Having Nothing

“as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”

— 2 Corinthians 6:10, ASV

The Later Years

In the last decade of her life, Ramabai seldom left Kedgaon. She was growing deafer, and in the end could hardly hear at all. She worked at the Bible translation for as many hours as she could spare, ran the community through her daughter and her helpers, wrote letters, prayed, and received visitors. Her own voice becomes harder to hear in these years. She had resolved, she wrote, that nothing should be “sown in my name,” and she wrote less and less about herself. Most of what we know comes from others.

The visitors came from everywhere. A young American, Howard Walter, spent three days at Mukti in 1918 and wrote that he had not been prepared for the impression she made on him. She was translating the Bible, and supervising the printing of a Marathi life of Christ of which 23,000 copies were already in Hindu homes. In 1919, when famine came again, Mukti fed some eight hundred starving people every day.

In the New Year’s honours of 1919 the British government awarded her the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, an award for public service in India, for distinguished service to Indian education. She was too weak to travel to Bombay to receive it from the Governor. Macnicol says that she chose to receive it instead from the hand of Mrs. R. A. Adams, the wife of the secretary of the Bible Society in Bombay, because of her love for the society’s work; Butler says that Manorama received it for her. Helen Dyer remarked that they had “heard nothing from her concerning it.” It is easy to believe. She had been given titles before, in Calcutta, forty years earlier. She had long since counted such things as nothing.

Setting Her House in Order

After Manorama’s death in July 1921, she knew that her own time was short. She appointed as her successor Lissa Hastie, an English friend who had worked beside her for twelve years, on condition, as Dyer’s book put it, that the work be “continued on exactly the same lines,” that is, as a work of faith. She signed a call for a Bible League to defend the authority of Scripture. She made her will. According to a friend, she set her house in order weeks before the end, and on the very day before she died wrote a letter about the care of some of the children.

A few days before her death, the secretary of the Bible Society in Bombay came to Mukti. She was too weak to speak, and too deaf to hear him. She sent for him to her room, and wrote with a trembling hand:

I want to say that I greatly appreciate your Society’s work. I have been a Christian for thirty-eight years. I have found a great salvation through the Society’s work. God bless you and yours.

Thirty-eight years took her back to her baptism at Wantage in 1883. Over the last ten years of her life, Macnicol records, she had given more than eleven thousand rupees to the Bible Society, and for years the girls at Mukti had set aside a fifteenth part of their daily grain for it. The Bible had been given to her freely. She gave it freely to others, and she gave to those who gave it to others.

5 April 1922

She died early in the morning of 5 April 1922, at Mukti. “She slipped away quietly in her sleep as the day broke,” Macnicol wrote. She was sixty-three, less than three weeks short of her sixty-fourth birthday. No source records a medical cause of death. Butler, who knew her, believed that her grief for her daughter, and the loss of all that Manorama had carried for her, had been too much for a body long weakened by the hardships of her youth. That is as near as we can come.

The cable to the American Association read: “Ramabai Promoted.”

The Funeral

The funeral service was conducted by her old friend Robert Hume of Ahmednagar, representing the American Association, with W. W. Bruere, who had helped to found the church at Mukti in 1897. Her plain coffin was carried on the shoulders of the young women of Mukti, and a thousand girls followed it to the cemetery. Over it was laid a white cloth inscribed with Paul’s words: “We shall all be changed, the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” On the lid were the words: “The Pundita Ramabai Medhavi — born April 23, 1858; slept April 5, 1922.”

All day, one of the Mukti workers wrote, people came from the villages around Mukti, people whom “Bai” had fed in every famine since 1896, to pay their respects. High castes, low castes, and outcastes stood together and folded their hands before the body of a Brahman woman who, in her youth, would have been polluted by the touch of most of them. One old Brahman widow, bent with age and with a lifetime of the fasting and hardship that were the lot of Brahman widows, leaned over the bed and cried out: “O, Great Mother, Great Mother, whom now shall I call Mother? Who will care for me?”

There was no money. Because all the gifts for Mukti had been sent in Ramabai’s name, none of them could be drawn until her will had been proved, and the courts were on holiday. “Here we were with a thousand people to feed,” Hastie wrote in June, “to say nothing of other expenses, and no money.” They prayed, and from day to day, she wrote, enough came to keep them going. Mukti was carrying on as its founder had intended.

Remembered

Across India, people gathered to honour her. At a memorial meeting in Poona, the British Collector of the district imagined her deaf ears “wakened to hear her Master say to her, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’” In Bombay, the poet and nationalist leader Sarojini Naidu, who was not a Christian, claimed her for India as “the first Christian to be enrolled in the calendar of Hindu saints.” It was meant as the highest praise a Hindu could give, and it was a sign that some of her countrymen, who had once called her a traitor, were ready to claim her as their own.

Having Nothing

The words at the head of this chapter are Paul’s description of the apostolic life: “as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.” They describe Ramabai’s life as well as any words could. She had been born into wealth and lost it in a famine. She had been honoured by the scholars of Calcutta and lost her honour in the eyes of her people. She had founded a great work and would not hold its property in her own name. She owned, as she said, nothing on earth but a few clothes and her Bible, and the Bible she translated she gave away, never allowing it to be sold. And she left behind her a community of more than a thousand people, a Bible in the language of the village women of Maharashtra, and a multitude of women and girls who had been given back their lives.

“I have fought the good fight,” Paul wrote at the end of his life, “I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7, ASV). Ramabai would not have claimed so much. She would have said, as she had said all her life, that God was faithful, and that she had proved him.