Pandita Ramabai and the Famine Roads of Maharashtra

Pandita Ramabai was born into a high-caste Brahmin family in India in 1858 and became one of the most learned women in the country, earning the rare title "Pandita" — scholar. She could have lived comfortably among the intellectual elite. Instead, after coming to faith in Christ, she founded the Sharada Sadan in Pune to educate child widows, girls as young as nine who had been cast out by society after their husbands died.

When famine devastated western India in 1896, Ramabai did not simply pray from a distance. She loaded bullock carts and traveled into the drought-ravaged countryside of Maharashtra, gathering starving girls from roadsides and government relief camps where thousands were dying. She brought back hundreds. By 1900, her Mukti Mission sheltered nearly two thousand women and children. She taught them trades, fed them daily, and gave them back their names.

This is Isaiah 58 with skin on it. God told Israel their fasting was hollow. They bowed their heads like reeds but ignored the hungry at their gates. "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen," the Lord asked, "to loose the chains of injustice, to share your food with the hungry and provide the poor wanderer with shelter?"

Ramabai understood that true worship walks out the front door and onto the famine roads. And the promise of Isaiah 58 followed her — her light broke forth like the dawn, and the ruins around her were rebuilt.