Ideas - This 19th-century feminist boldly challenged the caste system

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

In the 19th-century, feminist and scholar Pandita Ramabai travelled America delivering lectures on how the caste system and patriarchy shaped the trajectory of women’s lives. When she came back to India, she explained America's customs around gender and race relations, and their experiment with democracy. IDEAS explores her rich life and legacy.Guests in this episode:Radha Vatsal is the author of No. 10 Doyers Street (March 2025), as well as the author of the Kitty Weeks mystery novels. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she earned her Ph.D. in Film History from Duke University and has worked as a film curator, political speechwriter, and freelance journalist.Tarini Bhamburkar is a research affiliate at the University of Bristol. Her research explores cross-racial networks and international connections built by British and Indian women's feminist periodical press between 1880 and 1910, which sowed the seeds of the transnational Suffrage movement of the early 20th century. Sandeep Banerjee is an associate professor of English at McGill University and a scholar of Global Anglophone and World literature, with a focus on the literary and cultural worlds of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Readings by Aparita Bhandari and Pete Morey.

Every writer has a beginning. For Arundati Roy, it was her mother. In Mother Mary comes to me, the Booker Prize-winning author of the God of Small Things offers an intimate and inspiring account of how she became the person and writer she is, shaped by her complex relationship to the mother she describes as, My Shelter and My Storm. This is not just a memoir. It is a love story, a reckoning, and a journey into the making of one of the world's most celebrated voices.

Mother Mary comes to me by Arundati Roy. Now, wherever books are sold. This ad is brought to you by Simon and Schuster, Canada. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. March 3, 1886. 28-year-old Pandit Aramabai looked up from the deck of the British princess,

the ship carrying her from Liverpool. pool to Philadelphia. They had just sailed through a storm. When the storm had abated, we got to see a great many flying fish soaring over the waves. Around 4.30 in the evening, we got our first glimpse of land, the North American continent of the Western Hemisphere, which in 1492, Christopher Columbus, thinking he had circumnavigated the earth, concluded to be Hindustan. Panditah Ramabai was born in India in 1858.

Now she was a world away. I cannot describe the joy I experienced then. I said to myself, well, my Hindustani friends, here we are, the souls of our feet exactly opposed to the souls of your feet. Here we are, strolling around on the deck and talking, and over there you are snoring in your beds. just see what a miracle this is. She's, I think, fascinated by the idea that Native Americans are called Indians,

and she keeps coming back to that. And I almost feel like she feels that America is in some way India's opposite double. When she disembarked, Ramabai would spend the next two and a half years traveling around America, giving public lectures, and writing about American social, political, and cultural customs. She says when they meet, they clasp their right hands together and shake them. And then they always ask, how do you do?

And you have to answer the appropriate answer is, I am fine, even if you're not fine. And she says, you know, linguistic usage is so strange. It hardly leaves any room to choose between truth and falsehood. You need to say something when you meet somebody else. So the people here start out by criticizing the prevailing weather. The results of her travels, a book called Conditions of Life in America, a wry, insightful portrait of a fledgling democracy. One person among the assembled residents might propose the name of some man for a certain job,

and everyone's opinion is then sought about the matter. This opinion being called a vote. A democracy that Ramabai hoped held clues for India's future after British rule. You know, we know about Tocqueville's democracy in America, but I couldn't believe I had never heard about her. This was not Pandita Ramabai's first book, and it would not be her last. In her remarkable life,

she also published accounts of the lives of women and girls in India and a spiritual autobiography about her conversion to Christianity. Here's ideas. producer, Pauline Holtzworth. So how did you first encounter the story of Pondita Ramabai? So I'm a writer of historical fiction. My previous novels are also set in the early 1900s in New York City. And as I was writing these books, I had a real problem, which was finding a voice in which

to tell the stories. I felt that the perspective I was bringing to the stories was that of someone who was born and raised in India. My name is Radha Vatsal. I'm a writer and researcher. While working on her new novel, Number 10 Doyers Street, about a female journalist who becomes embroiled in the case of a Chinatown gangster in 1910's New York City, she kept searching for the right narrative voice. Finally, sort of in desperation, I said to myself, wait a minute, New York City is a port city, like other port cities, like London, like Bombay. It must have had people from all over the world. The early 1900s, Manhattan alone had a population of 2.2 million

people. There must have been just one Indian person, at least one Indian person that could have been. And it's quite unbelievable because the minute I sort of made that imaginative leap, I found, yes, in fact, there had been women from India who had come to the United States, and Pandit Aramabai was one of the first names that I came across. And then when I learned that she had written a book about her travels, it really felt like she was the inspiration for the character I was trying to create. I guess what I find very exciting about the book also was that it conveys a sense of agency for colonized and conquered people,

that they weren't just sort of sitting there accepting there a lot, but that they actually had agency, that they were curious about the world, that they went out and they went abroad too and tried to learn about the world and then see what they could get from the outside world and use for their own purposes. So we're going to talk later about conditions of life in America and about the book she wrote before that. But I want to talk a little bit now about her early life. What do you know about the circumstances of her early life

and how that shaped her how she was in the world? So Panditah Ramabai had a very unusual upbringing and she was born in 1858 in southern India. And her father was a Brahman, which is the priestly caste and the highest caste in Hinduism. And her mother was just nine years old when she was married to Ramabai's father, who was in his 40s at the time. And she actually talks about this incident in her book, The High-Cast Hindu woman. And she says, you know, it was the most extraordinary marriage. her grandfather or her mother's father was taking a pilgrimage with his two young daughters. And he saw this man who would be Pandita Ramabai's father.

And then he, within a matter of hours, arranged the marriage of his nine-year-old daughter to this much older man. And the very next day, Ramabai's parents, you know, set off on a pilgrimage. Brahmabai's father was a Sanskrit scholar, but he decided to teach his wife Sanskrit and to teach her some of the ancient texts. And the idea of educating a woman particularly at a time when women were not even supposed to be literate in the regular, you know, whatever vernacular language they spoke. So to decide that you're going to teach your wife Sanskrit, which is, you know, an ancient Indian language equivalent of. maybe Latin, was a huge deal, and it basically also caused a lot of friction between him and his community, which is why he was always on the road. He had three children. Ramabai was the youngest.

So Ramabai starts learning her Sanskrit when she's eight, and it's her mother who teaches her. By the age of 12, she'd memorized 12,000 Sanskrit stanzas. And the family, they all earn their living as traveling preachers. They go around villages, reciting the verses in towns, and presumably explaining them in local languages. And I think it puts her in this very rare position of being a woman who is able to speak in public and is very used to speaking in public. It almost seems like this is sort of a model for,

what her life will be because she will go on to travel across America, across India, giving public lectures. Exactly. And it also makes her, I think, because she was never grew up in any kind of fixed society, I think then she kind of develops her own moral compass. She both breaks with Hinduism, but even later when she converts to Christianity, she doesn't want to be part of any particular sect. She's always very, very independent-minded.

And she also had to become independent quite young after the death of her parents. That's right. So when she's about 15 years old, there's a famine in the country. Both her parents die within a few months of each other. And then her older sister dies. And then she and her brother continue as itinerant preachers. And she says that over the years, maybe she and her brother walked two or four thousand miles. And she starts building a reputation because they're still doing the same thing preaching in public.

And she starts building a reputation as this young woman who's able to recite these Sanskrit verses. And so when they finally come to the state of Bengal, when she's about 20 years old, she's examined by a panel of Sanskrit scholars. And they're so impressed by her learning that they give her the, I guess, I don't know whether the word is epithet or, but they call her pundita, which means female pundit or a female scholar and you know pundit is the word from which we get the word pundit in English

TV pundit or expert In 1880 Pandita Ramabai married a Bengali lawyer defying expectations by marrying someone from a lower caste he died less than two years later not long after their daughter was

born. In 1883, she and her daughter set sail for England. And she wants to go to England to learn how to be a doctor because at the time in India, there aren't any Indian women doctors. And she feels that it's very important that because women are very hesitant to be seen by male doctors, that the need for for women doctors in India is huge. She's in her 20s. She goes to England with a two-year-old daughter. And she writes this letter where she lists 10 objections,

the 10 objections that she's heard to why she shouldn't go. One is her weak constitution and her very young daughter. The other issues she can't speak English and that it's not proper to live among Christians. And her response, which I think is so interesting for a woman at that time to write. She says, you know, such as human nature that every person knows what is best for him. And she says, you know, she has been traveling around India for most of her life and her daughter has also been traveling around India. So she feels pretty sure that they can marriage in England.

And then also, she talks about her years as an itinerant preacher with her family. And she says that after spending just a few days in one place and hearing a language spoken, she would be able to speak in that language. And so she says, you know, if I could do that, why shouldn't I be able to learn English the same way? She arrives in England and discovers that her hearing isn't good enough to become a doctor. But the other big thing that happens when she goes to England and she leaves India promising that being among Christians is not going to alter her in any way. But within months of her arrival in England, she converts to Christianity.

I think she was looking for answers when she came. She was quite inspired by Christianity because she saw Hinduism as quite oppressive for women. So my name is Dr. Tarani Pamburka and I'm currently a research affiliate at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. My research so far has been about colonial India and Victorian Britain, especially looking at women's relationships with each other. And now I'm sort of moving closer towards studying women's periodicals from the late 19th century. So when she came to England, she wanted to know more about Christianity. So she came to stay at this place quite near Oxford called Wantage at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

and she had already worked at a branch of that church in Puna, so she thought, well, I can probably find more answers. So one of the main reasons I feel that she converts to Christianity is because she feels that Hinduism really doesn't have a good place for women in it. She says somewhere in her writings that basically women as women don't have a path to salvation. Women first have to go through several cycles of birth and rebirth to be, born a man, then you have to be born a Praman man, and only then can you maybe have a chance of escaping the cycle. There were reformers at the time who believed that you couldn't separate

Hinduism and the caste system, that the two just went together. And so reformers like Ambedkar, who also actually interestingly attended college at Columbia University in the 1910s, he, was one of the, their four main castes, the priests, the warriors, the merchants and traders, and then the laborers or workers. And then there's a whole group of people who fall outside the caste system. They were called untouchables. The word we now use is Dalit. So Ambedkar, who was a famous Dalit leader, he believed that there was no way to take the caste system out of Hinduism. And so he, in fact, converted to Buddhism. Pandita Ramabai came to England and to Christianity, hoping to step outside the hierarchy

of the caste system. But she soon found herself navigating other forms of repressive hierarchy. When she comes to England, how is she received? She was received very positively because they wanted her to come, because she had potential to be the ideal native converted subject. But when she came, she was received very positively, came, I think. She always came with this idea that for everything I get from you, I will give you something. So she offered to teach her mother tongue Marathi to the women at the church near Oxford. She offered to do loads of things which she thought would be a good payback. But I think despite how well received she was, she realized she had very little agency over her own

decisions. So whenever she questioned certain aspects of Christianity, she faced pushback from her mentor at Wantage, Sister Geraldine. She wanted to know why the Bible, for instance, could not be written in native languages, so more people could access it. If people in India were to be inspired to adopt Christianity as their religion. Latin is not the mother tongue of Marathi. So our Indian sisters will not find a single word in it that they know or is like to some word that is known to them. Then why should we be kept in ignorance of our professed text? And she also has theological questions about Anglican religions and about why we must all submit to one authority. You said you agree that it is no use teaching me.

when I do not come to you in a humble, childlike, teachable spirit. In teaching what? In teaching that your Anglican church is the sole treasury of truth? In teaching that your clergy are the only true priesthood and messengers of truth, far be it from me to listen to such teaching, it is not humility, but a gross cowardice. She gets a lot of pushback because she's constantly told that, oh, well, you are still in doubt and you allowed us to baptize you while you were still in doubt.

But all she's saying that, as long as there is life, there is the space to question things. I hope you will not be vexed with my freedom of speech. After a year living in the Christian community in wantage, Pandita Ramabai enrolled in the teaching program at the Cheltenham Ladies' College. I think her mentor at Cheltenham was more sympathetic. Her name was Dorothea Beel, and she was herself an educator, like Ramabai wanted to be. Remabwe wanted to start schools for girls in India. And I think she had had her own doubts about her faith, so she was more sympathetic.

But at the end of the day, I think both Dorothea Beale and Sister Geraldine wanted her to listen to them. And Ramabe was not there to listen. She was there to ask questions and get answers to them. And that's when she started facing, I think, a lot of doubt about her religion, but also about, you know, colonialism and the sort of hierarchy that she was in when it came to women in England. Tarini Bamberker is fascinated by the relationships between Indian and British women in this era, the mix of intimacy and resentment, solidarity and denigration. I had seen lots of stuff written about men's relationships with men in the colonial period or the sexual politics of British women and Indian men's relationships or Indian women and British men. But I felt that there was no proper record of how women interacted with each other across race in the 19th century, other than British women and their servants that served them in their homes.

And the only thing that you do find, I think Victorians love the idea of female friendship, but women's relationships with women, I think, were more complicated than that. You know, it wasn't all friendly. I'm really interested in this idea that, you know, people want to sort of theorize or categorize these interactions primarily through the lens of friendship. And I wonder what other concepts or containers you think enrich or widen our understanding of what those interactions were. There was always this sort of hierarchy in place,

which we need to understand, made both sides conscious, but one more so than the other. So when you read about British women interacting with Indian women who lived in, like, wealthier homes, sometimes as middle-class women, the British women felt more conscious.

Because in terms of class, they were not the Indian women's equal. But in terms of race, thought of themselves as, you know, more satiria. This dynamic came alive when women like Panda Ramabai came to England and when British women went to India and wrote about their experiences for a British audience. Politically, we can see that they were almost constructing a female gaze,

a female colonial gaze through observing, writing down and then distributing this knowledge out there in Britain for people to read by their fireplace. in the north of England, never having gone to India or never needing to go because it was all in the book. And I think what they did was also used this knowledge about India, especially the women in India, as their own specific niche to write about. Because what they said was women in India, especially in wealthy homes, lived in these like separate quarters that men were not allowed to enter. So what the women were saying is, we're offering you the most unsighted

aspects from these places where women live. You've written on also another female travel writer in this period, parks, and instances of what you describe as a returned Indian female gaze in their writing. Oh, yeah. Where do you see that returned gaze coming through in these travel logs? So I think in a lot of them, you find quite rewarding instances. All these British women traveling who, you know, go into these spaces to like basically write by the Indian women they see, and then, you know, they find moments where they feel quite conscious

about what they're wearing. It's like, why are you wearing so many layers of garments? Why don't you have just, you know, one tunic and one piece scarf over your shoulder? But I think Parks is interesting because she, she's also the one who promises to make revelations, you know, right from the title of her book, which is called Revelations from the Zanana, the Zanana being this space that the women live in. in one excerpt she writes about her encounter with the queen from central India that she visits they decide to go horse riding together and when she turns up riding side saddle the women laugh at her because indian women always rode us tried and the riding habits that they wore were always designed as trousers and then they laugh at her and then they instruct her to put on their

writing habit. So she's instructed to leave and to go and put on this trouser sari. And then she comes back and says, this is actually really good. I felt so conscious when they were all laughing at me. I think Queen Elizabeth should never have changed the writing style for women in

the early modern period. And every time someone reads that, part of my chapter, they really love it. In both 19th century England and India, the feminist movement was gaining steam. In India, there was a lot of talk about reform in society at that time.

And women were saying that we need to improve the way we are treated in society, in our homes, in a marriage, for instance. But what was also picking up was anti-colonial resistance to sort of stand up against British rule. And in the course of that, what was happening was gender reform and these questions about women's emancipation were being sidelined. So I think that just not inspired, but drove all these women like Panditara Mabai, but also other names that I can think of, to write these manifestos and then to eventually start publishing their own periodicals and pamphlets to say that this issue should also take center stage. And I think that sort of led to this renaissance of women starting not just periodical,

were beginning to write in English, to travel, to question the sort of patriarchy that reduced women to such disempowered positions in society. And that is why, especially in the 1880s, in the late 1880s, you see this growth in the number of women edited periodicals, because before that, 90% of them were edited by men, intended at women were edited by men. And I think I always see it as women taking control of their own freedom. the change in their own lives, that then led to, you know, an even more solid suffrage movement in India, where women demanded for the right to vote. How was the Indian women's movement viewed in the British women's press during this era?

I think it was viewed favorably, but favorably in the sense that British women thought that they were viewing it favorably. But for them, the idea was always to guide and steer Indian women in doing so. So almost like saying we are the ones, you know, as European white women who have set the norms for how women should seek emancipation and maybe you can learn from us. And that is actually what Pandez Ramabai struggled with a lot, especially in England when she first came to the West. There's a term for it, which I find quite beautiful, called imperial feminism in that they were always really open. Like when you look at the periodicals as well, Clearly, they were very excited by seeing Indian women who were, you know, coming to England, going to America, starting schools for girls, or going to university themselves.

But there was always a sort of condescending note to it, saying, well, you could do it this way, you know, you can take the backseat and let us teach you. In 1884, a Reverend and Wantage wrote this note to Dorothy O'Beal. I think that Mary Ramabai's knowledge of Indian ways, etc., will give her a powerful influence which no English woman can have. All that she needs is an English development of her Indian brains. But church authorities bristled at the fact that Pandita Ramabai was teaching Marathi in Sanskrit to students at Cheltenham Ladies College. They thought it would go to her head. Here's the Bishop of Lahore. undertaking a professorship among English young ladies might lead to a little undue self-exaltation.

But a less prominent position for a short time with a humbler title such as teachership would probably lessen the danger of elation of the mind very considerably. And when she began lecturing to boys as well as girls, church authorities were horrified. The bishop of Bombay claimed Panda Ramabai would never be taken seriously as a missionary or educator in India. If people there learned she had taught men. I'm afraid you will think me a terrible wet blanket, but there is not a missionary or a bishop in India who would not endorse what I say. I consider that if Ramabai begins to lecture in this country,

the hope of her doing good work among her country woman is at an end. Panditah Ramabai would have none of it. I know India and its people better than any foreigners. If you and your country people do not trust the people of India, it matters little. But for my part, I do trust and love my country with all my heart. It was very kind of you to give me a home in this country, for which I shall remain grateful to you all my life. But at the same time, I must tell you,

that when I find out that you or your friends have no trust in me, and they want whether directly or indirectly to interfere with my personal liberty, I must say goodbye to you and go my own way, by which my Lord God will guide me. I have long since taken all matters which concern me into my own hand, and shall by no means let others lay hand on my hand. my liberty. She ultimately did just that.

When Pandita Ramabai left India in 1883, she left around the same time as another woman, traveling west to become a doctor. Anandhii by Joshi sets off to America, and Pandita Ramabai sets off to England. In 1886, as her friendships in England were growing strained, she received an invitation to attend Joshi's medical school graduation in the United States. And that's what brings her to America in the first place. You're listening to a documentary about the remarkable life of Pandata Ramabai, an iconoclastic 19th century Indian feminist and social reformer.

You're listening to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Every writer has a beginning. For Arundati Roy, it was her mother. In Mother Mary comes to me, the Booker Prize-winning author of the God of Small Things offers an intimate and inspiring account of how she became the person and writer she is shaped by her complex relationship to the mother she

describes as, my shelter and my storm. This is not just a memoir. It is a love story, a reckoning, and a journey into the making of one of the world's most celebrated voices. Mother Mary comes to me by Arundati Roy. Available now, wherever books are sold. This ad is brought to you by Simon & Schuster, Canada.

If you want to hear daily news, that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul. Check out As It Happens. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Yilke Ossal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables.

Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Panditah Ramabai arrived in America on March 6, 1886. The continent of America was hemmed in by a layer of ice. The sun reflecting off it almost blinded your eyes. Just six days later, she gave a public lecture at the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia to more than 500 people. It made headlines all the way back in India,

where a newspaper reported, quote, a Hindu woman of high caste, her slight figure wrapped in the white robe of Indian widowhood, speaking with a voice of musical sweetness and distinction, told the story of Hindu womanhood. And so began a new phase in her life. You know, she really did travel all over the U.S. She went from New York to Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Portland,

She went to the south, to Louisville, Kentucky, to Tennessee. And in all these places, she was talking to groups of hundreds of people, mostly women. These lectures were the basis for her book, The High-Cast Hindu Woman, which sold more than 10,000 copies. One of the things that Ramabai says is that marriage and widowhood is particularly difficult for the higher. classes, particularly for the top two castes, Brahman's and the Shatria, the warrior class. She says that women of lower castes actually probably have more freedom because they need to work, whereas these casts are so focused on maintaining purity that they really have to keep their women under lock and key, as it were.

So some of these girls, as I said, are married off to much older men. So she talks about girls of 7, 8, 9 being married off to men who are 60, 70. So oftentimes their husband will die. And so these girls who could be 10 or 11 years old at the time that they've become widows are marked for life as being widows. They're made to shave their hair. They're not given enough food. They're not allowed to mix with other people. If they pass someone else, they bring bad luck so people don't want to see a widow first thing in them.

There are all kinds of superstitions. So basically their whole life is just completely wasted. Pandita Ramabai appealed to American women to donate money for a project she wanted to start. But she was adamant that Indian women's future had to stay in Indian women's hands. So I think she comes up with this very ingenious solution. She makes this argument, which then subsequently a lot of, of other Indian women reformers make. She says that Indian women need an education, not just for themselves, but for the sake of the country, that you can't have half the population being completely

illiterate. You know, she says that the degradation of the country is a result in part of the degradation of its women. And she says that it cannot come from outsiders, that we need Indian women to become teachers. And then she says, where are we to find these teachers? And she said, I have a whole group of women in India that nobody else wants, which are these child widows. And she proposes setting up a school for child widows who are so discriminated against and unwanted in their own homes and teaching them how to read and write with the goal of making them self-sufficient and making them teachers who would then go on to teach other Indian women. So one thing, like I think an interesting way to think about her is as a translator. So for when she writes high-class Hindu women, she's translating India for American audiences.

But while she was traveling across the States, translating India for an American audience, she was also beginning to write a new book called Conditions of Life in America, translating America for an Indian audience back home. Here's producer Paul E. Holdsworth. You mentioned that she is acting as a translator. And she's also using language throughout the book to kind of create a sense of either shared experience or common touch points for Indian readers.

And I wonder what some of the phrases that you find most interesting are in terms of kind of making America intelligible and familiar to an Indian. audience. For me, it's so fascinating because she's explaining America to people who, I mean, for sure, would never go to America and may not have had much information about the country in the first place. So she says, you know, liberty is the household deity of the Americans. And she talks about the basic mantra of the American people being, you know, government is for the people, off the people, by the people. And she describes things like she describes the hotel. like the celestial palaces of the god Indra.

She talks about snow being like the smallest lentil that falls on your hand without making any sound, the Allegheny mountains like the foothills of the Himalayas. And then, you know, she describes sometimes some people like Francis Willard, who I believe was the head of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, as an American Sarasvati, Sarasvati being the goddess of learning. So she kind of refigures America in these. Indian terms? That's actually fascinating, because that is a key way for people to make sense of an alien space, right? This is very much present in, say, colonial writings on India, to go back

to my favorite hobby horse, like people are going to the source of the ganges for the first time, and there's a mountain called Mount Sivling, and there's like hordes of writers talking about, this is an Indian matter horn. If you see the image, you can see why you would think of it as an Indian Matterhorn, but there are also interesting references. Oh, it's a Matron as it would come to you in a nightmare. My name is Shundeeb Banerjee. I'm an associate professor of English at McGill University.

I work on literature from South Asia, usually with English, Bengali, and Hindi. If you think of the travelogue, typically it is about Europeans, in the modern era, Westerners writing the non-West. So it's very much implicated in a certain kind of narration of space. And if you think of the genre, it's where the space really is where the action is. So in the colonial moment, the travelogue emerges because, and I'm here thinking about South Asia and I'm thinking about the British, but this is by and large true for other colonial powers as well.

The British are very interested in understanding the land that they'll govern. which, I mean, they're very interested in understanding what is possible in terms of collecting taxes, productivity, and those kinds of things. So initially, what you see are people writing quite literally about flora, fauna, agriculture, the society, climate. And it doesn't make for tantalizing reading. But nevertheless, it's actually quite exciting. So this becomes a way of making South Asia visible to the British administrators, and over time with the development of what we now call tourism. And this is also like in the 19th century, tourism is becoming a thing. This was also a moment when travel within India was becoming easier.

With the advent of the railways, you suddenly have these regional units that comprise India, now being quite literally being integrated as one kind of. of space. And so writing about this becomes easier because you quite literally can feel India as one entity. Leading to a new era of travel logs by Indian intellectuals. So you get a kind of an Indian stake on India. But these are not necessarily a different way of looking because oftentimes they're imitating British protocols. Sometimes consciously, sometimes, you know, just to mock the British, that's also happening.

And then over time, this becomes a way of reclaiming agency. And this is also the time Indians are writing their history. So history, writing and travelogue, as it were, go hand in hand. Increasingly, you also have people traveling beyond the Indian borders. So going to other parts of empire, going to Britain, going to Europe, going to America. I'm not very familiar about people writing about America. Kandita Ramabai, for me, is a bit of an exception that way. But there are people writing about Britain.

People are going to China at this point and writing about China. So it's not just sort of looking towards the West, but also looking towards other parts of Asia. The writers of travelogues often search for meaning or metaphors in other places as a way to understand the place that they come from themselves. For example, Shondi Benerji points to travelogues by Bengali intellectuals in the 19th century. who are really writing a deeper story about the future of India and its past. I'm here thinking about someone like Golanat Chandra who writes this travels of a Hindu to the upper provinces of India. And he's starting with Bengal and he's going all the way up the ganges and the Yamuna.

There's a very clear desire to mark colonial modernity as distinct from what came before. And so therefore there's a desire to downplay the achievements of the Mughals, the centrality of Delhi, and Calcutta, which is for Chandar, very much this rising metropolis. In this case, he's actually replicating the discourse that one finds in the British, that Delhi is a city of the past. It is also a kind of living museum of the Indian past. And Calcutta, Bombay, these are, I guess, the future of India in a sense. And if I may just put on my literature professor hat for a second. What travel writing does also is it allows you to

ideologically mark space out as progressive or regressive, right? So I move up the country and I go to a backward place where Calcutta is progressive, Delhi is backward. So it's almost like a moving through space becomes a way of moving through time. It's almost like time travel of a certain kind. And those strategies, you see this in colonial travel writing that I've come from English, England to India and I've moved across space, but I've now reached a place that's backward. So you're actually inscribing a certain register of time on this space. Panda Ramabai certainly found some aspects of American life backwards. She also is extremely critical and goes into quite a bit of detail about women wearing birds' feathers in their hats

and the number of birds that are killed in the name of fashion. And then she also has a whole section. on animals, and she calls pastures and branches the vegetable farms of America. And she comes up very strongly against killing animals to eat them. Oh, look, these heartless people then say, I've got a fish on my line. And they pull the fish out of the water and feast their eyes on its death agonies. When you see these practice of theirs,

you can't help but feel that it would be a very good thing. good thing indeed if the compassionate missionaries of the Lord Buddha were to come here and turn their hearts around. She also says, you know, that they don't really season food. They know

nothing about seasoning vegetables with spices, the way we do. But despite the faults she found in America's present and past. She was primarily interested in possibilities for India's future. I mean, I think for her what was most interesting was that the Americans had managed to gain independence from the British. She's looking for a model that India can follow in its quest

for independence. She's looking for a system of government and also a system of society that might work for India. And the largest section in conditions of life in America is about women. And I think she's very, very impressed by all the progress that American women have made. And she wants to hold that up as a model for India and Indian women. For a lot of Indians, I would imagine America would be a land of remarkable promise. Like, I mean, yes, it's a settler colonial space. But nevertheless, it's a place where.

where you don't have a king, for instance. So, you know, as the saying goes, you could be president if you want. America has some very, very interesting influences on the Indian landscape. In a few decades, America would be the site for the emergence of Indian communism. M.N. Roy will become a communist, will set up the Communist Party of Mexico and eventually the Communist Party of India in Tashkent. But he's really becoming radicalized in America. It becomes a land of possibility for many of these thinkers, writers,

simply because they are not England with its kind of restrictions and rigidities. The whole political system, I think she goes into detail about it. You know, she explains who senators are and representatives and how the president is just a normal man. I think she mentions also how George Washington only served for two terms and then they go back to being ordinary citizens and that their vote doesn't count. more? Here, in America, the vote of presidents such as Washington, Lincoln, and Grant, or of learned people such as Franklin, Jefferson, and Emerson, counts not one whit more than the vote of the most ordinary Negro citizen. And what is more?

There is not a single citizen in this country who does not possess all the same rights as a citizen that those famous men did. I recently just read an account by another Indian traveler who visited America during the Civil War. And he manages to actually meet Abraham Lincoln. And he says, here in America, you can meet the president. Whereas in India, even to meet the lowliest British official

is so difficult. But at the same time, America is also very aware of the question of race. So Indian farmers who are coming into America at this point of refuse citizenship. So it's a very contradictory. It's a very contradictory space. Slavery is the very central issue for many Indians, and that just continues all the way to

Martin Luther King coming to India when he does. So there's a strong sense of solidarity. This is something absolutely central, particularly in post-colonial India, where it really becomes a kind of vocal leader of the third world is very, very instrumental in pushing against the apartheid regime of South Africa. This is really kind of the long history. But these ideas are very much being forged to my mind in the 19th century. You know, even when she talks about liberty being the household goddess of the Americans,

everybody gets to be American when they enter the country. She does notice that, of course, that doesn't include the Chinese. This is a great blot indeed on the reputation of this freedom-loving race that likes to call itself civilized. And she was highly critical of how indigenous people were treated. Not only do the Indian people not enjoy any of the rights of American citizenship, they do not even have the right to file a suit against anyone in any ordinary court of the United States. The United States government has allotted certain places called Indian reservations

where the various Red Indian tribes are to live. If any Indian should cross the borders of his reservation, he either loses his life to an American hunter's bullet or else he is caught in the clutches of some judge and is punished for leaving his reservation without permission. But then she also talks about people working hard to improve those situations. I think she is a little bit optimistic. It's like 20 years since the Civil War.

She thinks that things are going to improve a lot. She says the idea that non-white communities, such as African-Americans, are of inferior worth, that this idea is deeply ingrained. But she feels that there's no fear at all that the racial discrimination and bigotry here in the United States will ever reach the level of caste discrimination in India. This American caste is one. And I found that sentence very interesting, particularly in light of recent work, like if you think of Isabel Wilkerson, book on cast in which she says, you know, she says the opposite. She says that basically America has a caste system with African Americans being like the outcasts of India.

But for Ramabai, she feels that the Indian system is much more entrenched. At one point, she even met Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who helped dozens of enslaved people escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad. know that she met Harriet Tubman through a letter that she wrote to her daughter. And basically in the letter, she tells her daughter the story of Harriet Tubman and how Tubman helped many African Americans to freedom. And she holds up Harriet as a example to her daughter of like what can be achieved when you are struggling for freedom. And I think she finds that struggle for freedom also, it resonates with her as someone from a colonized country who is trying to find a way

to freedom as well. Over a century later, some of her assessments of American democracy now feel achingly ironic. Because everyone is in favor of freedom of thought and opinion, no one harbors really, animosity towards the people of an opposing party. Especially this one. If the occasion should ever arise for making war, the government of the United States does not commit itself to such a monstrous action unless and until the representatives, the senators, and the president debate and consider

the reasons for the war, whether these are compelling enough to bring matters to the point of shedding human blood. and what will be gained or lost by the war. And then all of them agree by majority vote to declare war. For Britain to wage war on Egypt, Burma, Afghanistan, and to suffocate a poor country like Hindustan under a stifling burden of debt, nothing more is needed than a mere nod of the head.

How much better it would have been if the British government had followed the example, of this democratic country, and not allowed a mere handful of people to meddle in the internal affairs of foreign countries. In 1888, two years after her arrival in America, she returned to India. She stopped in Japan for two weeks on her way home, where she met with Japanese social reformers and address the Tokyo Christian Temperance Union. When she went back to India, she started a school for child widows and child brides and

then that expanded. The organization, the Mukti mission that she started, is still in existence today and it still receives funding from the U.S. today. I think in India, she was marginalized because of her conversion to Christianity. I think there were a lot of people who felt that it was unnecessary. and it would have been better if she could have done everything that she did without converting. So I think people viewed that conversion as a betrayal. Her daughter, Manorama, completed a degree at Bombay University

and traveled to the United States again to continue her studies. When she came back to India, she became her mother's partner in running the Mukti mission. She was supposed to take over the organization. take over the organization, but she died in 1921. Pundit Aramabai died nine months later from septic bronchitis. She was just a few weeks away from her 64th birthday. Her last publication came out after her death, a full translation of the Bible into Marathi. Once you get someone like Panditaharamabai, she's not the only one.

And the minute you find her, you actually start finding so many more people who came, who wrote about their experiences from India. And if they came from India, then they would have also come from other parts of the world. So you see that there were so many more types of connections than we are familiar with or that we think of when we think of those periods in time. And I think that's important because it makes us realize, or at least it made me realize, is that this whole idea of like, you know, European cities and American cities, particularly port cities, as having like a homogenous, primarily white past, like that's just a myth.

It never existed. And that the world has always been more multicultural than we typically imagine. And I feel like once you can see the past with all these kinds of connections going on, When you think of Rama by coming, not only meeting with white women all across America, and she has a great actually anecdote about going to the south where she's, I think she's either in Kentucky or Nashville, where she's given a talk and she's invited to stand or sit on the platform on the podium. And she invites the other southern ladies who are present, the leaders of whatever organization to stand with her and they're kind of hesitant. And it's she, this Indian woman,

who's encouraging them to come and stand on the stage with her. So she's talking to those women. She's talking to Harriet Tubman. She's talking to women intellectuals on the East Coast. And I think once we start seeing the past like that, I think it helps us also imagine different ideas for the future. On Ideas, you've been listening to a documentary about the remarkable life of Pandita Ramabai. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth.

Special thanks to Radha Vatsal for bringing us this story. Readings by Aparata Bandari and Pete Mori. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval, Williard, and Emily Kiervezio. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed. Here, I must say goodbye. It is getting dark. You will, of course, write to me what you think of my argument.

Yours mischievous, Mary Rama. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.