Meera Kosambi's Seminal Article on Rama-bai, Rakhma-bai, and Anandi-bai
Indian Women and the "Western Influence"
In terms of historical periods, there is in India an unhealthy obsession with the “ancient” and the Mughal periods, with many unquestioningly glorifying the former and denigrating the latter. Frankly, and to our huge collective intellectual loss, we are not talking enough about other times: e.g., the 1800s. In fact if there is any past century the events and ideas from which continue to shape Indian and South Asian lives to this day, and fuel conversations even today, that is arguably the nineteenth century. A rich illustration of this is the brilliant 1994 essay titled The Meeting of the Twain: The Cultural Confrontation of Three Women in Nineteenth Century Maharashtra by Meera Kosambi, the legendary scholar of gender studies and Maharashtra studies.
The central theme of this essay resembles a sweeping historical drama: within a single decade in the late 1800s, three young women from Maharashtra with different family backgrounds and vastly different personal contexts, but whose paths were bound to criss-cross, all voyaged to the “West” — a significant and highly uncommon thing for women from the subcontinent during this time — and then returned to India, to the “East”, to lead very different lives. [The terms East and West are imperfect terms, but they work fine for the purposes of this article, and of course are used in Kosambi’s essay.] One of them passed away soon after return, struck by tuberculosis: an ancient ailment that the “West” would soon conquer even as its exploitative policies in the East were making people there highly vulnerable to it. Another became a successful medical doctor and would go on to practice “Western” medicine for decades. The third converted to Christianity and immersed herself fully in social work and advocacy after toying briefly with the idea of becoming a doctor. And all of these East-West encounters occurred before India’s most feted East-West encounter of that time: the 1893 US visit of Narendranath Datta (aka Swami Vivekananda).
The three stars of Kosambi’s essay are Rama-bai Dongre aka Pandita Rama-bai, Rakhma-bai Raut, and Anandi-bai Joshi (the name her parents gave was Yamuna), all born within a decade of the 1857 Uprising. [For more on the “bai” suffix in Marathi, see this excellent elaboration by Nandini Patwardhan who recently wrote a book on Joshi, and whose style I adopt in putting the hyphen before bai]. The “meeting of the twain” in the essay title alludes to the widely known and mostly-misinterpreted line from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, — the poem begins with Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, but then goes on to generally affirm the common humanity of all people irrespective of borders etc. — who incidentally was a contemporary of the three women. Kosambi writes that in nineteenth-century India, the East-West “interaction was inevitable, though neither voluntary nor friendly; and its parameters had changed considerably over time.” In Maharashtra (as in the larger subcontinent and in other parts of the globe), the reaction to the intrusion of European ideas “spanned the entire spectrum from hostility and resistance to admiration and emulation”. Still, when Kosambi was writing this circa 1994, not much was known about how women responded to the intellectual assault of colonialism. By a fantastic stroke of luck, there were in Maharashtra these three well-known women whose responses to Western influence had not only been preserved in the historical record, but were also so different from each other that they reaffirmed major lessons of humanities scholarship: that people and their attitudes are complex, and that there is no single way of defining a nation or a culture or (the hopelessly misused term) “civilization”.
In other words, even though it’s now trendy to denigrate major ideas from the humanities as “woke”, there is no escaping the fact that humans and human societies are fundamentally diverse and complex, notwithstanding the aggressive urge of some to control and homogenize them. “It is an interesting coincidence,” writes Kosambi, “that the individual stances adopted by them [Rama-bai, Rakhma-bai, and Anandi-bai] on the major issues of social change and reform — namely, education, change in marriage customs, and religious conversion — were quite diverse and covered all the logically possible combinations.”
To me, the essay’s overarching plotline — three women from 1890s India going to the US and UK and coming back with very different perspectives on what Indians should take from them and what not — is the real deal, the fascinating stuff that history and historical writing are made of. Early on, Kosambi lays out the women’s personal contexts: “The upper stratum to which the three women under consideration belonged was far from being monolithic. Although the full complexity of their diverse backgrounds within this stratum cannot be analysed at length here, the major differences need to be identified. Anandi-bai typified orthodox Brahmin womanhood; Pandita Rama-bai was exposed to several orthodox Brahmin influences but not to the full force of a well-knit Brahmin community with its own pressures and compulsions, and therefore enjoyed a far more individualistic space; Rakhma-bai had the benefit of a more liberal non-Brahmin but upper class atmosphere of Bombay.” [Let me note here that while I’ve put this within quotation marks, Kosambi does not use hyphens before bai.]
Kosambi argues that among the three, Rakhma-bai had the “most liberal perspective on colonial rule, stressing its benign and enlightened aspects”, while Anandi-bai displayed “a transparent antipathy to British colonial rule, matched by a firm nationalism, although she conceded that British education was essential and beneficial to women”. On Pandita Rama-bai, here’s what Kosambi — who over time became the foremost authority on Rama-bai — had to say:
“The best-recorded and most complex reaction is that of Pandita Rama-bai, because of her unique situation. Accidents of history and her own choices placed her at the intersection of several axes. On the axis of Indian social orthodoxy and reform, she occupied the unenviable position of a high caste Hindu widow who had been married to a low caste man of a different regional community [Bengal]. On the axis of orthodox Hinduism and religious reform, she was a Brahmin converted to Christianity… On the axis of Church hierarchy and Christianity, she was a strongly individualistic non-denominational Christian. But, on the axis of nationalism and pro-colonialism, she was a staunch nationalist.”
Of course even Rakhma-bai and Anandi-bai’s attitudes were complex, as we learn throughout the essay. Kosambi mentions that for Rakhma-bai, she could only find a few primary sources: namely two letters to the editor published in The Times of India. That makes it difficult for us to know the nuances and complexities of her ideas. Anandi-bai tragically died early, and hence we know of her beliefs and attitudes only as a very young person who did not even live beyond 23 years of age.
An astonishing co-incidence — one that makes the combined stories of these 1890s women so cinema-worthy — is that all three crossed paths with each other.
“Rama-bai’s first contact with Anandi-bai was in Calcutta when the latter invited the recently widowed Rama-bai to stay with her, though the offer was declined. Their next meeting was in 1886 when Rama-bai attended Anandi-bai’s graduation in Philadelphia as her ’kinswoman’, though the nature of their blood relationship is unknown. [By the way, some sources and Wikipedia now mention that they were cousins, but without further elaboration.] That Anandi-bai took a keen interest in Rama-bai’s career, and was perplexed by her conversion [to Christianity] but not intolerant of it, is clear from her letters. For Rakhma-bai, the Pandita was a source of considerable moral support during the entire ordeal of her prolonged court trial, as shown by the available fragments of their correspondence during this time.”
So what were these women’s attitudes toward British colonialism and toward “Western” ideas? Kosambi’s essay includes some telling quotes and an excellent analysis. She classified their attitudes under three major themes: education for women, change in marriage-related customs (especially child marriage), and religious conversion. To summarize:
“On the need for education, all three women were in close agreement, and they all demanded [Western] professional (more specifically, medical) education for women. However, after this point, their ideas diverged. Anandi-bai stopped short of institutional social change, while both Rakhma-bai and Rama-bai were vocal and even militant in advocating such change. Again, Rakhma-bai’s radicalism did not stretch as far as religious change; in fact she took no public position on the matter of the relative merits of different religions (while Anandi-bai was a practising Hindu, but tolerant of other religions). It was only Rama-bai who went to the extreme of religious conversion… Rama-bai’s book, The High Caste Hindu Woman, is a heavily caustic indictment of Hindu society and its relegation of women to social inferiority. She argues that the stigma of undesirability attaches to a girl from the moment of her birth — an event which is tolerated only because ‘it is necessary for the continuance of the race that some girls should be born into the world’.”
A whole spectrum of diverse attitudes indeed.
In the years after this article, Meera Kosambi would go on to dive deeper into the ideas, beliefs, and lives of Rama-bai and Anandi-bai, and would pen definitive biographies of them: Pandita Ramabai: Life and Landmark Writings, and A Fragmented Feminism: The Life and Letters of Anandibai Joshee.
Here’s the full text of Kosambi’s 1994 essay.
Here’s Rama-bai’s famous book The High Caste Hindu Woman, which was a “heavily caustic indictment of Hindu society and its relegation of women to social inferiority.” The Introduction to this book was written by Rachel Bodley, Dean of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where Anandi-bai went for medical studies.
Here’s the very first biography (1888) of Joshi, written by the American writer Caroline Dall who knew her from her Philadelphia days: The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee, a Kinswoman of the Pundita Ramabai.
Thanks very much. Of them, I knew only Rama-bai and Anandi-bai and the latter only in broad strokes.