Women's History Review

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Multiple contestations: Pandita Ramabai's

educational and missionary activities in late
nineteenth-century India and abroad

Meera Kosambi

To cite this article: Meera Kosambi (1998) Multiple contestations: Pandita Ramabai's educational
and missionary activities in late nineteenth-century India and abroad, Women's History Review, 7:2,
193-208

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029800200171

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 PANDITA RAMABAI’S MISSIONARY ACTIVITIES
Women’s History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1998

Multiple Contestations:
Pandita Ramabai’s educational
and missionary activities in late
nineteenth-century India and abroad

MEERA KOSAMBI
SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, India

ABSTRACT Pandita Ramabai, a Brahmin scholar of repute, converted to

Christianity during her visit to England for higher studies in the 1880s. Her
encounter with Christianity and the Anglican Church, within the imperial,
Orientalist and patriarchal framework, was problematic. But Ramabai found
her new religion to be a source of spiritual sustenance and basis for an
international network of Christian women and men who aided her ambitious
residential school for Hindu widows. Ramabai’s contestation of the Hindu
religion and patriarchy, however, extracted a heavy price in her being socially
marginalised and erased from the official histories of Western India. This article
explores Ramabai’s trail of multiple contestations through the Indian Hindu
and imperial Christian terrains to reach her goal of women’s empowerment
through education.

In September 1883 Pandita Ramabai, a Brahmin woman highly respected in

India for her orthodox Hindu learning, converted to Christianity. She had
been living at the time at Wantage in England, as a guest of the Anglican
Community of St Mary the Virgin. The shock waves created by the event in
India were matched in intensity by the exultation in England. Though both
reactions were short-lived, Ramabai’s subsequent life functioned as the site
where the ideological tensions between Hindus and Christians, and between
the reformers and conservatives among the Hindus, were played out. She
also became a valuable asset for spearheading social change for women in
Western India – an asset over which competing claims were made by the
social reformers in their efforts to spread women’s education, and by the
Anglican missionaries in their bid to win more upper-caste converts to
Christianity.

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MEERA KOSAMBI

Ramabai was uniquely located within the turbulent confrontation

between British imperialism and the traditional Hindu culture of
Maharashtra (the Marathi-speaking region in Western India, then partly
subsumed under the Bombay Presidency). The Brahmin élite’s erstwhile
multiple hegemony – born of a ritual supremacy and a monopoly of sacred
knowledge, and reinforced by political power – was gradually eroded by the
new multiple hegemony of the ruling British élite who were the new political
masters, economic overlords and possessors of a powerful knowledge –
secular though permeated by the Christian value system. The encounter
generated some constructive initiatives for socio-religious reform adopted
mainly by the upper castes whose women were subjected to severe
constraints. The reform discourse was an entirely male one, between
reformist and conservative men, and between the Indian reformers and
British officials who made the eventual Indian political autonomy contingent
upon social reform. Gender inequities which formed an important pivot of
reform were predictably addressed and redressed by public men whose
relatively liberal ideas were clearly circumscribed by the patriarchal ideology.
It remained for a woman to transgress the boundaries of patriarchy
through educational and religious activism and to reinscribe women into the
male discourse. This woman, Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), thus enjoyed the
distinction of being the sole woman champion of the women’s cause in the
male-dominated world of gender reform in Western India. But the distinction
proved to be more symbolic than real, because she was almost totally
obscured from the official histories of Western India, condemned both
during her lifetime and after her death for her challenge to the Hindu,
patriarchal social order of the day.
But Christianity, which was once a source of spiritual sustenance and
material support for Ramabai, generated its own conflicts. Ramabai’s
conversion situated her at the heart of the Orientalist discourse of racial,
cultural and religious hegemony which she contested with the same fervour
as she did the patriarchy of the Anglican Church.
This article explores Ramabai’s trail of contestations through the
Indian Hindu and imperial Christian terrains to reach her goal of women’s
empowerment through education, and the price she paid in being erased
from the mainstream historical records of Maharashtra – the very society she
sought to help.

Ramabai’s Life Trajectory

The social context for Ramabai’s life was the traditional upper-caste Hindu
society which mandated pre-pubertal marriage and immediate post-pubertal
consummation of marriage for girls, and which denied education to women
– both to stress their disprivileged status and to curb their freedom of
communication. The salient issues in gender reform, therefore, were the

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abolition of child marriage, support for widow remarriage, and introduction

of women’s education. These initiatives were radical enough occasionally to
trigger off open conflict between the reformist minority and the conservative
majority. Reform and religion intersected repeatedly because the multiple
oppression of women was justified by sacralising the patriarchal ideology
which treated women as inferior and subservient to men, as born solely for a
wife-mother role, and as the legal wards and property of their husbands. The
reform issues therefore posed a direct challenge to both patriarchy and
religion in varying degrees. The strongest challenge of all came from Pandita
Ramabai herself, who interrogated both patriarchy – through her nationally
and internationally famed championship of women’s education – and the
Hindu religion, through her conversion to Christianity and overt missionary
activity.[1]
Ramabai’s training for her momentous task had already begun during
her unconventional childhood, lived largely outside the confines of a strictly
regulated community such as circumscribed the lives of her contemporaries.
She was the youngest of the three surviving children of an erudite Sanskrit
scholar of Western India, who incurred the hostility of fellow Brahmins by
his only deviation from orthodoxy – insistence on imparting the ‘sacred’
Sanskrit language and its texts to a woman, namely, his wife. There followed
the furore predictable in a society which excluded women and the lower
castes even from basic literacy, and which contained only minute urban
pockets of girls and boys educated in the caste-neutral, Western-type
governmental and missionary schools. He then withdrew to a modest home
he built himself in a forest where he ran a residential school for boys in the
traditional Hindu style.
Born at this forest home, Ramabai left it in babyhood, as the family
embarked on an unceasing pilgrimage to holy places across the Indian
subcontinent, eking out a meagre living by reciting sacred stories and
practising austerities calculated to earn religious merit. At the age of 16
Ramabai lost both her parents, emaciated by a rigorous lifestyle and
undernourishment, to a severe famine in the Madras Presidency. Two years
later, her older sister (whose early and unhappy marriage had dissuaded
their father from arranging a similar and customary early marriage for
Ramabai) also died. Ramabai and her brother then continued their
pilgrimage, the only way of life they knew.
When the pair reached Calcutta in 1878, the 19 year-old Ramabai took
the city by storm with her mastery over the Sanskrit language and texts.
After a public examination by a panel of celebrated scholars, she was
conferred with the titles of ‘Pandita’ (Scholar) and ‘Saraswati’ (Goddess of
Learning). The much lionised Ramabai was soon drawn into the orbit of
social reform, and travelled widely in the Bengal Presidency addressing
women in their secluded quarters on the need for women’s education and
emancipation, drawing heavily on the mythological figures of educated,

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MEERA KOSAMBI

active and independent women. Ramabai was thus already launched on her
career as an educationist before she was 20.
Tragedy struck yet again when Ramabai lost her brother in 1880. She
soon married his friend and her former suitor Medhavi, a Bengali
non-Brahmin lawyer (by civil registration, as inter-caste marriage was
disallowed by the Hindu religion). Within less than 2 years of a happy
married life and a few months after the birth of their daughter Manorama,
Medhavi died, leaving the 24 year-old Ramabai a penniless widow with an
infant. By this time, Ramabai’s fame as a Sanskrit scholar and champion of
women’s education had spread widely, and efforts began to be made by the
social reformers of Maharashtra to reclaim their ‘native daughter’ to assist in
their work.
Ramabai’s arrival at Poona, the cultural centre of Maharashtra, in late
April 1882 heralded hectic activity in this direction. With the full support of
local social reformers she established a women’s association, the Arya
Mahila Samaj, to promote social awareness among them, on 1 June 1882.
Branches were soon set up at major cities in the region. By the end of June
1882 she published her first, and rather patronising, book in Marathi, Stree
Dharma Neeti [Morals for Women] with the objective of counselling the
“helpless and lacking in knowledge” women “in our unfortunate
country”.[2]
As an already famous expert on women’s education, Ramabai was
invited to testify before the Hunter Commission on Education in September
1882. She outlined the public hostility towards women’s education, stressed
its value as well as the need for women teachers and inspectors of schools,
and made an additional plea for women doctors because Indian women
would not consult male doctors, especially for gynaecological complaints.
Greatly impressed, Dr Hunter had her Marathi testimony translated into
English, and publicised her suggestions for women’s medical education and
the need for women doctors, in England. This was a partial cause of the
formation, a few years later, of the National Association for Supplying
Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, commonly known as the
Countess of Dufferin Fund after its president, the Vicereine of India.[3]
Given the dearth of opportunities in India, Ramabai formed an ambitious
plan to go to England for medical studies, undeterred by the numerous
objections voiced by well-wishers and critics alike, who stressed her youth
and lack of worldly wisdom, responsibility for her baby daughter, and
near-total ignorance of English.[4] With the help of the Sisters of the
Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV) at Poona, Ramabai made contact
with the Community’s headquarters at Wantage in England, and obtained an
assurance of practical and financial help, but without strings attached by
way of religious pressures.[5] In April 1883 she sailed from Bombay for
England.

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 PANDITA RAMABAI’S MISSIONARY ACTIVITIES

In mid-May Ramabai reached England in good health and spirits.[6] By

September, however, she was sunk in a deep depression caused partly by the
suicide of her Indian woman companion who had accompanied her on her
voyage (and who had been baptised on her deathbed, allegedly at her own
request [7]), and partly by the discovery that a hearing defect precluded her
medical education. At the end of September 1883, with a suddenness which
remains mysterious, she and her daughter Manorama were baptised into the
Anglican Church at Wantage. In India the news created the expected storm,
generating charges of betrayal, deception and mercenary behaviour.
‘Mary Rama’ was guided in spiritual matters by the elderly Sister
Geraldine of the CSMV, a dogmatic disciplinarian who admitted to being
intellectually ill-equipped for the task.[8] Ramabai’s doctrinaire disputes with
Sister Geraldine and the Church authorities continued, mainly due to her
insistence on accepting the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ as her principal doctrine,
while refusing to believe in the divinity of Christ or miracles such as the
Immaculate Conception and Resurrection. She incurred charges of
arrogance and lack of faith – charges which were also imbued with a strong
racial and cultural prejudice.[9]
In the meantime, the CSMV enrolled Ramabai at the Cheltenham
Ladies’ College for an education in the sciences and English, a language
over which she rapidly developed a good command, judging by her
published letters from late 1883 onward.[10] The founder and Principal of
the College, Miss Dorothea Beale, a moderate feminist who had championed
women’s education in England [11], was better able than the Anglican nuns
to appreciate Ramabai’s “wonderful mind and character”.[12] She
established an instant rapport with Ramabai, and discussed her spiritual
doubts and difficulties sympathetically. But Ramabai’s friction with the
Anglican Church continued, with Sister Geraldine appealing to Miss Beale to
give Ramabai “a little teaching on submission to authority” because “She
has to learn that as a Christian, she is bound to accept the authority of those
over her in the Church. She is inclined to take too independent a line”.[13]
If Miss Beale did not oblige in this regard, she helped in other ways, as by
offering Ramabai a professorship to teach Indian languages to English
women and men.
In the midst of considerable uncertainty about her future plans,
Ramabai received an invitation to visit the USA in March 1886. The occasion
was the graduation of her ‘kinswoman’ Anandibai Joshee from the Woman’s
Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP) at Philadelphia, as India’s very
first woman doctor. The Dean of WMCP, Professor Rachel Bodley, made it
amply clear that she hoped to enlist Ramabai’s support on her behalf:
if the tidings might be sent to India that you braved a wintry ocean to
witness Anandibai receive her degree as a Doctor of Medicine, you in a
certain sense gave your sanction to her act and enfolded her and her
work in your own future leadership.[14]

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MEERA KOSAMBI

Against her guardians’ wishes, Ramabai accepted the invitation as a duty

indicated by her “inner voice” in the service of “my countrywomen”.[15]
In many ways this American visit was the making of Ramabai’s career,
both as an educationist and a missionary. It launched her into Philadelphia’s
public life (and also the USA’s, judging by the media publicity generated in
New York and elsewhere) as an honoured guest at the graduation ceremony
and as a speaker at a special event the following day. Ramabai then set out
to study the school system of Philadelphia, and also mounted a campaign to
publicise the cause of Indian women, especially widows for whom she hoped
to open a residential school. Only a month after her arrival, she wrote to
Miss Beale that she had spoken before “several assemblies” and that “People
seem to like my imperfect speeches”.[16]
Over the next 2½ years Ramabai travelled across the North American
continent giving public lectures. She visited women’s organisations, met
famous persons like Frances Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union, and garnered support for her scheme.[17] In December 1887 the
American Ramabai Association was formed in Boston, and a subsidiary
opened later in San Francisco. The Association pledged financial support for
a secular residential school for Hindu widows for a period of 10 years. As
part of the fund-raising effort, Ramabai wrote The High-caste Hindu
Woman, her most famous book and virtually an Indian feminist manifesto,
in 1887.
In early February 1889 Ramabai arrived in India. A month later her
school, the ‘Sharada Sadan’ [Home of the Goddess of Learning], was opened
in Bombay amid great publicity. She received full support from the social
reformers, who were impressed not only with her ability single-handedly to
raise generous funds abroad but also with her continued devotion to Indian
social reform. The fact that her Christian conversion had not ‘denationalised’
her was felt to be reassuring. Even the largely conservative Marathi weekly
of Poona, the Kesari, expressed pride “that such an extraordinary woman
was born in our midst” [18], admitting that “Today our society has a great
need for women like Pandita Ramabai ... It is to her credit that she has not
given up her national pride together with her religion”.[19]
The Sharada Sadan was the first institution in India of its kind, a
residential school for Brahmin women, mainly widows (but also unmarried
girls and day scholars), providing a regular school education as well as
vocational training like teacher education and nursing. It was a radical idea
which sought to achieve economic self-reliance for women while providing
shelter. Even as the Home was gaining acceptance, Ramabai shifted it to
Poona in order to reduce expenses and to access the orthodox cultural
heartland of Maharashtra.
This proved to be Ramabai’s undoing, for a patriarchal backlash
quickly followed. The perceived ‘pampering’ of widows (who were required
by religion and custom to practise austerities) was unpalatable to a large

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section of the local Brahmins. Also, suspicions of surreptitious Christian

propaganda were fuelled by Ramabai’s policy of allowing the girls to attend
her private prayers, undermining her own avowed policy of religious
neutrality – in the spirit if not the letter. A regular warfare broke out
between her conservative attackers and reformist supporters, both factions
using their newspapers to good effect. In the aftermath of the scandal, the
local Advisory Committee of the school resigned, most other reformers
withdrew their support, and guardians removed their wards from the Home.
An inquiry team sent by the Ramabai Association of Boston exonerated
Ramabai but could not undo the harm. Her marginalisation from
mainstream Hindu society was now an established fact.
Isolated and boycotted, Ramabai shifted the school, after the first 10
years, out of Poona to the nearby village of Kedgaon in 1899. It then
became an overtly Christian missionary institution, under the terms of the
new contract with the American Ramabai Association. This was also the time
of a widespread famine in Western and Central India, and Ramabai’s own
painful childhood experience of famine drove her to rescue hundreds of girls
and women; these women were later described by the famous nationalist and
anti-reformer B. G. Tilak as “widows caught in Ramabai’s net during the
unique opportunity of the famine years”.[20] This mob of unruly and
uneducated rural women, so different from the strictly disciplined
upper-caste widows, was indeed controlled through large-scale conversions
to Christianity and frequent ‘Revivals’. These visitations from the Holy Spirit
were akin to the phenomenon of ‘possession’ by Hindu deities with which
these women were familiar; however, they were treated with scepticism by
Ramabai’s Christian friends.
The Kedgaon establishment, known as the Ramabai ‘Mukti’ [Salvation]
Mission, soon grew into a large community of 2000 women, and was neatly
divided into several sections: the original Hindu Widows’ Home, a Home for
Christian Women, a ‘Rescue Home’ for sexually victimised women, a
separate section for old women and one for blind women. The usual
domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning, caring for the young and the sick
were done by the inmates themselves. A regular school conducted classes
according to government rules, and vocational training was given in
weaving, tailoring and handicrafts, as well as in the running of a laundry and
an oil-press. An impressed Christian visitor commented that “all the tasks in
this female kingdom, from beginning to end, are performed by women”.[21]
In 1919 Ramabai was awarded the Kaiser-e-Hind Gold Medal, which she
was too unwell to receive personally in Bombay. The Mukti Mission
prospered. Similar activities were being introduced elsewhere by Ramabai’s
daughter. Manorama was an able and devoted assistant to her mother, and
had travelled widely to England, the USA (where she completed part of her
higher education) and also to Australia (in 1902-03) where she published
The High-caste Hindu Woman with a biographical introduction, under the

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title Pandita Ramabai: the widows’ friend. However, overwork and health
problems claimed Manorama at the age of 40 in 1921. Having borne this last
tragedy of her life stoically, Ramabai herself passed away the following year
at the age of 64, as copies of her magnum opus, the Marathi translation of
the Bible, were rolling off the Mukti Mission’s printing press, run by her
own specially trained girls.

Educational and Missionary Activities

The twin axes of Ramabai’s career, educational and missionary, had quite
distinct origins. A crusading zeal for women’s education was an inheritance
from her father. Having received a rigorous traditional education from her
parents and having been trained in public speaking through the recitation of
sacred stories, Ramabai was equipped for this career as few other women of
her generation were. It was a relatively easy transition to writing books and
lecturing to women on reform issues. A progressive reviewer of Ramabai’s
Stree Dharma Neeti found it “commendable that the task of championing
the women’s cause and of speaking or writing on their behalf, which used to
fall to the lot of men so far, has now been undertaken by one belonging to
the female sex herself”.[22]
Importantly, Ramabai’s idea of education was comprehensive in scope.
It was informed from the outset by her conviction of women’s need for
social awareness and self-improvement, which she propagated through the
Arya Mahila Samaj. “Self-reliance” was her password for progress which ran
through the Stree Dharma Neeti and formed part of the programme
outlined at the end of The High-caste Hindu Woman and translated into the
organisation of the Sharada Sadan and the Mukti Mission.
Missionary activity was a later phase of Ramabai’s career. Although a
deep religiosity had served as an anchor to Ramabai’s life since her
childhood, it had initially been framed by the Hindu tradition of
personal belief and practice, proselytisation being alien to Hinduism,
which tends to be exclusive rather than inclusive. But Christianity
inevitably led to proselytisation, because the Anglican Church
consciously groomed her for a missionary career in India.
But a tentative beginning of this career seems to have been made in
the USA where she discovered the power of an appeal to her
audiences as a fellow Christian. A newspaper commented, in its report
of her maiden public speech:
And when the earnest little lady suddenly closed her address by asking
an American company of educated and refined men and women to join
with her in a moment’s silent prayer ‘to the Great Father of all the
nations of the earth’ in behalf of the millions of her Hindoo sisters to

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 PANDITA RAMABAI’S MISSIONARY ACTIVITIES

whose cause she has given her life, there was something almost startling
in the strangeness of the unique situation.[23]
In a sense then, Ramabai’s missionary career started by preaching to the
Christians, and her earlier speeches sought not to evangelise but to
propagate the cause of Indian women. She was to make a similar appeal to
the Christian charity of her American readers in her The High-caste Hindu
Woman, “[i]n the name of humanity, in the name of your sacred
responsibilities as workers in the cause of humanity, and, above all, in the
most holy name of God”.[24]
What followed after her return to India was an attempt to achieve a
delicate balance between inner Christian conviction and outward religious
neutrality. The American Ramabai Association which funded the Sharada
Sadan insisted on it being run as a secular institution, neither encouraging
nor suppressing any religion. But Ramabai’s indirect method of allowing the
girls to attend her private prayers, Manorama’s childish attempts to preach
the Christian message to them and the considerable affection which the girls
felt for both, predictably influenced some in the direction of wishing to learn
more about Christianity with a view to eventual conversion.
Up to this point Ramabai’s proselytisation was covert; open mission-
ary activity came later, and seems to have been born of spiritual
despair and social isolation. In A Testimony Ramabai speaks of a
“revelation” during the dark period following the storm over the
Sharada Sadan.[25] Soon afterwards, a number of factors coincided to
make missionary propaganda possible and also desirable for her: at the
end of the first 10 years, she was freed by the American Ramabai
Association of the obligatory religious neutrality, the hordes of famine
victims at Kedgaon needed to be controlled and disciplined, and
Ramabai herself perhaps needed to retaliate against her Hindu detrac-
tors by openly expressing her religious (though still
non-denominational) affiliation. Proselytisation also placated her
Christian detractors who had attacked her earlier policy of religious
neutrality in the Sharada Sadan.[26]
Ramabai had already come a long way in her missionary zeal and
efforts by 1896, when she attended a mission camp meeting, accompa-
nied by 15 converted girls. She “offered thanks to the Heavenly Father
for having given me fifteen children, and I was, by the Spirit, led to
pray that the Lord would be so gracious as to square the number of my
spiritual children before the next camp meeting took place”. Six
months later she had her “225 souls”.[27] The march towards mass
conversions in true missionary fashion had begun, and Ramabai’s

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conflict with the Anglicans was over, although she remained

non-denominational all her life.
The extent and ways in which Christianity provided an impulse for
Ramabai’s social action were complex, considering that her endeavours for
women’s education preceded her conversion and that her missionary activity
– a direct offshoot of her conversion – was not a prerequisite for her
educational career. The centrality of Christianity in Ramabai’s life, then, was
evident at distinct levels: its philosophy provided spiritual sustenance in her
darkest days, and in more practical terms, the international Christian
networks functioned as a support structure and a source of funding and of
volunteer workers for her institutions in India.

Interface with Christianity and the Church

Although Christianity formed a backdrop for Ramabai’s life, her encounter
with the Anglicans also involved a series of contestations – religious, racial
and cultural. Coming from a Hindu tradition of theological debates, she was
selective in accepting some elements of her new religious doctrine. The
independent-minded Ramabai also resisted the perceived high-handedness of
the Church in imposing on her its dogma and discipline, and criticised the
racial and cultural arrogance of the Anglican missionaries in India, who
remained ignorant of the culture of the very people they attempted to win
over. It was perhaps the truth of this allegation which enhanced Ramabai’s
value as a potential missionary for the Anglicans. The Rev. Canon William
Butler of Wantage wrote to Miss Beale: “I think that Mary Ramabai’s
knowledge of Indian ways, etc. will give her a power of influence which no
English woman can have”, adding condescendingly, “All that she needs is an
English development of her Indian brains”.[28]
But this fusion involved irreconcilable elements. The first contradiction
pivoted on the relationship between culture and religion: indigenisation of
Christianity was a red thread running through Ramabai’s conviction and she
favoured the adaptation of Christianity to Indian culture which was
anathema to the Church. The initial conflict centred on Ramabai’s
opposition to wearing the crucifix, which was alien to the Indian experience,
or at least having it inscribed with Sanskrit instead of Latin words.[29] The
outcome of this particular battle remains unknown, though ultimately
Ramabai won the war, with her insistence on both non-denominational
Christianity and indigenisation, and went on to compose Marathi and Hindi
psalms. But by the time she undertook her life’s work, the monumental
translation of the Bible into Marathi (from the original English, Hebrew and
Greek versions), her devotion to Sanskrit had turned to bitter distaste for
Hinduism; and she strove meticulously for a religiously-neutral Marathi,
shorn of all Sanskrit words with their inherent Hindu connotations.[30]

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Another site of contestation was Ramabai’s personality and career

opportunities. Functioning within the imperialistic discourse, the Church
regarded her primarily, or even only, as a recent convert who was first and
foremost an Indian, and who had therefore to be kept ‘in her place’. An
extended exposure to England was seen as a threat to her ‘Indianness’. The
Bishop of Lahore expressed a fear that “there will be an end to her great
work as a Reformer in India, if she remains this side of the water” for any
length of time.[31] The Bishop of Bombay endorsed the sentiment:
A native Christian (Anglicised) is ruined for life as far as future
usefulness is concerned. I consider that if Ramabai begins to lecture in
this country, the hope of her doing good work among her countrywomen
is at an end ... Ramabai owes herself to her own countrywomen. English
girls have not the shadow of a claim upon her, and every moment that
she gives to them means a fresh obstacle raised in the way of her
discharging what is clearly the one function to which God has called
her.[32]
Miss Beale’s offer of a professorship to Ramabai alarmed the Church
authorities, because of the possible effects of this enhanced status on a
‘native’ who was, by definition, prone to vanity, “one of their very
faults”.[33] A suggestion was made that since a “Professorship among
English young ladies ... might lead to a little undue self-exaltation”, “a less
prominent position ... with an humbler title such as teachership ... would
probably lessen the danger of elation of mind very considerably”.[34]
But while the Anglican Church sought to mould and groom Ramabai
as an instrument for its own purposes, and while she herself asserted her
independence, her future career as a missionary was not in real doubt to
either.

Contestation of Patriarchy
The major contestation in Ramabai’s educational and missionary activities
was that of patriarchy. In a sense she had been complicit in such a
resistance since her father’s insistence on her education in Sanskrit, the
‘divine language’ reserved for upper-caste men.[35] Thus armed, Ramabai
experienced her first public encounter with the forces of patriarchy when
she set up the Arya Mahila Samaj in 1882 to mobilise women, and aroused
instant hostility in the conservative camp. The Kesari commented:
In reality, it is the task of men to eradicate these and other evil customs
in our society. Women cannot interfere in it for many years to come –
even if they are ‘panditas’ and have reached the ultimate stage of reform
... Our women will have to be under the control of men for a long time to
come.[36]

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The hostility which had initially greeted Ramabai’s leadership role in the
Arya Mahila Samaj surfaced also when she testified before the Hunter
Commission in 1882. The conservative Anglo-Marathi paper, The Native
Opinion, was generally critical of her testimony and refused to share “the
urgency of supplying this desideratum [of women doctors]. We do not just
now need lady doctors; but ... a class of respectable midwives”.[37]
Predictably, a society which valued women chiefly as mothers naturally
felt a greater need for midwives than for doctors, and was content to leave
women to suffer in silence. It is therefore significant that Pandita Ramabai
contributed visibly to the cause of getting foreign medical aid as well as
medical education for Indian women. This was no mean feat, because even
the simple non-professional education for women as discussed by the Hunter
Commission was only partially endorsed by the Western-educated
conservatives. After recommending some sort of “opening of the mind” and
“a habit and inclination to reason”, the conservative press asserted:
In educating our females our first care must be to try to make them good
house-wives and good mothers ... If we want our girls to be useful they
must learn to read and write, to keep accounts, to sew and above all to
cook. These we think can be better taught at home than in a public
school.[38]
As the “opening of the mind” and the “habit and inclination to reason” was
to lead women no further than their wife-mother-housewife role, it was
inevitable that Ramabai’s insistence on women’s education, self-confidence
and self-reliance was vehemently opposed.
But if the Indian version of patriarchy was staunch, Ramabai’s
encounter with the patriarchy of the Anglican Church across the globe was
equally harsh. It was sparked initially by Miss Beale’s offer of a professorship
in 1884, which would involve her teaching male students. The Bishop of
Bombay was quick to protest:
Above all things, pray believe that her influence will be ruined for ever
in India if she is known to have taught young men. Suffice it to say that
it would cause scandal even among the better sort of native men, and
that nothing would ever undo the harm it would do her among native
women.[39]
Ramabai’s prompt rejoinder was that “It surprises me very much to think
that neither my father nor my husband objected [to] my mother’s or my
teaching young men while some English people are doing so” and that her
having addressed mixed or solely male audiences in India “did not seem to
take away my influence with my countrypeople, and why should it be so
now, I cannot see”.[40] Perhaps the most telling comment on the episode,
and on the patriarchal convergence of Hinduism and Christianity, came from
Miss Beale:

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In Christ she had learned that there was perfect liberty, and though there
was necessarily a church order and subordination, yet in the Spirit, there
was in Christ neither male nor female. It seemed going back to what she
had been delivered from.[41]

Verdicts of History
Pandita Ramabai’s life was a narrative of parallel but discursively distinct
contestations: that of a woman against male hegemony both in Hindu
society and the Anglican Church, that of an Indian Christian convert against
the British Anglican bishops and nuns, that of an Indian Christian
missionary (in both the covert and overt phases) against the oppression of
Hindu women. Following these contestations, she was marginalised both
during her lifetime and the subsequent ‘gatekeeping of history’ in retaliation
for her dual interrogation of Hinduism and patriarchy. The Anglicans,
however, came to accept her non-denominational Christianity and
independent stance; in fact it was the Christian networks worldwide which
aided her endeavours during her lifetime and have done so since.[42]
It is Ramabai’s image as a Christian icon which is perpetuated in all
her serious biographies, and more so outside than within India. Among the
earliest was Helen Dyer’s, published in 1900 on her return to England after
10 years in India, “in response to ... [the] impression” “that the Lord would
have us do something in England for Ramabai”.[43] Jennie Chappell also
published a biography in England, soon after Ramabai’s death.[44] In the
USA, Mary Lucia Bierce Fuller (daughter of Jenny Fuller whose The Wrongs
of Indian Womanhood, published in New York, had an introduction by
Ramabai) published her biography of Ramabai in 1928.[45] In Australia,
Bertha Todd, President of the Australian Council of the Ramabai Mukti
Mission (which is still operating) compiled a story of Ramabai’s life and
work, probably in the 1920s.[46] In India most of Ramabai’s biographies
have been written by Christians, as for example, the Rev. Macnicol [47], or
Indian Christians like Padmini Sengupta [48], S. M. Adhav [49], Dongre &
Patterson [50], and by D. N. Tilak (son of the Rev. N. V. Tilak) who wrote in
Marathi.[51] The occasional Hindu biography in Marathi (e.g. Sathe [52]) is
apt to stress her social reform activities but disregard the Christian aspect.
Posterity has not been much more forgiving to Ramabai than her
contemporary mainstream Hindu society.
If Ramabai transgressed the boundaries of patriarchy in her
educational and missionary activities, she also paid a predictably heavy price.
So complete was her ‘erasure’ from the history of Western India that it is
only now, three-quarters of a century after her death, that we are beginning
to make a fresh appraisal of the extent of her ‘transgressions’ and
contestations, as well as their price, and to reclaim her manifold
contribution to the cause of Indian women.

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Notes
[1] This biographical sketch draws heavily on M. Kosambi (1988) Women,
emancipation and equality: Pandita Ramabai’s contribution to the women’s
cause, Economic and Political Weekly, XXIII, No.44, pp. WS 38-49, and also on
M. Kosambi (1995) Pandita Ramabai’s Feminist and Christian Conversions:
focus on Stree-Dharma Neeti (Bombay: Research Centre for Women’s Studies,
SNDT Women’s University). Detailed references are therefore largely omitted.
[2] Kosambi, Pandita Ramabai’s Feminist and Christian Conversions, p. 55.
[3] R. L. Bodley (1981) Introduction, in P. Ramabai’s The High-caste Hindu
Woman, reprint, p. xiv (Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and
Culture).
[4] P. Ramabai (1988) Pandita Ramabai Yancha Englandcha Pravas, 2nd edn, pp.
4-5 (Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture).
[5] Ibid., p. 3.
[6] Ramabai, Pandita Ramabai Yancha Englandcha Pravas.
[7] A. B. Shah (Ed.) (1977) The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai,
p. 11 (Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture).
[8] Ibid., p. 5.
[9] M. Kosambi (1992) An Indian response to Christianity, Church and colonialism:
the case of Pandita Ramabai, Economic and Political Weekly, XXVII, pp. WS
61-71.
[10] Shah, Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai.
[11] D. Spender (1983) Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, pp.
417, 448 (London: Ark Paperbacks).
[12] Shah, Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai, p. 36.
[13] Ibid., p. 47.
[14] Ibid., p. 165.
[15] Ibid., p. 167.
[16] Ibid., p. 171.
[17] In her book on the USA, Ramabai gives an enthusiastic description of American
women’s progress in the fields of education, employment, legal rights and
organisational abilities, in a chapter entitled ‘The condition of women’. P.
Ramabai (1889) United Stateschi Lokasthiti ani Pravasavritta (Bombay: Nirnaya
Sagar Press). See also F. Willard (1889) Glimpses of Fifty Years: the
autobiography of an American woman, pp. 557-559 (Chicago: Woman’s
Temperance Publication Association) for a sketch of Ramabai.
[18] Kesari (Marathi weekly published at Poona), 12 February 1889, p. 3*. All
quotations marked by an asterisk (*) have been translated from the Marathi
original by myself.
[19] Kesari, 28 May 1889, p. 2*.

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[20] Kesari, 12 January 1904. p. 5*. The statement was inaccurate because not all
the rescued women were widows; but it captured the hostility of the mainstream
Hindu society towards Ramabai.
[21] Dnyanodaya (Anglo-Marathi weekly published at Bombay), 28 November 1907,
p. 380*.
[22] Kesari, 1 August 1882, p. 2*.
[23] Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 13 March 1886.
[24] Ramabai, The High-caste Hindu Woman, p. 59.
[25] P. Ramabai (1977) A Testimony, 10th edn (Kedgaon: Ramabai Mukti Mission).
[26] Kosambi, Pandita Ramabai’s Feminist and Christian Conversions.
[27] P. Ramabai (1903), Pandita Ramabai: the widows’ friend, 2nd edn, pp. 126-128
(Melbourne: George Robertson & Co.).
[28] Shah, Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai, p. 45.
[29] Ibid., pp. 28-29.
[30] S. M. Adhav (1979) Pandita Ramabai, pp. 196-215 (Madras: The Christian
Literary Society).
[31] Shah, Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai, p. 38.
[32] Ibid., p. 39.
[33] Ibid., p. 45.
[34] Ibid., p. 43.
[35] This was an exact counterpart of Latin in medieval Europe where the creation
and perpetuation of knowledge as an exclusively male preserve had been
achieved through Latin, taught to men “as a kind of male puberty rite”, as
discussed by S. J. Hekman (1990) Gender and Knowledge: elements of a
postmodern feminism, pp. 31-32 (Cambridge: Polity Press). In India the
connection was even closer and more clearly sacralised: a Brahmin boy
underwent the sacred ‘thread ceremony’ about the age of 9 when he embarked
upon a study of Sanskrit texts, traditionally in his teacher’s house where he
would spend the next few years, but by the late nineteenth century at his own
house where his father or a local learned man gave him lessons.
The protest against men’s hegemonic access to knowledge (both sacred and
secular) was common to early feminists in different parts of the world. Ramabai’s
first protest was articulated in Stree Dharma Neeti before her exposure to
Western feminism; her Western precursors included, among others, Aphra Behn
in eighteenth-century England, who charged men with denying women access to
Latin and Greek which held the key to male superiority, and Sarah Grimke in
nineteenth-century America who called men “the editors and translators of the
Bible”, as shown by D. Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to
Them, pp. 37-38, 222.
[36] Kesari, 8 August 1882, p. 5*.
[37] The Native Opinion (Anglo-Marathi weekly published in Bombay) 17 September
1882, p. 596.

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[38] The Native Opinion, 17 September 1882, p. 596.

[39] Shah, Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai, p. 44.
[40] Ibid., p. 60.
[41] Ibid., p. 49.
[42] In fact, the current superintendent of the Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission at
Kedgaon is an Australian woman who has been at the Mission since 1961.
[43] H. S. Dyer (undated) Pandita Ramabai: the story of her life (London: Morgan &
Scott).
[44] J. Chappell (undated) Pandita Ramabai: a great life in Indian missions
(London: Pickering & Inglis Ltd).
[45] M. L. B. Fuller (1928) The Triumph of an Indian Widow (New York:
The Christian Alliance Publishing Company).
[46] B. Todd (undated) Carest Thou Not? Being the Story of Pandita Ramabai and
the Mukti Mission (Melbourne: Australian Council of the Ramabai Mukti
Mission).
[47] N. Macnicol (1926) Pandita Ramabai (Calcutta: Association Press).
[48] P. Sengupta (1970) Pandita Ramabai Saraswati: her life and work (Bombay:
Asia Publishing House).
[49] Adhav, Pandita Ramabai.
[50] R. K. Dongre & J. F. Patterson (1963) Pandita Ramabai: a life of faith and
prayer (Madras: The Christian Literature Society).
[51] D. N. Tilak (1960) Maharashtrachi Tejaswini Pandita Ramabai (Nasik: Nagarik
Prakashan).
[52] T. Sathe (1975) Aparajita Rama (Pune: D. P. Nagarkar).

MEERA KOSAMBI is Professor and Director of the Research Centre for

Women’s Studies, RCWS, SNDT Women’s University, Juhu Campus, Juhu
Road, Mumbai 400 049, India (rcwssndt@boms.vsnl.net.in). As a sociologist
with a PhD from the University of Stockholm, she has contributed three
books and several articles in the field of urban studies, mainly on colonial
urbanism in India. Her work in women’s studies has two foci. On the subject
of gender issues in the nineteenth-century social reform movement, she has
authored the books At the Intersection of Gender Reform and Religious
Belief (RCWS, 1993) and Pandita Ramabai’s Feminist and Christian
Conversions (RCWS, 1995), as well as articles; on the subject of
contemporary women, she has co-authored Women in Decision-making in
the Private Sector in India (RCWS, 1995), and edited Violence against
Women (UNESCO, 1993) and Women’s Oppression in the Public Gaze
(RCWS, 1994).

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