Nineteen Months

“Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth; and the reproach of thy widowhood shalt thou remember no more. For thy Maker is thy husband; Jehovah of hosts is his name: and the Holy One of Israel is thy Redeemer; the God of the whole earth shall he be called.”

— Isaiah 54:4-5, ASV

Srinivas

From Calcutta, Ramabai and her brother travelled on through Bengal and into Assam, lecturing and being received with honour. Then, in 1880, Srinivas fell ill and died. Macnicol places his death at Dacca in May 1880. Other early accounts say Calcutta. The details are uncertain, but what passed between them in his illness, as she wrote it for Rachel Bodley, is not.

His great thought during his brief illness was for me; what would become of me left alone in the world? When he spoke of his anxiety, I answered: “There is no one but God to care for you and me.” “Ah,” he answered, “then if God cares for us, I am afraid of nothing.” And, indeed, in my loneliness, it seemed as if God was near me; I felt His presence.

She was twenty-two. Her father, her mother, her sister, and now her brother were dead. Some of her admirers later retold the exchange in tidier words. In her own telling it is simpler and braver: there was no one but God to care for either of them, and her dying brother found that enough.

A Marriage Across Caste

Six months later she married. Her husband was Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer with a master’s degree and a law degree from the University of Calcutta, who had been a friend of her brother’s. He was not a Brahman. Ramabai described him as “a Bengali gentleman of the Shudra caste.” He was in fact a Kayastha, a respected caste of scribes and officials, but orthodox Brahmans counted such men as Shudras, and for a Brahman woman to marry one was, in their eyes, a scandal and a pollution.

She married him knowing all this, and she said plainly why. “Having lost all faith in the religion of my ancestors I married a Bengali gentleman of the Shudra caste.” Neither of them wished to be married with Hindu or Christian rites. “We neither of us believed either in Hinduism or Christianity,” she told Bodley, “and so we were married with the civil marriage rite.” Modern scholars date the marriage to November 1880. In Poona, Mrs. Ramabai Ranade later recalled, orthodox women gossiped that the “horrid creature” had been married to Krishna at Dwarka by her father and had then gone and married a Bengali — a story Ramabai herself denounced as wholly false.

They made their home at Silchar, a small town in the Cachar district of Assam, where Bipin practised law. In the spring of 1881 a daughter was born. They had longed for a daughter, Bodley was told, and the name was waiting for her: Manorama, “heart’s joy.”

A Pamphlet in the Library

At Silchar something happened that seemed small at the time.

While living with my husband at Silchar, Assam, I had found a little pamphlet in my library. I do not know how it came there, but I picked it up and began to read it with great interest. It was Luke’s Gospel in the Bengali language.

There was a Baptist missionary in the town, a Mr. Allen, who sometimes visited them and spoke about the gospel. He explained to her the first chapter of Genesis. “The story of the creation of the world was so very unlike all the stories which I read in the Puranas and Shastras that I became greatly interested in it. It struck me as being a true story, but I could not give any reason for thinking so or believing in it.”

She read and asked questions, and she told her husband that she meant to become a Christian if she were fully satisfied that it was true. Bipin was not pleased.

My husband, who had studied in a mission school, was pretty well acquainted with the Bible, but did not like to be called a Christian. Much less did he like the idea of his wife being publicly baptised and joining the despised Christian community. He was very angry, and said he would tell Mr. Allen not to come to our house any more. I do not know just what would have happened had he lived.

It is a telling scene. The husband who had defied his caste to marry her was not prepared for her to defy it further. Crossing caste in marriage was radical, but a Hindu reformer could do it and remain respectable in progressive circles. Becoming a Christian meant joining a community that most Hindus regarded as outcast, “the despised Christian community,” and it would have cost him dearly.

Cholera

He did not live. Early in 1882, probably in February, Bipin Medhavi died of cholera. Ramabai remembered the marriage as “nineteen months of happy married life,” though the dates that modern scholars give suggest it was closer to fifteen months. Manorama was less than a year old.

“My husband died of cholera within two years of our marriage,” she wrote in A Testimony, “and I was left alone to face the world with one baby in my arms.”

To understand what this meant, we have to remember what it meant to be a widow in Hindu India. A widow was believed to be to blame for her husband’s death, through sins in this life or a former one. Among the higher castes she could not remarry. Her head was shaved, her jewellery taken away, and she wore coarse clothing for the rest of her life. She ate one meal a day and fasted often. She was kept away from weddings and festivals because her presence was unlucky. She was often treated as a servant by her husband’s family. And child-widows, girls who had been married as infants and widowed before they had ever lived with their husbands, suffered all this from childhood to old age.

Ramabai was spared most of it. She had married outside Hindu custom, and she did not follow its rules for widows. But she knew them from the inside, and she had seen what they did. Now she was twenty-three, alone, with no family, a baby daughter, and no home.

“He Must Himself Draw Me”

She did not despair. In the grief of those months, she said, God seemed nearer, not further away. “This great grief drew me nearer to God. I felt that He was teaching me, and that if I was to come to Him, He must Himself draw me.”

That is a remarkable sentence for someone who was not yet a Christian. She did not yet know who God was. She had lost her faith in the gods of her fathers, she was not satisfied with the religion of the Brahmos, and she had only begun to read the Christian scriptures. But she had grasped something that many Christians take years to understand: that she could not find her own way to God, and that if she was to come to him, he must bring her. Jesus said the same: “No man can come to me, except the Father that sent me draw him” (John 6:44, ASV).

Years later she described her state of mind at this time. “I was desperately in need of some religion. The Hindu religion held out no hope for me; the Brahmo religion was not a very definite one, for it is nothing but what a man makes for himself. … It could not and did not satisfy me; still I liked and believed a good deal of it that was better than what the orthodox Hindu religion taught.”

Thy Maker Is Thy Husband

The words at the head of this chapter were spoken by the prophet Isaiah to Israel in exile, pictured as a widow, forsaken and ashamed. “Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed … the reproach of thy widowhood shalt thou remember no more. For thy Maker is thy husband.”

Ramabai would come to know these words, and to see in them a promise for every widow of India. In the Hindu world, a woman’s husband was her god, and when he died her hope died with him. The Bible told her the opposite: that God himself would be a husband to the widow, that her widowhood was not her disgrace, and that she need not be ashamed. She would spend her life telling that to the widows of India. But first she had to learn it herself.

She did not go back to Calcutta. All her family were gone, and there was no one to go back to. She went first to Madras, meaning to learn English there, but found the language of the south wholly strange to her. So in 1882, with her baby, she went west, to the city where her father had studied as a young man and first heard a woman reciting Sanskrit: to Poona.