In 1878, in the senate hall of the University of Calcutta, a woman of twenty addressed a room of Sanskrit scholars. She had no degree, no school record and no institution behind her. She had arrived in Bengal on foot-thin family finances, having spent years reciting Sanskrit scripture for a living at pilgrimage sites across India, and the pandits of Calcutta had heard about her and invited her to speak.
The address was well received. The faculty of the university then examined her and conferred two titles: Pandita, for her command of Sanskrit, and Sarasvati, after the goddess of learning. She was the first woman to be awarded either in that way. Both titles stuck to her name for the remaining forty-four years of her life.
Her name was Ramabai Dongre, and everything she knew she had learned without a school. India had schools in 1858. It did not have one that would take a girl like her.
A House Where a Girl Was Taught Sanskrit
Ramabai was born on 23 April 1858 into a Marathi-speaking Brahmin family. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, was a Sanskrit scholar of a stubborn and specific kind: he believed women should be educated, and he acted on it. He taught his daughter Sanskrit at home.
He had done the same for his wife. Ramabai's mother, Lakshmi, had been married at nine to a man far older than herself, and Anant Shastri then taught her Sanskrit — a decision in stark contrast to the customs around them. Lakshmi became so accomplished that she began teaching young boys. That was where the trouble started. Orthodox Brahmins opposed it severely, and the pressure forced the family to move to a desolate place to get away from it.
The household income came from recitation. Anant Shastri travelled extensively across India with his family, and they earned a meagre living reciting the Purana at pilgrimage sites. Ramabai grew up inside that performance. She was taught, but she was also apprenticed — standing up in public and speaking difficult texts aloud to strangers was how the family ate, and it is where her ease in front of an audience came from.
Orphaned on the Pilgrim Road
During the famine years of the 1870s the family was broken. Ramabai was orphaned at sixteen, and she and her brother Srinivas did the only thing they had been trained to do: they continued the family tradition of travelling the country reciting Sanskrit scriptures.
It was not a gentle education. They moved from one pilgrimage town to the next with the text as their only asset, and she acquired something a classroom could not have taught her: the habit of speaking to whoever was in front of her. She addressed audiences of any gender, in whatever space she could find. When women would not come out into public spaces at all, she went into the women's quarters and argued with them there about getting an education.
She was, by then, a young widow travelling without family protection, earning money with her voice, in a society with firm ideas about where a woman like that belonged. The recitation circuit she had inherited from her father was simultaneously her income, her curriculum and her platform.
The Examination That Made Her Pandita
Word of the woman who could recite and dispute Sanskrit reached Calcutta. The pandits there invited her to speak, and she travelled to Bengal. After the address in the senate hall, the University of Calcutta examined her; the titles Pandita and Sarasvati followed in 1878.
Calcutta changed the questions she was asking. She met the Bengali gentry. She met the reformer Keshab Chandra Sen, who gave her a copy of the Vedas and encouraged her to read them for herself. She attended Christian meetings for the first time and was struck by the manner of worship. She had been raised inside one tradition and had mastered its hardest texts. Calcutta handed her other traditions to compare them against.
A Marriage Outside Every Rule
Srinivas died in 1880. Later that year Ramabai married Bipin Behari Medhvi, a Bengali lawyer from the Kayastha community, a caste lower than her own. It was an inter-caste, inter-regional marriage performed as a civil ceremony on 13 November 1880, and it was considered scandalous by the standards of the time.
Their daughter was born on 16 April 1881 and named Manorama — "heart's joy." Around the same period Ramabai wrote a poem on the condition of Sanskrit and sent it to the Oriental Congress in Berlin, where the Indologist Monier Monier-Williams read a translation of it with a warm introduction.
Then the marriage ended. Bipin Behari Medhvi died of cholera on 4 February 1882. Ramabai was twenty-three years old, with a baby, no husband and no family structure to fall back on. She later recalled that, because of her unorthodox life, almost nobody thought of her at all.
The Evidence She Gave at Twenty-Three
What she did next is the part of her biography that reads like a curriculum vitae assembled out of malice. She moved to Pune and founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a women's society dedicated to education and to ending child marriage. In the same year, 1882, the colonial government appointed the Hunter Commission to examine education in India. Ramabai gave evidence before it.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the educated men of this country are opposed to female education and the proper position of women. 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. — Pandita Ramabai, evidence to the Hunter Commission, 1882
She did not stop at complaint. She proposed that teachers be trained, that women be appointed as school inspectors, and that Indian women be admitted to medical colleges on the grounds that there were things only a woman doctor could treat. Her evidence caused a sensation; it reached as far as Queen Victoria and is credited with helping to set in motion the Women's Medical Movement later taken up by Lord Dufferin.
Stri Dharma Niti, and a Passage to England
She published her first book, Stri Dharma Niti ("Morals for Women") in 1882. The earnings from it, together with contacts with an Anglican community of nuns, the Community of St Mary the Virgin, took her to Britain in 1883 to train in medicine.
She was rejected from the medical programmes — the reason given was her progressive deafness. She stayed in England instead, teaching and learning, and it was during those years, at Wantage and Cheltenham, that her education acquired its strangest chapter: the woman who had mastered Sanskrit scripture as an act of family survival now had to acquire English as an adult, in the country that ruled her own.
English, Learned in Her Twenties and Thirties
The evidence that she learned the language to a professional standard is not a certificate. It is the corpus she produced in it.
She converted to Christianity during her stay in England, and her account of that choice is one of the sharpest sentences she ever wrote in the language she was still learning:
There were only two things on which all those books, the Dharma Shastras, the sacred epics, the Puranas and modern poets, the popular preachers of the present day and orthodox high-caste men, 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. — Pandita Ramabai, on her conversion
Her relationship with her Anglican mentors was contentious. She kept her vegetarian diet against pressure. She rejected parts of Anglican doctrine she regarded as irrational, including the doctrine of the Trinity. She questioned whether the crucifix she was asked to wear had to carry a Latin inscription instead of the Sanskrit she wanted. That last detail is worth pausing on: at the moment when she was most dependent on English-speaking institution, she was still insisting on the language of her own learning.
The High-Caste Hindu Woman
In 1886 she left Britain for the United States at the invitation of Dr Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of her relative Anandibai Joshi, the first Indian woman to qualify as a doctor. Ramabai stayed two years. She lectured across the United States and Canada, translated textbooks, and wrote.
The book was The High-Caste Hindu Woman, dedicated to Anandibai Joshi, and it was her first book written in English. It documented the lives of child brides and child widows in detail that had not been put in front of an English-reading public before. Through it and the speaking tour that followed — including an invitation from the suffragist Frances Willard, and an address to the national convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in November 1887 — she raised the equivalent of 60,000 rupees.
That money had a purpose built into it. She had learned a new language in her thirties in order to raise money for girls who, like her, had been denied an education in the one she was born into. She sailed back to India in June 1888 as a National Lecturer for the WCTU, and she spent the rest of her life spending what she had raised.
Sharada Sadan, Mukti, and the Famine Carts
In 1889 she opened Sharada Sadan in Pune — a home and school for child widows — with the backing of Hindu reformers including M. G. Ranade. The support did not last. Ramabai did not hide her Christian faith, and when several students converted, the reform circles of Pune withdrew. She moved the school sixty kilometres east to the quieter village of Kedgaon and renamed it the Mukti Mission.
In 1896, when famine struck, she took a caravan of bullock carts through the villages of Maharashtra and brought out outcast children, child widows, orphans and destitute women by the thousand. By 1900 the Mukti Mission held about 1,500 residents. It is still operating today.
Seven Languages and the Marathi Bible
Ramabai was, by the record of her own institution, a woman who knew seven languages. The one that mattered most to her was the one she was born speaking: Marathi.
She translated the Bible into Marathi from the original Hebrew and Greek — not from an English intermediary. For a learner, that is the most demanding form of the exercise she had been performing since childhood. Her father had taught her to recite a sacred text in a language of prestige; she ended up rendering a sacred text into the language of ordinary people, working from the source languages rather than a translation. It is the last and heaviest item in a curriculum she assembled herself.
She was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal for community service in 1919. Her daughter Manorama, educated at Wantage and at Bombay University, became principal of Sharada Sadan and her mother's designated successor — but Manorama died in 1921. Ramabai never recovered from it. She died nine months later, on 5 April 1922, of septic bronchitis, aged sixty-three.
The Opposition She Took as a Cost of Business
It would be sentimental to tell this story without the resistance. Conservative upper-caste Maharashtrian opinion fought her work on widows and women's education for years. B. G. Tilak used his paper, Kesari, to criticise her repeatedly, and some of his language about her was vulgar. She was attacked for her marriage, for her religion, for her institutions, and for the company she kept.
She kept the institutions running anyway. A commemorative stamp was issued in her honour in 1989, and the Church of England remembers her on 30 April.
What a Learner Can Take From It
- Home can be a full curriculum. Her father's decision to teach a daughter Sanskrit was an act of civil disobedience against custom. It gave her the only qualification she ever held when she walked into the senate hall at twenty.
- Translate as your ceiling test. She recited Sanskrit, argued in Sanskrit, was examined in Sanskrit, and finished by translating Hebrew and Greek into Marathi. Rendering source into target, with no intermediary, is the hardest honest measure of a language.
- Acquiring a language late is not a smaller achievement. She did not learn English in childhood and never used it as a native. She used it to publish a book that moved money and attention across two continents.
- Interest is the only thing that lasts. There was no course, no tutor, no degree, and no institution standing behind her from the age of sixteen to the end of her life. What kept the learning going for forty years was work she wanted done.
- Keep the language you were born into. The recognition she refused to give up — Sanskrit on a crucifix, Marathi as the target of a translation — says as much about her priorities as anything she wrote.
Ramabai was examined once, at twenty, and never awarded a degree in her life. She built a school, raised money on three continents, rescued thousands of people, and translated a library into her mother tongue. What she proved is uncomfortable for anyone waiting for the right institution: nobody ever taught her the last thing she learned either.