Interview: When Pandita Ramabai refused to accept the ‘proper’ Christian beliefs of her mentors – Scroll.in

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Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) was a woman on the move. An Indian feminist, activist, and reformer, she journeyed to the United States in the 1880s – having previously traveled to Great Britain where she converted to Christianity.
In the US, she gave lectures to packed audiences across the country and raised funds to support and educate Hindu child widows. On her return to India, she wrote a book in Marathi explaining America and its customs, institutions, and people to her fellow Indians.
Radha Vatsal appeared as a guest on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s programme Ideas to discuss Ramabai’s life and legacy in an episode titled, “How this 19th-century Indian feminist flipped the travelogue on its head”. Here, Vatsal speaks to producer Pauline Holdsworth, to go deeper into Ramabai’s story and the making of the episode.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
What interested you about Pandita Ramabai when you first heard about her?
I’ve always been really interested in travel narratives and what it is that people observe or are drawn to when they travel. I was really struck by, first, the clarity and sharpness of Ramabai’s voice, and she’s also very funny and very strong minded. She is moving through all of these spaces and learning from them and shaping them, as well as maintaining her own autonomy.
I was also really interested in her travels within India, and the fact that she had a childhood that was on the move. From a very young age, she was speaking in public, and encountering people of all different backgrounds and it made me think about how somebody shaped by that kind of life would develop her own moral center.
The other thing that I was struck by was her writing about American democracy, especially in this 21st-century moment where there’s a lot of discussion about a crisis of democracy, not just in the United States, but worldwide. Reading her initial hope and faith in democracy as a political system made me wish that we could read what she would write about the state of democracy worldwide today.
You took Ramabai’s story and opened it up so that it was more than just a narrative of her life. Can you talk about your process and how you found the areas that would be the most helpful to expand on?
I’m always fascinated by looking at both microcosms and macrocosms. And that’s something I’m always looking for when I’m working on episodes for Ideas – which is a programme on CBC radio that’s been running since the 1960s. On the show, we try and look at how ideas play out across time and space, and Pandita Ramabai is, of course, somebody who is moving across time and space in a really interesting way.
One of the things I wanted to explore were the dynamics between her and the different white women that she was encountering. I came across an article by Dr Tarini Bhamburkar [research affiliate at the University of Bristol] in which she points out that there hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to women’s relationships with women across race during this time period.
Dr Bhamburkar says that Victorianists love to theorise women’s relationships across race through the label of female friendship, but there’s a lot more that’s going on under the surface. And that was something that came up in the letters between Pandita Ramabai and her two friends and mentors in England, Sister Geraldine and Dorothea Beale. They were not very happy with the way that Ramabai was not accepting their Christian beliefs – because she had converted at this point, and that’s something that, when she returned to India later in her life, was quite controversial.
There’s one moment where they’re trying to get her to accept teachings that they consider to be proper Christianity. And Ramabai writes back: “I am not prepared to accept an essential doctrine which I shall not find in the Bible. I hope you will not be vexed with my freedom of speech.”
At another point, one of them says that she needs to come to them in a humble, childlike, teachable spirit. And Ramabai ends up replying: “Far be it from me to listen to such teaching. It is not humility, but a gross cowardice.”
When you read her writing, it’s hard not to be compelled by her as a figure, and by her very independent mind.
So when you put the episode together, you have read material about her and found out these interesting things. Do you try to get your guest speakers to hit on those points, or do you ask the questions and see where they lead?
I feel like I can never exactly hear what the final form will be when I’m starting an episode or even when I’m doing the interviews… And I often find that when the interviews lead me in directions that I couldn’t have anticipated, it makes for a richer episode.
When you and I spoke first, I had a sense of the chronological narrative arc of Ramabai’s life and her travels, and I thought that that would probably be a through line for the episode, and then I had in my mind, a sense of certain aspects that would open up. But speaking with Dr Sandeep Banerjee [associate professor of English at McGill University] opened up other questions around the British colonial travelogue and how it narrates space, as well as the formation of solidarity across geography between, say, African Americans and Indians.
Pandita Ramabai is very engaged with the work of people like Harriet Tubman [former slave who became a prominent abolitionist], and I think she really sees that as a model or inspiration for India.
So when you first reached out to me about Pandita Ramabai, I was really excited because I think there’s so much in this larger archive that is so fascinating.
For instance, there are also Indian travelers in this time period going to China, going to the Middle East – they’re not just looking towards the West. They’re looking to other parts of Asia, and these travelogues give us really interesting insights into the formation of transnational connections.
For me it always a reminder that transnational connections are not new. Particularly now, when there’s so much rhetoric about immigration, it makes us feel that all these connections and immigration and travel, it’s all relatively recent. But that’s not correct, it’s been going on for a long time.
Yes. So all of these worlds keep opening up from the interviews, and I’m trying to figure out how can I have a balance between the forward momentum of the story of Pandita Ramabai’s life with also, doors opening up from it.
You can listen to the episode on Pandita Ramabai, How This 19th-century Indian Feminist Flipped the Travelogue on its Head, here.
Pauline Holdsworth is a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where she produces radio documentaries for Ideas, CBC’s national program for intellectual history and contemporary thought.
Radha Vatsal is the author of No. 10 Doyers Street and other novels. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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