Pandita Ramabai and the Famine Children of Pune

In 1896, famine swept across western India, leaving thousands of child widows and orphans starving along the roads of Maharashtra. Pandita Ramabai, a Sanskrit scholar and Christian convert, had already opened her Mukti Mission near Pune to rescue young widows from lives of abuse. But when the famine struck, she did not retreat behind the walls of respectable charity. She loaded bullock carts and traveled into the drought-stricken villages herself, gathering skeletal children whom no one else would claim.…