Baptising Pandita Ramabai
Faith and religiosity in the nineteenth-century social reform movements of colonial India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8960901 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati (0000-0003-4506-4916, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, corresponding author), Prithvi Sinha (0000-0002-0667-7974, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University), Sneha Garg (Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 393-424 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-29 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00194646211020307 |
| OpenAlex | W3175787090 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 29 |
This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai’s reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity—a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity—provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fall-out with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy’s oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women’s movement
Christianity · Colonialism · Faith · Hinduism · Orthodoxy · Piety · Political science · Politics · Religiosity · Religious identity · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies
Holy Humanitarians
Nationalism and the Visibility of Women in Public Space
CHAPTER Four Silencing Heresy
Wicked Widows
Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words. Selected Works
Translation and the Christian Conversion of Women in Colonial India
Making “ideal” Indian women
Frances Willard
Tracing the voice
The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850-1920
American Piety
Multiple contestations
Feminist Inheritances and Foremothers
The Construction of Hinduism in America
Returning the American Gaze
Colonial Encounters in Late-Victorian England
The Indian Women's Movement
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2025 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |