Her Early Years<\/strong><\/h3>\nPandita 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\u201378.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s elder brother Srinivasa, who was 18 years and emaciated, and nearly dying himself, carried the dead body two miles to the burial place.<\/p>\n
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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tough Years of Travel<\/strong><\/h3>\nRamabai was sixteen years old at the time, and now only she and her eighteen-year-old brother remained. In the next four years with her brother, they walked barefoot over 4,000 miles throughout India on various sacred pilgrimages.<\/p>\n
They often went without food and shelter. Srinivasa sometimes found a little work, but he would make four rupees for a month\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Although the priests had warned them 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.<\/p>\n
Then they noticed another strange thing, that 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. These lies started to trouble the brother and sister.<\/p>\n
Honored And Revered<\/strong><\/h3>\nPandita Ramabai and her brother Srinivas traveled over India reciting Sanskrit scriptures. Finally, Ramabai\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n
Three distinguished educators of Calcutta University tested her learning and were awestruck by the twenty-year-old woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The amazed questioners concluded, \u201cWe 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 \u2018Saraswati\u2019 has come down amidst us in human form.\u201dWith that, she bequeathed the title \u201cSaraswati,\u201d after the Hindu goddess of learning. Shortly after that, a Bengali scholar gave her the title \u201cPandita.\u201d A Pandit was a title of honor given only to the most learned individuals. Since Pandita 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.<\/p>\n
Haunting Plight Of Women in India<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn time, Pandita Ramabai started reading things in the sacred scripts that disturbed her. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwomen 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.\u201d It disturbed her that, \u201cA woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Marriage<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 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 leave 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.<\/p>\n
In October, six months after her brother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Her society considered Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai Originally Loathed Christianity<\/strong><\/h3>\nMedhavi, 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.
\nOn 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: \u201cThis 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.\u201d
\nHer baby daughter born on April 16, 1881, born only months before the death of her father, Manoramabai, brought her joy, her name meant, \u201cthe joy of her heart,\u201d After her husband\u2019s death, Pandita Ramabai moved with her daughter to Chennai to study the English language.\u00a0 Over time, she got more involved with aiding helpless women and working towards social reform.<\/p>\n
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!.<\/p>\n
Days In England<\/strong><\/h3>\nA 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.<\/p>\n
The love that these sisters showed toward suffering women at a rescue home they ran left a deep impression on Ramabai: \u201cHere, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfallen women\u201d to the dogs on the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 encounter with the \u201cfallen\u201d 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 \u201cfallen\u201d woman at that! She realized that \u201cChrist 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
While still in Wantage, Pandita Ramabai received a personal letter from Reverand Goreh that would later be published as a pamphlet called, \u201cIs There Any Proof that Christianity is a Divinity-given Religion?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Ramabai felt something vital still missing in her newfound faith: She still felt she was not connected to Christ and did not know Him.\u00a0 In the meantime, she immersed herself in studies, training, and teaching.\u00a0 She recalls her spiritual state at the time she left San Francisco in November 1888 to return to Mumbai: \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1891, she read the book From Death into Life by Rev. W. Haslam, an English preacher. 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 \u201cgave its privileges equally to men and women,\u201d without \u201cdistinction of caste color, or sex made in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She came to realize that she needed Christ Himself, not merely His religion: \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0 Although baptized eight years earlier, now wanted to fully surrender.<\/p>\n
Surrender and Divine Breakthrough<\/strong><\/h3>\nFinally, she surrendered herself unconditionally to Jesus Christ: \u201cOnly 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarized her experience of discovering new life in Christ: \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
Her new life in Christ was especially marked by the abundant joy that she never knew before: \u201cThe 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\u2026. All the riches, all the gain, all the joys of the world do not begin to compare with the joy of salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. This joy proved to be far too immense to keep hidden under a bushel: \u201cMy life is full of joy\u2026. I can scarcely contain the joy and keep it to myself.\u201d The joy of the Lord became her strength and empowered her to work indefatigably for her Master.<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai also grew an irresistible burden for evangelism. She needed to share the good news about Jesus Christ with others: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Contribution to India and Social Reforms<\/strong><\/h3>\nAfter Medhvi’s death (1882), Ramabai moved to Pune where she founded Arya Mahila Samaj (Arya Women’s Society). Influenced by the ideals of Jesus Christ, the Brahmo Samaj, and Hindu reformers, the purpose of the society was to promote the cause of women’s education and deliverance from the oppression of child marriage.<\/p>\n
When in 1882 the Hunter Commission was appointed by the colonial Government of India to look into education, Ramabai gave evidence before it. In an address before the Hunter Commission, she declared, “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.” She suggested that teachers be trained and women school inspectors be appointed.<\/p>\n
Further, she said that as the situation in India was that women’s conditions were such that women could only medically treat them, Indian women should be admitted to medical colleges. Ramabai’s evidence created a great hit and reached Queen Victoria. It bore fruit later in starting of the Women’s Medical Movement by Lord Dufferin. In Maharashtra, Ramabai made contact with Christian organizations also involved in women’s education and medical missionary work, in particular a community of Anglican nuns, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV)<\/p>\n
With earnings from the sale of her first book, Stri Dharma Niti (“Morals for Women,” 1882), and contacts with the CSMV, Ramabai went to Britain in 1883 to start medical training; she was rejected from medical programs because of progressive deafness.<\/p>\n
During her stay, she converted to Christianity. Among the reasons Ramabai gave for her conversion was her growing disillusionment with orthodox Hinduism and particularly what she saw as its ill regard for women. In an autobiographical account of her conversion written years later, Ramabai wrote that 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.”<\/p>\n
Ramabai had a controversial relationship with her Anglican “mentors” in England, particularly Sister Geraldine. However, in 1886, she traveled from Britain to the United States at the invitation of Dr. Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of her relative and the first female Indian doctor, Anandibai Joshi, staying for two years.\u00a0 During this time she also translated textbooks and gave lectures throughout the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n
She also published one of her most important books, The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Her first book written in English, Ramabai dedicated it to her cousin, Dr. Joshi. The High-Caste Hindu Woman showed the darkest aspects of the life of Hindu women, including child brides and child widows, and sought to expose the oppression of women in Hindu-dominated British India. Through speaking engagements and the development of a wide network of supporters, Ramabai raise the equivalent of 60,000 rupees to launch a school in India for the child widows whose difficult lives her book exposed.<\/p>\n
While giving presentations in the U.S. to seek support for her work in India, Ramabai met American Suffragette and Women’s rights activist, Frances Willard in July 1887. Willard invited Ramabai to speak at the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union convention in November 1887 where she gained the support of this large women’s organization. She returned to India in June 1888 as a National Lecturer for the WCTU. Mary Greenleaf Clement Leavitt, the first World Missionary of the WCTU, was already there when Ramabai returned, but they did not meet. Ramabai worked however with the WCTU of India once it was officially organized in 1893.<\/p>\n
in 1889, she returned to India and founded a school for child widows in Pune called Sharada Sadan, which had the support of many Hindu reformers, including M.G. Ranade. Although Ramabai did not engage in overt evangelism, she did not hide her Christian faith either, and when several students converted to Christianity, she lost the backing of Pune’s Hindu reform circles. She moved the school 60 kilometers east to the much quieter village of Kedgaon and changed its name to the Mukti Mission.<\/p>\n
In 1896, during a severe famine, Ramabai toured the villages of Maharashtra with a caravan of bullock carts and rescued thousands of outcast children, child widows, orphans, and other destitute women and brought them to the shelter of the Mukti Mission. By 1900 there were 1,500 residents and over a hundred cattle in the Mukti mission. A learned woman knowing seven languages, she also translated the Bible into her mother tongue\u2014Marathi\u2014from the original Hebrew and Greek. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission is still active today, providing housing, education, vocational training, etc. for many needy groups including widows, orphans, and the blind<\/p>\n
Mukti Mission Home For The Widows<\/strong><\/h3>\nBy July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence in the Mukti Mission<\/a>, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cScripture Reading Class.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit<\/strong><\/p>\nPandita 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.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Pandita Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: \u201cThere 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.\u201d By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWhile 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miss Abrams reports, \u201cFrom 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWe are now seeing the results of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: \u201cSeven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are \u201cthe saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,\u201d but she \u201ccalled all these afflicted ones by the names of \u2018friends,\u2019 lest any despise them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of corrupt 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: \u201cLove, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: \u201cIt 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.\u201d He tells of Ramabai\u2019s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that \u201cthey had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.\u201d Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that
\nThe work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai\u2019s 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: \u201cThe Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God\u2026. God\u2019s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support.<\/p>\n
The prayers of God\u2019s people are more precious than silver or gold.\u201d Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day\u2019s supply on hand: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Last Triumphant Days<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 1920 Ramabai\u2019s 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 her daughter, Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty.<\/p>\n
Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter\u2019s 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\u2026 and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.<\/p>\n
Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai\u2019s deathbed: \u201cAt five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips\u2014Bai! 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\u2019s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep\u2014and such it was\u2026 Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone\u2019s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Though she was one of India’s greatest woman reformers, unfortunately, no Indians want to recognize Pandita Ramabai<\/a> because she became a Christian<\/a> even though she had Brahmin Marathi roots.\u00a0 In fact, over the ages, a lot of conspiratory lies have been made about this marvelous brave woman.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hamslive.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Pandi-300x190.jpg\")
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\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t
Ramabai was sixteen years old at the time, and now only she and her eighteen-year-old brother remained. In the next four years with her brother, they walked barefoot over 4,000 miles throughout India on various sacred pilgrimages.<\/p>\n
They often went without food and shelter. Srinivasa sometimes found a little work, but he would make four rupees for a month\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Although the priests had warned them 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.<\/p>\n
Then they noticed another strange thing, that 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. These lies started to trouble the brother and sister.<\/p>\n
Honored And Revered<\/strong><\/h3>\nPandita Ramabai and her brother Srinivas traveled over India reciting Sanskrit scriptures. Finally, Ramabai\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n
Three distinguished educators of Calcutta University tested her learning and were awestruck by the twenty-year-old woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The amazed questioners concluded, \u201cWe 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 \u2018Saraswati\u2019 has come down amidst us in human form.\u201dWith that, she bequeathed the title \u201cSaraswati,\u201d after the Hindu goddess of learning. Shortly after that, a Bengali scholar gave her the title \u201cPandita.\u201d A Pandit was a title of honor given only to the most learned individuals. Since Pandita 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.<\/p>\n
Haunting Plight Of Women in India<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn time, Pandita Ramabai started reading things in the sacred scripts that disturbed her. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwomen 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.\u201d It disturbed her that, \u201cA woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Marriage<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 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 leave 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.<\/p>\n
In October, six months after her brother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Her society considered Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai Originally Loathed Christianity<\/strong><\/h3>\nMedhavi, 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.
\nOn 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: \u201cThis 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.\u201d
\nHer baby daughter born on April 16, 1881, born only months before the death of her father, Manoramabai, brought her joy, her name meant, \u201cthe joy of her heart,\u201d After her husband\u2019s death, Pandita Ramabai moved with her daughter to Chennai to study the English language.\u00a0 Over time, she got more involved with aiding helpless women and working towards social reform.<\/p>\n
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!.<\/p>\n
Days In England<\/strong><\/h3>\nA 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.<\/p>\n
The love that these sisters showed toward suffering women at a rescue home they ran left a deep impression on Ramabai: \u201cHere, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfallen women\u201d to the dogs on the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 encounter with the \u201cfallen\u201d 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 \u201cfallen\u201d woman at that! She realized that \u201cChrist 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
While still in Wantage, Pandita Ramabai received a personal letter from Reverand Goreh that would later be published as a pamphlet called, \u201cIs There Any Proof that Christianity is a Divinity-given Religion?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Ramabai felt something vital still missing in her newfound faith: She still felt she was not connected to Christ and did not know Him.\u00a0 In the meantime, she immersed herself in studies, training, and teaching.\u00a0 She recalls her spiritual state at the time she left San Francisco in November 1888 to return to Mumbai: \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1891, she read the book From Death into Life by Rev. W. Haslam, an English preacher. 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 \u201cgave its privileges equally to men and women,\u201d without \u201cdistinction of caste color, or sex made in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She came to realize that she needed Christ Himself, not merely His religion: \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0 Although baptized eight years earlier, now wanted to fully surrender.<\/p>\n
Surrender and Divine Breakthrough<\/strong><\/h3>\nFinally, she surrendered herself unconditionally to Jesus Christ: \u201cOnly 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarized her experience of discovering new life in Christ: \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
Her new life in Christ was especially marked by the abundant joy that she never knew before: \u201cThe 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\u2026. All the riches, all the gain, all the joys of the world do not begin to compare with the joy of salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. This joy proved to be far too immense to keep hidden under a bushel: \u201cMy life is full of joy\u2026. I can scarcely contain the joy and keep it to myself.\u201d The joy of the Lord became her strength and empowered her to work indefatigably for her Master.<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai also grew an irresistible burden for evangelism. She needed to share the good news about Jesus Christ with others: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Contribution to India and Social Reforms<\/strong><\/h3>\nAfter Medhvi’s death (1882), Ramabai moved to Pune where she founded Arya Mahila Samaj (Arya Women’s Society). Influenced by the ideals of Jesus Christ, the Brahmo Samaj, and Hindu reformers, the purpose of the society was to promote the cause of women’s education and deliverance from the oppression of child marriage.<\/p>\n
When in 1882 the Hunter Commission was appointed by the colonial Government of India to look into education, Ramabai gave evidence before it. In an address before the Hunter Commission, she declared, “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.” She suggested that teachers be trained and women school inspectors be appointed.<\/p>\n
Further, she said that as the situation in India was that women’s conditions were such that women could only medically treat them, Indian women should be admitted to medical colleges. Ramabai’s evidence created a great hit and reached Queen Victoria. It bore fruit later in starting of the Women’s Medical Movement by Lord Dufferin. In Maharashtra, Ramabai made contact with Christian organizations also involved in women’s education and medical missionary work, in particular a community of Anglican nuns, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV)<\/p>\n
With earnings from the sale of her first book, Stri Dharma Niti (“Morals for Women,” 1882), and contacts with the CSMV, Ramabai went to Britain in 1883 to start medical training; she was rejected from medical programs because of progressive deafness.<\/p>\n
During her stay, she converted to Christianity. Among the reasons Ramabai gave for her conversion was her growing disillusionment with orthodox Hinduism and particularly what she saw as its ill regard for women. In an autobiographical account of her conversion written years later, Ramabai wrote that 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.”<\/p>\n
Ramabai had a controversial relationship with her Anglican “mentors” in England, particularly Sister Geraldine. However, in 1886, she traveled from Britain to the United States at the invitation of Dr. Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of her relative and the first female Indian doctor, Anandibai Joshi, staying for two years.\u00a0 During this time she also translated textbooks and gave lectures throughout the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n
She also published one of her most important books, The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Her first book written in English, Ramabai dedicated it to her cousin, Dr. Joshi. The High-Caste Hindu Woman showed the darkest aspects of the life of Hindu women, including child brides and child widows, and sought to expose the oppression of women in Hindu-dominated British India. Through speaking engagements and the development of a wide network of supporters, Ramabai raise the equivalent of 60,000 rupees to launch a school in India for the child widows whose difficult lives her book exposed.<\/p>\n
While giving presentations in the U.S. to seek support for her work in India, Ramabai met American Suffragette and Women’s rights activist, Frances Willard in July 1887. Willard invited Ramabai to speak at the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union convention in November 1887 where she gained the support of this large women’s organization. She returned to India in June 1888 as a National Lecturer for the WCTU. Mary Greenleaf Clement Leavitt, the first World Missionary of the WCTU, was already there when Ramabai returned, but they did not meet. Ramabai worked however with the WCTU of India once it was officially organized in 1893.<\/p>\n
in 1889, she returned to India and founded a school for child widows in Pune called Sharada Sadan, which had the support of many Hindu reformers, including M.G. Ranade. Although Ramabai did not engage in overt evangelism, she did not hide her Christian faith either, and when several students converted to Christianity, she lost the backing of Pune’s Hindu reform circles. She moved the school 60 kilometers east to the much quieter village of Kedgaon and changed its name to the Mukti Mission.<\/p>\n
In 1896, during a severe famine, Ramabai toured the villages of Maharashtra with a caravan of bullock carts and rescued thousands of outcast children, child widows, orphans, and other destitute women and brought them to the shelter of the Mukti Mission. By 1900 there were 1,500 residents and over a hundred cattle in the Mukti mission. A learned woman knowing seven languages, she also translated the Bible into her mother tongue\u2014Marathi\u2014from the original Hebrew and Greek. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission is still active today, providing housing, education, vocational training, etc. for many needy groups including widows, orphans, and the blind<\/p>\n
Mukti Mission Home For The Widows<\/strong><\/h3>\nBy July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence in the Mukti Mission<\/a>, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cScripture Reading Class.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit<\/strong><\/p>\nPandita 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.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Pandita Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: \u201cThere 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.\u201d By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWhile 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miss Abrams reports, \u201cFrom 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWe are now seeing the results of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: \u201cSeven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are \u201cthe saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,\u201d but she \u201ccalled all these afflicted ones by the names of \u2018friends,\u2019 lest any despise them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of corrupt 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: \u201cLove, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: \u201cIt 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.\u201d He tells of Ramabai\u2019s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that \u201cthey had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.\u201d Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that
\nThe work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai\u2019s 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: \u201cThe Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God\u2026. God\u2019s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support.<\/p>\n
The prayers of God\u2019s people are more precious than silver or gold.\u201d Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day\u2019s supply on hand: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Last Triumphant Days<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 1920 Ramabai\u2019s 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 her daughter, Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty.<\/p>\n
Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter\u2019s 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\u2026 and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.<\/p>\n
Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai\u2019s deathbed: \u201cAt five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips\u2014Bai! 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\u2019s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep\u2014and such it was\u2026 Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone\u2019s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Though she was one of India’s greatest woman reformers, unfortunately, no Indians want to recognize Pandita Ramabai<\/a> because she became a Christian<\/a> even though she had Brahmin Marathi roots.\u00a0 In fact, over the ages, a lot of conspiratory lies have been made about this marvelous brave woman.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t
In time, Pandita Ramabai started reading things in the sacred scripts that disturbed her. \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwomen 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.\u201d It disturbed her that, \u201cA woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Marriage<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 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 leave 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.<\/p>\n
In October, six months after her brother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Her society considered Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai Originally Loathed Christianity<\/strong><\/h3>\nMedhavi, 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.
\nOn 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: \u201cThis 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.\u201d
\nHer baby daughter born on April 16, 1881, born only months before the death of her father, Manoramabai, brought her joy, her name meant, \u201cthe joy of her heart,\u201d After her husband\u2019s death, Pandita Ramabai moved with her daughter to Chennai to study the English language.\u00a0 Over time, she got more involved with aiding helpless women and working towards social reform.<\/p>\n
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!.<\/p>\n
Days In England<\/strong><\/h3>\nA 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.<\/p>\n
The love that these sisters showed toward suffering women at a rescue home they ran left a deep impression on Ramabai: \u201cHere, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfallen women\u201d to the dogs on the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 encounter with the \u201cfallen\u201d 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 \u201cfallen\u201d woman at that! She realized that \u201cChrist 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
While still in Wantage, Pandita Ramabai received a personal letter from Reverand Goreh that would later be published as a pamphlet called, \u201cIs There Any Proof that Christianity is a Divinity-given Religion?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Ramabai felt something vital still missing in her newfound faith: She still felt she was not connected to Christ and did not know Him.\u00a0 In the meantime, she immersed herself in studies, training, and teaching.\u00a0 She recalls her spiritual state at the time she left San Francisco in November 1888 to return to Mumbai: \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1891, she read the book From Death into Life by Rev. W. Haslam, an English preacher. 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 \u201cgave its privileges equally to men and women,\u201d without \u201cdistinction of caste color, or sex made in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She came to realize that she needed Christ Himself, not merely His religion: \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0 Although baptized eight years earlier, now wanted to fully surrender.<\/p>\n
Surrender and Divine Breakthrough<\/strong><\/h3>\nFinally, she surrendered herself unconditionally to Jesus Christ: \u201cOnly 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarized her experience of discovering new life in Christ: \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
Her new life in Christ was especially marked by the abundant joy that she never knew before: \u201cThe 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\u2026. All the riches, all the gain, all the joys of the world do not begin to compare with the joy of salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. This joy proved to be far too immense to keep hidden under a bushel: \u201cMy life is full of joy\u2026. I can scarcely contain the joy and keep it to myself.\u201d The joy of the Lord became her strength and empowered her to work indefatigably for her Master.<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai also grew an irresistible burden for evangelism. She needed to share the good news about Jesus Christ with others: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Contribution to India and Social Reforms<\/strong><\/h3>\nAfter Medhvi’s death (1882), Ramabai moved to Pune where she founded Arya Mahila Samaj (Arya Women’s Society). Influenced by the ideals of Jesus Christ, the Brahmo Samaj, and Hindu reformers, the purpose of the society was to promote the cause of women’s education and deliverance from the oppression of child marriage.<\/p>\n
When in 1882 the Hunter Commission was appointed by the colonial Government of India to look into education, Ramabai gave evidence before it. In an address before the Hunter Commission, she declared, “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.” She suggested that teachers be trained and women school inspectors be appointed.<\/p>\n
Further, she said that as the situation in India was that women’s conditions were such that women could only medically treat them, Indian women should be admitted to medical colleges. Ramabai’s evidence created a great hit and reached Queen Victoria. It bore fruit later in starting of the Women’s Medical Movement by Lord Dufferin. In Maharashtra, Ramabai made contact with Christian organizations also involved in women’s education and medical missionary work, in particular a community of Anglican nuns, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV)<\/p>\n
With earnings from the sale of her first book, Stri Dharma Niti (“Morals for Women,” 1882), and contacts with the CSMV, Ramabai went to Britain in 1883 to start medical training; she was rejected from medical programs because of progressive deafness.<\/p>\n
During her stay, she converted to Christianity. Among the reasons Ramabai gave for her conversion was her growing disillusionment with orthodox Hinduism and particularly what she saw as its ill regard for women. In an autobiographical account of her conversion written years later, Ramabai wrote that 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.”<\/p>\n
Ramabai had a controversial relationship with her Anglican “mentors” in England, particularly Sister Geraldine. However, in 1886, she traveled from Britain to the United States at the invitation of Dr. Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of her relative and the first female Indian doctor, Anandibai Joshi, staying for two years.\u00a0 During this time she also translated textbooks and gave lectures throughout the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n
She also published one of her most important books, The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Her first book written in English, Ramabai dedicated it to her cousin, Dr. Joshi. The High-Caste Hindu Woman showed the darkest aspects of the life of Hindu women, including child brides and child widows, and sought to expose the oppression of women in Hindu-dominated British India. Through speaking engagements and the development of a wide network of supporters, Ramabai raise the equivalent of 60,000 rupees to launch a school in India for the child widows whose difficult lives her book exposed.<\/p>\n
While giving presentations in the U.S. to seek support for her work in India, Ramabai met American Suffragette and Women’s rights activist, Frances Willard in July 1887. Willard invited Ramabai to speak at the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union convention in November 1887 where she gained the support of this large women’s organization. She returned to India in June 1888 as a National Lecturer for the WCTU. Mary Greenleaf Clement Leavitt, the first World Missionary of the WCTU, was already there when Ramabai returned, but they did not meet. Ramabai worked however with the WCTU of India once it was officially organized in 1893.<\/p>\n
in 1889, she returned to India and founded a school for child widows in Pune called Sharada Sadan, which had the support of many Hindu reformers, including M.G. Ranade. Although Ramabai did not engage in overt evangelism, she did not hide her Christian faith either, and when several students converted to Christianity, she lost the backing of Pune’s Hindu reform circles. She moved the school 60 kilometers east to the much quieter village of Kedgaon and changed its name to the Mukti Mission.<\/p>\n
In 1896, during a severe famine, Ramabai toured the villages of Maharashtra with a caravan of bullock carts and rescued thousands of outcast children, child widows, orphans, and other destitute women and brought them to the shelter of the Mukti Mission. By 1900 there were 1,500 residents and over a hundred cattle in the Mukti mission. A learned woman knowing seven languages, she also translated the Bible into her mother tongue\u2014Marathi\u2014from the original Hebrew and Greek. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission is still active today, providing housing, education, vocational training, etc. for many needy groups including widows, orphans, and the blind<\/p>\n
Mukti Mission Home For The Widows<\/strong><\/h3>\nBy July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence in the Mukti Mission<\/a>, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cScripture Reading Class.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit<\/strong><\/p>\nPandita 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.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Pandita Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: \u201cThere 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.\u201d By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWhile 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miss Abrams reports, \u201cFrom 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWe are now seeing the results of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: \u201cSeven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are \u201cthe saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,\u201d but she \u201ccalled all these afflicted ones by the names of \u2018friends,\u2019 lest any despise them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of corrupt 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: \u201cLove, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: \u201cIt 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.\u201d He tells of Ramabai\u2019s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that \u201cthey had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.\u201d Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that
\nThe work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai\u2019s 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: \u201cThe Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God\u2026. God\u2019s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support.<\/p>\n
The prayers of God\u2019s people are more precious than silver or gold.\u201d Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day\u2019s supply on hand: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Last Triumphant Days<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 1920 Ramabai\u2019s 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 her daughter, Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty.<\/p>\n
Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter\u2019s 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\u2026 and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.<\/p>\n
Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai\u2019s deathbed: \u201cAt five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips\u2014Bai! 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\u2019s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep\u2014and such it was\u2026 Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone\u2019s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Though she was one of India’s greatest woman reformers, unfortunately, no Indians want to recognize Pandita Ramabai<\/a> because she became a Christian<\/a> even though she had Brahmin Marathi roots.\u00a0 In fact, over the ages, a lot of conspiratory lies have been made about this marvelous brave woman.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t
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.
\nOn 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: \u201cThis 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.\u201d
\nHer baby daughter born on April 16, 1881, born only months before the death of her father, Manoramabai, brought her joy, her name meant, \u201cthe joy of her heart,\u201d After her husband\u2019s death, Pandita Ramabai moved with her daughter to Chennai to study the English language.\u00a0 Over time, she got more involved with aiding helpless women and working towards social reform.<\/p>\n
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!.<\/p>\n
Days In England<\/strong><\/h3>\nA 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.<\/p>\n
The love that these sisters showed toward suffering women at a rescue home they ran left a deep impression on Ramabai: \u201cHere, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfallen women\u201d to the dogs on the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 encounter with the \u201cfallen\u201d 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 \u201cfallen\u201d woman at that! She realized that \u201cChrist 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
While still in Wantage, Pandita Ramabai received a personal letter from Reverand Goreh that would later be published as a pamphlet called, \u201cIs There Any Proof that Christianity is a Divinity-given Religion?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Ramabai felt something vital still missing in her newfound faith: She still felt she was not connected to Christ and did not know Him.\u00a0 In the meantime, she immersed herself in studies, training, and teaching.\u00a0 She recalls her spiritual state at the time she left San Francisco in November 1888 to return to Mumbai: \u201cMy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1891, she read the book From Death into Life by Rev. W. Haslam, an English preacher. 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 \u201cgave its privileges equally to men and women,\u201d without \u201cdistinction of caste color, or sex made in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She came to realize that she needed Christ Himself, not merely His religion: \u201cI 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.\u201d\u00a0 Although baptized eight years earlier, now wanted to fully surrender.<\/p>\n
Surrender and Divine Breakthrough<\/strong><\/h3>\nFinally, she surrendered herself unconditionally to Jesus Christ: \u201cOnly 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarized her experience of discovering new life in Christ: \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
Her new life in Christ was especially marked by the abundant joy that she never knew before: \u201cThe 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\u2026. All the riches, all the gain, all the joys of the world do not begin to compare with the joy of salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. This joy proved to be far too immense to keep hidden under a bushel: \u201cMy life is full of joy\u2026. I can scarcely contain the joy and keep it to myself.\u201d The joy of the Lord became her strength and empowered her to work indefatigably for her Master.<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai also grew an irresistible burden for evangelism. She needed to share the good news about Jesus Christ with others: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Contribution to India and Social Reforms<\/strong><\/h3>\nAfter Medhvi’s death (1882), Ramabai moved to Pune where she founded Arya Mahila Samaj (Arya Women’s Society). Influenced by the ideals of Jesus Christ, the Brahmo Samaj, and Hindu reformers, the purpose of the society was to promote the cause of women’s education and deliverance from the oppression of child marriage.<\/p>\n
When in 1882 the Hunter Commission was appointed by the colonial Government of India to look into education, Ramabai gave evidence before it. In an address before the Hunter Commission, she declared, “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.” She suggested that teachers be trained and women school inspectors be appointed.<\/p>\n
Further, she said that as the situation in India was that women’s conditions were such that women could only medically treat them, Indian women should be admitted to medical colleges. Ramabai’s evidence created a great hit and reached Queen Victoria. It bore fruit later in starting of the Women’s Medical Movement by Lord Dufferin. In Maharashtra, Ramabai made contact with Christian organizations also involved in women’s education and medical missionary work, in particular a community of Anglican nuns, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV)<\/p>\n
With earnings from the sale of her first book, Stri Dharma Niti (“Morals for Women,” 1882), and contacts with the CSMV, Ramabai went to Britain in 1883 to start medical training; she was rejected from medical programs because of progressive deafness.<\/p>\n
During her stay, she converted to Christianity. Among the reasons Ramabai gave for her conversion was her growing disillusionment with orthodox Hinduism and particularly what she saw as its ill regard for women. In an autobiographical account of her conversion written years later, Ramabai wrote that 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.”<\/p>\n
Ramabai had a controversial relationship with her Anglican “mentors” in England, particularly Sister Geraldine. However, in 1886, she traveled from Britain to the United States at the invitation of Dr. Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of her relative and the first female Indian doctor, Anandibai Joshi, staying for two years.\u00a0 During this time she also translated textbooks and gave lectures throughout the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n
She also published one of her most important books, The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Her first book written in English, Ramabai dedicated it to her cousin, Dr. Joshi. The High-Caste Hindu Woman showed the darkest aspects of the life of Hindu women, including child brides and child widows, and sought to expose the oppression of women in Hindu-dominated British India. Through speaking engagements and the development of a wide network of supporters, Ramabai raise the equivalent of 60,000 rupees to launch a school in India for the child widows whose difficult lives her book exposed.<\/p>\n
While giving presentations in the U.S. to seek support for her work in India, Ramabai met American Suffragette and Women’s rights activist, Frances Willard in July 1887. Willard invited Ramabai to speak at the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union convention in November 1887 where she gained the support of this large women’s organization. She returned to India in June 1888 as a National Lecturer for the WCTU. Mary Greenleaf Clement Leavitt, the first World Missionary of the WCTU, was already there when Ramabai returned, but they did not meet. Ramabai worked however with the WCTU of India once it was officially organized in 1893.<\/p>\n
in 1889, she returned to India and founded a school for child widows in Pune called Sharada Sadan, which had the support of many Hindu reformers, including M.G. Ranade. Although Ramabai did not engage in overt evangelism, she did not hide her Christian faith either, and when several students converted to Christianity, she lost the backing of Pune’s Hindu reform circles. She moved the school 60 kilometers east to the much quieter village of Kedgaon and changed its name to the Mukti Mission.<\/p>\n
In 1896, during a severe famine, Ramabai toured the villages of Maharashtra with a caravan of bullock carts and rescued thousands of outcast children, child widows, orphans, and other destitute women and brought them to the shelter of the Mukti Mission. By 1900 there were 1,500 residents and over a hundred cattle in the Mukti mission. A learned woman knowing seven languages, she also translated the Bible into her mother tongue\u2014Marathi\u2014from the original Hebrew and Greek. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission is still active today, providing housing, education, vocational training, etc. for many needy groups including widows, orphans, and the blind<\/p>\n
Mukti Mission Home For The Widows<\/strong><\/h3>\nBy July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence in the Mukti Mission<\/a>, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cScripture Reading Class.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit<\/strong><\/p>\nPandita 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.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Pandita Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: \u201cThere 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.\u201d By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWhile 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miss Abrams reports, \u201cFrom 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWe are now seeing the results of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: \u201cSeven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are \u201cthe saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,\u201d but she \u201ccalled all these afflicted ones by the names of \u2018friends,\u2019 lest any despise them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of corrupt 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: \u201cLove, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: \u201cIt 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.\u201d He tells of Ramabai\u2019s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that \u201cthey had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.\u201d Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that
\nThe work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai\u2019s 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: \u201cThe Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God\u2026. God\u2019s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support.<\/p>\n
The prayers of God\u2019s people are more precious than silver or gold.\u201d Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day\u2019s supply on hand: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Last Triumphant Days<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 1920 Ramabai\u2019s 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 her daughter, Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty.<\/p>\n
Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter\u2019s 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\u2026 and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.<\/p>\n
Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai\u2019s deathbed: \u201cAt five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips\u2014Bai! 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\u2019s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep\u2014and such it was\u2026 Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone\u2019s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Though she was one of India’s greatest woman reformers, unfortunately, no Indians want to recognize Pandita Ramabai<\/a> because she became a Christian<\/a> even though she had Brahmin Marathi roots.\u00a0 In fact, over the ages, a lot of conspiratory lies have been made about this marvelous brave woman.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t
Finally, she surrendered herself unconditionally to Jesus Christ: \u201cOnly 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarized her experience of discovering new life in Christ: \u201cI 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.<\/p>\n
Her new life in Christ was especially marked by the abundant joy that she never knew before: \u201cThe 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\u2026. All the riches, all the gain, all the joys of the world do not begin to compare with the joy of salvation.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. This joy proved to be far too immense to keep hidden under a bushel: \u201cMy life is full of joy\u2026. I can scarcely contain the joy and keep it to myself.\u201d The joy of the Lord became her strength and empowered her to work indefatigably for her Master.<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai also grew an irresistible burden for evangelism. She needed to share the good news about Jesus Christ with others: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Contribution to India and Social Reforms<\/strong><\/h3>\nAfter Medhvi’s death (1882), Ramabai moved to Pune where she founded Arya Mahila Samaj (Arya Women’s Society). Influenced by the ideals of Jesus Christ, the Brahmo Samaj, and Hindu reformers, the purpose of the society was to promote the cause of women’s education and deliverance from the oppression of child marriage.<\/p>\n
When in 1882 the Hunter Commission was appointed by the colonial Government of India to look into education, Ramabai gave evidence before it. In an address before the Hunter Commission, she declared, “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.” She suggested that teachers be trained and women school inspectors be appointed.<\/p>\n
Further, she said that as the situation in India was that women’s conditions were such that women could only medically treat them, Indian women should be admitted to medical colleges. Ramabai’s evidence created a great hit and reached Queen Victoria. It bore fruit later in starting of the Women’s Medical Movement by Lord Dufferin. In Maharashtra, Ramabai made contact with Christian organizations also involved in women’s education and medical missionary work, in particular a community of Anglican nuns, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin (CSMV)<\/p>\n
With earnings from the sale of her first book, Stri Dharma Niti (“Morals for Women,” 1882), and contacts with the CSMV, Ramabai went to Britain in 1883 to start medical training; she was rejected from medical programs because of progressive deafness.<\/p>\n
During her stay, she converted to Christianity. Among the reasons Ramabai gave for her conversion was her growing disillusionment with orthodox Hinduism and particularly what she saw as its ill regard for women. In an autobiographical account of her conversion written years later, Ramabai wrote that 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.”<\/p>\n
Ramabai had a controversial relationship with her Anglican “mentors” in England, particularly Sister Geraldine. However, in 1886, she traveled from Britain to the United States at the invitation of Dr. Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, to attend the graduation of her relative and the first female Indian doctor, Anandibai Joshi, staying for two years.\u00a0 During this time she also translated textbooks and gave lectures throughout the United States and Canada.<\/p>\n
She also published one of her most important books, The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Her first book written in English, Ramabai dedicated it to her cousin, Dr. Joshi. The High-Caste Hindu Woman showed the darkest aspects of the life of Hindu women, including child brides and child widows, and sought to expose the oppression of women in Hindu-dominated British India. Through speaking engagements and the development of a wide network of supporters, Ramabai raise the equivalent of 60,000 rupees to launch a school in India for the child widows whose difficult lives her book exposed.<\/p>\n
While giving presentations in the U.S. to seek support for her work in India, Ramabai met American Suffragette and Women’s rights activist, Frances Willard in July 1887. Willard invited Ramabai to speak at the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union convention in November 1887 where she gained the support of this large women’s organization. She returned to India in June 1888 as a National Lecturer for the WCTU. Mary Greenleaf Clement Leavitt, the first World Missionary of the WCTU, was already there when Ramabai returned, but they did not meet. Ramabai worked however with the WCTU of India once it was officially organized in 1893.<\/p>\n
in 1889, she returned to India and founded a school for child widows in Pune called Sharada Sadan, which had the support of many Hindu reformers, including M.G. Ranade. Although Ramabai did not engage in overt evangelism, she did not hide her Christian faith either, and when several students converted to Christianity, she lost the backing of Pune’s Hindu reform circles. She moved the school 60 kilometers east to the much quieter village of Kedgaon and changed its name to the Mukti Mission.<\/p>\n
In 1896, during a severe famine, Ramabai toured the villages of Maharashtra with a caravan of bullock carts and rescued thousands of outcast children, child widows, orphans, and other destitute women and brought them to the shelter of the Mukti Mission. By 1900 there were 1,500 residents and over a hundred cattle in the Mukti mission. A learned woman knowing seven languages, she also translated the Bible into her mother tongue\u2014Marathi\u2014from the original Hebrew and Greek. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission is still active today, providing housing, education, vocational training, etc. for many needy groups including widows, orphans, and the blind<\/p>\n
Mukti Mission Home For The Widows<\/strong><\/h3>\nBy July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence in the Mukti Mission<\/a>, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cScripture Reading Class.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit<\/strong><\/p>\nPandita 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.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Pandita Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: \u201cThere 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.\u201d By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWhile 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Miss Abrams reports, \u201cFrom 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pandita Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWe are now seeing the results of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: \u201cSeven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are \u201cthe saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,\u201d but she \u201ccalled all these afflicted ones by the names of \u2018friends,\u2019 lest any despise them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of corrupt 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: \u201cLove, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: \u201cIt 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.\u201d He tells of Ramabai\u2019s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that \u201cthey had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.\u201d Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that
\nThe work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai\u2019s 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: \u201cThe Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God\u2026. God\u2019s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support.<\/p>\n
The prayers of God\u2019s people are more precious than silver or gold.\u201d Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day\u2019s supply on hand: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her Last Triumphant Days<\/strong><\/h3>\nIn 1920 Ramabai\u2019s 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 her daughter, Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty.<\/p>\n
Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter\u2019s 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\u2026 and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.<\/p>\n
Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai\u2019s deathbed: \u201cAt five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips\u2014Bai! 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\u2019s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep\u2014and such it was\u2026 Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone\u2019s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Though she was one of India’s greatest woman reformers, unfortunately, no Indians want to recognize Pandita Ramabai<\/a> because she became a Christian<\/a> even though she had Brahmin Marathi roots.\u00a0 In fact, over the ages, a lot of conspiratory lies have been made about this marvelous brave woman.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t \n\t\t\t <\/div><\/div>\n\t\t
By July 1892 the Sarada Sadan had forty widows in residence in the Mukti Mission<\/a>, including girls from ages seven to the forty-year-old cook. But after Ramabai\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cScripture Reading Class.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1893 the gathering storm was unleashed. Two teachers, who did not look at Ramabai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The Outpouring Of The Holy Spirit<\/strong><\/p>\n Pandita 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.<\/p>\n At the beginning of 1905, the Lord led Pandita Ramabai to start a special prayer circle at Mukti to pray for revival: \u201cThere 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.\u201d By the end of six months, 550 women were meeting twice a day to pray for this revival.<\/p>\n 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: \u201cWhile 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Miss Abrams reports, \u201cFrom 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Pandita Ramabai summarizes the revival that came after the six months of concentrated prayer: \u201cIn 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201cWe are now seeing the results of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Ramabai wrote of the fruit the revival was producing: \u201cSeven hundred girls and women of the Mukti people have given themselves to prayer and the study of God\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Bible were listed hundreds of girls for whom she prayed, some of whom are \u201cthe saddest derelicts, and the halt and the maimed and the blind,\u201d but she \u201ccalled all these afflicted ones by the names of \u2018friends,\u2019 lest any despise them.\u201d<\/p>\n While the focus of the revival was the abandonment of corrupt 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: \u201cLove, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Rev. Butcher of Church Missionary Society speaks of his witnessing the phenomenon of simultaneous prayer during the Mukti revival: \u201cIt 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.\u201d He tells of Ramabai\u2019s daughter Manoramabai participating in it. She told him that \u201cthey had never been able to give God praise or worship in such a satisfying way till they did so in tongues.\u201d Although Rev. Butcher was reticent to acknowledge the validity of the more unusual manifestations of the Spirit, he concluded, \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Rev. Franklin, an American missionary, also described the renewed lives that The prayers of God\u2019s people are more precious than silver or gold.\u201d Manoramabai tells how Mukti Mission ran on a short supply line, never having more than a day\u2019s supply on hand: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1920 Ramabai\u2019s 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 her daughter, Manoramabai home to glory at the age of forty.<\/p>\n Ramabai was too ill to attend her daughter\u2019s 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\u2026 and her daughter. She died on April 5, 1922, a few weeks before her 64th birthday.<\/p>\n Jessie Ferguson, a missionary on staff, describes the scene at Ramabai\u2019s deathbed: \u201cAt five a.m. we were aroused by a cry and knew without any telling what had happened. Only one word was on our lips\u2014Bai! 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\u2019s door. We went into her room and there she lay upon her bed as though in a sound sleep\u2014and such it was\u2026 Her face showed with glory and beauty and only one word seemed to come to everyone\u2019s lips: Beautiful. No earthly beauty but the beauty and peace and joy of a soul whose home is God\u2019s.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Though she was one of India’s greatest woman reformers, unfortunately, no Indians want to recognize Pandita Ramabai<\/a> because she became a Christian<\/a> even though she had Brahmin Marathi roots.\u00a0 In fact, over the ages, a lot of conspiratory lies have been made about this marvelous brave woman.<\/p>\n
\nThe work of the Mukti Mission continued for the rest of Ramabai\u2019s 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: \u201cThe Mukti Mission depends wholly upon God\u2026. God\u2019s children who desire to pray for it need not consider themselves under any obligation to pay money for its support.<\/p>\nHer Last Triumphant Days<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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