How Pandita Ramabai Pioneered a Fearless Crusade for Women’s Education

Pandita Ramabai was a nineteenth-century Indian scholar, reformer, and institution builder whose mastery of Sanskrit, command of multiple languages, and fearless public advocacy made her one of the most formidable voices for women's education and welfare in Indian history. Born into a family that had already broken convention by educating a daughter in Sanskrit, she survived devastating personal loss, crossed caste and religious boundaries that her contemporaries found incomprehensible, and built institutions in Pune that gave thousands of Indian women, particularly widows and famine survivors, the education and economic independence that the society around them had decided they did not deserve. Her life was a sustained argument, made through books, through speeches, through ocean crossings, and through the brick and mortar of actual institutions, that Indian women were fully capable of learning everything and deserved the opportunity to do so.

The Woman Who Knew More Sanskrit Than Her Critics

The scholars of Calcutta did not know quite what to make of Ramabai when she appeared before them in 1878. She was twenty years old, she had walked across large parts of India with her father and then with her brother after her father’s death, and she had used those years of wandering to study Sanskrit with an intensity that had given her a command of the classical texts that most Brahmin men with formal scholarly training would have found difficult to match.

The scholars tested her. They asked her to recite from the Vedas, from the Upanishads, from the texts of Sanskrit grammar and rhetoric that constituted the highest measure of classical learning in the tradition they represented. She recited. They asked her to interpret. She interpreted. They granted her the title of Pandita, the title given to a master of Sanskrit learning, and they granted her the additional title of Sarasvati, the name of the goddess of learning. No woman had received these titles before her from this assembly.

What the scholars of Calcutta had perhaps not fully anticipated was that the woman they had just declared a master of the Sanskrit tradition was also a woman who had read that tradition carefully enough to understand, with a precision that no amount of respectful silence could blur, what it said about women and what the consequences of what it said were in the lives of the women around her. The title gave her a platform. She used the platform to say what she had read.

A Childhood in the Forest

Ramabai was born on April 23, 1858, in Gangamul, a forested area in Karnataka, to a family whose own story was already unusual by the standards of nineteenth-century Hindu society. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, was a Sanskrit scholar of considerable accomplishment who had made the decision, extraordinary for his time and social position, to teach Sanskrit to his wife Lakshmibai. This decision had cost him the social acceptance of the orthodox community, which considered the education of women in the sacred language a violation of religious law, but Anant Shastri had concluded from his own reading of the texts that the prohibition had no adequate scriptural basis, and he was not a man who allowed social pressure to override his own careful reasoning.

He applied the same reasoning to his daughter. Ramabai grew up learning Sanskrit alongside her brothers, in a household that combined the rigors of classical learning with the material simplicity of a family that had chosen principle over social comfort. The family traveled extensively, moving between pilgrimage sites and scholarly communities, and the years of wandering that shaped Ramabai’s childhood gave her an unusually direct encounter with the diversity of Indian social and religious life.

The famine of the early 1870s destroyed the family. Anant Shastri, his wife, and one of Ramabai’s sisters died of starvation and illness within a short period, leaving Ramabai and her brother Srinivas alone, continuing the wandering life without the father whose scholarship had given it purpose and whose example had given both children the intellectual formation that would define everything they would later do.

The two siblings walked across India together, studying, reciting, engaging with scholars and religious communities, and arriving eventually at Calcutta, where the recognition that Ramabai received from the city’s Sanskrit scholars was the first formal acknowledgment that the education her father had given her had produced something that the tradition could not simply ignore.

The Widow and the Book

Ramabai’s brother Srinivas died in 1880. She married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer who was not a Brahmin, a choice that crossed caste lines in a way that the orthodox community of the time considered a serious violation of social and religious law. The marriage was brief and, by the available accounts, genuinely companionate. Bipin died in 1882, leaving Ramabai a widow with an infant daughter, Manoramabai, in precisely the social condition that she had already begun to write about, the condition of the Hindu widow in a society that had organized itself to make that condition as difficult and as punishing as possible.

She had already published Stri Dharma Neeti, a book on women’s moral conduct, in 1882, making her one of the first Indian women to publish a work of social criticism in Marathi. The book argued for women’s education and for the reform of the social conditions of widowhood from a position that was grounded in both classical textual authority and direct personal observation. She knew the texts that were used to justify the treatment of widows. She knew them better than most of the people who invoked them. And she knew, with the precision of someone who had spent years studying Sanskrit grammar and rhetoric, that the interpretation of those texts being used to condemn widows to lives of enforced misery was not the only interpretation available and was not the most careful one.

The book attracted attention and controversy in equal measure. It also attracted the attention of the Deccan Education Society in Pune, which invited Ramabai to teach Sanskrit and Marathi, making her one of the first women to hold a teaching position at an institution of any standing in western India.

The book that would make her internationally known came five years later. The High-Caste Hindu Woman, published in English in 1887 after Ramabai had moved to England and then to the United States, was an account of the condition of upper-caste Hindu women, particularly widows, in nineteenth-century India, written with the authority of an insider and the analytical clarity of someone who had spent years thinking carefully about the structural conditions that produced what she was describing.

The book was read by audiences in Britain and America who had limited direct knowledge of Indian social conditions but who responded to the combination of specific, documented evidence with systematic argument that Ramabai brought to her account. It raised funds, built networks of support, and created an international audience for Ramabai’s reform work that would prove crucial to the institutional projects she was about to undertake.

The Conversion and the Storm

In 1883, while she was in England studying at the Cheltenham Ladies College in preparation for her eventual journey to the United States, Ramabai was baptized as a Christian. This decision was perhaps the single most controversial act of her public life, more controversial even than her marriage across caste lines, more controversial than her public criticism of Hindu orthodoxy’s treatment of women, because it was understood by the Hindu reform community, which had been her primary constituency and her primary support base, as a betrayal.

The response from figures like Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade, who had been among her supporters in Pune, was one of distress and disappointment. The response from the orthodox community was one of vindication, the sense that her criticism of Hindu social practice had always been motivated by an alien orientation and could now be dismissed on those grounds.

Ramabai’s own account of her conversion was carefully articulated and consistently maintained across the decades that followed. She had accepted Christianity not as a rejection of Indian identity or of the intellectual tradition she had been formed by but as a personal spiritual decision that she had arrived at through her own reading and her own reasoning. She also maintained, with considerable firmness, that her conversion did not change her commitment to the welfare of Indian women or her assessment of the social conditions that made that welfare so inadequately served by the existing order.

The storm of controversy did not slow her down. She had work to do and she went to do it.

The American Years and the Funding of a Vision

Ramabai spent three years in the United States, from 1886 to 1889, during which she lectured extensively, built networks of support among American Christian women’s organizations, and wrote The High-Caste Hindu Woman, which she used as both a fundraising tool and a public argument for the institutional work she was planning to undertake on her return to India.

The American audiences she addressed were moved by what she described and organized to support what she proposed. The Ramabai Association, founded in Boston in 1887, committed to funding a school for Hindu child widows in India for ten years, providing the financial foundation on which Sharada Sadan would be built.

She also studied American educational methods during these years, visiting schools and institutions with the careful attention of someone who was planning to build something similar and wanted to understand what worked and what did not. The practical orientation that characterized everything she did, the insistence on understanding a problem completely before designing a solution and on building institutions that could actually function rather than simply embodying a correct principle, was fully evident in the way she used her American years.

Her book My Testimony, written and revised over several years, documented her spiritual journey and the development of her thinking about the relationship between Christianity, Indian social reform, and the specific condition of Indian women. It is a document of unusual intellectual honesty, the account of a mind working through questions that had no easy answers and refusing to pretend that the difficulty was less than it was.

Sharada Sadan and What It Actually Did

Ramabai returned to India in 1889 and opened Sharada Sadan, the Home of Learning, in Bombay before moving it to Pune, where it became the most significant institution for the education of high-caste Hindu widows that had yet existed in India.

The institution was deliberately and carefully designed to be acceptable to a Hindu community that was deeply suspicious of Ramabai’s Christian identity and deeply anxious about the possibility that the school was a vehicle for converting its students. Ramabai made explicit promises that no religious pressure would be placed on students, that the curriculum would be secular and practical, and that the institution would serve the educational needs of widows without requiring them to adopt any particular religious position.

She kept those promises, at considerable personal cost. When some of her students expressed interest in Christianity and eventually converted, the resulting controversy threatened to destroy the institution she had built. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, whose own position on social reform was considerably more conservative than that of the Phule tradition, used his newspaper Kesari to attack Sharada Sadan as a vehicle for Christian conversion and called for a boycott.

The attack was not entirely without foundation, since some students had indeed converted, but it was grossly disproportionate to the actual character of the institution, which was providing education, shelter, and economic training to women who had nowhere else to go. The controversy damaged Sharada Sadan’s reputation and reduced its student numbers in the short term, but the institution survived.

The famine years of the late 1890s gave Ramabai’s work a new and more urgent dimension. When the great famines of 1896 and 1897 swept across Maharashtra and the Deccan, producing an enormous population of displaced women and children, Ramabai moved with characteristic directness. She traveled into the famine-affected areas herself, arranged transportation for women and children who had been completely abandoned by every other form of social support, and brought them to an expanded settlement near Kedgaon, outside Pune, that became the Mukti Mission.

The Mukti Mission at Its Height

The Mukti Mission, which Ramabai established at Kedgaon in 1898, was at its peak a community of nearly two thousand women and children, most of them famine survivors and widows who had no other recourse. It was not simply a school or a shelter. It was an attempt to create, within the boundaries of a single community, the conditions of education, economic self-sufficiency, and human dignity that the society surrounding it denied its members.

The Mission ran its own printing press, staffed by women who had been trained to operate it. It had workshops for carpentry, weaving, and other practical skills. It ran an agricultural operation that the women themselves managed. It had a school that educated both the children in the community and the women who had arrived as adults without any prior access to formal education. It had medical facilities, a hospital, and a training program for nurses.

The scale of the undertaking was extraordinary, particularly given that Ramabai was funding it primarily through the American support networks she had built during her time in the United States and through her own relentless fundraising efforts. She was not working with government support or with the backing of a large institutional structure. She was working with the organizational intelligence of someone who had decided that a thing needed to exist and had figured out how to make it exist.

The printing press at Mukti Mission produced Ramabai’s Marathi translation of the Bible, a project she undertook in the final decade of her life and which required her to learn Greek and Hebrew so that she could work from the original texts rather than from existing English translations. She worked on this translation until the last weeks of her life, completing it shortly before her death on April 5, 1922.

The Pandita at the End

Ramabai died at Kedgaon on April 5, 1922, eleven days before what would have been her sixty-fourth birthday. She had outlived her daughter Manoramabai by less than a year, Manoramabai having died in 1921 after decades as her mother’s closest collaborator and the person who more than anyone else understood the full scope of what the Mission required to function.

The Mukti Mission continued after her death and continues today, more than a century later, operating schools and vocational training programs for women and children in Kedgaon, making it one of the longest continuously functioning institutions for women’s welfare established by an Indian reformer in the nineteenth century.

The title she had been given by the scholars of Calcutta, Pandita, the master of Sanskrit learning, was the most accurate single word that could be applied to her. She had mastered the tradition. She had read it with more care and more honesty than most of its defenders. She had used what she read to build the most rigorous possible argument for the transformation of the conditions it described. And she had then gone and built the institutions that gave that transformation a physical address.

That sequence, mastery, honesty, argument, institution, was the whole of what she did. It was enough to change the lives of thousands of women in her own lifetime and to establish a tradition of women’s education and welfare that the society around her was eventually, slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely compelled to take seriously.

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Curious Indian: Fast Facts

• Ramabai was granted the title of Pandita by the Sanskrit scholars of Calcutta at the age of twenty, the first woman ever to receive this recognition from that assembly, which had tested her with the same rigorous examination it applied to male scholars.
• Her father Anant Shastri Dongre had defied orthodox convention to teach his wife Sanskrit, a decision that cost him his social standing and established the family’s tradition of placing principle above social acceptance that Ramabai inherited and amplified.
• The High-Caste Hindu Woman, published in 1887, was written and published during her time in the United States and raised both the funds and the international awareness that made the founding of Sharada Sadan possible on her return to India.
• She learned Greek and Hebrew in her sixties in order to translate the Bible directly from original texts into Marathi, completing the translation shortly before her death and demonstrating the intellectual drive that had characterized her entire life.
• The Mukti Mission she founded at Kedgaon in 1898 grew to house nearly two thousand women and children at its peak, running its own printing press, agricultural operations, workshops, hospital, and school entirely staffed by the women of the community.
• Her conversion to Christianity in 1883 was the most controversial act of her public life, leading to attacks from both the Hindu orthodox establishment and the reform community that had previously supported her, but she maintained throughout that her spiritual decision did not alter her commitment to the welfare of Indian women.
• She received the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal in 1919, one of the highest honors the British colonial government awarded to civilians, recognizing the humanitarian scale of her famine relief work in the 1890s.
• Her daughter Manoramabai worked alongside her at Mukti Mission for decades and died in 1921, less than a year before Ramabai herself, making the final years of the Mission’s founding period a time of profound personal loss alongside continued institutional work.
• Ramabai’s Marathi publications, including Stri Dharma Neeti and her Bible translation, place her among the most prolific women writers in nineteenth and early twentieth century Marathi literature, a dimension of her contribution that has received less attention than her institutional work.
• The Church of South India and the Anglican Communion have recognized Pandita Ramabai as a saint, with her feast day observed on April 5, making her one of the very few Indian women reformers to receive formal religious recognition across multiple Christian traditions.

Conclusion

Pandita Ramabai’s crusade for women’s education was fearless in the most literal sense. She was not unaware of the consequences of what she was doing. She had watched her father lose his social standing for teaching her mother Sanskrit. She had experienced the hostility of the scholarly establishment before it gave way to recognition. She had seen the reform community withdraw its support when her religious choices confounded their expectations. She had been attacked in the most influential Marathi newspaper of her time by one of the most powerful public figures of her era.

She continued. She opened Sharada Sadan and kept it open through the controversy. She traveled into famine-affected areas and brought thousands of women to Kedgaon and built a community around them that gave them what the society around them had refused to give. She learned two more languages in her sixties to do a translation she considered necessary. She did not slow down because the opposition was real and sustained and came from people whose opinions carried social weight.

The fearlessness was not the absence of feeling. It was the refusal to let feeling become the reason not to act. She was angry about what the Sanskrit texts said about women. She was grief-stricken by the deaths that had shaped her life. She was hurt by the withdrawal of support from people she had considered allies. She was all of these things and she continued anyway, because the work was more important than any of those responses and because the women at Kedgaon needed the work to continue more than Ramabai needed the comfort of stopping.

The Mukti Mission is still there. The women trained in its workshops, the children educated in its schools, the tradition of women’s welfare that it established in Kedgaon, these are the continuation of the argument that Pandita Ramabai made with her life. The argument has not been completed. But it is further along than it was when she began it, and that distance is her gift to everyone who has continued walking in the same direction.

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