Appendix D: Notes on Sources and Method

“it seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write unto thee in order … that thou mightest know the certainty concerning the things wherein thou wast instructed.”

— Luke 1:3-4, ASV

This appendix explains where the story told in this book comes from, how the sources were weighed, and which popular claims have been corrected. It is written for readers who want to check the story for themselves, and for anyone who will retell it.

Ramabai’s Own Writings

Wherever possible, this book lets Ramabai speak for herself. Her principal English writings, all now in the public domain, are these:

• The High-Caste Hindu Woman (Philadelphia, 1887), her own book, with an introduction by Rachel Bodley that includes much biographical material told to Bodley by Ramabai, and her 1882 evidence to the Education Commission. When the book was reprinted in 1901, Ramabai asked for Bodley’s introduction to be left out. Where Bodley’s account of her childhood differs from Ramabai’s own, this book follows Ramabai.
• Famine Experiences in India (1897), two letters written for the relief of the famine, containing her fullest account of her parents’ deaths and her own famine journeys.
• A Testimony (Kedgaon, 1907, with later additions), her account of her spiritual journey. We have not found a copy of the original pamphlet. It survives in a condensation made with her permission by J. J. Lucas (Pandita Ramabai: A Wonderful Life, 1919) and in a fuller text printed by Helen Dyer (see below). The two differ: Dyer’s text omits the names of the Hindu reformers who helped her in Poona and of Father Nehemiah Goreh, and Lucas’s includes them. This book quotes both, and follows Lucas where Dyer has cut.
• A short tract, Trying to be Saved by Their Own Merit, describing the pilgrimage to Pandharpur.
• Her letters to the Ramabai Association in Boston, printed in its annual reports from 1890 to 1898, and other letters printed in Pandita Ramabai: The Widows’ Friend (Melbourne, 1903), whose later chapters were written by her daughter Manorama.

Her Marathi writings, including Stri Dharma Niti (1882) and her book on the United States (1889), and her correspondence with the Wantage sisters, edited by A. B. Shah as The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (1977), have been used only through what modern scholars report of them. The modern English translations of these works are in copyright.

The Early Biographers

• Helen S. Dyer, Pandita Ramabai: The Story of Her Life (1900), and Pandita Ramabai: Her Vision, Her Mission and Triumph of Faith (London, after 1922), whose last chapter, on Ramabai’s death, was completed by another hand after Dyer’s own death. Dyer knew Ramabai and her circle, and her books contain many letters and first-hand accounts, especially of the revival. She wrote to inspire prayer and support, treats Hinduism with open contempt, and was herself a participant in at least one controversial episode (the hiding of a girl in 1893) that she describes approvingly.
• Clementina Butler, Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati (1922), a memorial life by the chairman of the American Ramabai Association’s executive committee, valuable for its American documents and its account of Ramabai’s last years.
• Nicol Macnicol, Pandita Ramabai (1926), in the series Builders of Modern India. The most careful of the early lives, it draws on the Marathi biography by D. G. Vaidya and the recollections of Ramabai Ranade, and is willing to criticise its subject.
• Jennie Chappell, Women Who Have Worked and Won (1900), a popular account that adds romantic details found nowhere else. It has been used sparingly and never alone.

Modern Scholars

This book has drawn facts and interpretations, but not text, from modern scholarship, especially Meera Kosambi (Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words, 2000, and her edition of Ramabai’s American book, 2003), Uma Chakravarti (Rewriting History, 1998), Gauri Viswanathan (Outside the Fold, 1998), Antoinette Burton (At the Heart of the Empire, 1998), Robert Eric Frykenberg (ed., Pandita Ramabai’s America, 2003), Keith J. White (Let the Earth Hear Her Voice, 2022), Edith Blumhofer on the revival, and Gary B. McGee on the history of speaking in tongues at Mukti. Short phrases from their work are quoted and attributed in the text.

Corrections to Popular Accounts

• Birthplace. She was born in a forest home at Gangamul in the Western Ghats, on the borders of Mysore State above her father’s native Mangalore district, not in the city of Mangalore. She never named the place herself.
• The famine deaths. Her parents and sister are often said to have died in 1877. Her own account and her age (about sixteen) suggest about 1874-75, early in the famine.
• Four thousand miles. The figure is her own, and refers to her wanderings with her brother after their parents’ deaths, not to the family’s pilgrimages.
• Her titles. She was acclaimed with the title Sarasvati by the pandits of Calcutta in 1878; “Pandita” seems to have followed by popular use. Claims that she was the first or only woman to receive such titles cannot be verified.
• Stories she did not tell. Keshab Chandra Sen gave her a Veda, by her own account, not a book of New Testament selections. The story of her brother exposing the “floating mountains” of a Himalayan lake, and the claim that she worked as a cook, appear only in later admiring accounts and are not used here.
• Her marriage. Modern scholars date it to November 1880, and her husband’s death to February 1882. She remembered it as “nineteen months.” The two cannot both be exact.
• The Education Commission. She gave evidence in Poona in September 1882, not 1883.
• Her baptism. She was baptised at Wantage on 29 September 1883. The tradition that Canon William Butler baptised her has not been confirmed from the register.
• Her return from America. She landed at Bombay on 1 February 1889, not at Calcutta and not in 1887 as two early accounts say.
• George Müller. She read the life of George Müller, the Bristol orphanage founder, about 1895, not during her years in England. The Müller she knew in the 1880s was the Oxford Sanskrit scholar Max Müller.
• The Marathi Bible. Hers was not the first Marathi Bible; William Carey and others had translated it earlier. Nor was she the first woman to translate the whole Bible; Julia Smith published an English translation in 1876. Hers was the first Bible in colloquial Marathi, and she was among the first women anywhere to translate the whole of Scripture from the original languages.
• The revival and Azusa Street. The Mukti revival began in June 1905, before the Azusa Street meetings of April 1906. Speaking in tongues at Mukti came later, in December 1906, after news of Azusa Street had arrived.
• Commemoration. The Church of England remembers her on 30 April. She appears on 5 April in some Episcopal Church resources, but not in that church’s current official calendar.
• Her death. She died on 5 April 1922 at the age of sixty-three, not sixty-four. No reliable source gives a medical cause.
• Mukti’s naming. Dyer places the dedication and naming of Mukti at the camp meeting of December 1897; Manorama dates the dedication of the “New Home” to 24 September 1898.
• Manorama’s death. The early sources give July 1921; one modern scholar gives June 1921.

Language

The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources describe Hindu religion and Indian people in language that is often contemptuous and sometimes racist. Ramabai herself, as a Christian, wrote harshly about the religion of her childhood. This book quotes such language only where it shows what she or her contemporaries thought, and does not adopt it. It has tried to describe Hindu belief and practice fairly, and to treat Ramabai’s Hindu critics as people with real reasons for their views.

Scripture

All Scripture quotations in the book’s own voice are from the American Standard Version (1901). Where Ramabai quotes Scripture in her own words, usually from the Authorized Version, her wording has been kept.

Method

This book is not a work of original archival research. It tells a true story for general readers from the published sources. Where the sources are uncertain, it says so. Where they disagree, it has preferred Ramabai’s own contemporary writings to later recollections, and contemporary records to the embellishments of admirers. No conversations have been invented. Every quotation comes from the sources named above.