other god for her. This god may be the worst sinner and a great criminal; still HE IS HER GOD, and she must worship him. She can have no hope of getting admission into Svarga, the abode of the gods, without his pleasure, and if she pleases him in all things, she will have the privilege of going to Svarga as his slave, to serve him.4
This did not sit well with Pandita. In fact, she lost all faith and hope in Hinduism as a result of her studies. “My eyes were being gradually opened,” she wrote. “I was waking up to my own hopeless condition as a woman, and it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I had no place anywhere as far as religious consolation was concerned. . . . I wanted something more . . . but I did not know what it was that I wanted.”5 Disenchanted with her culture and religion, Pandita made a bold move that shocked her peers: she married a Bengali lawyer, a man far below her Brahman caste.
Despite her husband’s reservations, Pandita turned toward Christianity. By chance she discovered and read a Bengali translation of the Gospel of Luke, and not long after she met a Baptist missionary who explained the book of Genesis to her, a story that was unlike anything she’d ever read before. The story struck her as true, though she admitted she couldn’t give any reasonable explanation for believing it.
After her husband died less than two years into their marriage, Pandita defied societal expectations by traveling with her young daughter to England. Widows in nineteenth-century India were considered social pariahs with virtually no rights and no status. Not only was a widow not allowed to marry again, but she was seen as the cause of her husband’s death and thus was viewed with fear and animosity. Forced to shave her head, the widow was allowed to eat only one meal per day and typically served as a household slave.
Pandita, on the other hand, refused to accept this lot. Ignoring expectations that she would retreat into her role as a widow, Pandita set her sights on a career in medicine and traveled to England to study there. While she stayed with a group of nuns, Pandita experienced a change of heart that refocused her energy from medicine to mission work. At the convent, for the first time in her life, she met women who were rehabilitated at a rescue home and who had subsequently rededicated their lives to the service of others. “I had never heard or seen anything of this kind done for this class of women by the Hindus in my own country,” she wrote. “Here I came to know that something should be done to reclaim the so-called fallen women, and that Christians . . . were kind to these unfortunate women, degraded in the eyes of society.”6
After reading the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John, Pandita acknowledged that Christ was indeed the Savior he claimed to be and that “no one else but He could transform and uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India and of every land.”7 A few months after her arrival in England, Pandita and her daughter were baptized into the Church of England.
Despite her conversion and baptism, though, Pandita struggled in her newfound faith. At times she still felt empty and unfulfilled, striving toward something in her faith but unsure of exactly what. She found the myriad Christian denominations, which she called “a Babel of religions,” confusing and even unnecessary, noting that such a proliferation of sects led to arguments and indicated a lack of unity. She also disagreed with much of the church doctrine. Pandita finally concluded that although she believed in Christ, “I shall not bind myself to believe in and accept everything that is taught by the church; before I accept it I must be convinced that it is according to Christ’s teaching.”8
“But a Drop in the Ocean”
After a visit to the United States in 1883, Pandita returned to Bombay and opened the Sharada Sadan (House of Learning), a residential school that trained girls and young women as teachers and nurses. She felt particularly called to help child widows. Given in marriage by their parents to a high-caste man at four or five years old, the girls were typically servants in their husband’s household until they were old enough to fulfill the traditional role of a wife. If, however, they became widowed, they were cast out of society and often turned to prostitution as the only means of survival.
Initially, Pandita did not directly instruct the students in religion, although she did read the Bible to them and pray with them every day. However, following a spiritual epiphany in 1891, she changed her approach to Christian education and evangelism. Eight years after her baptism in England, Pandita realized that although she had found Christian religion, she had not found Christ. As a result, she ceased reading books about the Bible and began to study the Bible itself, meditating on the messages God gave her. “There were so many things I did not understand intellectually,” she wrote. “One thing I knew by this time, that I needed Christ, and not merely His religion.”9 As a result of this epiphany, Mukti Sadan, which opened to provide shelter, sustenance, and education during the famine of the late 1890s, offered secular and Christian education and trained the girls to lead useful Christian lives.
Pandita was the first to admit that as a Brahman, a member of the high caste, she was a stranger to the conditions and needs of the so-called fallen women of India. Yet ever since she had witnessed the dramatic transformation of the fallen women in England, she felt compelled to help these same women in India, many who were “married to the gods” and employed by the priests as prostitutes in the Hindu temples.
In 1899 Pandita opened Kripa Sadan, the Home of Mercy. By 1900, in the midst of the famine, the home housed more than 350 girls and women, and altogether, Sharada Sadan, Mukti Sadan, and Kripa Sadan provided food, shelter, and education to more than one thousand girls and women. Still, the needs were overwhelming. As Pandita wrote in 1900,
My heart is burdened with the thought that there are more than 145 million women in this country who need to have the light of the knowledge of God’s love given to them. All the work being done . . . in this vast country is but a drop in the ocean. It will be a very small help to add our particle to that drop. But every particle added will increase the drop, so it will be multiplied and permeate the ocean until it becomes a stream of the living water that flows from under the throne of God, to give life and joy to this nation.10
In 1889 Pandita stood before two thousand delegates of the National Social Congress in Bombay. As she prepared to speak about two resolutions for gender reform, she waited at the podium for the crowd to quiet. “It is not strange, my countrymen, that my voice is small,” she began when she had the audience’s full attention, “for you have never given a woman the chance to make her voice strong!”11 Pandita Ramabai may have viewed her work as merely a drop in a vast ocean, but in giving voice to the voiceless, in speaking for the oppressed, she walked in the footsteps of Jesus.