Pandita Ramabai’s Struggle Against Patriarchy in Hinduism and Christianity

In nineteenth-century India, a Brahmin widow who challenged the religious authorities of her own community was rare. A woman who then challenged the church she had converted to was almost unthinkable. Pandita Ramabai did both. A Sanskrit scholar honoured with the title “Pandita,” she spent her life arguing that the oppression of women was not the will of any god but the work of men who controlled religious institutions. Her story shows how patriarchy adapts itself to different faiths, and how one woman refused to accept it in either Hinduism or Christianity.

Who was Pandita Ramabai 🔗

Ramabai Dongre was born in 1858 into a Chitpavan Brahmin family. Her father, a Sanskrit scholar, broke with convention by teaching his daughter the sacred language and texts that were normally forbidden to women. This education shaped everything that followed. By the age of twenty, after being examined by the faculty of the University of Calcutta, she became the first woman to earn the titles “Pandita” and “Sarasvati” for her mastery of Sanskrit.

Her early life was marked by tragedy. She lost her parents and sister to starvation during the famines of the mid-1870s. In 1880 she married Bipin Behari Medhvi, a Bengali lawyer from a lower caste. The marriage was both inter-caste and inter-regional, a significant break with tradition at the time. Her husband died within two years, leaving her a widow with an infant daughter, Manorama. This personal experience of widowhood gave her firsthand knowledge of the social position she would spend her life fighting against.

The patriarchal structures within Hinduism 🔗

Ramabai’s scholarship made her a uniquely dangerous critic. Because she could read the original Sanskrit texts, she could not be dismissed as ignorant of the tradition she attacked. She located the source of women’s oppression directly in religious law. In The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), she named the lawgiver Manu as one of those who had worked to make women hateful in the world’s eyes, pointing to how the Manusmriti and other texts denied women access to scripture and confined them to housekeeping.

The plight of the child widow 🔗

The figure at the centre of her critique was the child widow. In a society that practised child marriage, a girl could become a widow before she ever lived with her husband. Custom then condemned her to a life of deprivation. Brahmin custom forbade widows from remarrying and subjected them to harsh restrictions on diet, dress, and social participation. Ramabai documented this suffering in detail, arguing that these women were treated as criminals upon whom divine judgment had supposedly fallen.

Her analysis went beyond describing cruelty. She showed that the oppression was systematic, rooted in texts and customs that the dominant castes followed strictly. Modern scholars have noted how her critique of Brahmanical patriarchy anticipated debates that continue today about practices linked to son-preference and the devaluation of daughters.

Challenging the male reformers 🔗

Ramabai did not only challenge orthodox society. She also challenged the male social reformers who claimed to support women. Appearing before the Hunter Commission on education, she made the sharp observation that the educated men of the country were largely opposed to female education and to women holding a proper position in society. She argued that women teachers should be trained and that women school inspectors should be appointed. Her insistence that women lead the work of women’s reform put her at odds even with sympathetic men, who were used to treating reform as their own domain.

Building institutions for women 🔗

Ramabai did not stop at criticism. She built organisations and institutions to give her ideas practical form.

The Arya Mahila Samaj 🔗

After her husband’s death she moved to Pune, where in 1882 she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj (the Arya Women’s Society). It was one of the earliest organisations in the country dedicated specifically to women’s welfare and education. The Samaj worked to promote women’s education and to put an end to child marriage. It gave women a platform to discuss their problems and organise for change, and branches soon spread to other cities in the region. The significance of this was not only educational. It demonstrated that women could mobilise, lead, and run a reform movement themselves.

Stree Dharma Niti 🔗

In the same year, Ramabai published her first book, Stree Dharma Niti (Morals for Women), written in Marathi. The book was intended to counsel women and urge them to educate themselves and transform their lives. The fact that she wrote it partly to finance a trip to England shows that her reforming drive was already well established before she encountered Christianity. The book drew on examples from Hindu tradition to make its case, showing that at this stage she was working to reform women’s lives from within her own religious framework.

Later she founded the Sharada Sadan, a residential school for child widows that offered both academic and vocational training, and eventually the Mukti Mission, which sheltered widows, orphans, and destitute women rescued during the famines of the 1890s. These institutions gave women not just education but a route to economic independence.

Conversion to Christianity 🔗

In 1883, while staying with the Anglican sisters of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin at Wantage in England, Ramabai was baptised into the Christian faith. Her conversion shocked Indian society and generated charges of betrayal and deception. Many viewed it as the abandonment of her heritage, and the controversy damaged her standing among the Hindu reformers who had earlier supported her.

Her attraction to Christianity was partly rooted in her search for a faith that affirmed the equality and value of women. She had grown disillusioned with the way orthodox Hinduism treated women, and she saw in the Christian message something that resonated with her commitment to social justice. Yet it would be a mistake to read her conversion as a simple exchange of one faith for another. She approached Christianity with the same critical mind she had applied to Hindu texts.

Contesting patriarchy within Christianity 🔗

This is the part of Ramabai’s story that is most often forgotten. Her conversion did not end her struggle against patriarchal religious authority. It simply moved the battlefield. She quickly discovered that the church, too, expected women to submit without question, and she refused.

The dispute over doctrine 🔗

Ramabai’s relationship with her Anglican mentors, especially Sister Geraldine, became contentious. She studied the Bible with the eye of a scholar rather than accepting it on the authority of the church. She struggled with the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, which she felt edged towards polytheism, and she questioned the church’s reliance on miracles and creeds. She insisted instead that the Sermon on the Mount should be her guiding doctrine. For this, she was charged with arrogance and a lack of faith, accusations that carried a clear racial and cultural prejudice against an Indian woman who dared to think for herself.

She asserted her independence in smaller ways too. She kept her vegetarian diet, and she resisted being treated as a passive convert to be shaped by her English hosts. One Anglican official wrote condescendingly that all she needed was an “English development of her Indian brains,” a remark that captures exactly the attitude she was fighting.

One patriarchy or another 🔗

What unites the two halves of Ramabai’s life is her refusal to substitute one form of patriarchy for another. As an encyclopaedia entry on her life puts it, she was not willing to trade one patriarchy for another, and she proved a thorn in the side of the Anglican authorities just as she had been to orthodox Hindu society. Her experience revealed that gender discrimination was not unique to any single religion. It was a broader systemic problem that could attach itself to any institution claiming divine authority.

This insight placed her ahead of her time. By challenging religious texts and institutions from within, while keeping her own spiritual conviction, she anticipated what would later be called feminist theology, the idea that sacred texts can be reinterpreted to support women rather than restrict them.

Why her legacy still matters 🔗

Ramabai’s contestation of religion came at a heavy personal price. She was socially marginalised by orthodox Hindus for her reform work and her conversion, and she was distrusted by the Anglican establishment for her independent reading of Christianity. For a long time she was nearly erased from the official histories of western India.

Yet her core argument remains relevant. She showed that institutions often resist change even when it aligns with their stated values, and that women’s rights advocates frequently face opposition from the very religious and social bodies that claim to support equality. The Mukti Mission she founded continues to operate, and her writings remain a foundational text for understanding the early Indian women’s movement. She demonstrated, through both her scholarship and her institutions, that education and economic self-reliance were the keys to changing women’s lives.

What do you think? If patriarchy can attach itself to any religion, as Ramabai’s life suggests, is the answer to reform religious institutions from within or to seek equality on entirely secular grounds? And what does it mean that a reformer who fought oppression in two faiths was, for so long, remembered fully by neither?

References

1. https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/the-high-caste-hindu-woman/
2. https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/archives/2020/03/23/womens-history-month-2020-pandita-ramabai-sarasvati/
3. https://wave-network.org/inspiring-thursday-pandita-ramabai-saraswati/
4. https://feminisminindia.com/2017/12/14/pandita-ramabai-high-caste-hindu-woman/
5. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandita_Ramabai
6. https://vajiramandravi.com/upsc-exam/pandita-ramabai/
7. https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ramabai-pandita
8. https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ramabai-pandita-1858-1922
9. https://www.indiafaith.in/Encyc/2021/4/23/Missionary-Life-of-Pandita-Ramabai.html