Saint of the Week: Pandita Mary Ramabai Sarasvati
4/9/2025
Pandita Mary Ramabai Sarasvati
Missionary and Social Reformer
1858 – 1922
Pandita Mary Ramabai was an eminent Indian Christian social reformer and activist. She was a poet, a scholar, and championed improving the plight of Indian women. As a social reformer, she fought for the emancipation of Indian women. Widely traveled across the Indian Subcontinent, she also toured the U.K. (1883) and the U.S. (1886-88). A prolific writer, her widely popular work, The High Caste Hindu Woman, revealed the darkest of aspects of Hindu women’s lives, including child brides and abuses they endured from the government. She voiced strong sentiments on what should be accomplished so that women might enjoy greater freedom, including protection for widowed women, child brides, and abolishing the practice of suttee. Born to an intellectual Brahmin family, Pandita’s father believed women should be educated. Bucking Hindu social tradition, he taught Pandita to read and write Sanskrit. When her parents and a sister died of starvation during the famine of 1874-76, she and her brother became itinerant, ending up in Calcutta. After her brother died in 1880, she again bucked Hindu norms, choosing to marry Babu Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer who was not a Brahmin and from a lower caste. Six months after her daughter’s birth, Babu died. Again left with but one family member, Pandita managed to receive a scholarship to study in England. There, became a Christian but never lost sight of her reform goals for India’s system. Returning to India, she helped establish Christian Churches with Sanskrit scripture instead of Latin text. She also tried to combine her new Christian ideals with her old Indian Culture and used this mix to promote change in India. As a Brahman caste member she was uniquely able to bring both men and women to Christianity due to the caste’s position as social leaders. She founded the Arya Mahila Sabha in 1881, the very first Indian feminist organization. She also established the Mukti Mission in 1889, a refuge for young widows who were abused by their families. The Pandita Ramabai Mukti Mission is still active today, providing housing, education, vocational training, and medical services, for needy groups including widows, orphans, and the blind.
