Having Nothing

“as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” — 2 Corinthians 6:10 (ASV)

Ramabai owed her faith, as she saw it, to a book. So she gave her last years to translating the whole Bible into Marathi. Missionaries had translated it long before, but in high, literary language full of Sanskrit words that village women could not follow. She wanted “the simplest form of Marathi speech.” She learned Greek and Hebrew, with help from her students and from members of the Bene Israel, an ancient Jewish community of western India. How much of the final text was her own work and how much she supervised is not entirely clear. She thought it would take seven years. It took more than fourteen. The girls at Mukti printed it themselves, and she never allowed it to be sold. She had received the Bible as a gift, so she gave it freely.

One careful biographer thought something was lost in these years. Once she had defended her parents' faith; later she saw almost nothing good in it, and for years would not let Sanskrit be taught at Mukti. Great Christians can have blind spots. It is also fair to remember what she had seen done to women in the name of religion.

Her daughter Manorama grew up sharing her mother with hundreds of other girls. Whatever she felt, she did not record it. She gave her life to her mother's work. At nineteen she took charge of the school, and later she led praying bands and started a school of her own. Everyone expected her to carry Mukti on.

In July 1921 Manorama was taken to hospital and an operation was attempted, but, as Clementina Butler, who knew them both, wrote, “her heart was not equal to the strain.” She was forty. Ramabai was sixty-three, nearly deaf, and dependent on her daughter for almost everything. Her letter was short: “All I have to say is 'The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, Blessed be the name of the Lord.'”

She lived less than nine months longer. She set her house in order and named an English friend, Lissa Hastie, to carry the work on “on exactly the same lines.” Days before she died, too weak to speak, she wrote to the Bible Society's secretary: “I have been a Christian for thirty-eight years. I have found a great salvation through the Society's work. God bless you and yours.”

She died in her sleep at Mukti on 5 April 1922, shortly after the translation was finished. The cable to America said: “Ramabai Promoted.” Young women carried her plain coffin, and a thousand girls followed. All day people came from villages she had fed in every famine since 1896. High castes, low castes and outcastes stood together by the body of a Brahman woman who, in her youth, would have been polluted by the touch of most of them. An old Brahman widow leaned over her and cried, “O, Great Mother, Great Mother, whom now shall I call Mother? Who will care for me?” The poet Sarojini Naidu, who was not a Christian, called her “the first Christian to be enrolled in the calendar of Hindu saints.”

Mukti still stands at Kedgaon, still caring for girls and women.

Paul described the Christian life as “having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” Ramabai lost her family's wealth in a famine and her honour among her own people. She owned a few clothes and a Bible. She left behind a Bible in the language of village women, and thousands of women and girls who had been given back their lives.

She would not want to be remembered as a heroine. She called herself a sweeper, and she would want you to remember God. “I have come to believe the Word of God implicitly,” she wrote, “and I have found out by experience that it is true.” Then she turned to her readers: “I entreat you, my readers, to prove the Lord as I have proved Him.”

One thing to do this week: choose one promise of God in the Bible and “prove” it this week: act on it in one specific way, and keep a note of what happens.