Abstract
“How many storms are our scattered boats required to face in this endless Ocean of Life,” a young Indian widow mused with audible exhaustion. It was not cold abstraction that had lent these lines their poetry but the equally chilling, even life-threatening experience of an oceanic storm in the cruel winter of early 1886. After half a week in her cabin of The British Princess, the air became “too stale to breathe.” Desperate, the passenger “resolved to go up on the deck” where, in spite of “the vast and dreadful aspect” of the roaring sea, “the fresh ocean air infused new life force […] my heart surged with energy, joy, and peace.” Applying “the lesson […] from this natural phenomenon,” she called on her readers: “Confront your foes and adversities, such as despair,” closing with the Sanskrit promise: “You will become fearless like a liberated soul.”1
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Notes
Meera Kosambi, ed., Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003, pp. 56–7.
On the Devil’s Pot, see the eponymous poem inspired by sailors’ tales and songs: Charles Godfrey Leland, Songs of the Sea and Lays of the Land. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1895, pp. 21–3.
Clementina Butler, Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati: Pioneer in the Movement for the Education of the Child-Widow of India. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1922, p. 18.
Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Ramabai to Sister Geraldine, May 8, 1885, in A.B. Shah, ed., The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai. Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture, 1977, p. 50.
Pandita Ramabai to Caroline Healey Dall, January 16, 1888, in Caroline Healey Dall, The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee: A Kinswoman of the Pundita Ramabai. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1888), pp. vi–vii.
Kahisbai Kanitkar, Pa. Va. Sau. Dr. Anandibai Joshee Yanche Charitra va Patre [The Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anandibai Joshee]. Mumbai: Manoranjak Granthaprasarak Mandali, 1912, p. 220.
Darlene Clark Hine, “The Corporeal and Ocular Veil: Dr. Matilda A. Evans (1872–1935) and the Complexity of Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 70 (2004): 3–34.
Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, “Forty Years of Medical Progress: Reminiscences and Comparisons,” Seventy-fifth Anniversary Volume of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA: The College, 1925.
Steven Jay Peitzman, A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850–1998. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 66, 273, n. 28.
Ronald L. Stuckey, “Rachel Littler Bodley (1831–1888),” in Louise G. Grinstein et al., eds, Women in the Biological Sciences: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 37–43.
See Kanitkar’s autobiographical notes to her work on Joshee in Meera Kosambi, trans., ed., Feminist Vision or “Treason against Men”? Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008, p. 60.
Pandita Ramabai, United Stateschi Lokasthiti ani Pravasavritta. Bombay: Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1889; repr. Bombay: Maharashtra State Board for Literature and Culture, 1996;
Frances Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman. Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publication Association, 1889, pp. 557–9;
Meera Kosambi, ed., Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter: The Peoples of the United States. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Helen S. Dyer, Pandita Ramabai: The Story of her Life. London: Morgan and Scott [1900]), pp. 19–22.
On liberal counters by Indian intellectuals to their British rivals: Christopher Alan Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 188–213.
See the oral history evidence in D. Betty Govinden, “Spelling out the Fragments of a Broken Geography: Claiming Pandita Ramabai in an Indian Diasporic Location in the Early 20th Century,” in Roger E. Hedlund et al., eds, Indian and Christian: The Life and Legacy of Pandita Ramabai. Chennai: Mylapore Institute for Indigenous Studies, 2011, pp. 96–126.
Pandita Ramabai, The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Philadelphia, PA: Press of the Jas. B. Rodgers Printing Co., 1887.
Friedrich Max Müller, My Indian Friends (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), pp. 129–34.
On Tsuda, Linda L. Johnson, “Tsuda Umeko und Meiji Cultural Nationalism Discourse,” in: Roy Starrs, ed., Japanese Cultural Nationalism: At Home and in the Asia Pacific. Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2004, pp. 46–60.
Alice Mabel Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women. Cambridge: The Riverside Press/Houghton, 1891;
Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s Education in Japan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 82, 84.
Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule. New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 272, n. 7;
Raden Adjeng Kartini, Letters of a Javanese Princess. New York: Norton, 1964, pp. 177–8.
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Rimner, S. (2015). Beyond the Call of Duty: Cosmopolitan Education and the Origins of Asian-American Women’s Medicine. In: Johnson, R.D. (eds) Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455383_22
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