God's Rules of Thumb

Rama Dongre was born in India in 1858, the daughter of a Hindu scholar from the Brahmin caste, the highest in Indian society. Her father did something almost unheard of in his day. He taught his wife and his daughters Sanskrit, the sacred language of the Hindu scriptures, which women weren't supposed to learn. The family lived on the road, travelling from town to town as pilgrims, with her father reading the scriptures in return for whatever people chose to give.

Then, in the late 1870s, a terrible famine swept across India. Rama watched her father, her mother and her sister die of starvation. She and her brother kept walking, thousands of kilometres across India, until they reached Calcutta in 1878.

There, the scholars of the city tested this young woman on the scriptures, and were so astonished that they gave her the title Pandita, meaning learned teacher. She was the first woman ever honoured with it. From then on she was known as Pandita Ramabai.

The hard years weren't over. Her brother died. She married a lawyer from a lower caste, which scandalised many people, and less than two years later he died of cholera, leaving her a widow in her early twenties with a baby daughter, Manorama.

Now she knew from the inside what it meant to be a widow in India at that time. Many widows, some of them only children who'd been married off young, were treated as bad luck and shut away from the world. Ramabai decided to give her life to them.

In 1883 she travelled to England to study, hoping to become a doctor. There, among a community of Christian sisters, she met Jesus, and she and her daughter were baptised. She went on to America, where she wrote a book about the plight of Indian women and won a group of supporters who promised to help her.

In 1889 she went home and opened a school for child widows in Bombay, later moving it to Poona. Then she bought a hundred acres of stony, waterless farmland at Kedgaon, near Poona. She and her helpers dug wells, put up buildings and called the place Mukti, which means freedom or salvation.

In 1896 famine struck India again. Ramabai remembered what famine had done to her own family. So she set out for the hardest-hit areas with a train of bullock carts and brought back starving girls and young widows, some of them dressed in rags. In the first couple of years she rescued about 300. When another famine came in 1900, she went again. By 1901 almost 2,000 women and children were living at Mukti.

What happened next, and the Bible principle behind it, is in Chapter 3.