Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers 'an unofficial Indian feminist manifesto', was published in the United States in 1887. The silence of a thousand years is broken, exulted Dr Rachel Bodley in her Introduction to Pandita Ramabai's The High-Caste Hindu Woman, a cogent account of the constricted and oppressed lives of upper-caste Indian women, which was appended with a proposal for their emancipation. Ramabai's biographies seem to be aligned primarily along a religious meridian, most of the English ones and some Marathi ones are by Christian authors engaged in an almost hagiographical project of portraying her life as a triumph of Christianity. Some recent scholarly analyses of Ramabai's contribution tend to focus on a short and relatively static period of her life and see her only as an unwavering feminist or Christian, without tracing her ideological evolutions.