The Forest School

“And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

— Deuteronomy 6:6-7, ASV

A Boy in the Palace

Ramabai’s story begins with her father, and her father’s story begins with a woman reciting poetry.

Anant Shastri Dongre was a Brahman from a village in the Mangalore district, on the south-western coast of India, below the long wall of mountains called the Western Ghats. He was born, as far as we can tell, at the end of the eighteenth century. As a young man, already married according to the custom of his people, he went north to Poona to study Sanskrit with a famous scholar named Ramachandra Shastri. Poona was then the capital of the Peshwas, the Brahman rulers of the Maratha lands, and Ramachandra Shastri had been engaged to teach Sanskrit to one of the Peshwa’s wives. Anant went with his teacher to the palace, and sometimes he heard the lady reciting Sanskrit poetry.

It astonished him. The sacred language was not meant for women. The law-books of the Brahmans taught that women, like the lowest castes, could not study the Vedas, and most learned men held that they should not learn Sanskrit at all. Here was a queen who knew it well. Rachel Bodley, who heard the story from Ramabai, wrote that his astonishment turned to admiration, and that he resolved to teach his own wife as his teacher had taught the queen.

His wife refused. So did his mother and the elders of the family. The experiment was abandoned. Years passed, children were born, and at last his first wife died.

A Bride of Nine

What happened next Ramabai told herself, without naming anyone, in The High-Caste Hindu Woman. It is one of a number of examples she gives of how carelessly Hindu fathers married off their daughters.

I know of a most extraordinary marriage that took place in the following manner: the father was on a religious pilgrimage with his family, which consisted of his wife and two daughters, one nine and the other seven years of age, and they had stopped in a town to take rest for a day or two. One morning the father was bathing in the sacred river Godavari, near the town, when he saw a fine-looking man coming to bathe there also.

The stranger was a widower. On learning his caste and clan and where he lived, the father offered him his nine-year-old daughter in marriage. “All things were settled in an hour or so; next day the marriage was concluded, and the little girl placed in the possession of the stranger, who took her nearly nine hundred miles away from her home.” The father went on with his pilgrimage the next day, “with a light heart.” Fortunately, Ramabai adds, “the little girl had fallen in good hands, and was well and tenderly cared for beyond all expectation.”

Rachel Bodley, writing with Ramabai’s help, identified the stranger as Anant Shastri, then about forty-four, and the little girl as Lakshmibai, Ramabai’s mother. Ramabai told the story to illustrate an injustice, and she did not hide her judgement of the father who gave his daughter away so lightly. She allowed that “fortunately the little girl had fallen in good hands,” and the reader who knows the sequel can see how fortunate: the stranger was the one man in a thousand who would teach her.

The Forest

Anant began at once to teach his young wife Sanskrit, and once again his family objected. This time he did not give in. He took his wife away, up into the mountains, and made a home in a forest on the top of a peak of the Western Ghats. Ramabai described it in A Testimony:

My father was a native of Mangalore district, but he chose a place in a dense forest on the top of a peak of the Western Ghats, on the borders of Mysore State, where he built a home for himself. This was done in order that he might be away from the hubbub of the world, carry on his educational work, and engage in devotion to the gods in a quiet place.

Ramabai never named the place, but her biographers call it Gangamul, and it is usually identified today with a spot in the Kudremukh hills where several rivers have their source. Bodley, who heard it from Ramabai, records her mother’s memory of the first night there, with no shelter of any kind, and a tiger crying across a ravine until dawn.

The Brahman pandits of the district did not leave him in peace. They reported him to the head of his religious order, and he was summoned to defend himself before the guru and an assembly of scholars, or be put out of caste. Ramabai tells what happened. “He quoted ancient authorities and succeeded in convincing the guru and the chief pundits that it was not wrong for women and Shudras to learn Sanskrit Puranic literature. So they did not put him out of caste.” He became known, she says, as “an orthodox reformer. Some people honoured him for what he was doing and some despised him. He cared little for what people said, and did what he thought was right.”

That sentence could stand as a summary of his daughter’s life.

It is worth being clear about what kind of reformer he was. Anant Shastri did not question the Hindu religion. He was, Ramabai says, “a very orthodox Hindu and strictly adhering to caste and other religious rules.” He kept the Vedas themselves from his wife, and taught her the Puranas, the great popular scriptures of Hinduism, not the most sacred texts. What he rejected was the rule that women must be kept ignorant. And his wife proved him right. “He found an apt pupil in my mother,” Ramabai wrote, “who fell in line with his plan and became an excellent Sanskrit scholar.” She did all the work of the household, cooked and washed and cared for the children and the guests, and then “devoted many hours of her time in the night to the regular study of the sacred Puranic literature.”

Ramabai

Six children were born to Anant and Lakshmibai, according to Macnicol, and three of them died young. Three lived: a son, Srinivas; a daughter, Krishnabai; and the youngest, a girl, born in April 1858. Her American supporters recorded the date as 23 April, and it was written on her coffin almost sixty-four years later. They named her Rama. With the ending that marks respect, she was Ramabai.

The forest home was a place of pilgrimage, and pilgrims came to it all year. Anant believed that hospitality was a religious duty, and he fed them all at his own expense. “For thirteen years he stayed there and did his work quietly,” Ramabai wrote, “but lost all his property because of the great expense he incurred in performing what he thought was his duty.” Before Ramabai was a year old, the money was gone, and the family had to leave.

My mother told me that I was only about six months old when they left their home. She placed me in a big box made of cane, and a man carried it on his head from the mountain top to the valley. Thus my pilgrim life began when I was a little baby.

Rachel Bodley, writing in 1887, described Ramabai being lifted from her bed in the forest at dawn for her Sanskrit lessons, with the birds singing in the trees around her. It is a lovely picture, and it is often repeated. But it cannot be right, if Ramabai left the forest as a baby. Bodley also wrote that the family set out when Ramabai was nine. Ramabai’s own account is different, and hers is the one this book follows. Whatever lessons she had, she had on the road.

Lessons on the Road

And she had them. “When I was about eight years old my mother began to teach me,” she wrote, “and continued to do so until I was about fifteen years of age. During these years she succeeded in training my mind so that I might be able to carry on my own education with very little aid from others.” Her first lessons, she remembered, were the committing to memory of two great Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavata Purana and the Bhagavad Gita. The grammar and dictionaries of Sanskrit were themselves written in verse, and she learned them by heart. Her admirers later said that she had memorised eighteen thousand verses by the time she was twelve. She never gave a number herself.

Her parents did not want their children to learn anything else. “Learning any other language except Sanskrit was out of the question. Secular education of any kind was looked upon as leading people to worldliness.” To learn English, or to mix with Mlechchhas, as foreigners and non-Hindus were called, was forbidden “on pain of losing caste and all hope of future happiness.” But a child on the road hears many languages. She picked up Marathi, which was her family’s language, and Kanarese, Hindustani, and Bengali, simply by travelling. One day she would write and lecture in Marathi and English, and translate the Bible from Hebrew and Greek.

The verse at the head of this chapter is Moses’ command to the parents of Israel, to teach God’s words to their children “when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way.” Anant Shastri and Lakshmibai did not know the God of Israel. But they did exactly what Moses commanded. They taught their children, and taught their daughters as well as their son, in their house and by the way, and above all they taught them to love the truth. Ramabai never forgot it. Long after she had left their religion, she defended their memory. One early biographer, Jennie Chappell, records her saying in America that if anyone wished to say that her father and mother were lost, they were never to say so in her presence.

Not Married

One more thing her parents gave her, and it may have been the greatest gift of all. They did not marry her as a child.

In the Brahman society of her day, a girl was usually married well before she reached puberty, often by eight or nine, and sometimes as an infant. A girl who remained unmarried after that age brought shame on her family. Anant had married Ramabai’s elder sister, Krishnabai, to a boy of her own age whose family had promised that he would study, and who did not. (Accounts differ on how young she was; Macnicol says her father had tried to keep her unmarried until twenty.) The marriage was unhappy, and her father did not want the same thing to happen to his youngest daughter. “My father and mother did not do with me as others were in the habit of doing with their daughters,” Ramabai told Bodley, “i.e., throw me into the well of ignorance by giving me in marriage in my infancy. In this my parents were both of one mind.”

It cost them. “This was of course against the caste rules,” Ramabai wrote, “so he had to suffer being practically put out of Brahmin society. But he stood the persecution with his characteristic manliness, and did what he thought was right, to give me a chance to study and be happy by leading a religious life.”

The proverb says: “Train up a child in the way he should go, And even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6, ASV). Anant Shastri trained his daughter to learn, to think, and to do what was right whatever people said. She departed from his religion. She never departed from that.