An incredible brilliant lady in India in the 1800s with a massive outreach to broken women in shackles. She later became a Christian.
Pandita Ramabai, India (23 April 1858 – 5 April 1922)
A Little Of Her Background Pandita Ramabai was born as Rama Dongre on 23 April 1858 in a Marathi-speaking Brahmin family. Her father, a very honorable man, Anant Shastri Dongre, a Sanskrit scholar, taught her Sanskrit at home. He finally died of starvation at the age of 78 during the Great Famine of 1876–78. It was terribly sad that the Brahmins around his home would not touch his dead body, because they could not be sure that he was truly a Brahmin. Ramabai’s elder brother Srinivasa, who was 18 years and emaciated, and nearly dying himself, carried the dead body two miles to the burial place. Shortly thereafter, Laxmibai, her mother suffered from fever and hunger and died as well. Then her older sister Krishnabai died from illness and hunger a few months later. Ramabai was shattered and she said, We were too proud to beg or to do menial work, and ignorant of any way of earning an honest living. Nothing but starvation was before us. My father, mother, and sister all died of starvation within a few months of each other.”
Tough Years of Travel Ramabai was sixteen years old at the time, and now only she and her eighteen-year-old brother remained. Though they both had their significant doubts in the Hindu religion, they continued as this was the only life and faith they knew. In the next four years with her brother, they walked barefoot over 4,000 miles throughout India on various sacred pilgrimages. They often went without food and shelter. Srinivasa sometimes found a little work, but he would make four rupees for a month’s worth of work but was very little. They lived mostly on grain soaked in water, seasoned with salt. Once they dug beds for themselves on the bank of the Jhelum River in Punjab and covered themselves with sand all the way up to their necks. They encountered another side of spirituality in other Brahmin pundits. On one occasion, they reached a Hindu shrine that reflected the seven floating mountains in a lake in the Himalayas. These mountains supposedly moved toward sinless pilgrims but remained immovable for wicked pilgrims. When Ramabai and her brother prostrated themselves before these mountains, the mountains did not move. They felt they must be the wicked pilgrims. Although the priests had warned then not to cross the lake because of the hungry crocodiles, Srinivasa rose up early morning before the priests got up and swam out to the mountains. When he arrived there, he discovered that the mountains were stones and mud planted with trees, placed on wooden rafts, falsely projected as the mountains from the Himalayas. Then they noticed another thing when a rich pilgrim arrived, a priest would call out and another priest would give the raft a push toward the wealthy pilgrim who would lavish generous gifts and money on the pundits. This falsity shattered the little faith they had in their Hindu religion.
Honored And Revered Still, her brother Srinivas and she traveled over India reciting Sanskrit scriptures. Finally, Ramabai’s fame as a lecturer reached Kolkata where the pundits invited her to speak. She received great awards and accolades for her rich knowledge of various Sanskrit works and Vedas. Pandita Ramabai was brilliant! Three distinguished educators of Calcutta University tested her learning and were awestruck by the twenty-year-old woman’s astonishing scholarship. Not only could she recite over 18,000 verses from the Bhagavat Purana, but also when they asked her questions, she would quickly answer in extemporaneous Sanskrit verses. She was quick, brilliant, but always gentle and humble.
The amazed questioners concluded, “We do not feel that you belong to this world since the great Pundits have been dazzled and amazed by your superhuman ability. The very Goddess of Learning ‘Saraswati’ has come down amidst us in human form.”With that, she bequeathed the title “Saraswati,” after the Hindu goddess of learning. Shortly after that, a Bengali scholar gave her the title “Pandita.” A Pandit was a title of honor given only to the most learned individuals. Since Ramabai was the first woman in India ever to be honored with this title, the news was publicized throughout India and she gained widespread fame overnight.
Haunting Plight Of Women In time, Ramabai started reading things in the sacred scripts that disturbed her. “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.” There was no hope for her in Hinduism. She disapproved of the Hindu law books that instructed men to give their daughters in marriage before they reached puberty. She found that the sacred Hindu writings taught that women “women of high and low caste, as a class, were bad, very bad, worse than demons, and that they could not get Moksha (salvation) as men.” It disturbed her that, “A woman’s only god is her husband and she is to worship him no matter how vile he may be and be his slave. The woman has no right to study the Vedas and Vedanta, and without knowing them, no one can know the Brahma. Without knowing Brahma, no one can get liberation. It was at this point in time that Ramabai resolved to spend her life bettering the status of women in India.
Marriage In May of 1880, Srinivasa, her dear brother died of an illness while traveling in Bengal. On his deathbed, he was concerned that his younger sister would now left alone in the world and asked her to promise that she would find a husband to care for her. Ramabai had suffered much grief for being already twenty-two and not married. In October, six months after her brother’s death, Ramabai married Babu Bipin Beharidas Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer and intimate friend of her brother. Over the previous year, they had liked each other and he had asked her to marry him at least five times. Since neither of them believed in Hinduism or Christianity, they were married with the civil marriage rites. Her society considered Ramabai’s marriage scandalous as she had married a lowly Sudra, Ramabai chose him because she knew him well and respected him, but this cost her to lose many Brahmin friends and supporters. Ramabai moved to Silchar in Assam, where Medhavi practiced law. It was while living with her husband that Ramabai found in the local library a Bengali pamphlet of the Gospel of Luke, which she read. A Baptist missionary, Mr. Allen, also visited their home at this time and preached the Gospel. She was fascinated as he went through the Genesis account of creation. Ramabai recalls, “I eagerly learned everything which I could about the Christian religion and declared my intention to become a Christian if I were perfectly satisfied with the new religion.”
Opposition to Christianity Medhavi, however, was not as enthusiastic about the idea of converting to Christianity. Having studied at a mission school as a child, he had more background knowledge of Christianity and adamantly opposed the idea of him or his wife becoming a despised Christian. He angrily insisted that Mr. Allen not come to their house anymore. On February 4, 1882, after only nineteen months of marriage, Medhavi died of cholera at age thirty. Ramabai, who loved and respected her husband grieved. She could later see, however, how God took him away for her good: “This great grief drew me nearer to God. I felt He was teaching me and that if I was to come to Him, He must himself draw me.” Her baby daughter born on April 16, 1881, born only months before the death of her father, Manoramabai, brought her joy, her name meant, “the joy of her heart,” After her husband’s death, Ramambai moved with her daughter to Chennai to study the English language. Over time, she got more involved with aiding helpless women and working towards social reform. Though she learned the Bible, which she enjoyed reading, she declared in a letter written to a newspaper that nothing would induce her to become a Christian!.
Days In England A desire grew in Ramabai to go to England in order to learn more about the education of women and receive training for her lifelong battle to help unshackle the women in India. She also desired to study English and the Bible. She landed in England in 1883 and was first taken in by the Sisters of Wantage. She had met one of these Anglican Sisters while in Poona and arranged to stay in their Home. The love that these sisters showed toward suffering women at a rescue home they ran left a deep impression on Ramabai: “Here, for the first time, I came to know that something should be done to reclaim the so-called fallen women and that Christians, whom Hindus considered outcasts and cruel, were kind to these unfortunate women degraded in the eyes of society. I had never heard or seen anything of the kind done for this class of women by the Hindus in my own country.” She could not help but contrast the compassion she witnessed with her Hindu society which considered morally destitute women as being the greatest sinners and unworthy of any compassion. The Hindu law demands that the king feed “fallen women” to the dogs on the outskirts of town. She also visited Rescue Homes at Fulham run by the Sisters of the Cross. When Ramabai asked the Sisters why they were so concerned about these fallen women, one of the Sisters told her of Jesus’ encounter with the “fallen” Samaritan woman in John 4. She told how Jesus came not to despise sinners but to save them. Ramabai was awestruck by the infinite love of Christ. Here is God actually offering salvation to a woman, and a “fallen” woman at that! She realized that “Christ was truly the Divine Savior He claimed to be, and no one but He could transform and uplift the downtrodden womanhood of India and of every land.”18
While still in Wantage, Ramabai received a personal letter from Rev. Goreh that would later be published as a pamphlet called, “Is There Any Proof that Christianity is a Divinity-given Religion?” After reading this letter, she became intellectually convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. She and her daughter were baptized in the Wantage Parish Church by Dean William Butler, on September 29, 1883. Ramabai saw in retrospect that there was still something vital missing in her newfound faith: She still felt she was not connected to Christ and did not know Him. In the meantime, she immersed herself in studies, training, teaching She recalls her spiritual state at the time she left San Francisco in November 1888 to return to Mumbai: “My religious belief was so vague at the time that I was not certain whether I would go to heaven or hell after my death. I was not prepared to meet God then.”
In 1891 God used the book From Death into Life by Rev. W. Haslam, an English evangelist. Through the account of his own conversion experience, Ramabai saw her need for such an authentic inward change. Up to this point, she had been content in finding in Christianity a religion that “gave its privileges equally to men and women,” without “distinction of caste color, or sex made in it.” She came to realize that she needed Christ Himself, not merely His religion: “I realized that I was not prepared to meet God, that sin had dominion over me, and I was not altogether led by the Spirit of God, and had not, therefore, received the Spirit of adoption, and had no witness of the Spirit that I was a child of God.” Although baptized eight years earlier, God now convicted her of her sin and showed her the desperate need she had for true salvation: “The Lord first showed me the sinfulness of sin and the awful danger I was in, of everlasting hell-fire and the great love of God with which He ‘so loved the world, that he gave His only begotten Son.’”
Beautiful Surrender and Divine Breakthrough Finally, she surrendered herself unconditionally to Jesus Christ: “Only those who have been convicted of sin and have seen themselves as God sees them under similar circumstances, can understand what one feels when a great and unbearable burden is rolled away from one’s heart. I shall not attempt to describe how and what I felt at the time when I made an unconditional surrender and knew that I was accepted to be a branch of the True Vine, a child of God by adoption in Jesus Christ my Savior.”
Ramabai summarized her experience of discovering new life in Christ: “I can only give a faint idea of what I felt when my mental eyes were opened, and when I who was sitting in darkness saw Great Light, and I felt sure that to me, who but a few moments ago sat in the region and shadow of death, the light had sprung up. Her new life in Christ was especially marked by the abundant joy that she never knew before: “The Holy Spirit made it clear to me from the Word of God, that the salvation which God gives through Christ is present, and not something future. I believed it; I received it, and I was filled with joy…. All the riches, all the gain, all the joys of the world do not begin to compare with the joy of salvation.” From this time forward she experienced joy unspeakable and full of glory, for she was receiving the goal of her faith, the salvation of her soul.36 This joy proved to be far too immense to keep hidden under a bushel: “My life is full of joy…. I can scarcely contain the joy and keep it to myself.”37 The joy of the Lord became her strength and empowered her to work indefatigably for her Master. Ramabai also grew an irresistible burden for evangelism. She needed to share the good news about Jesus Christ with others: “I feel I must tell my fellow-creatures what great things the Lord hath done for me. And I feel that if it was possible for Him to save such a great sinner as I am, he is able to save others. The only thing that must be done by me is to tell people of Him, and of His love for sinners, and His great power to save them.”
Mukti Mission Home For The Widows By July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai’s radical conversion, the work of the school was never the same. Some of the women who had only come for the Bible reading portion of the Ramabai’s family prayers now began to stay and kneel down with Ramabai as she poured out her fervent prayers to her newfound personal Lord and Savior. She also began to encourage the others to cast their own burdens on the Lord. By 1893, out of the 53 girls in the school, 20 made it a habit to attend the family worship and her “Scripture Reading Class.” In 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai’s recent change favorably, arranged to take the girls out for a day-long picnic. Slowly over the years, more girls were taken out due to the fear that the girls would become Christians. Ramabai announced that she and a few of her assistants were going to stay back and spend the time in prayer. Moreover, she said that any of the girls that wanted to stay behind with them could also do so. More than half the girls stayed behind, and they spent all day in prayer and studying the Bible. By the end of the day, twenty of them expressed their desire to follow Christ, and a few received Him as their personal Lord and Savior.
The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit Ramabai began to hear how God was pouring out his Spirit in revival in various parts of the world. She heard about the movement of new life that God was bringing to Australia through the ministry of R. A. Torrey, and she sent her daughter Manoramabai and her assistant Miss Abrams to Australia in 1903. Ramabai also heard about the great outpouring of the Spirit in Wales. At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: “There were about 70 of us who met together each morning and prayed for the true conversion of all the Indian Christians, including ourselves, and for a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all Christians of every land.” By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival. Six months into the prayer circles, the unusual outpouring of the Holy Spirit began. On the evening of June 29, Ramabai walked into one of the prayer meetings and found a roomful of women on their knees weeping, praying, confessing their sins, and calling upon God to empower them with the Holy Spirit. Helen Dyer describes what happened the next night: “While Pandita Ramabai was quietly expounding the Scriptures in the church to the members of the prayer circle, the Holy Spirit descended and many began to pray aloud. They burst out in tears and loud cries. Little children, middle-sized girls, and young women wept bitterly and confessed their sins. Some saw visions and experienced the power of God and things that are too deep to be described. Two little girls had the spirit of prayer poured on them in such great torrents that they continued to pray for hours. They were transformed, with heavenly light shining on their faces.” Miss Abrams reports, “From that time, our Bible school was turned into an inquiry room. Girls struck down under conviction of sin while in school, or in the industrial school, or at their work, were brought to us. Lessons were suspended and we all, teachers and students, entered the school conducted by the Holy Spirit.” Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: “In six months from the time we began to pray in this manner the Lord graciously sent a glorious Holy Ghost revival among us, and also in many schools and churches in this country. The results of this have been most satisfactory. Many hundreds of our girls and boys have been gloriously saved, and many of them are serving God and witnessing for Christ at home and in other places.” Two weeks later, Ramabai took a band of assistants into nearby Poona, and the revival spread to orphanages and schools there. It eventually spread to various missions operating in India. There were daily Bible studies, prayer meetings, and evangelistic services held at Mukti during this time of revival. Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, wrote, “We are now seeing the results of God’s work in transfigured lives marked by intercessory prayer, Bible study, and more preaching to the heathen. Bible study and prayer have characterized the work here from its beginning and were the preparation for the revival, yet both have been deepened by the revival.” Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: “Seven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God’s Word that they might go to the place where God sends them to take the Gospel. They are already visiting the villages around where they sing Gospel hymns and read the Word of God to the village people. About sixty go out daily by turns so that each one gets her turn every twelfth day. They pray regularly for those they visit. The Lord put this plan in my heart and He is going before.” Ramabai testifies that one result of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was that they were given a spirit of prayer that could spend hours praying for others. By January 1906, prayer bands at Mukti were praying for 29,000 people by name. Mary Fuller recalls that in Ramabai’s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are “the saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,” but she “called all these afflicted ones by the names of ‘friends,’ lest any despise them.”
While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of evil practices and the experience of joy in newfound salvation, the various extraordinary physical manifestations (e.g., the sensation of burning, simultaneous prayer, speaking in tongues) soon attracted the attention and concern of others. Ramabai herself did not have a large share in these manifestations, but she never sought to restrain them. She gave her defense to critics in the Mukti Prayer Bell in 1907: “Love, perfect divine love, is the only and most necessary sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But other gifts, such as the power to heal, to speak with tongues, to prophecy, are not to be discarded.” Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: “It was impossible to hear what anyone was praying about in the volume of sound which arose and which might continue for an hour or more at a stretch.” He tells of Ramabai’s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that “they had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.” Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, “I could not help seeing what a number of splendidly devoted workers she had, women very truly converted and spirit-filled, with a keen love for God and for His Word and also with a keen evangelistic spirit.”
Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that The work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai’s life. She trusted in the Lord to provide the $200 a day that was necessary to cover all the costs. In the 1910 issue of Mukti Prayer Bell, Ramabai testified about their complete trust in God: “The Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God…. God’s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support. The prayers of God’s people are more precious than silver or gold.” Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day’s supply on hand: “The manna came day by day, and as our God gives our children their spiritual food of a morning, so He also supplies our temporal needs.”
Her Last Triumphant Days In 1920 Ramabai’s health failed rapidly and she designated her daughter as the one who would take over the ministry of Mukti Mission. But God had other plans. On July 24, 1921, God called Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty. Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter’s funeral. She firmly believed she would soon see her daughter. Nine months later, Ramabai, who had been suffering from septic bronchitis, went to be with her Lord… and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.
Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai’s deathbed: “At five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips—Bai! And only too true was the thought that filled our hearts with alarm, and which we hoped against hope was a mistaken one. We hurried around and found that a crowd had gathered near Bai’s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep—and such it was… Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone’s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God’s.
There is so much more about this incredible lady’s life. Please do read her book, written by Helen S Dyer and you can visit the website made in her memory. There is so much to learn from women of great faith, who rose from the fire of their trials with a mighty faith and love for God.
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