Introduction: The Pandita and Her Biographers

“and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

— John 8:32, ASV

Three Ramabais

If you ask about Pandita Ramabai in India today, you may hear of three different women.

The first is a social reformer. She appears in school textbooks and on a postage stamp issued in 1989. She was one of the first Indian women to speak in public for the education of women, to found a women’s society, and to describe, in print and before government commissions, the lives of child-brides and widows. Historians such as Meera Kosambi and Uma Chakravarti have written about her chiefly in this light, as a pioneering thinker whose criticism of her own society was so sharp that the reformers of Maharashtra later preferred to forget her. In this telling, her Christianity is sometimes a footnote, sometimes a later and narrower phase.

The second woman is a Christian saint. She is remembered on 30 April in the calendar of the Church of England, under the name she took at her baptism, “Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures.” She founded Mukti, which still shelters women and children at Kedgaon. She prayed down a revival in 1905 that historians of Pentecostalism count among the sources of the movement. She translated the Bible. In this telling, her early life as a scholar and reformer is sometimes only a preparation for her real work.

The third woman, in the eyes of some Hindu nationalists, is a missionary who used her learning and her reputation to draw Hindu girls away from their faith. That charge was first made in her lifetime, and it has never quite gone away.

Each of these portraits leaves out something the others include. This book is written from a Christian point of view, and it will not pretend that her faith in Christ was a footnote. It was the centre of her life. But it will also try not to leave out the reformer, the feminist, the critic of her own church, or the Hindu critics who had reasons for their anger. The verse at the head of this introduction is Jesus’ promise: “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Ramabai spent her life looking for the truth, and she was not afraid of it. Her story should not be told in a way she would have been afraid of either.

Her Own Words

The best guide to Ramabai is Ramabai. She wrote a great deal, in Marathi and in English, and much of her English writing survives.

The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887) is her own book, written in America. The edition of that year also contains a long introduction by her friend Dr. Rachel Bodley, the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which includes many details of her early life that Ramabai told her. Some of these details do not agree with Ramabai’s own later accounts. When the book was reprinted in 1901, Ramabai asked for Bodley’s introduction to be left out.

Famine Experiences in India (1897) is a short pamphlet she wrote to raise help for the famine-stricken. It begins with the fullest account she ever gave of how her own parents died, twenty years earlier.

A Testimony, written at Mukti in 1907, is her account of her spiritual journey. We have not been able to find a copy of the original pamphlet. It survives in two later printings: a condensation made with her permission by the missionary J. J. Lucas in 1919, and a fuller text printed by Helen Dyer in a biography published soon after Ramabai’s death. The two do not quite agree. Dyer’s version, for reasons she does not explain, leaves out the names of the Hindu reformers who helped Ramabai in Poona, and the name of the Indian priest, Father Nehemiah Goreh, whose book, Ramabai said, convinced her of the truth of Christianity. This book uses both, and quotes Lucas where Dyer has cut.

Her letters to her American supporters were printed in the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in Boston between 1890 and 1898. Others were printed in Australia. They are among the most vivid things she wrote.

There are important gaps. Her letters to the Anglican sisters at Wantage, which record her arguments with them over doctrine and obedience in the 1880s, were collected and published in India in 1977, and that collection is still in copyright. We know their contents chiefly from what modern scholars have written about them. Her Marathi writings, including a book about America, are known to most English readers only through modern translations.

The Biographers

Three biographers who wrote during her lifetime or soon after it are in the public domain, and all three are useful.

Helen Dyer, an English writer who knew her and supported her work, published Pandita Ramabai: The Story of Her Life in 1900 and a longer book, Pandita Ramabai: Her Vision, Her Mission and Triumph of Faith, published after Ramabai’s death, in about 1923. Dyer wrote to inspire prayer and giving. She calls her first book “a record of answered prayers.” She sometimes adds colour that Ramabai’s own accounts do not contain, and she writes of Hinduism with a contempt that goes beyond even Ramabai’s own sharp later judgments, and without Ramabai’s lifelong respect for her parents’ sincerity.

Clementina Butler, an American Methodist and a member of the Ramabai Association, published a memorial biography in 1922, the year of Ramabai’s death. It is short, warm, and valuable for its American documents.

Nicol Macnicol, a Scottish missionary and scholar of Indian religion who worked for many years in western India, published Pandita Ramabai in 1926 in a series called Builders of Modern India. It is the most careful of the three. Macnicol used the Marathi biography by D. G. Vaidya and the recollections of Ramabai Ranade, and he warns his readers that Ramabai’s later descriptions of Hinduism were written “after she had been for many years a Christian,” so that “we cannot expect a balanced judgment from such a witness.” That is a fair warning for us as well.

Where these writers tell stories that do not appear in Ramabai’s own accounts, this book says so. Where they disagree with each other, or with her, the disagreement is noted. The end of the book has a fuller note on the sources, and a list of popular claims that turn out not to be true.

Two Conversions

One more thing needs to be said at the beginning, because it shapes the whole story.

Ramabai was baptised in the Church of England in September 1883. But she herself did not date her conversion to her baptism. In A Testimony she wrote: “I came to know, after eight years from the time of my baptism, that I had found the Christian religion, which was good enough for me; but I had not found Christ, who is the Life of the religion.”

The difference between finding the religion and finding Christ is at the heart of her testimony. For eight years she was a Christian by conviction. She believed that Christianity was true, and that it was better than anything she had known. She was baptised, she taught, she lectured. But something was missing, and in about 1891 she found it. This book takes her distinction seriously. It does not read her later evangelical faith back into her earlier years, nor does it dismiss those earlier years as unimportant. The woman who argued with the sisters at Wantage about the Trinity and the woman who knelt at Mukti in 1905 to pray for revival were the same woman. Both were looking for the truth. The second had found more of it.

Paul wrote that Christians “know in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9, ASV). Ramabai would have agreed. Her life was a long discovery, and she was willing to be taught.