Baptising Pandita Ramabai: Faith and religiosity in the nineteenth-century social reform movements of colonial India

Abstract

This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai’s reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity—a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity—provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fall-out with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy’s oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women’s movement.

Vivekananda: Indian Swami and Global Guru

“…He also sidestepped the critique of Pandita Ramabai, the female Sanskrit scholar who had converted to Christianity. She had been fabulously successful in garnering American support for a school for young widows and was famous for maintaining that Hinduism was cruel to women, especially to uppercaste widows (Bhagabati et al 2021;Frykenberg 2016;Kosambi 2000;Ramabai 1977). Vivekananda disliked white women and missionaries claiming to protect Hindu women from Indian patriarchy, and therefore their alliance with Ramabai confounded him.…”

Conversion and Cow Protection in India: Analysis and Critique of Hindutva Politics

“…However, in the history of Catholic Christian Missions, different emphases replaced or modified this original conception (Bevans and Schroeder 2004) which was retained or re-emphasized in contemporary times: "Conversion is … not the joining of a community in order to procure "eternal salvation"; it is, rather, a change in allegiance in which Christ is accepted as Lord and center of one's life" (Bosch 1997: 488). 5 Wakankar's (2018) philosophical interpretation of conversion in the Marathi community of the nineteenth century expands this Christian paradigm; see also : Bhagabati (2021). (Oddie 2003).…”