A Famine of the Word

“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord Jehovah, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of Jehovah.”

— Amos 8:11, ASV

The Book She Had Been Given

Ramabai owed her faith, as she saw it, to a book. In Calcutta in 1878 some Christians had given her a Sanskrit Bible, which she thought a waste of time to read and never parted with. At Silchar she had found Luke’s Gospel in Bengali in her library. In Poona she had read the New Testament in Marathi with Miss Hurford. In England she had heard John 4 read aloud. And around 1891, by her own account, she had come to Christ only when she gave up reading books about the Bible and read the Bible itself.

So it is not surprising that in the last part of her life she gave more and more of her time to giving the Bible to others. Her great project was a new translation of the whole Bible into Marathi. It was not the first Marathi Bible. Missionaries, beginning with William Carey at Serampore early in the nineteenth century, had translated the Scriptures into Marathi long before, and a revised version was in use in her day. But she believed that a new one was needed, for two reasons.

Two Reasons

The first was that the existing Marathi Bible was written in a high, literary language, full of Sanskrit words. Educated men could read it. The village women she loved could not. She wanted a Bible in the plain everyday Marathi of ordinary people, a translation, as Helen Dyer put it, in “the simplest form of Marathi speech, so that the women of the country with no mental training and a limited vocabulary could easily understand it.” The Psalmist had said: “The opening of thy words giveth light; It giveth understanding unto the simple” (Psalm 119:130, ASV). She wanted the simple to understand.

The second reason was theological. Many of the Sanskrit words in the older translations, she believed, carried Hindu ideas that would mislead those who heard them. As a scholar of Sanskrit and of Hindu philosophy, she knew those associations as few missionaries could. About 1909, five years into her own work, she wrote a strong letter to the revisers of the Marathi Bible. She thanked the missionaries for giving India the Scriptures, but protested:

Almost all the vernacular translations of the Bible were made with the help of Hindu pundits for the sake of putting the translations into correct language, so they have many words which teach pure Hindu ideas of religion. There are some words which cannot be separated from idolatrous ideas. They make wrong impressions on non-Christian hearers, and if done knowingly it is dangerous and sinful to use them.

She gave a long list of examples. “Supposing in each chapter of the Bible there are five mistakes, or mistranslated words, then we have no less than 5945 mistakes or mistranslations in the whole Marathi Bible. Ought we to teach and preach the Bible with so many mistakes?”

She was also alarmed by the influence of what was then called the “higher criticism,” the critical study of the Bible that was spreading from German universities into the missions. She believed it undermined the authority of Scripture, and she wrote bitterly about preachers who had “determined to know everything, save Jesus Christ.” In one letter she used the words of the prophet at the head of this chapter: “We are living in a strange time. There is famine, not of food and water, but of the Word of God.” She had lived through two famines of bread. She feared this one more.

How She Worked

The work began, according to Dyer, in 1904, with a Marathi concordance giving the Greek and Hebrew meaning of each word. Ramabai believed that God had given her the plan, with the words: “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith Jehovah of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6, ASV).

She learned Greek and Hebrew for the work. For the Old Testament she spent years preparing an interlinear comparison of five different versions of its words and idioms, and her preparation for the New was as thorough. Some of her students made a special study of Greek and of Hebrew to help her, and she had the help of members of the ancient Jewish community of western India, the Bene Israel, who knew the Hebrew Scriptures. How much of the final translation was her own work and how much she supervised is not entirely clear. Macnicol, the most careful of her biographers, says that she acquired “some knowledge” of the languages so that she might supervise the translation with intelligence. Others give her a greater share. She would not have cared which. It was the Bible that mattered, not the translator.

She thought it would take seven years. It took fourteen, and more. It was done in the midst of everything else: running a community of two thousand, praying through the revival, rescuing girls from famine, raising money by prayer. The press at Mukti, worked by the girls themselves, set the type in Marathi, Greek, Hebrew, and Roman letters. A tentative edition of the New Testament as far as Acts was printed in 1912. As each part was finished, it was put to use. When she reached the Psalms, she sent for an Indian musician to set them to music so that the girls could sing them.

She never allowed it to be sold. She had received the Bible as a gift, she said, and she must give it freely. Jesus had said to his disciples: “freely ye received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8, ASV).

A Narrowing?

Macnicol, who admired her greatly, also thought that something was lost in these years. In her early years in Poona, he says, a translation of the Bhagavad Gita had gone on alongside her plans for the Bible. Now she saw only darkness in the religion of her fathers. For many years she would not allow Sanskrit to be taught in her schools, for fear of “the subtle poison of Vedanta,” and she would not let her own daughter learn the language of her mother and grandfather. Macnicol wondered whether the danger of Hindu words in the Bible was as great as she feared. After all, he pointed out, the very name of her settlement, Mukti, was a Sanskrit word with a Hindu meaning, and every Christian who used it understood it to mean the salvation of Christ.

It is a fair point, and a reminder that great Christians can have blind spots. A woman who had once defended her parents’ faith against those who called it worthless came, in later life, to see almost nothing good in it. But it is also fair to remember why. She had seen what the Hindu law-books taught about women, and what she had seen done to widows at Brindaban and Pandharpur. She knew, as Macnicol did not, what it was to be a Brahman woman. And Sanskrit did eventually come back into her schools, once she had prepared textbooks of her own.

The First of Its Kind

The translation of the whole Bible was finished shortly before her death in 1922, and the complete edition was published after it. It is often said that she was the first woman ever to translate the whole Bible. That is not quite right. An American woman, Julia Smith, had published her own translation of the whole Bible into English in 1876. What can be said is that hers is generally regarded as the first translation of the whole Bible into colloquial Marathi, the language of ordinary people, and that she was among the first women anywhere to undertake the translation of the whole of Scripture from the original languages.

In the Church of England’s calendar, where she is remembered on 30 April, she is described simply as “Translator of the Scriptures.” Of all the things she did, it was perhaps the one that she would have chosen to be remembered by.