Pandita Ramabai: A Life & A Time

Uma Chakravarti is a historian and she lectured at Miranda House College for Women. She has worked and written on issues of caste and gender and is active in democratic rights and women’s movements. Her works include Social Dimension of Early Buddhism and Gendering Caste.

Extracts from “Pandita Ramabai: A Life and A Time”

“Over the years, particularly after she moved to Kedgaon, she experimented with ideas that could provide women with space to grow and be self-sufficient, a sort of female community for women of all castes (unlike other institutions where only Brahmana women were admitted), providing a sanctuary for them within the larger society which was dominated by men…..Increasingly, in her later years, Ramabai turned inwards much more to a gospel-based Christianity (while retaining a distance from any particular denomination) and then to an emotional rather than intellectual relationship with Christ.”