The Sweeper

“He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, And lifteth up the needy from the dunghill; That he may set him with princes, Even with the princes of his people. He maketh the barren woman to keep house, And to be a joyful mother of children. Praise ye Jehovah.”

— Psalm 113:7-9, ASV

The House of Grace

Mukti grew faster than anyone had planned. Among the girls brought out of the famine districts were some who, in the words of the time, had been “sinned against by wicked men.” Around the turn of 1898-99 two American women came to Kedgaon to work among them, and Ramabai decided to build a separate home for such women and girls, where they could be cared for without shame. She called it Kripa Sadan, the House of Grace.

There was no money for it. On the evening of 20 March 1899 the foundation stone was laid anyway, at a service with missionaries and nearly a hundred workmen standing by. Ramabai, or one of her workers (the accounts differ), explained to the workmen that “although there was not a single pice in hand to build this new house, yet the foundation stone was laid in obedience to God’s order.” No debt would be incurred. They would look to God alone. The house was built, and in the years that followed it sheltered hundreds of women whom most of society would have treated as beyond help.

It was a remarkable thing for a woman of her background to do. In the Hindu law-books she had studied, a “fallen” woman deserved no pity; a king might have her thrown to the dogs. At Fulham, sixteen years before, she had first seen Christians caring for such women, and had been told the story of the woman at the well. Now she built them a house and gave it the name of grace.

The Second Famine

In 1899 the rains failed again, and a terrible famine struck western India, especially Gujarat. It was one of the worst of the century. This time Ramabai could not leave Mukti herself, and she sent out others in her place: nearly twenty helpers, eight of whom, she noted with evident joy, were women who had themselves been rescued from starvation in 1896. They brought back girls by the hundred.

By August 1900 there were more than thirteen hundred and fifty Gujarati girls at Mukti. Ramabai listed them by age: about a hundred and fifty under seven, five hundred between seven and fourteen, some six hundred between fourteen and twenty, and the rest under thirty. Most could not read. She prayed for teachers, and chose fifty of the older Christian girls to train as teachers themselves. A school of more than fifty classes was planned.

There were other problems. At one point more than nineteen hundred people, and over a hundred cattle, depended on the wells at Mukti for water. Many of the famine children were ill, and many died. The Mukti cemetery, one of her colleagues wrote, was “very full of those who have died from the effects of famine.” A missionary who visited at the end of 1901 found some two thousand women and girls living in stone buildings with tiled roofs, with dormitories, kitchens, kitchens and dining rooms in a building four hundred and twenty-five feet long, a hospital, schools, workrooms, gardens, five wells, and a great church. “Five years ago,” he wrote, “there was nothing here but an open field.”

Work

Ramabai did not believe in charity that left people idle. The girls were taught to read and to earn a living. They worked in the fields and the gardens, cooked and cleaned, wove cloth, made clothes, and later printed books on the mission’s own press, set up about 1900. Older Christian girls helped the matrons care for the newcomers. Many were trained as teachers and Bible-women, and went out to work in villages and other missions. A home for boys was opened in 1902.

She had not forgotten what had destroyed her own family: “the pride of caste and superior learning,” which had kept them from “stooping down to acquire some industry.” She meant her girls to be able to work with their hands.

A Day at Mukti

What was it like to run such a place? Around 1901 she kept a diary for a few days, and part of it was printed. It is one of the few places where we see her ordinary life. A girl who did not like to be corrected cursed her and called her names. “I smile at it,” she wrote, “for I am so well used to hearing them curse me and speak dirty words about me.” The storekeeper reminded her that blankets and other things were needed, not knowing that there was no money to order grain. People came with their wants and their grievances all day. The last complaint of the evening was from a girl who said she did not get enough oil for her hair. Ramabai quieted her, kissed a few girls standing near her door, said goodnight, and shut it.

My feet were aching and my head was tired. Before going to bed, at half-past eight, I opened my Bible and began to read. The Holy Spirit brought one special verse to my mind to comfort me. “And the Government shall be upon His shoulders.” “What a blessing,” I said to myself, “all this burden does not fall on me, but He bears it on His shoulders.”

The verse is from Isaiah’s prophecy of the child who would be born: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder” (Isaiah 9:6, ASV). She had two thousand people depending on her, and that night, at least, she went to bed knowing that the weight was not hers to carry.

“I Am a Sweeper”

In 1901 a missionary named Mary Macdonald came to work at Mukti. Ramabai, as Helen Dyer later reported, told her what she wanted.

Now I want you to go through this institution and teach them all about the Lord Jesus Christ. I am a sweeper; that is all I am. I sweep into this compound as many as I can get; child-widows, deserted wives, and orphans of every kind, and I want you missionaries to preach to them.

In India a sweeper was one of the lowest occupations there was, the work of the untouchable castes who cleaned what others would not touch. That a Brahman woman, a pandita honoured by the scholars of Calcutta, should call herself a sweeper was a deliberate reversal of everything she had been brought up to believe about purity and rank. It was also exactly what she did. She swept up the people their families and their society had thrown away.

The verse at the head of this chapter says that God “raiseth up the poor out of the dust, And lifteth up the needy from the dunghill; That he may set him with princes.” It ends with a promise to the barren woman, who in the ancient world was a figure of shame: God “maketh the barren woman to keep house, And to be a joyful mother of children.” Ramabai had only one child of her own. By 1901 she was mother to two thousand.

Christian Outcasts

Not everyone saw it that way. To many Hindus, Mukti was a place where famine children, who could not choose for themselves, were made into Christians. Some families came and took their girls back, and the government returned about thirty to relatives who claimed them. When two of her former pupils were gathering widows and children from a princely state, an official of the Raja asked them bluntly: “How many more women and children are you going to turn into Christian outcasts, and when do you intend to stop this work?”

The young women answered that their Saviour had commanded them to make disciples, and they would go on until the world was his. Ramabai would have given the same answer. But the question was a fair one from where the official stood, and it was asked again and again, and is still asked today. The famine girls did not come to Mukti because they wanted to become Christians. They came because they were starving. Most of them did become Christians. Ramabai never hid that she hoped they would, and never pretended that Mukti was anything but a Christian community. What she would not accept was that the gospel made them outcasts. In her eyes, they had been outcasts already. Now they had a home.