As Abraham

“By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.”

— Hebrews 11:8, ASV

Not Knowing Whither

Four years later, in Philadelphia, Ramabai tried to explain to Rachel Bodley what it had meant to leave India.

I could not have done this unless I had felt that my faith in God had become strong: it is such a great step for a Hindu woman to cross the sea; one cuts oneself always off from one’s people. But the voice came to me as to Abraham. … It seems to me now very strange how I could have started as I did with my friend and little child throwing myself on God’s protection. I went forth as Abraham, not knowing whither I went.

She was not yet a Christian. She had read some of the New Testament, and she had listened to Miss Hurford and Father Goreh. But she already knew the story of Abraham, and she already thought of her journey in its terms. The verse at the head of this chapter describes it: “he went out, not knowing whither he went.” God had said to Abram, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee” (Genesis 12:1, ASV). Ramabai had no country, no kindred, and no father’s house left to leave. But she was leaving her caste and her people’s good opinion, and she knew she might never have them back.

Wantage

She landed in England in the spring of 1883, and the Sisters of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin met her at the ship and took her to their convent at Wantage, a market town at the foot of the Berkshire Downs, south-west of Oxford. The Wantage sisters were an Anglican religious order of the High Church kind, devoted to prayer, teaching, and works of mercy, with a house in Poona, where Miss Hurford had worked. One of them, almost certainly Sister Geraldine, took Ramabai under her care. “The Sisters took me to their Home,” Ramabai wrote, “and one of them who became my spiritual mother, began to teach me both secular and religious subjects.” She learned English there, and it was there that she spent her first year.

Her plan had been to study medicine. It did not work out. She was already partly deaf, whether from scarlet fever or from the hardships of her wandering years, and she was told that her deafness would make it impossible for her to train as a doctor. It was a hard blow. She had crossed the sea to become a doctor for the women of India, and now she could not.

A worse blow followed. Her friend and companion, Anandibai Bhagat, who had come with her from India, took her own life a few months after they arrived. The reasons have never been clear. Some people at the time, including the Oxford scholar Max Müller, suggested that the young woman had been terrified of being pressed to become a Christian. Others have seen other causes. None of her published accounts mentions it. She was twenty-five, and she had now lost her parents, her sister, her brother, her husband, and the friend who had come with her from India. For a time, it seems, she was badly shaken.

Fulham

Then something happened that she never forgot. The Mother Superior sent her for a change of air to one of the order’s houses in London, and there she was taken to see the rescue homes at Fulham, where the Sisters of the Cross worked among women who had been prostitutes.

The Sisters there took me to see the rescue work carried on by them. I met several of the women who had once been in their Rescue-Home, but who had so completely changed, and were so filled with the love of Christ and compassion for suffering humanity, that they had given their life for the service of the sick and infirm. Here for the first time in my life, I came to know that something should be done to reclaim the so-called fallen women, and that Christians, whom Hindus considered outcasts and cruel, were kind to these unfortunate women, degraded in the eyes of society.

She had never seen anything like it in India. “I had not heard anyone speaking kindly of them, nor seen any one making any effort to turn them from the evil path.” The Hindu law, she wrote, commanded that the king should cause such women “to be eaten by dogs in the outskirts of the town.” Here, the women whom society had cast out were nursing the sick in the name of Christ.

She asked the sister who was teaching her what it was that made Christians care for these women. The sister read to her the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel: the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well.

The Woman at the Well

It is not hard to see why that chapter struck her. The Samaritan woman belonged to a despised people, whom the Jews would not touch. She had had five husbands and was living with a man who was not her husband. She came to the well at midday, alone, when the other women had gone. And Jesus, a Jewish teacher, spoke to her, asked her for a drink, told her the truth about her life without condemning her, and offered her “living water.” “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst” (John 4:14, ASV). She was the first person in John’s Gospel to whom Jesus plainly said that he was the Christ. And she went back to her town and told everyone.

Ramabai had spent months reading the Hindu law-books and discovering that they had nothing to say to a woman except that she was “worse than demons” and could hope for salvation only through her husband. Now she heard of a teacher who went out of his way to speak to a woman of the worst reputation, and offered her, directly, the gift of God.

She spoke of the Infinite Love of Christ for sinners. He did not despise them but came to save them. I had never read or heard anything like this in the religious books of the Hindus. I realized, after reading the fourth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, that Christ was truly the Divine Saviour He claimed to be, and no one but He could transform and uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India, and of every land.

“Thus my heart was drawn to the religion of Christ.”

Goreh’s Book

Her heart was drawn. Her mind still needed convincing, and she was not a woman who would believe anything without reasons. The reasons came, she said, from Father Goreh. “I was intellectually convinced of its truth on reading a book written by Father Goreh.” Goreh was the author of a searching critique of the Hindu philosophical systems from a Christian point of view. He also wrote to her from India, and she wrote of one of his letters: “His humble, sweet voice has pierced my heart. I think no one would have had the power of turning me from the Brahman religion but Father Goreh.”

It is worth noticing that the two voices that brought her to the point of faith were, one, a sister of an English order showing her Christians caring for outcast women, and, two, an Indian Brahman convert showing her, in her own intellectual tradition, why Christianity was true. She needed both. She was never satisfied with a faith that was only feeling, or with one that was only argument.

Baptism

On 29 September 1883, at Wantage, Ramabai was baptised in the Church of England, and Manorama with her. She took the baptismal name Mary. According to Macnicol, she was baptised in Wantage parish church by Canon William Butler, the founder of the order, with Sister Geraldine among the witnesses; later accounts call Geraldine her godmother. She was later confirmed.

She was calm about it, not ecstatic. “I was comparatively happy,” she wrote, “and felt a great joy in finding a new religion which was better than any other religion I had known before. I knew full well that it would displease my friends and my countrymen very much; but I have never regretted having taken the step. I was hungry for something better than what the Hindu Shastras gave. I found it in the Christian’s Bible and was satisfied.”

She was right about her countrymen. When the news reached Poona, the friends who had helped her there were dismayed, and the orthodox felt vindicated. The brilliant Brahman widow who had stood before the Education Commission had gone to England and been lost to the Christians. For some of her countrymen, she has never been forgiven.

But there is one more thing to say about this baptism, and Ramabai herself said it. What happened at Wantage, she came to believe, was real, but it was not the whole story. She had found the religion. She had not yet found the Person. That would take another eight years.