The Open Gates of Mukti

During the devastating Indian famine of 1896, Pandita Ramabai — a Sanskrit scholar turned Christian — threw open the gates of her mission compound in Kedgaon, India. She sent ox carts into the countryside to gather starving widows and abandoned girls whom no one else would touch. They arrived skeletal, dressed in rags, many too weak to walk. Ramabai asked nothing of them — no caste credentials, no payment, no religious test.…