In a Different Voice: Pandita Ramabai’s Gendered Critique as Intellectual Biography

This paper explores the life and work of Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), a reformer who strongly resisted Brahmanical epistemology and patriarchal ideologies in late nineteenth–early twentieth-century India, using the theoretical perspective of intellectual biography and focusing on the ideational aspects of Ramabai’s life and work in late nineteenth-century colonial India. The paper utilises her auto/biographical accounts and social critiques and analyses them in the context of burgeoning contemporary nineteenth-century discourses on the condition of women and their emancipation, with particular reference to high-caste Hindu women. I argue that Ramabai’s narrativizing of her life approximates to “autobiography as manifesto” (Smith). Her scathing social critique of Brahmanical patriarchies articulated in The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887) and her slim autobiography My Testimony (1907) present a rational justification for her conversion and for her work to rehabilitate widows, both of which elicited criticism and censure.