Sunday, August 3, 2003		Books

Ahead of her times
A.J. Philip

Pandita Ramabai’s America: Conditions of Life in the United States.
edited by Robert Eric Frykenberg. William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, USA. Pages 322. $ 49.

ANYBODY who has read Pandita Ramabai Saraswati would be amazed by her scholarship, revolutionary ideas and visionary approach. This nineteenth century iconoclast was a pioneer in many fields and should have ranked among the greatest daughters of this country. But how many have even heard about her? Before I come to that in a moment, an introduction of her would be in order. Come to think of it, she needs an introduction in this country!

Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) was born to an itinerant Brahmin scholar who made a living reciting the sacred texts in public places. In due course, she picked up the profession with such `E9lan that her listeners were wonderstruck by her prodigious memory. She could recite off-hand the whole of Valmiki’s Ramayana, not to mention the Bhagvadgita and give her questioners chapter and verse. She was another Sarasavahini, the scholastic wife of Mandan Mishra who, as the story goes, moderated the famous debate on advaita between Adi Shankara and her husband at Mahishi in Bihar’s Saharsa district.

Ramabai’s biographer, Padmini Sengupta, quotes a Calcutta scholar, who threw up his hands after subjecting young Ramabai to a long and searching examination, "We do not feel that you belong to this world since the great Pandits have been dazzled and amazed by your superhuman ability. The very Goddess of Learning ‘Saraswati’ has come down amidst us in human form."

But she cared two hoots for such balderdash as she was more bothered about the injustice meted out to women while claiming to accord them the status of goddesses. She studied the Vedas at a time when such studies by women were proscribed. It opened her eyes to the miserable plight of the widows, the so-called untouchables and the inadequacies of the socio-religious order to redeem them and the sheer hypocrisy practised, be it in the name of cow protection or charity.

So long as she used her mellifluous voice to mesmerise people with stories from the Puranas, she was the darling of the elite of the times and the twice-born caste to which she belonged. But the moment she began speaking out against injustices, having in the meantime found her own personal saviour, she was dropped like a hot potato. And when she started mingling with the lower castes taking care of widows and orphans from among them, she lost her "purity" and thereby her place in the pantheon of the Panditas.

Imagine, when Ramabai articulated views to the effect that God had created man and woman as equals and a woman’s moksha did not lie in serving her husband as a vassal, Gandhi’s Kasturba was being ordered about to wash the toilets. Her ideas have a striking similarity to the Gandhian views, though they were articulated much before Gandhi descended on the Indian political scene. What a pity, her name does not even figure in today’s discourse on such subjects as empowerment of women and human rights.

It is difficult to believe that Ramabai, who did not have the benefit of formal education, was a participant in the polemics of that era when Lokmanya Tilak on one side and Gopala Krishna Gokhale on the other debated the finer points of nationalism, Hinduism and freedom struggle. Of course, her unabashed feminist advocacy and the fact that she was at that time unarguably the most serious woman writer of Marathi placed her in a vantage position to lend the debate a fresh perspective.

A life-long advocate of liberty, which reached the West centuries before democracy and had its origin in the rise of the Christian Church, Ramabai appropriately named her mission at Kedgaon near Pune Mukti and spent the evening of her life tending to the needs of its inmates.

The volume under review is the first English translation of her book published in 1889 on the United States of America where she spent over two years giving lectures on a variety of subjects and raising funds for her project back home. She was hardly 28 when she landed in the US in March 1886 but had lived the equivalent of several average lifetimes having already become a widow with a daughter to look after.

She was simply flabbergasted by the kind of progress the US had achieved and the way the enterprising men and women of the country were unitedly sowing the seeds of progress in all walks of life. The nation had come a long way since the Puritan settlers from England transformed the hardy territory into a land where "honey and milk flowed".

Nothing escapes her critical observation as she looks at the historical evolution of the US and understands the phenomenon called the American dream. She is simply amazed to know that "before President (1882-85) Ulysses S. Grant became the Commander of the Army of the United States, he used to work as a tanner."

Those who have read Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America, will have difficulty judging which one ranks first in the order of merit. Ramabai’s work may not have the intellectual flavour or sophistication of Tocqueville’s magnum opus but it is no less exhaustive and enchanting. What makes her critique of American life all the more appealing is the subtle critique of the culture, which she herself represented and which prevented her country from attaining its full potential of growth. It is not that she turned a blind eye to the shortcomings in Western life. She was unsparing in her criticism, for instance, of the ways of the established Church which she found moving away from Christ’s teachings.

But in her own case, she moved closer and closer to Christ and it was the faith in Him that sustained her in the face of tragedies like early widowhood and the death of her only daughter, whom she had groomed as her worthy successor. Neither during her lifetime nor after that could she regain her rightful place in the history of the nation. A small price for forsaking the ancient Shastras for the Veda of Christ.