The Famine

“When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.”

— Psalm 27:10, ASV

Twenty Years Later

In January 1897 Ramabai sat down in Poona to thank the friends who had helped her and to describe her first journey into the famine districts of Central India. Before she described their sufferings, she described her own. “I feel deeply for these poor dying people,” she wrote, “because I have myself [known] what it is to suffer from hunger and thirst, and have seen my dearest relatives die of starvation.” She said she would never have written the story down, “had not the necessity of my present situation obliged me to do so.” It is the fullest account we have of how her family died, and this chapter follows it closely.

She dated it “some twenty-two years ago,” in a famine that reached its height in the Madras Presidency in 1876-77 but had begun at least three years before. Later in the same pamphlet she calls herself “a girl of sixteen” at the time, and Rachel Bodley, who heard the story from her in 1887, gives the same age. That would place their deaths in about 1874 or 1875, in the early years of the famine, not at its peak. She gives no year.

A Famine of Their Own Making

Ramabai did not blame the weather for all of it. Her father, she explained, had once been a landholder and an honoured pandit who had earned wealth by his learning. But as he grew old and blind he lost it all “in one way or another.” His children had no secular education, and no trade.

We had all the sacred learning necessary to lead an honest religious life; but the pride of caste and superior learning and vanity of life prevented our stooping down to acquire some industry whereby we might have saved the precious lives of our parents.

In short we had no common sense, and foolishly spent all the money we had in hand in giving alms to Brahmans to please the gods, who, we thought, would send a shower of gold mohurs upon us and make us rich and happy.

In A Testimony she described it more simply. The sacred books promised that if people worshipped the gods in the prescribed ways, gave alms, fasted, and repeated the holy names, the gods would appear and give them what they asked. “We decided to take this course of meeting our temporal wants. For three years we did nothing but perform these religious acts. At last all the money which we had was spent, but the gods did not help us. We suffered from famine, which we had brought upon ourselves.”

Her brother Srinivas, “a stalwart young fellow of twenty-one,” ruined his health by fasting for months on end. When the money was gone, the family sold their jewellery, their good clothes, their silver, and at last their cooking pots of brass and copper, and gave the money to the Brahmans. They lived on a little coarse rice until the last grain was eaten. “Oh, the sorrow, the helplessness, and the disgrace of the situation!”

The Forest at Tirupati

They were staying at Tirupati, the hill shrine where Ramabai’s memories of religion began. There, after a long discussion, they decided that it would be better to go into the forest and die than bear the disgrace of poverty among their own people. That night they left their lodging and walked into the jungle. For eleven days and nights they lived on water, leaves, and a handful of wild dates.

At last her father, old, blind, and starving, could bear no more. He decided to drown himself in a sacred pool nearby, which in Hindu belief was not suicide but a holy death. It was suggested that the rest of the family should do the same. First he said goodbye to each of his children, one by one. Ramabai, the youngest, came last.

I shall never forget his last injunctions to me. His blind eyes could not see my face, but he held me tight in his arms; and, stroking my head and cheeks, he told me in a few words, broken with emotion, to remember how he loved me, and how he taught me to do right, and never depart from the way of righteousness. His last loving command to me was to lead an honorable life, if I lived at all, and serve God all my life.

“Remember, my child,” he said, “you are my youngest, my most beloved child. I have given you into the hands of our God. You are His, and to Him alone you must belong and serve all your life.”

She was too bewildered to answer. Twenty years later, as a Christian, she wrote: “He did not know the only true God, but served the, to him, unknown God with all his heart and strength.” She was thinking of Paul in Athens, who found an altar inscribed “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD,” and said to the Athenians, “What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto you” (Acts 17:23, ASV). “I can now say to the departed spirit of the loving parent, ‘Yes, dear father, I will serve the only true God to the last.’ But I could not say so when my father spoke to me for the last time.”

Her father asked for an hour alone to prepare for death. Then Srinivas stepped in. He could not bear to watch his father drown himself, he said. They would give up their pride of caste and go to work. He would carry their father down the mountain himself, and find work in the nearest village. Their father agreed. “Our hearts were gladdened,” Ramabai wrote, “and we prepared to start from the forest. And yet we wished very much that a tiger, a great snake, or some other wild animal would put an end to our lives. We were too weak to move, and too proud to beg or work to earn a livelihood.”

Sugar and Water

It took them nearly two days to drag themselves out of the forest to a village at the foot of the hill. They took shelter in a temple, but the Brahman priests turned them out. They moved into the ruins of an old temple outside the village, where nothing lived but wild animals. A young Brahman, seeing their helplessness, gave them some food.

On the day they reached the village her father fell ill with fever. “On the first day, at the beginning of his last illness, he asked for a little sugar and water. We gave him water, but could not give sugar.” He could not eat the coarse food they had. He became unconscious, and died on the morning of the third day.

No one in the village would help to carry his body. The young Brahman who had fed them paid for a grave to be dug, but he dared not touch the corpse himself, for fear of losing caste, since he was not sure they were Brahmans. Before his death Anant Shastri had taken the vows of a sannyasi, a holy man, and so he was to be buried, not burned. “As there was no one else who could help to carry the dead, my brother tied the body in his dhoti, like a bundle, and carried it alone over two miles to its last resting-place. We sadly followed to the river bank, and helped him a little.” They buried him outside the village, away from any house, and went back to the ruined temple.

Raichur

That same evening her mother fell ill with fever. There was no work and no food, and they could not stay. They walked for a time with their sick mother, and then some kind people gave them a little food and the fare to the town of Raichur. There they stayed for some weeks, too weak to go on. Srinivas could not work, and they could not bring themselves to beg. Now and then someone gave them something to eat.

One day her mother was so hungry that she sent Ramabai to a neighbour’s house to ask for a piece of bajri bread, the coarse millet bread of the poor.

I went there very reluctantly. The lady spoke kindly to me, but I could on no account open my mouth to beg that piece of bajree bread. With superhuman effort and a firm resolution to keep my feelings from that lady, I kept the tears back; but they poured out of my nose instead of my eyes, in spite of me, and the expression of my face told its own story.

The woman understood, and asked if she wanted some food. “So I said, ‘Yes, I want only a little piece of bajree bread.’ She gave me what I wanted; and I felt very grateful, but could not say a word to express my gratitude. I ran to my mother in great haste, and gave it to her. But she could not eat, she was too weak.” A few days later her mother died.

This time two Brahmans came to help, and with them Ramabai and her brother carried their mother’s body to the burning-ground, about three miles from the town. Bodley adds a detail that Ramabai must have told her: that because she was so short, she carried her share of the weight on her head.

Her sister Krishnabai died soon afterwards. “My elder sister also died of starvation, after suffering from illness and hunger. During those few months before our sister died, we three travelled on foot from place to place in search of food and work; but we could not get much of either.” We do not know where she died, or when.

Taken Up

Within a few months, then, Ramabai lost her father, her mother, and her sister. She was about sixteen. Only her brother was left.

The verse at the head of this chapter is David’s: “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.” Ramabai’s parents had not forsaken her. They had loved her to the end, and her father’s last act had been to give her into the hands of God, the only God he knew. She did not yet know the God who would take her up. But she came to believe that he had already done so, in that forest above Tirupati. “My father’s prayers for me were, no doubt, heard by the Almighty, the all-merciful heavenly Father, whom the old Hindu did not know.”

She carried the memory for the rest of her life. “The memory of the last days of their life, full of sorrow, almost breaks my heart,” she wrote in 1897. And it shaped her work in a way she could not have foreseen. Years later, Ramabai told her daughter: “When you go to Raichur, think of my mother, and remember that it was there that I got my inspiration for famine work.”