Preface

“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, Is God in his holy habitation.”

— Psalm 68:5, ASV

The first five volumes of this series told the stories of Watchman Nee in China, John Hyde in the Punjab, Corrie ten Boom in Haarlem, Mary Slessor in south-eastern Nigeria, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther on the Niger. This sixth volume returns to India, to a woman who was born in a forest in the Western Ghats in 1858 and died at Mukti, her settlement at Kedgaon outside Poona, in 1922, and who in between became one of the most remarkable people of her century.

Pandita Ramabai was many things at once, and people have never agreed which of them mattered most. She was a scholar of Sanskrit, so learned that the pandits of Calcutta acclaimed her with the title Sarasvati, after the goddess of learning. She was a pioneer of women’s rights in India, who told a British commission in 1882 that the women of her country were “oppressed and cruelly treated” by the men, and who wrote a book that a modern scholar has called an Indian feminist manifesto. She was a widow and a single mother at twenty-three. She crossed the sea to England at a time when a high-caste Hindu woman who did so was thought to have lost her caste for ever. She became a Christian, argued with the Anglican sisters who had baptised her, lectured across America, and came home to found a school for child-widows that was attacked by the leading Hindu reformers of her day. She walked into the famine districts of Central India and brought back hundreds of starving girls. She built a community at Kedgaon that at its height fed and housed some two thousand women and children, without an endowment or a bank balance. She saw a revival there that spread across India. And in the last years of her life she translated the whole Bible, from Hebrew and Greek, into the everyday Marathi of the village women she loved.

She also called herself a sweeper. “I sweep into this compound as many as I can get,” she told a missionary who came to work with her in 1901, “child-widows, deserted wives, and orphans of every kind.”

Why Her

This series is called Portraits of Courage, and courage in Ramabai’s case took an unusual form. She was not a martyr. No one put her in prison. Her courage was the courage to think for herself and to act on what she thought, whatever it cost her. It cost her a great deal. When she was a girl it cost her family their standing among the Brahmins, because her father refused to marry her off as a child. When she married, it was across caste, to a man her world regarded as far beneath her. When she became a Christian, many of her own people counted her a traitor, and some still do. When she refused to be told what to believe by the Christians who had baptised her, they feared for her orthodoxy and rebuked her. When girls in a school she had promised would be neutral in religion began coming to her Christian prayers, and some of them asked to become Christians, the reformers who had supported her resigned in anger. And when she stood between the British government and the famine girls it had failed to protect, she warned that if the state again licensed vice, “British iniquity will reach its climax,” words that her British biographers do not quote.

She did all this as a woman, in a society that gave women almost no public voice, and she did much of it half-deaf, often ill, and always short of money. She did it, as she came to believe, in dependence on God. The verse at the head of this preface is one she would have recognised as a description of her own work. God is “a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows.” She spent her life trying to be his hands.

Her Own Words

We are fortunate in having a good deal of Ramabai’s own writing in English. The High-Caste Hindu Woman, published in Philadelphia in 1887, is her own book. Famine Experiences in India, written in 1897, tells the story of her parents’ deaths in her own words. A Testimony, first printed at Kedgaon in 1907, is her account of her spiritual journey. Her letters to her American supporters were printed year by year in their reports. This book quotes her wherever it can, and marks the places where we depend instead on what others said about her.

Her biographers are a mixed blessing. The earliest were admirers who wanted to raise money for her work, and they told her story as a missionary romance, adding details she never gave and sometimes leaving out things she did say. The most careful of the older lives, by Nicol Macnicol in 1926, had access to sources in Marathi. Modern scholars in India and the West have written about her with great seriousness, some chiefly as a reformer and some chiefly as a Christian. The introduction that follows explains how this book has tried to find its way among them.

Her story is not always comfortable. She could be imperious and hard to work with. She changed her mind about important things, and said so. Her Christianity was not quite the Christianity of the missionaries who taught her, and she did not want it to be. Her faith grew in stages, and she was honest about them. For eight years after her baptism, she said, she had found “the Christian religion,” but not Christ. It is one of the most honest confessions any Christian has made, and it is part of why her testimony still rings true.

Like the Psalmist, she looked back at the end of her life and saw that she had been carried. “He upholdeth the fatherless and widow” (Psalm 146:9, ASV). She had been both, and she spent her life upholding others who were.