“My Great Sin”

“Deliver them that are carried away unto death, And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back. If thou sayest, Behold, we knew not this; Doth not he that weigheth the hearts consider it? And he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? And shall not he render to every man according to his work?”

— Proverbs 24:11-12, ASV

A Different Kind of Letter

Ramabai’s first famine letter, written in January 1897, was an appeal: sad, humble, full of Scripture. Her second, written in May, after she had been back to the famine districts and home again to a new disaster, was angrier. It is worth reading carefully, because it shows a side of her that many of her admirers preferred not to show. She was not only a gentle saint gathering orphans. She was also a fierce critic of injustice, and she did not exempt the British rulers of India from her criticism, or even her Christian friends.

“Kept”

On her second journey she went back to the government poorhouses looking for young widows and girls. In one of them she asked a girl of about fourteen whether she would like to come with her.

She said she would, but that she was “kept” there by some one. I did not understand her at first. So I asked her three times over, to know if she was detained there against her wish; but I understood the dreadful meaning of that word “kept,” when an old woman sitting beside her explained it to me. This was in a government poorhouse, where the government officers are supposed to protect the virtue of young women detained under some pretence or other. I told the deputy commissioner of that district about it. He was staying in the same town. He nodded his head, and said that it is quite possible that such things are happening in the poorhouses, but he cannot help it.

The women who worked in the relief camps, she wrote, were paid so little, and had to pay so much to the overseers who hired them, that young women “have either to starve or sell their virtue. There is no other alternative for them.”

Then she turned to the British army. In the princely states of Central India, she had learned, British soldiers and officers were among the chief opponents of missionaries living near them. When some American women missionaries had tried to settle near a military camp, the soldiers had refused to have them. The reason, she said, was plain: many of the soldiers wanted no witnesses to what they did. They took the daughters of the local people, kept them as long as they wished, and turned them out when they were tired of them. The parents, many of them respectable people of high caste, were powerless. “These devils in human shape keep the girls so long as they want, and turn them away when they get tired of them.”

The Contagious Diseases Acts

For years the British government in India had run a system of licensed prostitution for its soldiers, under laws known as the Contagious Diseases Acts. Women in the cantonments were registered, inspected, and confined if found to be diseased. Christian reformers in Britain and America had fought the system for years, and two American women, Kate Bushnell and Elizabeth Andrew, had recently exposed how it worked in India. The laws had been repealed, but there was pressure to bring them back.

Ramabai wrote without restraint.

Christians in India and England must wake up at this time, and try their best not to allow the dreadful demon, the C. D. act, to come into existence again. The birthright of Indian women had been trampled down long enough. If the C. D. act comes into existence again, British iniquity will reach its climax, and God’s vengeance is sure to come down on the ruling nation. The wicked must not think that the poor, ignorant women of this country have no defender; for “their Redeemer is strong, the Lord of hosts is His name: He shall thoroughly plead their cause.”

“British iniquity.” “God’s vengeance … on the ruling nation.” These were not words that a colonial subject wrote lightly, and they are not words that appear in the admiring biographies written by her British friends. But they are hers, and they belong in her story. She had written ten years earlier that “under the so-called Christian British rule, the woman is in no better condition than of old.” She had not changed her mind. She was grateful to the British for many things, and she supported the government when she thought it was right. She did not think that being a Christian meant excusing a Christian nation’s sins against the women of her country.

The Magistrate

When she came back to Poona early in 1897, she found that bubonic plague had reached the city. The authorities, terrified of its spread, were imposing drastic measures, and many of them fell hardest on the poor.

The city magistrate, a Mr. Plunkett, ordered her to remove more than a hundred of her famine girls from Poona within forty-eight hours. She had nowhere to take them and no money to move them. He told her, in effect, that she had brought them there, and she could take them away again, or send them to the segregation camp. “To have brought the girls here to save them from starvation and death,” she wrote, “was my great sin.” She would not be allowed to keep any famine girls in Poona, even in hired houses, nor to enlarge her school. Her compound of nearly three acres was to hold only thirty people.

She was furious, and her letter shows it. She wrote that “the reign of terror had begun in Poona,” and that the magistrate had come under the influence of the Poona men, “of all men in India … famous for their disregard of women’s feelings.” She added a sharp reminder that he too had once had a woman “to nurse him and rock his cradle when he was a helpless little baby.”

It is not a saintly letter. It is a very human one. She had brought starving children out of the famine and was being treated as if she had brought the plague. And the consequences were real. She sent the girls to camp in the open at Telegaon, some twenty miles away. The water was bad and the sun intense. Within a week one of the school’s own pupils, “a nice, healthy child, the only child of her old father,” died of sunstroke. Two others died later.

Kedgaon

There was one place left. In 1894 or early 1895 the school had bought a farm at Kedgaon, a village on the railway some thirty-five or forty miles from Poona, as a source of fruit and income. There was no shade, no proper building, and no water supply fit for hundreds of people. But there was land, and it was outside the municipality.

“A little over five weeks ago I took all my girls to dwell at Kedgaum,” she wrote in May. They lived in sheds fenced with thorn bushes. The heat was intense, and the girls fell ill with fever and sore eyes. Her own eyes were so strained that she could hardly write. A cattle-shed was being built, and when the rains came, she said, they would have to live in it with the cows and bullocks. She was planning small houses where the famine girls could live in families, each in the care of one of the trained pupils of the Sharada Sadan.

It was a dismal beginning. Out of it came Mukti.

“We Knew Not This”

The verse at the head of this chapter is a warning. “Deliver them that are carried away unto death,” it commands, “And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back. If thou sayest, Behold, we knew not this; Doth not he that weigheth the hearts consider it?” The deputy commissioner who said “he cannot help it” knew. So did the soldiers, and the overseers, and the magistrate who told her to take the girls away. So, she said, did she, and she blamed herself for the three children at Sohagpur.

She did not claim to be better than they were. But she would not say, “We knew not this.” She had seen, and she would act, and she would tell others what she had seen whether they wanted to hear it or not. Moses had said of the Lord: “He doth execute justice for the fatherless and widow” (Deuteronomy 10:18, ASV). She intended, in her own small way, to do the same.