Pandita Ramabai’s Early Life and Non-conformist Background

In 1878, a young woman barely twenty years old walked into the senate hall of Calcutta University and held her own in a public examination of the Sanskrit scriptures. The learned men who tested her came away so impressed that they awarded her two titles never before given to a woman: Pandita, the learned one, and Sarasvati, the goddess of wisdom. Her name was Ramabai Dongre. To understand how a woman came to master a language that society had locked away from her sex, we have to go back to the forests where she was born, and to the rebellious father who refused to follow the rules.

A father who broke the rules 🔗

Pandita Ramabai was born on 23 April 1858 into a Marathi-speaking Chitpavan Brahmin family. Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, was a Sanskrit scholar by training. But he was not an ordinary Brahmin. He held a conviction that was, for his time, close to heresy: that women had every right to learn and to read the sacred texts.

This belief was not abstract. In the 19th century, Sanskrit was treated as the exclusive property of upper-caste men. It was the language of philosophy, law, and religion, and the orthodox view held that women were simply unfit for such learning. Teaching Sanskrit to a woman was not just unusual. It was considered a violation of religious and social order.

The first act of defiance 🔗

Anant Shastri’s rebellion began with his own household. When he first tried to teach Sanskrit to his wife, her family came down on him hard and forced him to stop. He did not give up the idea. Years later, as a widower of about forty-four, he married Lakshmibai, a girl of nine, and found in her a willing and able student. He taught her Sanskrit at home, openly defying the customs of the time.

This was the environment into which Ramabai was born. Her father educated both his wife and his daughters, and for this he was ostracised by his community. The price of his principles was steep, and the whole family paid it.

A childhood in the forest 🔗

Because of the pressure his unconventional ideas attracted, Anant Shastri eventually moved his family away from settled society. He set up an ashram in the forest at Gangamul, near Mangalore, and it was here that Ramabai entered the world. She later described herself as “the daughter of the jungle” because of how different her upbringing was from that of other girls.

Life as wandering reciters 🔗

The family soon ran out of money. To survive, they took up the life of pauranikas, public reciters of the Puranas, the Hindu mythological texts. They travelled from one pilgrimage site to another across India, performing recitations of sacred literature and living on the alms offered by those who came to listen. It was a hard, itinerant existence marked by long stretches of poverty and even starvation.

Yet this wandering life was also Ramabai’s classroom. Surrounded by scripture and recitation from her earliest years, she absorbed the texts deeply. By some accounts she could recite the Bhagavad Gita by the age of seven, and she went on to master Sanskrit literature, theology, and philosophy. Estimates of her abilities vary, but she became proficient in Sanskrit alongside other languages at a level that astonished those who met her.

Learning what women were forbidden to learn 🔗

The significance of this education cannot be overstated. Both her parents trained her in the Shastras, Puranas, and Sanskrit at home, and providing such learning to a girl was considered unusual and heretical by the community to which they belonged. Ramabai was not simply being educated. She was being equipped with the exact intellectual tools that the patriarchal order had reserved for itself. In time, she would turn those very tools against that order.

Tragedy and the great famine 🔗

The family’s precarious life finally caught up with them. The great famine that swept across India in 1876-78 devastated them. Within a short span, Ramabai lost her father, her mother, and her elder sister Krishnabai. She was orphaned at the age of sixteen.

One often-repeated account holds that her father, having exhausted all means of supporting his family, performed jala samadhi, deliberately drowning himself, and that his grief-stricken wife died soon after. What is firmly established is that the deaths came under severe economic strain and starvation, leaving only Ramabai and her brother Srinivas. The two of them, equipped with little more than their education and their training in recitation, decided to continue their father’s work and keep travelling across the country reciting Sanskrit scriptures.

Calcutta and a moment of recognition 🔗

Ramabai’s reputation as a woman fluent in Sanskrit travelled faster than she did. By the time she and her brother reached Calcutta, the city’s pandits had heard of her and invited her to speak. Calcutta was then the intellectual heart of what is often called the Indian Renaissance, a centre of reformist thought, and it was the ideal place for her talents to be noticed.

The titles that broke a barrier 🔗

Her address in the senate hall of Calcutta University was a triumph. The scholars who examined her could not deny what stood before them: a young woman who could not only recite the scriptures but debate their finer points with authority. In recognition of her command over the Sanskrit texts, Calcutta University conferred on her the titles “Pandita” and “Sarasvati” in 1878, making her the first woman in India to earn them as a Sanskrit scholar. She was about twenty years old. A glass ceiling that had stood for centuries had just been cracked.

From scholarship to reform 🔗

Calcutta gave Ramabai more than honours. It exposed her for the first time to the city’s reformist currents, particularly the Brahmo Samaj, a movement that campaigned against idolatry, the caste system, child marriage, and the practice of sati. The theistic reformer Keshab Chandra Sen gave her a copy of the Vedas and encouraged her to read them, an extraordinary gesture given that these were the most sacred and most jealously guarded of Hindu texts.

This encounter changed the direction of her energy. Until then her learning had been a remarkable personal achievement. In Calcutta it began to turn outward into a cause. Engaging with reformers broadened her vision from pure scholarship to active social reform, and she started to see her knowledge not as a trophy but as a weapon against the orthodoxy that kept women uneducated and unfree.

The making of an advocate for women 🔗

Ramabai began addressing audiences on the condition of women. This itself was radical, since respectable women of the period did not appear in public spaces. To reach those who would never come out to hear her, she would sometimes go inside the women’s quarters of homes to convince them to get educated. Her scholarship gave her arguments a force that men found difficult to dismiss, because she could meet them on their own scriptural ground.

Why her background mattered 🔗

It is worth pausing on the logic of her life. The patriarchal order had argued that women were intellectually unfit for higher learning. Ramabai’s very existence refuted that claim. Her mastery of religious Sanskrit scriptures laid the foundation for her critique of patriarchy and her advocacy for gender equality. She had been raised to challenge the prevailing notion that women were unfit for higher learning, and she now made that challenge her life’s work.

Personal loss continued to shape her path. Her brother Srinivas died in 1880, leaving her alone. She then married Bipin Behari Medhvi, a Bengali lawyer, in a civil ceremony. Because he was from a different caste and region, the marriage was considered inappropriate, another quiet act of defiance in the pattern her father had set. Widowed within two years, she moved to Pune and, on 1 June 1882, founded the Arya Mahila Samaj to promote women’s education and to fight the oppression of child marriage.

The thread that runs through it all 🔗

Looking back, the shape of Ramabai’s early life is remarkably consistent. A non-conformist father refuses to follow caste and gender rules and is cast out for it. He raises his daughter on forbidden knowledge in the forests and on the pilgrimage roads. Tragedy strips away her family but leaves her with the one inheritance that cannot be taken: her learning. That learning then carries her to Calcutta, wins her unprecedented recognition, and finally becomes the basis of a lifelong campaign for the women of her country.

What began as one man’s stubborn rebellion against orthodoxy ended up producing one of India’s earliest and most formidable advocates for women’s education and emancipation. The ostracism the family suffered was, in a sense, the soil in which her independence grew. When Ramabai later told the Hunter Commission of 1882 that the educated men of the country were overwhelmingly opposed to female education, she spoke with the authority of someone who had lived the proof of what an educated woman could become.

What do you think? Was Ramabai’s extraordinary scholarship a result of her father’s deliberate rebellion, or would her own intellect have found a way to express itself even within a conventional upbringing? And in a society that punished her family for educating its daughters, do you think hardship and exclusion strengthened her resolve, or simply made an already difficult path harder?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandita_Ramabai
2. https://www.boloji.com/articles/14562/freedom-to-be–pandita-ramabai
3. https://artsandculture.google.com/story/pandita-ramabai-zubaan/4wVx8_4U248xIQ?hl=en
4. https://www.thenewhistoria.org/schema/pandita-ramabai-saraswati/
5. https://traci.in/pandita-ramabai-1858-1922/
6. https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/archives/2020/03/23/womens-history-month-2020-pandita-ramabai-sarasvati/
7. https://itihaas.ai/en/people/pandita-ramabai
8. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/pandita-ramabai/