The Storm of 1893

“What time I am afraid, I will put my trust in thee. In God (I will praise his word), In God have I put my trust, I will not be afraid; What can flesh do unto me?”

— Psalm 56:3-4, ASV

The Morning Prayers

By the spring of 1893 the school in Poona had more than sixty pupils, most of them widows. And more and more of them were coming to Ramabai’s room in the early morning.

Soonderbai Powar, an Indian Christian teacher who had become Ramabai’s close friend and colleague, returned from a visit to England that spring and found “all the girls attending Ramabai’s prayer-meetings.” Helen Dyer, who knew the school well, estimated that fully half the widows were by then coming to the morning prayers. Some of the girls in the school were not widows but orphans or poor girls whom Ramabai had taken in and supported herself, and a few she had adopted outright. These girls, Dyer wrote, she felt it her duty to instruct in the Christian faith.

That May, on a Hindu festival day during the hot-weather holiday, Ramabai offered the girls a choice between a picnic and a day of prayer. According to Dyer, about thirty of the sixty-odd girls chose to stay for prayer, and more than twenty of them said they wished to learn about Christ.

Nothing was done in secret. And that was precisely the problem.

The Resignation

On 13 August 1893 the three Hindu gentlemen whose names appeared on the school’s reports as its advisory board in Poona wrote to the Ramabai Association in Boston. They were R. G. Bhandarkar, the Sanskrit scholar; M. G. Ranade, the judge and reformer who had welcomed Ramabai to Poona eleven years before; and C. N. Bhat. Their letter is worth quoting at length, because it put their case fairly and it was the case that most educated Hindus believed.

Encouraged, apparently, by some expressions contained in your Committee’s communications, Pundita Ramabai has during the past year or so departed from the lines of strict neutrality on which the institution was started and managed for some time. We have strong reasons to believe that many of the girls are induced to attend her private prayers regularly, and read the Bible, and that Christian doctrines are taught to them. Pundita Ramabai has also shown her active missionary tendencies by asking the parents and guardians of girls to allow them to attend her prayers, and in one case at least, to become Christians themselves; and we are assured that two of the girls have declared to their elders that they have accepted Christ. Such a departure from the original understanding cannot fail, in our opinion, to shake the stability of the institution, and alienate public sympathy from this work. We are sorry our individual remonstrances with the Pundita Bai have proved of no avail. If the Sadana is to be conducted as an avowed proselytizing institution, we must disavow all connection with it.

According to the Association, they published their resignation in the newspapers before it reached Boston; according to Ramabai, they sent a circular to parents and guardians asking them not to send their girls to the school.

The effect was immediate. The Poona papers, already hostile, grew fiercer. Anonymous letters threatened Ramabai’s life. Parents came and took their girls home. Ramabai’s own register records that thirty-one pupils were withdrawn: twenty-six widows and five others. She kept track of every one. Twelve went to the Poona High School for girls, where some of her former advisers paid fees for some of them. Nine later came back. One remarried. One went to train as a nurse. Four, she wrote, were “kept at home in a miserable condition,” and one “went to her destruction.”

Two Sides

It would be easy to tell this story as a simple conflict between a faithful Christian and her persecutors. It was not. Ranade and Bhandarkar were not bigots. They were among the most liberal Hindus of their day, men who had risked their own standing to support women’s education and widow remarriage. They had supported Ramabai when few others would. They had lent their names to her school on the understanding that it would not be used to make converts. And they believed, with reason, that the understanding had been broken.

They were not wrong about the facts. Girls were attending Ramabai’s prayers and reading the Bible, and she did not deny it. She did deny that there had been any conversions or baptisms, though rumour said that two of the widows had privately professed faith in Christ. In an interview published in a Madras newspaper she told her side of the story.

They had nothing practically to do with the internal management of the Sadan. … We went on satisfactorily for some time, but when the number of girls attending my private prayers rose to about twenty, the matter was reported to them. 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 — I could not restrict my intercourse with the pupils. As a Christian was at the head of the institution, the girls must be more or less under Christian influences.

Some time earlier, according to Macnicol (drawing on Kelkar’s life of Tilak), she had told one of her leading critics plainly that she could not undertake that a Hindu girl entering her school would always remain a Hindu.

Where does the truth lie? Both sides were honest, and both had a point. The reformers were right that the school had been presented as neutral, and that a school run by a devout and persuasive Christian, whose room was always open, could not in practice be neutral in the way Hindu parents understood. Ramabai was right that she had never compelled anyone, that she had never made the Bible a school subject, that the girls who came to her prayers came freely, and that no one could reasonably ask her to shut her door against a girl who wanted to pray. The underlying problem was that the promise of neutrality had been made in America, in good faith, by people who did not fully understand what it would mean in Poona. Even in America the message had been double: her own book had told Christian readers that such a school would “prepare the way for the spread of the gospel,” and Boston had soon been embarrassed by newspaper talk of “converts.” Ramabai herself had helped to make it. Now she could not keep it in the way her critics understood it, and she would not pretend to.

The Americans sided with her. Mrs. Judith Andrews, chair of the Association’s executive committee (the very committee whose letters the advisers had blamed), reached Bombay on Christmas Day 1893 and stayed more than six months. She concluded that Ramabai had kept faith with her promises as she understood them, that no girl had been compelled, and that many of the charges against her were baseless. The Association stood by her. But the school was badly damaged. “The last and greatest of all storms,” Ramabai wrote, “in 1893 did us a great deal of harm, — we have not yet recovered.”

The Girl Who Was Hidden

There was another episode that year, less creditable to Ramabai’s friends, and it should be told. One of the girls she had taken in was not a widow but the young daughter of a Bombay woman attached to a temple, placed with Ramabai by a Hindu reformer. When the storm broke, the reformer turned against the school and urged the mother to reclaim her daughter. The girl did not want to go back. The girl was first sent into a Bombay hospital to gain time. Then Helen Dyer and a friend living in her house moved her out of the city to a missionary, and kept Ramabai herself in ignorance of where she was. The case came before the police. The mother did not appear. The missionary then baptised the girl, at the girl’s own wish but without Ramabai’s knowledge or consent.

Dyer, who used the phrase “justifiable expedients” for the steps Ramabai took to keep girls from being carried off, plainly approved. Ramabai, by Dyer’s own account, had begged for the girl to be produced, fearing that otherwise the school would be ruined. The episode added fuel to the fire, and it showed how difficult it was for Ramabai to control what others did in her name. It also shows why Hindu parents feared her school. It is to her credit that she wanted the girl returned. It is to the discredit of some of her friends that they did not listen.

Not Afraid

What kept her going? According to Helen Dyer, in that terrible year three promises from the Bible came to her. One was from Isaiah: “No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper” (Isaiah 54:17, ASV). Another was Jesus’ word to his disciples: “In the world ye have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” The third was from the prophet Malachi: “prove me now herewith.” That last one would matter greatly in the years ahead.

The psalm at the head of this chapter was written, its title says, when David was a fugitive in the hands of his enemies. “What time I am afraid, I will put my trust in thee.” Ramabai was afraid, in 1893. She was a woman alone, attacked by the leading men of her own people, threatened with death, abandoned by friends, her school half empty, her work in danger of collapse. She did not pretend not to be afraid. She trusted anyway. And she came out of that year freer than she went in.

Looking back, she wrote that she had been delivered twice: “I have been 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.” It is hard not to think that the first deliverance was won in the storm of 1893. The second had already begun, quietly, two years before.