Pilgrims

“Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not;”

— Psalm 115:4-5, ASV

Puranikas

For the next fifteen years the Dongre family lived on the road. “Ever since I remember anything,” Ramabai wrote, “my father and mother were always travelling from one sacred place to another, staying in each place for some months, bathing in the sacred river or tank, visiting temples, worshipping household gods and the images of gods in the temples, and reading Puranas in temples or in some convenient place.”

They were Puranikas, public readers of the Puranas, the great Sanskrit collections of Hindu myth and legend. It was an honourable calling. A Puranika sat in a temple hall, under a tree, or on the bank of a sacred river, and read aloud from his manuscript in Sanskrit. Few of the hearers understood a word. That did not matter. The sound of the sacred text was believed to purify those who heard it, and those who stopped to listen gave the reader a present: a handful of rice, a coin, a flower, a few cowrie shells. “The reading and hearing of the sacred literature is in itself believed to be productive of great merit,” Ramabai explained. “We never had to beg or work to earn our livelihood. We used to get all the money and food we needed, and more; what remained over after meeting all necessary expenses was spent in performing pilgrimages and giving alms to the Brahmins.”

So the child grew up reciting the scriptures in public, with her father, her mother, her brother, and her sister, in towns and temples across the south and west of India. She learned to speak before crowds while she was still a child. It was an odd education, and a rich one. It gave her a memory stocked with poetry, a voice that did not fear an audience, and a first-hand knowledge of popular Hindu religion that few Indian women and almost no Europeans possessed.

What She Saw

It also gave her a great deal to think about. Many years later, after she had become a Christian, Ramabai wrote down her memories of the sacred places she had visited as a child. Macnicol, who read them, warns that they were written by a convert looking back, and that “we cannot expect a balanced judgment from such a witness.” That is fair, and we should read them in that light. But her memories are also specific and unsentimental, and they show a child who was watching closely.

Her earliest memory of religion, she said, was from about the age of four, at the hill shrine of Tirupati in the south. The priests there told the pilgrims “any number of lies.” “My parents knew all about these lies and laughingly made mention of them. But yet the priests were looked upon as very gods and worshipped accordingly.” The family bathed in a waterfall called Papanasini, the “destroyer of sin,” though, she says, they “knew in their own hearts that the sins remained where they were, as before.”

When she was about thirteen, the family spent a year at Dwarka, on the coast of Gujarat, the city of Krishna. According to legend, Krishna’s golden city had sunk beneath the sea, but on one rare day, which came only once in sixty years, Krishna would show it to the sinless. The day came while they were there. Pilgrims arrived in their thousands. The Dongres bathed in the sea, gave alms to the Brahmans, recited the sacred texts, and waited through a cloudy day for the vision. At sunset the clouds on the horizon glowed gold.

Many people did not dare to say that they did not see the city, for that would be confessing that they were sinners. They kept silence about it and so did we. But we were convinced in our inmost hearts that we saw no city but saw the ordinary clouds which we were accustomed to see, almost daily, at the time of sunset.

“The pockets of the priests were filled with money,” she added, “while the pilgrims went empty away.”

At Pandharpur, in the Maratha country, the great shrine of the god Vithoba, the family prostrated themselves at the first sight of the holy city, and drank the muddy water of the Bhima river to wash away their sins. Ramabai wrote that she went there first “as a Hindu fully believing in all that I heard,” but that “the seed of unbelief was planted in my young heart by the sight of the inconsistency of the priests and worshippers.”

The First Call

She saw other things, too, that she never forgot.

When she was about nine, the family was living on the banks of the Jumna, in the north. There she saw a young wife beaten by her husband and her mother-in-law. Nearly thirty years later she wrote: “Her cries went right to my heart and I seem to hear them now after nearly thirty years. … I suppose that was the first call I received to enter upon the sacred duty of helping my sisters according to the little strength that I had.”

When she was about thirteen, she went with her mother and sister to visit the women’s quarters of a prince who had four wives. The eldest had borne him two sons, and her rooms were bright with happiness. The other three had no children, and their faces, she remembered, were “sad and careworn; there seemed no hope for them in this world, since their lord was displeased with them, on account of their misfortune.” She never forgot that either. When she came to write her book about the women of India, it was one of the scenes she described.

She saw such things as a Hindu girl, and as a Hindu girl she did not yet know what to make of them. The teaching around her, as she later described it in The High-Caste Hindu Woman, did not tell her they were wrong. It told her that a woman’s suffering was the result of sins in a former life, and that her only hope lay in pleasing her husband. Her own parents had broken with that teaching in their own home. But the questions it raised were only beginning to take shape in her mind.

Stone and Silence

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from a psalm that mocks the idols of the nations. “They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not.” It is a hard verse to use about the religion of a family that was sincere, learned, and devout, and it should be used carefully. Anant Shastri and Lakshmibai were not fools. They knew, Ramabai later wrote, that they did not worship the stone images themselves, but the gods whom the images represented. “We knew the Vedanta, and knew, also, that we worshipped not the images, but some gods whom they represented.”

And yet, she went on, “all our learning and superior knowledge was of no avail. We bowed to the idols, as thousands of learned Brahmans do. We expected them to speak to us in wonderful oracles.” What she remembered, looking back, was not that the images were ugly or that her parents were foolish. It was the silence. “The stone images remained as hard as ever, and never answered our prayers.” She was writing of the last years before her parents died, when the family prayed day and night for wealth and help; but the silence was the same silence she had met at Dwarka.

When she wrote those words in 1897, she added a verse from the prophet Jeremiah, in the old version she knew. In the American Standard Version it reads: “every goldsmith is put to shame by his graven image; for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them” (Jeremiah 10:14, ASV). For the child at Dwarka, staring at the sunset clouds and seeing no golden city, there was no such verse. There was only the quiet suspicion that the promises were not true, and the knowledge that one must not say so.

Her family was not unusual in its questions. Many devout Hindus of that age, and many before and since, have looked beyond the images and the priests toward a God who could not be seen or bought. Ramabai was not yet looking for Christ. She did not know that he existed. But she was learning, as she stood among the silent pilgrims at Dwarka, that she would rather know the truth than pretend to see what was not there. That habit of mind would lead her, in the end, a very long way.