ABSTRACT
Pandita Ramabai's critique of Hindu patriarchal systems and her focus on educating upper-caste child widows was transformed during the late 1890s and the first years of the twentieth century, when India suffered a series of devastating famines. Although male social reformers had been addressing the patriarchal oppression of Indian women in the wake of colonialist and British feminist critiques over the course of the nineteenth century, Ramabai's public visibility as a Hindu woman and then as a converted Indian Christian was unique. Her two English essays, Famine Experiences and To the Friends of Mukti School and Mission, in addition to various letters and autobiographical pieces, are remarkable and important documents, for the gender famine discourse in late nineteenth-century India. These essay's also draw a connection between the Contagious Diseases Act, instituted in India in 1868 and amended after 1888, and the trafficking in women during famine periods.
