Pandita Ramabai: The Scholar Who Rescued the Forgotten

In India long ago, most girls were not taught to read at all. But Ramabai's father believed a girl could learn, and he taught his daughter the oldest and hardest books in the land. She learned so much that when she grew up, the wise men of India gave her a special name: Pandita, which means “the learned one.” A woman had almost never been given such an honour.

But Ramabai had seen how hard life could be for women and girls in her country. When a girl's husband died, she was often treated as if the sadness were her fault — these “widows,” some of them only children, were made to suffer, and many had no one at all to care for them. And when famine came and the crops failed, it was the orphans and the poor who starved.

Ramabai became a follower of Jesus, and she believed He had given her all her learning for one purpose: to rescue the people India had forgotten. So that is what she did. She travelled into the worst of the famine and gathered up starving girls and orphans by the hundreds and brought them home.

She built a place for them near the city of Pune and called it Mukti, which means “Salvation.” It grew into a great home where thousands of rescued women and children were fed and taught and loved, and learned trades so they could stand on their own. And like William Carey, Ramabai gave her people the Scriptures in their own words, translating the whole Bible into her Marathi language — a labour of many years that she finished only just before she died.

Ramabai grew famous, and was honoured even by those who did not share her faith, for her learning and her tireless love for the poor. But fame never turned her head. She wore plain clothes, ate simple food, and worked beside the very women she had rescued, until they were not her servants but her family.

Pandita Ramabai took the learning that was meant to make her famous and spent it, every bit, on the widows and orphans nobody else would help.