The Scholar Who Found Living Water at Mukti

In 1878, Pandita Ramabai stood before the scholars of Calcutta — the first woman in India to earn the title "Pandita," a Sanskrit scholar of the highest order. She had memorized eighteen thousand verses of Hindu scripture. Yet for all her learning, Ramabai carried an unquenchable thirst.

Her parents had starved to death during a famine. Her husband died just nineteen months after their wedding, leaving her a twenty-three-year-old widow with an infant daughter. In Hindu society, a young widow was considered cursed — shunned, stripped of dignity, invisible.

Ramabai searched everywhere for water that would satisfy. She studied reform movements, traveled to England, lectured across America. Nothing filled the well inside her. Then, in a small Anglican community in Wantage, England, she encountered Jesus Christ — and everything changed.

She returned to India and founded the Mukti Mission near Pune, where she rescued thousands of child widows, temple prostitutes, and famine orphans — the very women her society had discarded. Mukti means liberation. Ramabai had found the living water Jesus promised the Samaritan woman, and she could not stop sharing it.

Like that woman at Jacob's well, Ramabai had searched in all the wrong cisterns. And like her, once she tasted the water that truly satisfies, she left her old vessels behind and ran to bring others to the Source.