Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States (1889) (review)

In Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery in New York State, lot 216-A stands out. Between the Carpenter and Eighmie families of Duchess County one will find a relatively simple gravestone with the following inscription: “Anandabai Joshee M. D., 1865–1887, First Brahmin Woman to Leave INDIA to obtain an Education.” Joshi, who had come to the US at the age of 17, went to Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia where she attained her M. D. at the tender age of twenty-one. Joshi went to India, but died tragically of tuberculosis the following year. Her family followed her request that her remains be sent to the US for burial.

At her graduation in 1886, the dean of the Women’s College invited Anandabai’s distant relation, Pandita Ramabai to Philadelphia to attend the graduation and to give a lecture on the status of Indian women. Ramabai had earned renown as a scholar, a writer, a champion of women’s education and a recent convert to Christianity. After her lecture in Philadelphia, Ramabai toured the US for almost three years, moving from one end of the country to the other, promoting her famous book The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887). The book uncovered the routine oppressions faced by the high-caste Hindu woman, some of its sanctioned by the holy books and translated into everyday life. The book had an enormous impact on certain sections of the US, and in December of the year of its publication, a group of people in Boston created a Ramabai Association. The Association planned to raise consciousness of the condition of the high-caste Hindu woman and raise money to set up a school for them in India. The “Ramabai Phenomenon” swept the country, and soon sixty-three “circles” had been established in diverse places. In a year, the Association raised $16,000, and more would come in time.

While she traveled the US and met a range of people, Ramabai began to fashion a narrative of her journey. Upon her return to India, she published her reflections of the United States in Marathi. The book, thanks to the substantial labors of Meera Kosambi, now comes to us in English, over a century later. Written for an audience with little knowledge of the United States, Ramabai offers a comprehensive summary of life in the United States in the manner of Tocqueville - her interest is not only in the United States, but also in what a discussion of equality in the United States could show about inequality elsewhere. “The throne of the Goddess of Liberty, and the home of knowledge and progress,” she writes glowingly, “is the United States. It is no wonder that the sight of this land also fills the heart of a proud but enslaved person with joy, allows him to forget his sorry state for a brief while and be immersed in the heavenly happiness of freedom; and makes him earnestly wish that all the people in all the countries of the world would acquire such a system of government, such liberty, equality and fraternity.”

The “United States of America” for Ramabai offers a useful heuristic device to unfavorably compare Britain and the British Raj in India. Ramabai acknowledges across her text that the US has a history of enslavement against both African and Native Americans, that there has been a struggle for justice, which is as yet incomplete. But her critique is often contradicted by her deep desire to produce the “USA” as a model: on page 114 she says that “racial discrimination and prejudice, which are most inimical to all progress and civility, are not altogether absent in this country,” and then on page 115 she notes, “Not a single right which is available to the White citizen of the United States is now denied to the Black; and there are favorable signs that the obstacles to social intercourse between the Black and White people...