The Storm of 1893

“What time I am afraid, I will put my trust in thee.” — Psalm 56:3 (ASV)

By 1893 the school had moved to Poona and had more than sixty pupils, most of them widows, and more and more were coming to Ramabai's morning prayers. According to Helen Dyer, one holiday about thirty chose a day of prayer over a picnic, and more than twenty said they wanted to learn about Christ. Nothing was done in secret. That was exactly the problem.

On 13 August 1893 three Hindu gentlemen who had lent their names to the school resigned. Two of them, Ranade and Bhandarkar, had welcomed her to Poona eleven years before. Their letter put their case fairly. The school had “departed from the lines of strict neutrality on which the institution was started,” they wrote. “If the Sadana is to be conducted as an avowed proselytizing institution, we must disavow all connection with it.”

Anonymous letters threatened her life. Parents took thirty-one girls home. She kept track of every one.

It would be easy to tell this as a simple story of a faithful Christian and her persecutors. It wasn't. Ranade and Bhandarkar were among the most open-minded Hindus of their day. They had risked their own standing for women's education, and backed Ramabai when few others would, on the understanding that the school would not make converts. They believed, with reason, that the understanding had been broken.

Ramabai told her side plainly. “We did nothing in secret. My room was always open. They asked me whether some of the girls attended my private prayers. I replied that they did. They then asked me to prevent them from doing so. I told them I could not conscientiously do that.” The Bible was never a school subject, and no girl was made to come.

Both sides had a point. A school run by a devout, persuasive Christian with an open door could not be neutral in the way Hindu parents understood. But Ramabai had forced no one, and she would not shut her door against a girl who wanted to pray. The promise had been made in good faith, in America, by people who did not see what it would mean in Poona.

Some of her friends behaved worse than she did. When one girl's mother came to reclaim her, though the girl did not want to go back, some of Ramabai's supporters hid her, kept Ramabai herself in the dark, and had her baptised without Ramabai's consent. Ramabai begged for the girl to be produced. It is to her credit that she wanted the girl returned, and to her friends' discredit that they did not listen. It also shows why Hindu parents feared her school.

What kept her going? According to Dyer, one promise that came to her that year was from Isaiah: “No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper.” She was a woman alone, attacked by the leading men of her own people, her school half empty. She did not pretend not to be afraid. She trusted anyway. Later she said she had been delivered twice: “first delivered from the slavery of man's opinions, from the fear of man which holds so many of my dear people, and a second time from the bondage of sin.”

Two years later some girls asked to be baptised. Six wrote to Boston: “This we have done out of our own free choice. No human being could have wrought this change in us, and no one could have induced us to become Christians.”

Being open about your faith can cost you friends, even good ones who are partly right. The answer is not to hide your faith, or to pretend the other side has no point. It is to be open, fair and unafraid. “What time I am afraid, I will put my trust in thee.”

One thing to do this week: think of someone who disagrees with you about faith or something important. Write down the strongest fair point they could make. Then, if the chance comes, listen to them properly before you answer.