Sharada Sadan

“Wisdom hath builded her house; She hath hewn out her seven pillars:”

— Proverbs 9:1, ASV

The Home of Wisdom

Ramabai spent the six weeks after her return preparing, and on 11 March 1889 she opened her school in a rented house at Chowpatty, on the seafront in Bombay. She called it Sharada Sadan, the Home of Sharada, which is another name for Sarasvati, the goddess of learning. The name was a deliberate choice. It told the Hindu families of Bombay that this was not a mission school, and that it honoured learning in their own terms. It can be translated simply as “the Home of Wisdom.”

The opening meeting was chaired by a Hindu woman, Mrs. Kashibai Kanitkar, and a leading Marathi paper called it the first time an Indian woman had presided over such an occasion. Ramabai spoke about her travels and her plans, and she did not flatter the men in the audience.

Let the newspapers and the general public say what they will, there is not the least doubt that the condition of the women of our country is heart-rending in the extreme. It is we, and we only, who can ever have a real knowledge of the welfare of our people. Foreigners can never know. … Gentlemen, in your parliament no one has allowed one of us sisters to plead the cause of India’s unfortunate women; I am fully convinced that you men have no better idea of the oppression and woe suffered by Hindu women than the British Parliament has of the misfortunes of Hindustan.

It is worth noticing what she was saying. Indian nationalists complained that the British Parliament could not understand India because no Indian sat in it. Ramabai turned the argument on the nationalists themselves. They could not understand the women of India, because no woman was allowed to speak among them.

Two Pupils

When the meeting ended and the guests went home, the school had two pupils. One was a young widow, whose name was Godubai. She had suffered greatly in her husband’s family and had more than once tried to take her own life. She was not quick to learn, and teaching her needed patience on both sides. Four years later she married a widowed professor at Fergusson College in Poona, Dhondo Keshav Karve, who became one of the great pioneers of women’s education in India. The other was a girl named Sharada, not a widow, who came as a paying day-pupil.

By the end of the first three months there were twenty-two. By the end of the first year there were twenty-seven, twelve of them widows. The aim was to train them, above all, to become teachers themselves, so that they could earn their own living with dignity. And the girls were allowed to keep the rules of their caste, so that no Hindu family need fear that a daughter would be polluted by living there.

The girls were also allowed to sing, which in orthodox homes was thought unbecoming for a respectable woman. “We have happy times in the evening,” Ramabai wrote, “when all the girls come into my room and we sing together as best we can. We have no love songs to sing, no comic bits to say; but we sing hymns, and feel quite content. You see, they do not allow women to sing; they think it is a bad thing in a housewife. But we are getting unruly in this school of ours. We are going to turn the tide, and make it a good and honourable taste.”

The Open Door

Sharada Sadan was not a Christian school. Ramabai had promised her American supporters and her Indian advisers that it would be neutral in religion. The Bible was not taught in class. The girls were free to follow their own religion. But she did not pretend not to be a Christian. Every morning, in her own room, she read the Bible and prayed with Manorama. And she left the door open.

One of her American friends, Miss Sarah Hamlin, described what happened. Going to Ramabai’s room one morning, she found eight of the older girls sitting on the lounge, listening intently to the Marathi Bible. When Ramabai knelt to pray, they knelt with her. Afterwards each girl came up to her, and she spoke a kind word to each, and kissed them.

“These are my own private prayers,” explained Pandita Ramabai. “No girl is compelled to come in; but one by one they have come of their own accord. At first, when they heard me with Manorama, they peeped in the door: then, one by one, they ventured a little farther. Occasionally, one would sit, but all would leave when I knelt: now all remain.”

It is a lovely scene. The Association in Boston, worried by newspaper talk of “converts,” warned that more had been made of it than it deserved. But it contains the whole of the conflict that was coming. To Ramabai, the open door was a matter of simple honesty. She would not force her faith on anyone, but she would not hide it either, and she would not shut out a girl who wanted to hear. To her Hindu advisers, the open door was a breach of trust. The parents who sent their daughters to Sharada Sadan had been promised a neutral school. What went on in the Principal’s room, they felt, was part of the school, whatever the timetable said.

A Voice Too Small

That December the Indian National Congress met in Bombay. Among the delegates were a handful of women, largely because of Ramabai’s influence. She spoke in support of two resolutions about widows. She denounced the custom of shaving widows’ heads, and the belief that if a widow kept her hair it would bind her dead husband in hell, and asked the men how they would like to have their own heads shaved on the death of a wife. When she stood up to speak there was a crush of men trying to hear her. She began, according to the Indian Magazine’s report: “It is not strange, my countrymen, that my voice is small, for you have never given a woman the chance to make her voice strong!”

The next hot season, in 1890, she went back to the forest of her birth for the first time. “The whole ground,” she wrote to a friend, “seemed hallowed with the association of my beloved parents.”

Poona and the Board

In November 1890 the school moved to Poona, where living was cheaper and the climate healthier. The move brought it under the eyes of the Poona reformers, and also of their opponents.

At first a new managing board was formed in Poona, which claimed full control of the admission of pupils and the funds, and gave Ramabai one vote in twelve. Under it, according to the Association’s chairman, the school was run as strictly Hindu, and Ramabai herself was forbidden to enter the dining-room, the kitchen, or the corridor while the girls were eating. The American Association refused to accept these terms, and the board was dissolved in the summer of 1891.

That summer and autumn the Poona papers attacked her fiercely. She was accused of disloyalty to her own people, of taking money from Americans under false pretences, of interfering with her pupils’ religion, and of getting rid of the managing board so that she could teach Christianity openly. Some of the attacks were indecent. One editor later withdrew his charges and apologised. Worn out, Ramabai offered to hand over the school and its funds, and to let someone “wiser than herself” be put at its head. The Association in Boston cabled back: “Be firm. The Association supports you. Funds and letters coming.”

“Those were the darkest days in the stormy time,” she wrote. “I was in great doubt, and was at a loss to know what would be the best course to follow. When this cablegram came, I was sure you would support me, and I went on in the usual way.”

But the storm left its mark. “Although we are living in our own country, and among our own people,” she wrote, “we are continually made to feel that we are among a strange and hostile people in a strange land. We are utterly defenceless, and almost friendless, in this beloved land of ours.”

In July 1892 the school moved into a compound of its own in Poona, bought by the Association, with two bungalows on nearly three acres of bare ground, which she soon turned into a garden. Within a year it had sixty-two pupils. The Home of Wisdom had its house. The verse at the head of this chapter describes Wisdom building her house and hewing out its pillars, and then sending out her maidens to call to anyone who would come: “Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither” (Proverbs 9:4, ASV). Ramabai’s house was open to any widow who would come. The question that was about to tear it apart was how open its mistress’s own door should be.