Remember the Days of Old

“Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations: Ask thy father, and he will show thee; Thine elders, and they will tell thee.”

— Deuteronomy 32:7, ASV

A Voice from Within

In 1896 the rains failed across much of India, and famine spread through the Central Provinces, north-east of Poona. Ramabai read the reports and felt the old memories stir. She did not want to go. Her school was still recovering from the storm of 1893. Money from America was barely enough for the girls she already had. She was thirty-eight, partly deaf, and tired. She argued with herself, and later wrote the argument down.

The human common sense said: “You had better stop here; and ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it,’ here. You have no means and no strength to do what you wish. Your powers are limited, and you will not be held responsible for not doing anything to help those famished people. Indeed, what can a weak woman do to help the dying thousands? Besides, the government of India and other benevolent people are doing what they can to relieve the poor and the needy. There is nothing for you to do.”

“I tried to quiet my conscience in this manner,” she wrote, “but louder and louder spoke the voice of God from within my heart: ‘Remember the days of old’; ‘Thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondsman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee’; and ‘Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?’ I could no longer keep still.”

The first of those verses is the one at the head of this chapter. Moses, near the end of his life, told Israel to remember where they had come from. Ramabai remembered. She remembered her father in the forest above Tirupati, and her mother at Raichur, and the bajri bread, and the sand-pits by the Jhelum. She had been a famine child herself. She could not now sit in a good house in Poona while other famine children died.

Sohagpur

At the end of 1896, having sent two workers ahead, she set out for the Central Provinces with a missionary friend. At the first town they visited, Sohagpur, they went early to the hospital to ask the doctor for permission to take orphan children. He was not there yet. Outside the hospital, three small children were walking.

Right before that hospital were walking three little famished, skeleton-like forms, and this first sight of their distress I shall never forget. … The eldest was a girl of about seven, the second a boy of five, and the youngest a baby-boy three years of age. The girl was protecting herself from the intense cold with a covering of rags, but the two boys had nothing on their bodies.

Their mother had died the day before. The youngest was desperately ill. They were crying for food, and Ramabai and her companion had none with them. Believing that they needed official permission before they could take the children, they went on to find the officer in charge of the poorhouse. When they came back, the children had gone. She searched the town and the country round it, and never found them.

“The memory of the three little ones, especially of the youngest child, who, I am sure, could not have lived many days after that, haunts me to this day. … The Lord have mercy upon us all, and give us repentance for not going to help such innocent little sufferers.”

It is characteristic of her that she did not blame the officials, or the doctor who was late, or the rules. She blamed herself.

The Poorhouses

She visited the government poorhouses and relief camps, and she described them without softening anything.

The first poorhouse we saw was no house at all. It was a grove in the outskirts of the town. Groups of famished people were seen sitting all round the grove. Some were lying down in heaps or sitting or lying in ashes on the dirty ground. … The food was nothing but dry flour and some salt. An accustomed eye could at once see that the grain was adulterated with earth before it was ground into flour.

She was fair to the government. “The government officials are kind, and are doing what they can,” she wrote. But the officials were few, and the thousands in their care were in the hands of overseers, cooks, and guards, many of whom stole the food and abused the people. Above all, she saw what happened to girls. Young women, widows, and orphans were being enticed away from the camps with sweets and promises and sold into prostitution. The traffickers, she wrote, were “carrying on a wholesale trade in young girls.”

At Itarsi she met a girl of fourteen in the street, an orphan held by a man who had taken possession of her and her little sister. The girl was afraid to leave him. Ramabai could not take her that day, but a week later, with the help of a young missionary and the police, the girl was freed, snatched back by her captor, and freed again. That night Ramabai took her to Jabalpur. She was already, Ramabai wrote, “ruined for life, and is suffering from horrible disease.”

“Hell has become a horrible reality to me,” she wrote, “and my heart is bleeding for those daughters of fond parents who have died, leaving them orphans. Who with a mother’s heart and a sister’s love can rest without doing everything in her power to save at least a few of the girls who can yet be saved from the hands of the evil ones?”

Three Hundred

From that first journey she brought back some sixty young widows to Poona. It cost more than eight hundred rupees, and most of her own school’s funds were already spoken for. She wrote a letter from Poona on 20 January 1897, which was printed and circulated to raise help. In it she told, in her own words and at length, the story of her parents’ deaths, and she announced a decision.

The Lord has put it into my mind to save three hundred girls out of the famine districts, and I shall go to work in His name. The funds sent to me by my friends in America are barely enough to feed and educate fifty girls, and several people are asking me how I am going to support all these girls who may come from Central India. … I do not know, but the Lord knows what I need.

“It seems a sin,” she added, “to live in this good house, and eat plenty of good food, and be warmly clothed, while thousands of our fellow-creatures are dying of hunger and are without shelter.” She and her girls, she promised, would live on one meal a day if necessary.

“It is a bold step I am taking without your permission,” she wrote to Boston before leaving again. The Association had agreed to support a school for high-caste widows, not a famine rescue mission, and when the news reached them her American supporters were alarmed. She had already gone. Within days she was back in the Central Provinces.

Girija

On the second journey she brought back more than a hundred widows, and helped to place many more orphans with other missions. One story from that journey she told at length, because it had taught her something about God.

They were travelling back from Damoh in a line of seven bullock carts, and stopped one morning to rest beside the river Herna, west of Jabalpur. One of the famine girls, still hungry, slipped into a field and picked some green gram. Ramabai made her give it back to the owner, gave the girls a lecture on honesty, and thought no more of it, until the ringleader ran away. A cart driver went after her and brought her back. Ramabai decided to make an example of her. She told the girl that she might go her own way, since she did not wish to stay, and that she would not be taken back. That evening, when the carts moved off, the girl said she was sorry and begged to come. Ramabai did not believe her, and ordered the carts to start without her.

The poor girl stood there for some moments; and then, her thin legs seeming not able to carry the weight of the body, she sat down on the ground and looked on the starting procession of carts in silence. … It was getting dark, the sky was clouded and looked as though it was going to rain. The dark mountain range and the river bank, now deserted by people, formed the background of that living picture of misery and helplessness. The world seemed very, very wide; and on it was thrown one little girl, friendless, homeless, and helpless. The picture is everlastingly engraved on my heart. … The sad picture was too much, too much for me. I ordered the driver to stop the cart, for I could not move an inch from that place.

As she sat in the cart, she thought of how often she herself had rebelled against God and gone her own way, and how often he had called her back. “The Lord taught me a precious object-lesson of His love in that desert place; and His Holy Spirit took Rom. v. 8 for a text, and showed me that, just as I was the object of His love, so ought the poor wandering girl to be an object of my love.” That verse reads: “But God commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, ASV).

She motioned the girl to come. The girl was too far away to hear, but she saw the hand, “and at once bounded and ran toward me, looking as though a new life had been put into her dead soul.” Her name was Girija, “a child of the mountain.”

It is a story about a hard woman learning to be soft, and Ramabai told it against herself. She had been right, by every rule of discipline, to leave the girl behind. She had also been wrong. The God who had waited for her had not waited until her repentance was genuine. He had called her while she was still a sinner. The whole of the work that was about to grow at Mukti was in that moment on the bank of the Herna.