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

Introduction: Returning the American Gaze: Situating Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter

Introduction Returning the American Gaze Situating Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter by meera kosambi The annual commencement of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania ,1 celebrated with customary splendor in March 1886, had a wider resonance than usual. It was to serve as a crucible in which international women’s history was made. By pioneering women’s medical education in the world the college had done Philadelphia proud; and the city’s educated elite now responded by thronging to the event. They “stood against the wall . . . , ¤lled every aisle and doorway and sat on the steps,”while the students ¤lled the front rows, the faculty the stage, “and a mass of ®owers in baskets, bouquets and different designs covered the footlights three deep” (Philadelphia Press, 12 March 1886). The college’s wide outreach had attracted students from all over North America and even from across the seas.2 This discursive intersection of feminism and internationalism was most visibly—and exotically—symbolized by Anandibai Joshee, who had sought in the USA the medical education still denied to women in India, vowing to qualify herself to meet “the growing need for Hindu lady doctors in India” (Dall 1888: 84). Stepping on the stage for her degree, “little Mrs. Joshee, the Indian lady, who graduated with high honors in her class, received quite an ovation. Her native costume, a graceful robe of white linen bordered with gold, was in pronounced contrast against the background of sombre-robed ladies and black-garmented men on the stage” (Philadelphia Press, 12 March 1886). That Anandibai became India’s ¤rst woman doctor further reinforced the college’s existing Indian connection and its pioneer credentials: the earliest Western women physicians to expand India’s medical ¤eld were Americans, led by a WMCP graduate.3 Building on these international linkages the college dean, Dr. Rachel Bodley, had invited Pandita Ramabai—a reputed champion of Indian women’s education and distantly related to Anandibai—to be a guest on the occasion. Ramabai, a Brahmin widow and Sanskrit scholar, was then a teacher-pupil at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College in England, and had recently converted to Christianity. Her fame had preceded her arrival in Philadelphia thanks to Dr. Bodley’s judicious advance publicity (New York Times, 7 March 1886), and her visibility was further heightened by her public lecture the day after the commencement. Under the rubric “A Hindoo Widow Talks to American Women—A Unique and Striking Scene,” the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin gave a glowing account of this “Hindoo [i.e., Indian] woman of high caste, her slight ¤gure wrapped in the white robe of Indian widowhood, out of which looked a face of most picturesque beauty and expression”; and of the unwritten address she delivered in ®uent, idiomatic English: Standing in an easy attitude, with her hands clasped upon the desk before her, and speaking with a voice of the most musical sweetness and distinctness, and with the unembarrassed manner of a genuine simplicity, she told the story of Hindoo womanhood to her American audience in a fashion that won all hearts and rivetted all attention. . . . [She proved] herself a woman who would be remarkable under any nativity. . . . And when the earnest little lady suddenly closed her address by asking an American company of educated and re¤ned men and women to join with her in a moment’s silent prayer “to the Great Father of all the nations of the earth” in [sic] behalf of the millions of her Hindoo sisters to whose cause she has given her life, there was something almost startling in the strangeness of the unique situation. (Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 13 March 1886) In its coverage the paper succinctly captured the warm and richly complex American response to Pandita Ramabai, whose potentially alienating “Indianness ” and “Hinduness” had been signi¤cantly mediated by her multicultural persona and Christian faith. The English-educated and Christian Ramabai was similar enough to be “one of us,” while her Sanskrit learning and her Brahmin mystique, dress, and diet made her an exotic “other.” She was perceived to have transcended the fate of the highly troped “oppressed Hindu widow,”and to have arrogated to herself championship of other widows; to be enlightened enough to have acquired a secular English education in England, and capable enough to impress America’s educated elite; to have traversed the globe, straddled cultures and religions, and to now have come to envelop...