No Caste, No Sex

“There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus.”

— Galatians 3:28, ASV

Three Women Again

The introduction to this book described three Ramabais: the reformer, the saint, and, to some of her critics, the missionary who drew Hindu girls away from their faith. Having followed her life to its end, we can see why each portrait exists, and why none of them is enough.

The reformer is real. Ramabai was one of the first Indian women to speak in public for the rights of women, to found a women’s organisation, to give evidence before a government commission, and to write a book arguing that the women of India were oppressed and must be educated and set free. She did it in her twenties, as a widow, against the united opposition of orthodox Hindu society. The historian Meera Kosambi has argued that her disappearance from the standard histories of Maharashtrian reform was caused as much by her being an outspoken woman as by her being a Christian. The Indian government recognised her contribution in 1989 by issuing a postage stamp in her honour.

The saint is real too. She gave away everything she had. She rescued thousands of women and girls from starvation and from prostitution. She founded a community that has lasted for more than a century. She trusted God for every meal for twenty-five years, and the meals came. She prayed for revival, and saw one that spread across India and beyond. She translated the Bible into the everyday speech of the people she loved. The Church of England remembers her every year on 30 April as “Pandita Mary Ramabai, Translator of the Scriptures,” and she appears on 5 April in some trial and supplementary calendars of the Episcopal Church in America, though not in its current official calendar. In 2018 the New York Times published an obituary of her in a series on remarkable people it had overlooked in their own time.

And the critics have a point that should not be dismissed. She did promise her Hindu supporters a neutral school, and that school did become a place where many girls became Christians. Most of the famine girls she rescued were children, who did not choose Mukti for its religion but because they were starving. She hoped they would become Christians, and most of them did. To those who believed that the Hindu tradition was the soul of India, this could only look like a loss. From 1897 on she made no secret of what she hoped for, and no source shows her compelling anyone to be baptised. But her Hindu critics believed in 1893 that she had concealed her aims, her own American committee feared the pledge had been broken, and the famine children at Mukti had little real choice about the teaching they received. But it is not surprising that those who did not share her faith saw her work differently.

One Woman

The truth is that all three portraits describe the same woman, and the threads cannot be separated. Her feminism and her faith were not two different things. She became a reformer because she read the Hindu law-books and found that they held out no hope for her as a woman. She became a Christian, in the deepest sense, when she discovered that in Christ there was hope for her as a woman, freely given. “What good news,” she wrote, “for me, a woman; a woman born in India among Brahmins, who hold out no hope for me and the like of me.” Her famine rescues were acts of faith and acts of social reform at once. Her Bible translation was for the women of the villages.

The words at the head of this chapter are Paul’s, written to the churches of Galatia, who were arguing about whether Gentile Christians must become Jews. “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus.” Ramabai summed up the same truth in her own words when she described her discovery of the gospel: “No caste, no sex, no work, and no man was to be depended upon to get salvation, this everlasting life; but God gave it freely to any one and every one who believed on His Son.”

No caste. In the community she founded, Brahman widows lived alongside the daughters of outcastes and prayed with them, and at her funeral high castes and outcastes stood together by her body. No sex. She taught that the Spirit of God was given to daughters as well as sons, to handmaidens as well as servants, and she sent young women out to preach across India. No work. She believed that salvation was not earned by pilgrimages or alms or fasting, as she had once believed, but freely given, and she gave freely in turn.

Mukti Today

The community she founded still exists. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission still stands at Kedgaon, east of Pune. According to its own figures it is home to some fifteen hundred people, among them orphaned and abandoned girls, widows, elderly and disabled women, and boys, and it runs schools for more than two thousand pupils, a hospital, a farm, and a Bible school, on a site of some two hundred and forty acres. One of its schools is still called Sharada Sadan. Another is named after Manorama. Ramabai would not build the mission on an endowment, and it still relies on gifts.

Her other legacies are harder to measure. The revival of 1905 spread to many other places in India, and through Minnie Abrams’s little book it reached as far as Chile, where it helped to begin a Pentecostal movement. Her Marathi Bible was printed and given away at Mukti, in the plain speech she had chosen for the village women. The women she trained became teachers, nurses, and Bible-women across western India. And her life became a story that has been told in many languages, to many people who never heard of the Shastras or the famines of the 1870s, as an example of what one woman’s faith and courage could do.

The Fatherless and the Widow

This book began with a verse from the Psalms: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, Is God in his holy habitation.” The verse goes on: “God setteth the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:6, ASV). Ramabai was fatherless at sixteen and a widow at twenty-three, and she knew what it was to be solitary. She spent the rest of her life setting the solitary in families: child-widows whose families had cast them out, famine orphans who had lost everyone, women whom society called fallen, girls sold in the camps. At Mukti they found a family, and a mother.

She would not want to be remembered as a heroine. She described herself as a sweeper. She would want to be remembered, if at all, as a witness to the faithfulness of God. “I have come to believe the Word of God implicitly,” she wrote, “and I have found out by experience that it is true.” And near the end of her testimony she turned from herself to her readers: “I entreat you, my readers, to prove the Lord as I have proved Him.”