Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) She was born as Ramabai Dongre, a high-caste Brahmin. While she was still very young her family fell into poverty and took to the roads as religious vagrants, travelling the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent and learning many of its languages. When she was sixteen both of her parents died of starvation, closely followed by her sister. Only she and her brother were left. Despite these horrors, her taste for reading enabled her at the age of twenty to become the first woman in India to earn the titles of pandita (the feminine of pundit, or Sanskrit scholar) and sarasvati, after examination by the faculty of the University of Calcutta. She then married a Shudra, a man of a labouring caste who were debarred from education. Pandita Ramabai noticed a copy of the Gospel of Luke written in Bengali in her husband’s library (part of the fruit of William Carey’s work). She asked him about it, and he told her he got it at a missionary school. She wanted to know more, so they invited a missionary into their home to explain it to her. She felt drawn to Jesus and wanted to become a Christian, but she knew her husband would not agree to that. Pandita Ramabai and her husband had planned to start a school for widows, but after they had been married for only eighteen months, her husband contracted cholera and died. As a widow, she was not welcome in her husband’s home, so she returned with her daughter to her home territory. She settled in Pune and began to learn English. She wrote her first book there, entitled Morals for Women. Her work brought her into contact with Christian missionaries. In 1883 she accepted an invitation by a congregation of Anglican nuns to visit England. For some time Ramabai had felt a distance from her Hindu upbringing, both on spiritual grounds and on the basis of her perception of the status of women in India. While in England she undertook a serious study of the Bible and eventually asked to be baptized. News of her conversion provoked angry public controversy in India. Ramabai herself wrestled with her strong aversion to the cultural imperialism of foreign missionaries in India. She was determined that becoming a Christian should not be construed as a denial of her Indian culture and roots. The gospel of Christ represented for her the purest expression of her own spiritual intuitions, in particular her growing belief that to serve women and the poor was a religious and not simply a social work. She returned to India and continued her charitable work, among other things founding a center for unwed mothers, a program for famine relief, and a series of schools for poor girls. Now, ironically, it was her fellow Christians who became her public critics. They charged that because she made no effort to convert the poor women in her centers her own conversion was only superficial. Ramabai refused to be drawn into theological or confessional debates. I am, it is true, a member of the Church of Christ, but I am not bound to accept every word that falls down from the lips of priests or bishops.... I have just with great efforts freed myself from the yoke of the Indian priestly tribe, so I am not at present willing to place myself under another similar yoke. Ramabai criticized the profusion of Christian denominations, a fact, she believed, that was bewildering to the poor. The spirit of Christ as reflected in the Bible sufficed to satisfy her own religious questions. From that source she learned that the heart of true religion was the love of God and the love of ones neighbor as oneself. That she live by this creed, she insisted, was all that anyone had a right to ask of her. In later years she prayed not for the conversion of Hindus but for the conversion of Indian Christians. Along with establishing schools, in 1904, Pandita Ramabai began translating the Bible into Marathi, her native language, from the original Hebrew and Greek; the New Testament was published in 1913, and the complete Bible in 1924. In 1919, the King of England awarded Pandita Ramabai the Kaiser-i-Hind award, the highest honor that could be given to an Indian during the colonial period. Pandita Ramabai cared for her girls until her death in 1922. The mission in Pune is still active today.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 08:50:54 +0000
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