Pandita Ramabai, the daughter of a wealthy Brahmin scholar and his much younger wife, was born in Karnataka, India. Having been instructed by her father to read Sanskrit, she set out at sixteen to walk across India, winning fame by reciting classic poetry and acquiring an honorific title: “Pandita,” mistress of wisdom. Married at twenty-two, she was widowed only a year later. Her travels in India, as well as her own and her mother’s experience, had sensitized her to the plight of widows and orphans, inspiring her to establish centers for their care in Poona and Bombay. Soon she became the leading advocate for the rights and welfare of women in India.

In 1883, while visiting England, she studied the Bible and asked to be baptized. News of her conversion provoked angry controversy in India, where she was accused of betraying her culture. She insisted that in the Gospel of Christ she had found the expression of her own spiritual intuition: her growing belief that to serve women and the poor was a religious, and not simply a social, work. Ironically, her fellow Christians also criticized her for making no effort to seek converts, pressing her for proof of her doctrinal orthodoxy. In reply, she said that her creed was to love God and her neighbor as herself. To this end, she said, she prayed not for the conversion of Hindus but of her fellow Christians.

“People must not only hear about the kingdom of God but must see it in actual operation, on a small scale perhaps . . . but a real demonstration nevertheless.”

—Pandita Ramabai