The Mukti Revival of 1905

In January, Abrams wrote, Ramabai spoke to the girls of the need of a revival and called for volunteers. Seventy came forward, and 550 were meeting twice daily when it began. Thirty young women of the Bible school were praying then for power to go to the villages.

By her first print Abrams was called at half past three in the morning of 28 June. The matron and an old girl said “Come over and rejoice with us”. She found all the girls of that compound on their knees, weeping and confessing. Dyer gives 29 June and adds a senior girl who ran for a pail of water because she thought another girl was on fire.

Abrams came into the room after the outbreak of 30 June had begun. Dyer writes that children and young women “wept bitterly and confessed their sins”. She adds that some few saw visions and that two little girls prayed for hours. Lessons were suspended, and the Bible room became an inquiry room.

An unnamed worker wrote that “Waves of prayer go over the meetings, like the rolling thunder”. Ramabai wrote that “Some have laughed at us, for we have become fools,” and that the girls cried, laughed, shook, trembled and danced. On 5 July a senior girl, lately converted, fell ill in class and died within the hour, and Dyer gives no cause.

Ramabai at first refused to let the Rev. R. J. Ward of Coonoor publish an account, and then accounts went to the Bombay Guardian. She took a band to Poona, and in September Abrams went with eleven girls to Telegaon. On 7 November Ramabai closed the school for ten days of prayer, when misappropriated things were given back.

About sixty went out to the villages daily by turns, by Ramabai's letter, and Dyer's later life says about fifty. The Missionary Review reported the next July that the bands were interceding for more than 29,000 people by name.

Ramabai was baptized in the Church of England at Wantage in September 1883. She opened the Sharada Sadan in Bombay in March 1889, with money from an association at Boston. Clementina Butler says the school was to be non-sectarian, “which the Hindus took to mean non-Christian”.

In August 1893 Ranade, Bhandarkar and others of her Advisory Committee resigned. They wrote that “If the Sadan is to be conducted as an avowed proselytising institution we must disavow all connection with it”. Twenty of fifty-three girls attended her Scripture class shortly before the resignations, by Macnicol's figure. She answered in America in 1898 that the Bible and the Vedas stood together on the shelves. She would not, she said, shut her door at prayer.

In the famine she brought three hundred girls and women from the Central Provinces, and plague in Poona moved them out to land near Kedgaon. She gave up taking only high-caste girls there. Her daughter Manoramabai wrote that “Every death that occurred in the school was thought by them to have been caused by the devil”.

Soonderbai Powar's “bands of their tongues loosed,” at her school in Poona, means shy girls praying aloud. An unsigned report in The Apostolic Faith, the movement's paper, which Gary McGee gives to Max Wood Moorhead, says that Ramabai and Abrams were moved by the news from Los Angeles. It says that seekers assembled at Mukti before Christmas of that year.

Albert Norton, a neighbouring missionary, wrote the next March that a week earlier he had heard a Marathi woman pray in English she could not otherwise speak. The next weekend, he says, 24 persons received tongues. None of those at Kedgaon, he says, understood the other languages.

Ramabai wrote that she was not surprised and that she sat apart so as not to stumble the girls. She added that some “were simply groaning”. Macnicol reports that she once uttered some sentences in Hebrew alone, while Edith Blumhofer says she did not speak in tongues.