Pandita Ramabai's America: Conditions of Life in the United States.

Young, Richard Fox

Pandita Ramabai's America: Conditions of Life in the United States.

Edited, with a biographical introduction, by Robert Eric Frykenberg; translated by Kshitija Gomes; Philip C. Engblom, translation editor. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. xxii, 322. $49.

Happily, the author of this extraordinary memoir, Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), a Christian Brahman reviled for her apostasy and rebuked for her protofeminist activism, is again receiving attention after years of undeserved obscurity. Disenchanted with Hinduism, which condemned her for being a widow, Ramabai undertook a journey that few Indians had attempted--to England and then America to study early childhood education. Ramabai's observations, originally published in Marathi, vividly portray a society she calls the "Nether World," which indeed is what America was in the imagination of her stay-at-home compatriots.

There's delicious irony here. "Nether World" translates back into Marathi as patalaloka, that is, "hell," the abode of the damned; Ramabai, after all, had to hold an audience that had been inured against the possibility of barbarous folk being models for anything but moral chaos. Being on the edges of cultures far beyond their Indocentric world, Ramabai had a vantage point for cross-cultural criticism that would have made her home-bound readers wonder who inhabited the more infernal region. It would be groundless, however, to suspect that America overawed Ramabai. "[Americans] have developed a veritable habit, when it comes to describing everything belonging to their country, of comparing it with everything belonging to other countries--and then of saying that they and theirs are always best" (p. 126). In times like ours, Ramabai sounds uncomfortably contemporaneous.

In 2003, the year this volume was published, a second translation appeared: Meera Kosambi's Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press). The volume under review has no index; Kosambi's does. While Robert Frykenberg's introduction rides his favorite historiographical hobbyhorses a bit hard, Kosambi has hers too. Her translation is tepid; theirs is lively: compare Gomes-Engblom on Ramabai's first American winter ("Ha ha ha! Hoo hoo hoo! Oo! Hoo!" p. 157) with Kosambi ("Brr! Brr!" p. 125). The difference makes theirs the better choice.

Richard Fox Young is Timby Associate Professor of the History of Religions at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey.