Worse Than Demons

“A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.” — Ezekiel 36:26 (ASV)

Ramabai and Srinivas were alone. For more than three years they walked. “We had walked more than four thousand miles on foot without any sort of comfort,” she wrote, “sometimes eating what kind people gave us and sometimes going without food.” The figure is her own: from the south to Kashmir and across to Calcutta. Srinivas earned “only four rupees a month, and sometimes much less.”

One freezing night by the Jhelum river in the Punjab, with no blankets, they dug “two gravelike pits,” lay in them, and covered their bodies, “except the heads,” with dry sand. Picture it: the children of a learned scholar, lying in two graves of their own digging.

They kept up their prayers and fasts, but their faith was draining away. “We had fulfilled all the conditions laid down in the sacred books and kept all the rules as far as our knowledge went,” she wrote, “but the gods were not pleased with us and did not appear to us.” (Admirers later added stories about these years, like Ramabai working as a cook. She never told them herself, so they are left out here.)

You might expect her to say that hunger taught her to care for the hungry. She said the opposite.

Yet I must say that suffering alone is not able to produce sympathy for other sufferers. My own experience of the unconverted state of mind, and the present knowledge of my fellow country women and girls, whom I have ample opportunity to study, shows that suffering in itself has rather a hardening effect on the human heart. It takes away almost all delicate feelings from the soul, making it as hard as a stone.

In 1878 they reached Calcutta, the capital of British India. A young woman of about twenty who could recite thousands of Sanskrit verses and compose new ones on the spot caused a sensation. The pandits gave her the title Sarasvati, after the goddess of learning, and she became known as Pandita Ramabai: Ramabai the scholar. (Later claims that she was the first woman ever so honoured cannot be checked.)

Asked to lecture to high-caste women on their duties according to the scriptures, she read the Hindu law-books carefully for the first time. They contradicted each other on almost everything, she found, except two things:

that women of high and low caste, as a class, were bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as untruth; and that they could not get Moksha as men.

Moksha is liberation from the endless round of death and rebirth. A woman's only hope, the books taught, was to worship her husband as a god and be born a man in some later life. “I wanted something more than the Shastras could give me,” she wrote, “but I did not know what it was that I wanted.”

In Calcutta she also met Christians for the first time. They gave her a Bible in Sanskrit. She thought reading it was “quite a waste of time,” and yet, “I have never parted with it since then.” And when she told the famous reformer Keshab Chandra Sen that women were not allowed to read the Vedas, he only smiled and gave her one. It was permission to think for herself.

What Ramabai said about suffering is worth remembering. People sometimes say hard times make you a better person. Sometimes they just make you colder and more guarded. She believed what changed her heart was not suffering but grace: God doing what Ezekiel promised, taking away “the stony heart” and giving “a heart of flesh.”

One thing to do this week: think of one way something hard has made you colder toward other people. Ask God honestly to soften that place, then do one small kindness this week for someone you would usually ignore.