The High-Caste Hindu Woman

“learn to do well; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

— Isaiah 1:17, ASV

Philadelphia

Ramabai reached Philadelphia in the first days of March 1886. On 6 March, in the house of Dr. Rachel Bodley, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, she met her relative Anandibai Joshee for the first time, and five days later she watched her graduate as a doctor of medicine, the first Indian woman to do so. Anandibai wrote of her admiringly, as a woman “delicate and flowerlike” who had yet, by her courage, “caused great yogis to quail before her.” It was a proud moment for both of them. It was also a short-lived triumph. Anandibai went home to India that year to take up a hospital post, fell ill with tuberculosis, and died early in 1887, at the age of twenty-one.

Ramabai had meant to stay in America a few weeks. She stayed nearly three years. Rachel Bodley’s house became her home, and Bodley herself became one of her closest friends. What held her was what she saw. “I am deeply impressed by and am interested in the work of Western women,” she wrote that summer, “who seem to have one common aim, namely, the good of their fellow-beings. It is my dream some day to tell my countrywomen in their own languages this wonderful story, in the hope that the recital may awaken in their hearts a desire to do likewise.”

She studied everything that might be useful to her in India. A Philadelphia woman showed her the city’s kindergartens, and in the autumn she enrolled in a course to train as a kindergarten teacher. She began to prepare a series of reading books for Marathi children, and when she found that illustrations were too expensive to have drawn in India, she bought hundreds of electrotype printing plates to take home. She visited schools and colleges. And she wrote.

The Book

The High-Caste Hindu Woman was published in Philadelphia in June 1887. Ramabai had it printed at her own risk to raise money, and by the time she left America some seven thousand copies had been sold, ten thousand within a few years. It is a short book, and an angry one.

She described the life of a high-caste Hindu woman from birth to death: the disappointment that greeted the birth of a daughter, the marriage of girls as young children to men they had never seen, the wife’s life in her husband’s family as the servant of her mother-in-law, and above all the life of the widow. She quoted the Hindu law-books against themselves. She described what she had seen herself. “A child of thirteen,” she wrote, “was cruelly beaten by her husband in my presence for telling the simple truth, that she did not like so well to be in his house as at her own home.”

She did not spare the British. English law in India, she pointed out, enforced child marriages through the courts. “Now, under the so-called Christian British rule, the woman is in no better condition than of old.” It was a line her Western admirers did not always quote.

Modern Indian scholars have called the book a feminist manifesto, and it is not hard to see why. It argued that women were half the nation, that the nation could not rise while they were kept down, and that the reform of Indian society must begin with the education of its women. Above all it pleaded for the child-widows, and it ended with a practical proposal. She would go home and start a school for high-caste widows, where they could be trained as teachers and so earn their own living with dignity. It would need help for about ten years, after which, she hoped, it could be supported by Indians alone.

I am fully aware of the great responsibility the trial — and it may be the failure — will involve; but as some one must make a beginning, I am resolved to try, trusting that God, who knows the need of my countrywomen, will raise up able workers to forward this cause, whether I succeed in it or not.

“Out of Nazareth”

The school she proposed would not be a Christian school. It would receive Hindu widows as Hindus, and leave them free in matters of religion. Bodley described the plan in her introduction: Ramabai “would make no condition as to reading the Bible or studying Christianity,” but would put on the shelves of the school library, “side by side, the Bible and the Sacred books of the East, and for the rest, earnestly pray that God will guide them to His saving truth.” That promise of neutrality would cause her great trouble later.

Bodley closed her introduction with a scene. Ramabai came into her library to say goodbye before a journey, and Bodley asked her if she had a last message for her readers.

“Remind them,” she replied, with animated countenance and rapid speech, as she clasped my hand, “that it was ‘out of Nazareth’ that the blessed Redeemer of mankind came; that great reforms have again and again been wrought by instrumentalities that the world despised. Tell them to help me educate the high-caste child-widows; for I solemnly believe that this hated and despised class of women, educated and enlightened, are, by God’s grace, to redeem India!”

When Nathanael first heard of Jesus, he asked, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46, ASV). The despised town produced the Saviour of the world. Ramabai believed that the most despised people in India, the child-widows, whom their own families considered cursed, could be the means of its renewal. It was a vision grounded in the gospel, and it would govern the rest of her life.

Boston

She took her cause to Boston, and Boston responded. In May 1887 a public meeting was held at Channing Hall. Because the school was to be non-sectarian, the leaders of the different churches could not sponsor it without dispute, and so the meeting was held under Unitarian auspices, with the support of Episcopalians such as the great preacher Phillips Brooks. On 13 December 1887 the Ramabai Association was formed. Its president was the writer Edward Everett Hale. Among its officers were Phillips Brooks, the Congregationalist Lyman Abbott, the temperance leader Frances Willard, and Rachel Bodley. It promised to support her school for ten years.

That night, it was later reported, she could not sleep for joy. “I am crying for joy,” she said, “that my dream of years has become a reality.”

For the rest of her time in America she travelled and spoke. She went as far as Canada in the north and the Pacific coast in the west. She gave more than a hundred lectures for the Association and many more on her own account, to pay her debts in England and America, and she insisted on repaying the sisters at Wantage for all they had spent on her. More than fifty local circles were formed to support her work. She also wrote a book in Marathi about America, describing to her own people the country she had come to admire, its schools, its women, and its freedoms, as well as its faults. It was published in Bombay in 1889.

Home

In November 1888 she sailed from San Francisco for India, by way of Japan and Hong Kong. As she set sail for home she was afraid. “I felt as if I were going to a strange country and to a strange people. I fell on my knees, committed myself to the care of our loving heavenly Father and sailed.” She had left India as a Hindu widow and was coming back as a Christian. She knew the welcome she could expect.

She landed at Bombay on 1 February 1889. She had been away nearly six years.

The verse at the head of this chapter is God’s command to his people through Isaiah: “seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” For three years in America she had pleaded for the widow, in lecture halls and churches and in a book that thousands read. Now she had to do what she had asked others to support. In less than six weeks, she would open her school.