Biography
Ramabai Dongre was born on April 23, 1858, in the Western Ghats region of India, in a Brahmin family. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, was a Sanskrit scholar who took the unusual step of teaching his wife and daughter to read Sanskrit, which was forbidden for women. He was a man of learning and piety. The family wandered through India as pilgrims, reciting the sacred texts and living on the gifts of the faithful. They suffered from poverty. In 1876, the great famine struck southern India. Her father, her mother and her sister died of hunger. Ramabai and her brother, Srinivas, survived. She was eighteen.
The two traveled on foot across India, reciting the Puranas, the sacred texts, in return for food. They reached Calcutta in 1878. There her fame as a Sanskrit scholar spread, and the pundits of the University of Calcutta examined her. They were so impressed that they awarded her the titles of Pandita, which means learned, and Sarasvati, after the goddess of learning. She was the first woman to receive these honors. She became a figure of national note. She also grew restless with Hindu teaching, which she saw as unjust to women. She began to see the oppression of widows and girls. She was moved by the plight of child widows, who were treated as outcasts.
Her brother died in 1880. In the same year, she married Bipin Behari Medhvi, a Bengali lawyer of lower caste, a union that broke the rules of caste. They had a daughter, Manorama. Her husband died of cholera in 1882, less than two years after the wedding. She was a widow, at the age of twenty-four. She moved to Pune, in western India, where she started a society for the education of women, called the Arya Mahila Samaj. In 1883, she sailed to England to study medicine, but she found that her hearing loss made it impossible. She stayed at a home run by the Anglican Sisters of Wantage, where she was taught about the Christian faith. She was baptized in 1883.
She went on to the United States in 1886, where she lectured on the situation of Indian women. She wrote a book, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, published in 1887, which described the suffering of child brides and widows. It was a sensation. She raised funds for a school. She returned to India in 1889 and opened Sharada Sadan, a home for high-caste widows, in Mumbai, which later moved to Pune. She taught the girls and trained them for work. She was criticized by Hindus, who accused her of trying to convert them. She had promised not to force her faith, but she held daily Bible readings.
In 1896, a terrible famine struck central India. She went out into the countryside and rescued starving girls. She brought them to a new home at Kedgaon, near Pune, which she called Mukti, meaning salvation. It grew to a community of two thousand girls and women, who were taught to read and to learn a trade. She was a strong and practical woman, who managed a farm, a school, a hospital and a church. In 1905, a revival broke out at Mukti. Hundreds of the girls were seized by a conviction of sin and the power of the Spirit. They prayed in tongues and took the gospel to the villages. The revival spread to other parts of India and was a forerunner of the Pentecostal movement.
She spent many years on a translation of the Bible into Marathi, her mother tongue. She learned Hebrew and Greek, and she worked from the original texts. She finished the work in 1922, a few months before her death. She was a woman of indomitable will, and she took on a number of causes. She also had her trials. She was often in conflict with the missionaries, who thought that she was too independent. She suffered from poor health. Her daughter, Manorama, took over the work.
She died on April 5, 1922, at Mukti, at the age of sixty-three. Her life shows the effect of a woman of great gifts who gave them to the rescue of the helpless. The home that she founded is still in operation.