Power Of Education - Pandita Ramabai

1858–1922

In India, there is a mission that has stood for over a century, serving hundreds of thousands of India’s poor and needy. Today, an orphanage gathers girls into families where they are given a future. A school at the mission combats India’s high illiteracy rate, teaching thousands to read.

This is only a portion of what Mukti Mission provides. There are medical services on site and traveling medical personnel who go to villages to treat people. A home for India’s unwanted—widows, unwed mothers, and special-needs children—provides outcasts with a place to live and vocational training. Mukti also has a two-thousand-seat church. It was all founded by an Indian woman known as Pandita Ramabai.

Pandita Ramabai had been brought up by a father who believed in female education. He taught his wife to read and write Sanskrit as well as several other languages, and she taught their daughter, who excelled in all her studies. By the way, Pandita is not her name; it’s a Sanskrit title awarded to scholars that means “learned.” She earned the title when men at Calcutta University discovered her education was equal to theirs.

By the time she was twenty-four, she’d been married, had a child, and was widowed. Ramabai decided to dedicate her life to improving the lives of Indian women. She had come into contact with some Christians in India and had read parts of the Bible, but while studying in England she finally converted to Christianity. Lodging there with a community of nuns, she was especially impressed with their grace-filled mission to prostitutes.

Before leaving England, she began raising funds for a new enterprise back in India—what eventually became Mukti Mission. And toward the end of her life, she translated the Bible into the local language so those at the most basic reading level could read it.

Education was obviously important in Ramabai’s life, and it came from many directions—unconventional parents, organized schooling, and a group of sisters sharing the grace of God. It all raises these questions: What are you learning these days? And what are you teaching others?

Feed the hungry, and help those in trouble. Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon.

Isaiah 58:10