INDIA'S
CHRISTIAN PILGRIM
It is a joy to call attention to outstanding nationals who
have been used of God to impact their own people by life and testimony with the
message of salvation through faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. One such individual is Ramabai.
Ramabai, born April
23, 1858, was the sixth and youngest child born to a high‑caste
orthodox Hindu scholar and reformist.
Her father, highly respected for his knowledge of the sacred Hindu
writings (Puranas), incurred the disfavor and wrath of his peers by teaching
his wife and daughter to read and write the Sanskrit language and encouraging
them to study the sacred Hindu literature.
Women were thought to be incapable of understanding such lofty
writings. The only god of a woman was to
be her husband.
Ramabai's father was a searcher
after truth. She recalls that "my
pilgrim life began when I was a little baby.
Ever since I remember anything, my father and mother were always
traveling from one sacred place to another, staying in each for some months,
bathing in and drinking from the contaminated sacred rivers or tanks, visiting
temples, worshipping household gods and the images of gods in the temples."
Through this extensive travel, she
learned most of the languages of India and was thoroughly
instructed by her father in the sacred Sanskrit writings. By the time she was twelve, Ramabai had
memorized eighteen thousand verses from the Puranas. From the snowy Himalayas to the
heat of south India, from Bombay to Calcutta, it was
one continual pilgrimage. Eventually,
both father and mother died of starvation, having spent all in their vain
search for truth in Hinduism. Ramabai was 16.
She and her older brother continued
this endless, hopeless pilgrimage the length and breadth of India. At the age of 20, she met some Christians and
was given a Bible in Sanskrit. As an
unregenerate soul, she could not understand it.
Her brilliance led to opportunities
to meet with scholars who, impressed with her profound understanding of
Sanskrit and almost all of the languages of India,
encouraged her to lecture on the Hindu doctrines. She did so with such
eloquence that she was given the title of "Pandita," which means scholar or
learned-the only woman so named in India. She was very eloquent and could compose
beautiful poetry extemporaneously in Sanskrit and other languages.
Ramabai's brother had been her
constant companion since the death of their parents. When he died in 1980, she was
devastated. A few months later she met
and married a young lawyer of a lower caste in Calcutta. They lived in Assam, where he
practiced law. It was there that she
came under the influence of a Baptist missionary who visited in their home on a
number of occasions. She also found
among her husband's papers a Gospel of Luke, which she read with real
interest. The Spirit of God was
beginning to work in her heart. Her
husband died of cholera after 19 months of marriage, leaving her with a newborn
daughter who was her pride and joy.
She was particularly burdened for
the plight of the child widows of India and for
the temple prostitutes, championing any effort to free them from such bondage. She wanted to learn English and finally went
to England, where she
was welcomed by an order of Anglican sisters.
It was there that she intellectually embraced Christianity and was
baptized along with her young daughter.
She had never really come to know Christ.
After several years in England, where she
taught in a women's college for a short period of time, she went on to the United
States and Canada. As a result of contacts made there, a society
was organized to help her found a place to care for the destitute child
widows. She returned to Bombay and
started the home, beginning with two young girls. This home was too visible to the high-caste
Hindu community; and when they saw that she taught the Bible, one of these
children was taken from her. She moved
to Poona, a less
visible place where the work grew, and later to a 100-acre farm nearby.
She records "My mind at that time
had been too dulled to grasp the teachings of the Holy Scripture. The open Bible had been before me, but I had
given too much of my time to the study of other books about the Bible and had
not studied the Bible itself as I should have done. I gave up the study of books about the Bible
after my return from America and took
to reading the Bible regularly. How
good-how indescribably good-what good news for me, a woman born in India among
Brahmans who hold out no hope for me and the likes of me. The Bible declares that Christ did not
reserve this great salvation for a particular caste or sex-no caste, no sex, no
work, no man was to be depended upon to get salvation-this everlasting
life. But God gave it freely to anyone
and everyone who believed on His Son Whom He had sent to be a propitiation of
our sins. The Holy Spirit made it clear
to me from the Word of God that the salvation which God gives through Christ is
present and not something future. I
believed it. I received it and was
filled with joy."
Her own life was transformed from
this period of time; and, in essence, she became an Indian Amy Carmichael. Her ministry grew until at one time she had
over 2,000 in her home.
She had read the lives of George
Mueller and Hudson Taylor and determined to live a life of faith as they did. She developed schools, vocational training,
Bible institute training. She developed
evangelistic bands that went out distributing literature in evangelistic work. There was an active printing ministry in
which large quantities of Christian literature were printed at the
institution. Teachers were trained. Weaving was introduced along with
farming. Many of those young ladies who
grew up in the home became the wives of Christian Indian men.
She saw the need for a new
translation of the Bible in the Marathi dialect, the predominant language in western India. For several years she studied Greek and
Hebrew on her own, mastering these languages.
She then translated the entire Bible into the Mararthi dialect.
She hoped her daughter, who was
involved in all aspects of the mission, would succeed her; but her beloved
child died suddenly in 1921. A year
later Ramabai contracted what was called a septic bronchitis, and she, too,
died. But the work of the home, which
was called the Ramabai Mukti Mission, has carried on. The term "mukti" means "salvation." Her home literally was a place of salvation
in a physical sense but even more so in a spiritual sense for countless
hundreds of child brides, widows, temple prostitutes, and women in dire
need. The ministry continues today.
JAD
5/24/00
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