“Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb”

“Open thy mouth for the dumb, In the cause of all such as are left desolate. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, And minister justice to the poor and needy.”

— Proverbs 31:8-9, ASV

Poona

Poona in 1882 was the intellectual capital of western India, and it was divided. On one side stood the reformers, men such as Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge, and R. G. Bhandarkar, a great Sanskrit scholar, members of a society called the Prarthana Samaj, the Prayer Society, which worshipped one God and worked cautiously for social change: the education of women, the raising of the age of marriage, the remarriage of widows. On the other side stood the orthodox, who saw in every such change an attack on Hindu society and on the Hindu nation, and whose leading voice in the coming years would be the brilliant young journalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

The reformers welcomed Ramabai. “The leaders of the reform party, and the members of the Prarthana Samaj treated me with great kindness and gave me some help,” she wrote. “Messrs. Ranade, Modak, Kelkar, and Dr. Bhandarkar were among the people who showed great kindness to me.” She gave readings from the Puranas at the Ranades’ house. Ranade’s young wife, also named Ramabai, who would become a pioneer of women’s education herself, never forgot her. “The sweet and musical flow of her speech and the manner in which she presented her subject were alike admirable,” Mrs. Ranade remembered. “In addition she had amazing skill in winning the hearts of her hearers for whatever she had to say.”

The Arya Mahila Samaj

Within a few months of her arrival, Ramabai founded a society of women. She called it the Arya Mahila Samaj, the Aryan Women’s Society. Its aims, as Macnicol records them, were “to work for the deliverance of women from the evil practices (e.g., child-marriage, the bondage of ignorance, etc.) which by tradition and custom have come down to India from the past,” and to work for the raising of women’s condition “in respect of religion, morality, etc.” It met on Saturdays, and she travelled from city to city in the Bombay Presidency founding branches of it.

It was one of the earliest organisations in India founded and led by a woman to work for women, and she did not mince her words. “Men look on us women as chattels,” she declared in June 1882. “We make every effort to deliver ourselves from this situation. But some will say that this is a rebellion against man, and that to do this is sin. To leave men’s evil acts unrebuked and remain unmoved before them is a great sin.”

That was more than orthodox Poona was ready to hear. The orthodox press attacked her almost at once. The Poona newspaper Kesari, which Tilak had helped to found, was criticising her by the summer of 1882.

She also wrote a small book in Marathi, Stri Dharma Niti, “Morals for Women,” a practical guide for women on how to improve their minds and manage their lives. It was, by later standards, a cautious book, which accepted a wife’s duties to her husband while urging women to educate themselves. But it contained one sentence that summed up her impatience with her country: “No spirit of daring, no ardour, no enterprise, no self-reliance, no anything — it is all No, no, no.” The sale of the book would help to pay for her voyage to England.

Before the Commission

In September 1882 the British government’s Education Commission, headed by Dr. W. W. Hunter, came to Poona to inquire into the state of education in India. The women of the Arya Mahila Samaj and others, some three hundred Brahman women with their children, gathered in the Town Hall to welcome the commissioners, to show them that the best families of the Maratha country wanted their daughters taught. Ramabai spoke for them. Then she gave evidence before the commission herself.

Hunter thought her evidence so important that he had it translated from Marathi and printed separately. She began by explaining who she was: the child of a man who had suffered for teaching women. “I consider it my duty,” she said, “to the very end of my life, to maintain this cause, and to advocate the proper position of women in this land.”

She asked for women teachers to be properly trained and properly paid, and for women inspectors of girls’ schools instead of men. Her reasons were blunt.

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the educated men of this country are opposed to Female Education and the proper position of woman. If they observe the slightest fault, they magnify the grain of mustard-seed into a mountain, and try to ruin the character of a woman. … Men being more able to reach the authorities are believed, while women go to the wall. … It is evident that women, being one-half of the people of this country, are oppressed and cruelly treated by the other half.

And she asked the government to train women doctors. “The women of this country are much more reserved than in other countries, and most of them would rather die than speak of their ailments to a man. The want of lady-doctors is, therefore, the cause of hundreds of thousands of women dying premature deaths.”

It was said at the time, on the authority of the Times of India, that her plea for women doctors reached the ears of Queen Victoria herself, and helped to inspire the movement later led by the Viceroy’s wife, Lady Dufferin, to provide medical care for Indian women. Rachel Bodley reported this as something that was “believed.” Whether or not it is true, the need Ramabai described was real, and she was among the first to describe it in public.

She was twenty-four. She had no degree, no position, and no family. But she had stood before a British commission and told it, in an answer the chairman later had printed, that the women of India were oppressed by the men. It was a courageous thing to do, and the verse at the head of this chapter describes it exactly: “Open thy mouth for the dumb, In the cause of all such as are left desolate.”

A Girl Who Had “Eaten Her Husband”

That same year, a Brahman child-widow of about twelve was brought to her. She had been married at five, and her boy husband had died a few days after the wedding. Her mother-in-law would not look at her. “She said the girl had eaten up her son and was a great demon.”

Ramabai took the girl to live with her. And as she looked at her, her plans began to take shape.

As I looked on that little figure my vague thoughts about doing something for my sisters in similar conditions began to take shape. … I began to place a plan for starting a Home for Hindu widows before my countrymen and to ask for their help. For six months or more I tried my best to get help, but could not. Then the thought came to me that I had better get a medical education and then do what I could to help widows. With that purpose I made up my mind to go to England, if the way opened for me.

She wrote those words many years later, as a Christian, and she added: “The unknown God, who was directing my steps toward the way of life, made it possible for me to carry out the purpose which He had put into my heart.”

Teachers

In Poona she met Christians again, and this time she listened more closely. A missionary of the Anglican High Church, Miss Hurford, came to teach her English and the New Testament in Marathi. “She used to teach me some lessons from the primary reading books, yet sometimes I was more interested in the study of the New Testament than in the reading books.”

Another visitor was Father Nehemiah Goreh. Goreh was, like Ramabai, a Chitpawan Brahman, a learned man who had become a Christian more than thirty years before and was now a priest of an Anglican religious order. He was gentle, humble, and a formidable scholar of Hindu philosophy. “The Rev. Father Goreh was another missionary who used to come and explain the difference between the Hindu and Christian religions,” she wrote. “I profited much by their teaching.” It was a book by Goreh that would later convince her of the truth of Christianity.

But she was not yet ready. Macnicol, citing Goreh’s biographer, records that she was said to have written to a vernacular newspaper around this time declaring that nothing would ever induce her to become a Christian. The letter itself has not been traced. If she said it, she had reason to. She had seen what becoming a Christian had cost others, and she knew what it would cost her in Poona.

The Sea

To go to England was itself an enormous step. For an orthodox Hindu of high caste, crossing the sea meant losing caste. For a woman, and a widow, to go alone with a small child to a country where she knew almost no one was almost unheard of. She knew it, and later wrote that a Hindu woman who crossed the sea cut herself off from her people for ever.

She went anyway. The Sisters of the Anglican Community of St. Mary the Virgin, at Wantage in Berkshire, to whom Miss Hurford had introduced her, agreed to receive her. In the spring of 1883, with Manorama, who was just two, and a young woman friend, Anandibai Bhagat, as her companion, she sailed from Bombay for England.

The Psalmist prayed that God would arise “To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, That man who is of the earth may be terrible no more” (Psalm 10:18, ASV). The girl who had “eaten up her son” was one of thousands, and Ramabai knew it. She was going to England to learn how to help them. God, as she later saw it, meant to teach her something more.