“Ramabai Is Dead”

“For am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? or am I striving to please men? if I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ.”

— Galatians 1:10, ASV

A Hard Question in Boston

The Ramabai Association in Boston had been formed in 1887 to support a secular school for high-caste Hindu widows for ten years. By 1897 it found itself the patron of something it had not planned: a school where the bell was rung for morning prayers, where nearly half the pupils were now famine children, and where the number of avowed Christians had almost doubled in a year. Before the year was out, Ramabai would bring three hundred more famine girls out of the Central Provinces.

At its annual meeting in March 1897 the Association’s officers faced the question openly. One of them, the Rev. Dr. E. W. Donald, who presided, put it with painful honesty. Ramabai, he said, had begun gathering the pupils for morning prayer, and the school bell had been rung to call them. “There has been no coercion,” he admitted. But when the head of the school rang the official bell and presided at the prayers, many girls would come who would not have come to a private room. And Ramabai “very frankly discloses the fact that she has not attempted to conceal from her pupils her desire that they should become Christians.”

Now, of course, we have to admit that this is a reversion of the past method of the school; and it is apparently — nay, really — a contradiction of the elementary principle of our Association. Secularity has been displaced by religion.

Should the Association, he asked, send Ramabai a mandate that she must give up her prayers, stop ringing the bell, “and cease her efforts to bring these women to the feet of Christ”?

Donald was not hostile. She had not, he granted, “proselyted or publicly preached,” and he wondered aloud whether a frankly Christian school might do the work as well, “and certainly with more permanent and beautiful results.” The difficulty was the promise that had been made.

The executive committee was just as frank. A visitor had reported Ramabai saying, “I have asked God to send only those girls who will become Christians.” Whether or not she had put it so bluntly, the committee wrote, the school had plainly changed. “The Sadan has become a Christian institution.” If the change came from the indirect influence of her Christian life, it was God’s work, and they rejoiced. But if any direct influence had crept in, “then the pledge to the people is broken.” They were also alarmed by her famine rescues, undertaken without their consent, and by her debts, and by her health.

They were not wrong. They had raised money from Unitarians and Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists, on the understanding that the school would not try to convert its pupils. They had defended her in 1893 on exactly that basis. And now she had, in their view, quietly changed the terms.

“Ramabai Is Dead”

In early 1898, as the ten years drew to an end, she came to Boston herself. On 16 March she spoke to the tenth annual meeting at Channing Hall. She did not apologise. She explained.

Her Hindu friends, she said, had wanted her to shut the door of her room when she read the Bible and prayed. “I said, No, I have the same freedom to practise Christianity which these girls have to practise their religion. Why should I shut the door of my room, which I do not shut at any other time during the twenty-four hours of the day?” She insisted that the school was still what she had promised: “No kind of religious training is compulsory. We do not teach the Bible or the Vedas to the girls.” The girls could keep their caste and their customs, and some still wore their gods around their necks. The girls who had come had read the Bible for themselves and compared it with their own religion. “Forty-eight of our girls have been brave enough to be publicly baptized and become Christians; and glory be to God for that! I think this is the best result of the school. We started an unsectarian school, and an unsectarian school it shall be to the end; but such must be the result of the shining light that comes from Heaven.”

She gave an account of the money. Out of about ninety-five thousand dollars the Association had sent her over ten years, she said, the school buildings and the farm were worth sixty thousand. That much she was giving back, and the rest had been spent “in raising up this family to rise up and call you blessed.”

Then she said something startling.

Now what shall be the future of the school? … The first thing I have to tell you in this connection is that Ramabai is dead. The person who went in your stead is dead and gone. What will you do with the property? … Do not concentrate your interest in one person, for that person will die and be gone, as many have gone before.

She meant that the work must not depend on her. People die; the Association must not. She asked them to found a new body “to go on working in the same old way.” She proposed a new association, a “Faith, Hope, and Love Association,” and asked for twenty thousand dollars a year. “Last year God told me I must go into the Central Provinces of my country for the rescue of three hundred girls. I had eighty cents in my hand; and I said, Where shall I get the money? But He said, ‘Go on, and money will come.’ … The Father sent thirty thousand dollars in that year.”

The Parting

The Association did what its charter required. It resolved to dissolve itself once a new body was formed. The Association’s land and buildings in Poona were conveyed to Ramabai outright, though she soon transferred it to the new Association, not wishing to hold it in her own name, “absolute, and not to create any legal trust.” And she was given formal notice that she was no longer authorised to contract any debt in the Association’s name. A new American Ramabai Association was then formed to continue supporting the school without the old charter’s restrictions. It supported her for the rest of her life.

It was not a bitter parting, but it was not an easy one. The old Executive Committee’s final report captured both their exasperation and their admiration. If they had sometimes thought her unwise in “letting her heart mislead her judgment,” and had seen in her “the impatience of a child under restraining advice,” they had also recognised “the simple, absolute faith of a child, the courage of the martyr, the spirit of the true reformer, and the glory of womanhood.”

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s, written to churches that wanted him to soften his message. “Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? … if I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ.” Ramabai had depended on the favour of Hindu reformers, and lost it in 1893. She had depended on the favour of her American supporters, and in 1898 she risked losing it too. She did not court either. She told them the truth about what she was doing, and left the consequences to God.

It is fair to ask whether she had been entirely straightforward. The honest answer is that she had changed, and so had her work, and she had not asked permission before changing it. She had promised a neutral school in good faith in 1887, when she herself had not yet found Christ in the way she later did. By 1897 she could no longer run a school in which the gospel was kept behind a closed door. She held that she had kept the letter of her promise. Her committee was not sure she had kept its spirit. When the time came, she told her supporters plainly, and gave them back what was theirs.

Five Minutes at Keswick

The strain of the American visit wore her out, and for a day she lay in her room, crying to God. Two friends heard of it and gave her what was needed to meet Mukti’s wants for a time. That summer she sailed for England, and on the way home to India she attended the Keswick Convention in the Lake District, the great annual gathering of evangelical Christians seeking a deeper spiritual life. Nearly four thousand people were there, she later recalled, in words Helen Dyer preserved.

At that time the Lord led me to ask those present to pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all Indian Christians. Five minutes were given me to speak, and I made the very best use of them. I requested God’s people to pray that 100,000 men and 100,000 women from among the Indian Christians may be led to preach the Gospel to their country people.

A hundred thousand men and a hundred thousand women. Jesus had told his disciples, “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he send forth laborers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38, ASV). It was an enormous request, and it was characteristic of her that she asked for women as well as men. She returned to India in August 1898, and went on praying. Seven years later, the answer began, at Mukti.