Pandita

“But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof; Neither is it found in the land of the living.”

— Job 28:12-13, ASV

Calcutta

In 1878 Ramabai and Srinivas reached Calcutta. It was the capital of British India, a city of great wealth and great poverty, of English offices and Bengali mansions, of colleges, printing presses, and newspapers, and it was in the middle of an intellectual ferment that historians would later call the Bengal Renaissance. Educated Bengalis were arguing about everything: religion, caste, the place of women, the relation between Indian tradition and European learning. Into this city walked a young woman of about twenty who could recite thousands of verses of Sanskrit poetry from memory, compose Sanskrit verse on the spot, and speak with authority about the Hindu scriptures. She caused a sensation.

“We stayed in Calcutta for about a year,” she wrote, “and became acquainted with the learned Brahmins.” By now she and her brother had moved a long way from the religion of their parents. By her own account, as Macnicol reports it, two years before Srinivas’s death they had given up much of their faith in the Hindu gods and adopted a simple belief in one God. But they still kept caste, and much of their thinking was still the thinking of devout Brahmans.

The Christians

In Calcutta, for the first time, they met Christians. They were invited to a Christian social gathering, and were shocked when they were offered refreshments. “We thought the Last Age, Kali Yuga, that is, the age of quarrels, darkness and irreligion had fully established its reign in Calcutta, since some of the Brahmans were so irreligious as to eat food with the English.” Then they watched the Christians pray.

We looked upon the proceedings of the assembly with curiosity, but did not understand what they were about. After a little while one of them opened a book and read something out of it, and then they all knelt down before their chairs and some said something with closed eyes. We were told that was the way they prayed to God. We did not see any image to which they paid their homage, but it seemed as though they were paying homage to the chairs before which they knelt.

Before they left, the Christians gave her a copy of the Bible in Sanskrit. Two of the men there, she remembered, were its translators, “grand old men,” whose names she had forgotten. “I liked the outward appearance of the book and tried to read it, but did not understand. The language was so different from the Sanskrit literature of the Hindus, the teaching so different, that I thought it quite a waste of time to read that Book; but I have never parted with it since then.”

Sarasvati

The learned men of Calcutta were fascinated by her. Macnicol records that she was welcomed at the Calcutta Senate House by three Sanskrit professors, two of them Englishmen, who chanted her praises in Sanskrit verse, and that she answered them at once in an extempore Sanskrit poem. “I am not worthy of the praise you have showered upon me,” she said. “I am only a humble worshipper in your temple of Saraswati.” Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of learning. Soon afterwards an assembly of the city’s pandits, after examining her, gave her the title Sarasvati itself.

The other title by which she has been known ever since, Pandita, the feminine of pandit, a learned scholar, seems to have come by popular acclaim rather than formal grant. From that time she was known as Pandita Ramabai. Her admirers later claimed that she was the first woman, or the only woman, ever to be given these honours. No one really knows whether that is true, and this book does not repeat it. It is enough that a young woman, orphaned and penniless, with no formal schooling, was hailed by the scholars of the capital as a master of the sacred learning.

Many years later, Macnicol noted, she counted all this as nothing. But at the time it mattered, and not only to her. A Bombay newspaper wrote that “the patriotic among us ought to feel proud that there is, even in our fallen condition, one such among their sisters who would do credit to the female sex in any country.” She had shown, in her own person, what an Indian woman could do if she were taught.

What the Books Said

Her fame brought an invitation that changed her life. Some of the pandits asked her to lecture to women in purdah, the high-caste women who lived secluded from the world, on the duties of women according to the Hindu scriptures. To prepare, she bought the Hindu law-books, the Dharma Shastras, and read them carefully for the first time. She had been taught the popular scriptures, not the law. Now she discovered what the law said about her.

She found, first of all, that the books contradicted each other on almost everything. “What one book said was most righteous, the other book declared as being unrighteous.” She quoted a line from the epic Mahabharata: “The Vedas differ from each other; Smritis do not agree with one another; the secret of religion is in some hidden place.” But on two things, she found, every authority was agreed.

There were two things on which all these books — the Dharma Shastras, the sacred epics, the Puranas and modern poets, the popular preachers of the present day, and orthodox high caste men, all were agreed — that women of high and low caste, as a class, were bad, very bad, worse than demons, as unholy as untruth; and that they could not get Moksha as men.

A woman, the books taught, could not attain moksha, liberation from the endless round of death and rebirth. Her only hope was to worship her husband as her god, however wicked he might be, and so earn the merit to be born again, in some later life, as a man. The same was true of the lowest castes, the Shudras and those beneath them, who were forbidden even to hear the Vedas.

She had known something of this all her life. Now it came home to her with overwhelming force.

My eyes were being gradually opened; I was waking up to my own hopeless condition as a woman, and it was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I had no place anywhere as far as religious consolation was concerned. I became quite dissatisfied with myself. I wanted something more than the Shastras could give me, but I did not know what it was that I wanted.

Her father had taught her mother Sanskrit because he believed that women could learn. He had defended himself before an assembly of pandits, and won. But the books he revered, she now found, held out no hope for the women he had taught. The books her family had followed into the forest had nothing to say to her, as a woman, except that she must wait to be born a man.

Keshab

Among the people who wanted to meet her was Keshab Chandra Sen, the most famous religious reformer in India. Keshab was the leader of the Brahmo Samaj of India, a movement that rejected image worship and caste and taught the worship of one God, drawing on the Upanishads, on other religions, and not least on the teaching of Jesus. He invited Ramabai and her brother to his house, took her into the inner rooms to meet his wife and daughters, and when she left he gave her a copy of one of the Vedas.

He asked if I had studied the Vedas. I answered in the negative, and said that women were not fit to read the Vedas, and they were not allowed to do so. I would be breaking the rules of religion if I were to study the Vedas. He could not but smile at my declaration of this Hindu doctrine. He said nothing in answer, but advised me to study the Vedas and Upanishads.

It was a small thing, a smile, but it was enough. “New thoughts were awakening in my heart. I questioned myself why I should not study the Vedas and Vedanta. Soon I persuaded myself into the belief that it was not wrong for a woman to read the Vedas. So I began first to read the Upanishads, then the Vedanta, and the Veda.”

Some of her early biographers later said that Keshab gave her a book of selections from the scriptures of all religions, including the Sermon on the Mount, as if the path to Christ had begun that day. Ramabai’s own account says only that he gave her a Veda. Hers is the account this book follows. What Keshab gave her was not the Gospel, but permission: the permission to read what she had been told she must not read, and to think for herself about it.

Where Wisdom Is Found

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from the book of Job, from a poem about the search for wisdom. Men dig for silver and gold, the poet says, and find precious stones in the depths of the earth. “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” It is not in the mines, not in the sea, and it cannot be bought with gold. Ramabai had more of the wisdom of her people than almost anyone of her age in India. She had just been honoured for it by the scholars of Calcutta. And she had found, at the bottom of it all, that it held no place for her.

The poem in Job ends with an answer: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; And to depart from evil is understanding” (Job 28:28, ASV). She did not know that answer yet. The Sanskrit Bible lay half-read among her books. But she had begun to ask the right question.