Manorama

“and he said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah.”

— Job 1:21, ASV

Heart’s Joy

Of all the people in Ramabai’s story, the one who appears most often and is known least is her daughter.

Manorama was born in Assam in the spring of 1881, the daughter her parents had longed for. Her name means “Heart’s Joy.” Before she was a year old her father was dead. She sailed to England with her mother at the age of two, was baptised with her at Wantage in 1883, went with her to America at nearly five, and was sent back to England to be cared for by the Wantage sisters while her mother travelled and lectured. For about three years she did not see her mother at all. She was brought back to India by one of the sisters, and was about eight when her mother opened the Sharada Sadan.

She was a Christian from childhood, and said so. Not long after the school opened, Soonderbai Powar visited and read the Bible to the pupils while Ramabai was out of the room. Little Manorama announced that she was a Christian, and that the Bible was her Shastra.

It cannot have been an easy childhood. She grew up shared with hundreds of other girls, first widows and then famine orphans, and her mother’s attention was always divided. She was sent away again for her education, to England and then to a seminary in New York State, and she was preparing to enter Mount Holyoke College when she was called home. Her mother, Macnicol tells us, would not allow her to learn Sanskrit, the language of her mother and grandfather, for fear of its Hindu associations. Whatever she felt about any of this, she did not record it. What she did was to give her life to her mother’s work.

Her Mother’s Right Hand

She came back to India in 1900, when the second famine had filled Mukti with more than a thousand new girls, and she took charge of the Sharada Sadan and the high school. She was nineteen. From then on she was her mother’s right hand. She taught, organised, edited the Mukti Prayer Bell, wrote reports and appeals, and travelled. In 1903 she went with Minnie Abrams to Australia and New Zealand, where she spoke about the work and helped to found circles of supporters who prayed by name for the girls at Mukti. In 1905 she led praying bands out from Mukti during the revival, and A visitor quoted by Macnicol, Canon Butcher, later heard her pray aloud in tongues at Mukti. She wrote a sequel to the Australian edition of her mother’s life, bringing the story up to 1902, and it is one of the sources on which this book depends.

In 1912 she was invited, and in 1912 or 1913 she started, a work of her own, a Christian school for girls at Gulbarga, in the Muslim-ruled state of Hyderabad to the south-east. She called it Shanti Sadan, the Home of Peace, and she was entirely responsible for it, raising its money separately from Mukti and spending a few days there every month. It was hard. The school taught the Bible, and the city was soon in a ferment because several pupils had confessed Christ in their own homes.

One episode from Gulbarga should be told plainly, because it shows the spirit of the time and the cost of it. When a plot of land was bought for the school, an idol stood in the middle of it, with a shrine where the farmers of the neighbourhood had worshipped every year at the start of the rains. Manorama wrote that “this we pulled down,” and dedicated the land to God standing on the spot where the shrine had been. To her it was an act of faith. To the people of Gulbarga, who were already angry, it can only have seemed an act of contempt. “This caused an uproar again,” Helen Dyer wrote, and the school fell from seventy pupils to two, though it slowly recovered to nearly forty. Manorama acted as most missionaries of her day would have acted, and probably as her mother would have approved. A modern reader, Christian or not, may still wish that it had been done differently.

In 1917 Manorama took her degree at the University of Bombay, so that the Mukti schools could be recognised to train teachers. She was by then her mother’s chosen successor, and everyone expected her to carry the work on after Ramabai’s death.

July 1921

Her health had long been fragile. In the summer of 1921 she was taken to the mission hospital at Miraj, south of Poona. An operation was attempted, but, as Clementina Butler wrote, “her heart was not equal to the strain.” She died there in July 1921. She was forty.

Ramabai was sixty-three, growing deaf, worn out by thirty years of labour, and dependent on her daughter for almost everything. The blow was terrible. Her letter to the officers of the American Association is short and restrained.

Let me thank you for your loving sympathy. All I have to say is “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, Blessed be the name of the Lord.” There are 360 pupils studying in the Sharada Sadan, the Primary and the Kindergarten. This work shall be continued as long as God gives us grace and strength. The school was well organized and brought to its present state by my daughter, who has gone to the next world before me!

One of Manorama’s last acts, her mother added, had been to draw up the timetables for the school year.

The Lord Gave

The words Ramabai quoted, in the older translation she knew, are Job’s, spoken when he heard that his children were dead. They are the words at the head of this chapter: “Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah.” Job said them in the first shock of his loss, before his long argument with God began, and they have been said by grieving Christians ever since. Ramabai did not argue. She had lost her father, her mother, her sister, her brother, her husband, and the friend who had come with her to England, all before she was twenty-six. Now, near the end of her own life, she had lost her only child. She blessed the name of the Lord.

Butler, who knew both of them, believed that the loss of her daughter, and of the support Manorama had given her, was more than her mother’s body could bear. It is very likely true. Ramabai lived less than nine months longer. But she did not stop working. When her old friend Ramabai Ranade, the widow of the judge who had resigned from her board in 1893, came to visit her in her grief, Mrs. Ranade later said that Ramabai preached the gospel to her.

Paul told the Thessalonians not to grieve over those who had died in Christ “even as the rest, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, ASV). Ramabai believed that her daughter had gone ahead of her to the country they had both been travelling towards, and that she would follow soon. She was right about that.