Pandita Ramabai

Topic: Print Culture and the Modern World · NCERT: Class 10, Ch 5 "Print Culture and the Modern World"

Meaning

Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) was a Sanskrit scholar and social reformer from present-day Maharashtra. In the 1880s she wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. She also set up homes and schools where widows could live and study.

She matters because NCERT names her, with Tarabai Shinde, as a woman who used print to attack her own society. Her work shows how print carried a woman's protest far beyond her own town.

Explanation

Background: why women's writing became possible

• Print made books cheap. Reading moved into middle-class homes, and many more women began to read.
• Girls learnt to read in two ways:
• liberal fathers and husbands taught them at home;

• new schools for girls opened after the mid-nineteenth century.

• Conservatives feared the reading woman. Many Hindus believed a girl who learnt to read would become a widow. Literacy was treated as bad luck for her husband.

• Widows had the hardest life. Among upper castes, a widow often had her head shaved and ate only plain food. She could not remarry. This was the main target of Ramabai's anger.

Who she was

• She was a Sanskrit scholar, which was very rare for a woman of her time. According to the standard account, scholars in Calcutta gave her the titles "Pandita" (learned woman) and "Saraswati" because of her learning.
• She was widowed young herself, so she knew a widow's life first-hand.
• She later became a Christian. This made orthodox Hindus suspicious of her work.

What she wrote and built

• The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887): her best-known book. She wrote it in English and published it abroad. It describes:
• child marriage;
• the cruel treatment of widows;

• how women were kept ignorant and shut inside the home.

• She used the money and support the book raised to found Sharada Sadan (a home and school for widows). It was set up in Bombay in 1889 and soon moved to Poona.

• She later set up the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon, near Poona. It gave shelter to widows, deserted women and famine victims.
• Her method: she wrote in print first, then built institutions that gave widows shelter, education and a way to earn a living.

Results

• Her writing made a widow's private suffering into a public issue that people read about in India and abroad.
• She showed that a woman could be a writer, a scholar and an organiser all at once.
• Orthodox critics accused her of using Sharada Sadan to make Christian converts. The debate shows how sharply her work divided opinion.

Time, place and evidence

• Period: the 1880s, the decade NCERT links her with. She lived from 1858 to 1922.
• Region: present-day Maharashtra, with Bombay and Poona as her main centres.
• Key people linked with her: Tarabai Shinde, who wrote in the same decade and region on the same theme of upper-caste women's suffering.
• How we know about her:
• her own printed works, mainly The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887);
• NCERT Class 10, Ch 5 Print Culture and the Modern World, which names her as a woman writing in print against women's oppression;
• records of the institutions she founded, such as Sharada Sadan.

Don't confuse with

• Tarabai Shinde: she wrote in the same decade (1880s) and the same region (Maharashtra), and NCERT puts the two together. Tarabai Shinde wrote Stri Purush Tulana (1882), a comparison of men and women. Pandita Ramabai wrote The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887) and founded Sharada Sadan.
• Rashsundari Debi: she was a housewife from East Bengal, not a reformer. She learnt to read secretly in her kitchen and wrote Amar Jiban (1876), the first full-length autobiography in Bengali.
• Kailashbashini Debi: she wrote from the 1860s, which is earlier than Ramabai, about women being shut inside the house and kept ignorant. She is a Bengal name, not a Maharashtra name.
• Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein: she worked in Bengal and focused mainly on Muslim girls' education. She founded the Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School in 1911 [2], and in 1926 she argued that Islam itself grants women an equal right to education. Ramabai's focus was upper-caste Hindu widows.

Prelims Hooks

• Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde: both wrote in the 1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, about the plight of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.
• The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887): author Pandita Ramabai.
• Sharada Sadan: a home and school for widows, founded by Pandita Ramabai. Do not confuse it with Begum Rokeya's girls' school.
• Chronological order of women writers in NCERT: Kailashbashini Debi (from the 1860s), then Rashsundari Debi (Amar Jiban, 1876), then Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai (1880s), then Begum Rokeya (1926 statement).
• Trap: Amar Jiban is by Rashsundari Debi, not Pandita Ramabai. Istri Dharm Vichar is by Ram Chaddha of Punjab, and it taught wives to be obedient. That is the opposite of Ramabai's message.

Mains Points

• Print turned a widow's private pain into public argument.
• A widow's suffering inside the household reached no one.

• Once Ramabai printed it, it became evidence that reformers could quote, in India and abroad.

• Print served both sides of the women's question.

• The same cheap press carried Ramabai's and Tarabai Shinde's anger.
• It also carried obedience manuals like Ram Chaddha's Istri Dharm Vichar and the Khalsa Tract Society's booklets on the "good woman".

• The technology did not decide the message. The people who used it did.

• Writing plus institutions:

• Ramabai did not stop at print. She built Sharada Sadan to give widows shelter, education and a living.
• This is similar to Begum Rokeya founding a school in 1911 [2].
• Reform lasted longest when the printed word was backed by real institutions.
• Her conversion to Christianity also shows the limits she faced: her critics used it to question her motives.

Related concepts

• Rashsundari Debi
• Tarabai Shinde
• Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

Read more

• Women and print