Ramabai was born in Mangalore, India, on April 23, 1858, the daughter of a Brahmin who, against the custom of his time, taught Sanskrit to his daughters. While still young, she traveled to places of pilgrimage reciting sacred texts and witnessed firsthand the suffering imposed on widows and girls in her culture.
At twenty, in 1878, she was recognized by the University of Calcutta with the titles of pandita and sarasvati, a rare achievement for a woman at that time. She married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a lawyer from a different caste, in 1880, but was widowed already in 1882, when cholera took his life, leaving her alone with their newborn daughter, Manorama.
In 1883, during a stay in England, Ramabai was baptized by the Anglican community of Wantage. Her faith, however, did not come fully formed: for years she questioned doctrines such as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, drawing close for a time to Unitarian ideas, until she experienced a more evangelical conversion in 1891.
Back in India in 1889, she opened the Sharada Sadan, a home and school for widows rejected by their families, first in Bombay and later moved to Pune. When several students converted to Christianity, she lost the support of the reformist Hindu circles that had previously backed her.
During the famine that struck Maharashtra in 1896, Ramabai traveled through villages rescuing thousands of children, widows, and abandoned women, bringing them into shelter. This work gave rise, in 1898, to the Mukti Mission, established in the village of Kedgaon. The method, however, was not free of criticism: Indian nationalist leaders of the time, such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, accused Ramabai of taking advantage of the vulnerability of starving orphans and widows to convert them to Christianity, a debate historians still discuss today when assessing her work.
In 1905, a period of intense prayer among the women of Mukti resulted in a revival marked by confession, tears, and reports of spiritual gifts, studied today as one of the earliest centers of Pentecostalism outside the West, alongside the Azusa Street Revival in the United States. The episode also sparked controversy among observers of the time, who disagreed about the nature of the phenomena experienced by the residents.
Knowing Hebrew, Greek, and other languages, Ramabai spent about eighteen years, beginning in 1904, translating the entire Bible into Marathi, avoiding the Sanskrit vocabulary that sounded distant to the poor, low caste women who had always been her intended audience.
She lost her daughter Manorama in 1921 and died in Kedgaon on April 5, 1922, days after completing the final revision of her translation. She left behind a legacy of accessible Scripture translation and of caring for the most vulnerable women of India.