On 11 March 1889 the Indian activist
known as Pandita Ramabai opened her Sharada Sadan (or Home for Learning)
in Chowpatty, an area of Mumbai (which was then, under the British Raj,
known as Bombay). She designed this institution to further a cause dear
to her heart: security and an education for Hindu women who were
widowed young. With this, after spending five years abroad in England
and the USA, Pandita Ramabai launched her mission to improve the lives
and opportunities of Indian women.
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.
Such a marriage would have been impossible before the Civil Marriage
Act of 1872. Put together with Ramabai’s scholarly achievement it
represents a remarkable commitment to the questioning of tradition, The
marriage seems to have been happy, but it was brief. Ramabai’s husband
died less than two years afterwards, leaving her with a daughter. In the
first year of her widowhood she did three highly significant things.
She founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a society of high-caste Hindu women
working for the education of girls and against child marriage. She
published her first book,
Morals for Women, or in the original Marathi
Stri Dharma Niti.
And she testified before the Hunter Commission on Education in India,
an enquiry set up by the British government. (Her testimony, which was
later printed, is said to have influenced the thinking of Queen
Victoria.)
The year after that she sailed for England, where she hoped to study
medicine so that in the end she could return to India as a doctor. This
was startlingly innovative: those few women practising as physicians in
Britain at this date had trained in continental Europe or the USA.
Pioneering female medical students at Edinburgh University were just
then meeting with opposition both from stealthy committee work (changing
the rules from year to year, withdrawing permissions already granted)
and from raucous male students who screamed and threw mud. (The results
of a chronological search in
Orlando on Sophia Jex-Blake, on
Edinburgh, or indeed on medicine during the mid and later nineteenth
century, each tell a gripping story.) Jex-Blake founded the London
School of Medicine for Women in 1874, during Ramabai’s stay in England.
The Times
came out in favour of medical education for women only in 1878, after
she had left. Ramabai found, apparently, that a greater impediment to
her own medical education in England than being female or being Indian
was the fact that she was deaf. Instead she used her time in England to
continue the study of Christianity which she had begun in India (her
faith in Hinduism had been shaken by the deaths of her parents) and had
herself and her young daughter baptised as Anglican Christians.
Many aspects of English life appealed to her, but having rejected the
Indian caste system by her marriage she was uncomfortable with the
hierarchy of social classes in England. Her view of the country must
have been darkened when an Indian woman who was accompanying her
committed suicide. Having relinquished her own dreams of a medical
degree, she travelled on to the USA to attend the graduation from the
Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia of Anandibai Joshee, the first
Indian woman to become a medical doctor, who was also her distant
relation.
Pandita Ramabai was by now full of plans for reforms in India, and
spent much of her time in America (and briefly in Canada) fund-raising.
She took up American causes too, supporting in print the Massachusetts
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and speaking at the
first meeting of the International Council of Women in 1888 (a body
which brought together activists from the US, Britain and Canada). She
took a course in kindergarten teaching. In America she found the kind of
democracy and the kind of women’s education that she was looking for.
“The national might of the United States,” she wrote, perhaps drawing an
implicit contrast with Britain, “does not lie in its standing army,
cannons, and swords; it lies in the educational advancement and
diligence of the nation’s inhabitants.”
By the end of 1888 Pandita Ramabai was back in India, where she very
soon founded her Sharada Sadan, or Home for Learning. Women in this
community were taught the doctrines of Christianity, though they were
also free to continue in their Hindu beliefs. Ramabai ran into problems
in India when she was seen as part of the Christian missionary effort,
though the same perception was useful when fund-raising in the USA. In
fact her own position was ecumenical, in keeping with her
internationalism and her opposition to divisions of caste and gender.
The Sharada Sadan was only one of her many initiatives working for the
education of women (from young girls to adults) and for security for
widows. When famine and plague struck the central Indian provinces in
the late 1890s, she turned her attention to the housing and education of
famine victims, creating a new organization for this purpose. She
published in Hindi and Sanskrit as well as in Marathi and English. Her
travel books about England and America interestingly reverse the
conventions of the western travel writer in the East. Her last,
posthumous work was a translation of the entire Bible into Marathi. Half
a century after her death, A. B. Shah called her “the greatest woman
produced by modern India and one of the greatest Indians in all
history.”
It is humbling to realise how few Western feminists know about
Pandita Ramabai. A number of scholarly works have appeared about her
recently in both India and the west (notably by the Indian feminist
sociologist Meera Kosambi), but she is not widely known. In spite of her
privileged background and her conversion to Christianity, she is very
much a heroine for our times. And of course she did not work alone. Such
reforms as the Age of Consent to Marriage Bill, 1891 (which raised the
legal age only from ten to twelve), took the efforts of innumerable
doctors, journalists, and others, many of them women. Indian society as
it is today owes an immeasurable debt to feminist thinkers like Pandita
Ramabai.
This information is provided by Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, and comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, by subscription: see http://orlando.cambridge.org.
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In this book, Pandita Ramabai relates the story of her life
with all its ups and downs from her birth in a high caste Hindu Brahmin family
till her encounter with Jesus Christ. She describes how she overcame the many
prejudices of Indian society to help downtrodden and fallen women. She also
describes her own spiritual journey, both in
India
and in the West and how various persons and events influenced her in an
insightful, honest and down to earth manner.
This book is the personal testimony of one of India’s most revolutionary thinkers of her time – more than 100
years ago.
Her achievements were many:
- She
was an exceptional Sanskrit scholar of her time when women did not have
access to basic educational facilities. Recognizing this, she was
conferred the title of “Pandita” by Calcutta
University.
- She
was a social reformer and defying the caste system, married a Shudra.
- She
established Arya Mahila Samaj in 1882 for the cause of women’s education.
- In
1896, during a severe famine, she toured the villages of Maharashtra
and rescued thousands of outcast children, widows, orphans and other
destitute women.
- She
established the Sharada Sadan in 1889 which eventually blossomed into what
is known as the Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission.
- She
translated the Bible into her native language, Marathi, from the original
Hebrew and Greek texts.