- Lived:
- 23 April 1858, in a forest clearing at Gangamula in the Western Ghats above Mangalore → on foot across the length of India → Calcutta (Kolkata) → Pune → England and America → the mission-town she built at Kedgaon, near Pune, where she died on 5 April 1922
- Field:
- Sanskrit scholarship and social reform — the first woman to be titled Paṇḍitā by the pandits of Calcutta, and the builder of Mukti, a self-sufficient refuge for widows and famine orphans
- The Big Idea:
- The learning locked away from Indian women could be won by a woman, turned into evidence, and converted — through a book, a foreign funding machine and a farm — into an institution that fed, schooled and employed the very widows the śāstras had discarded.
- In their words:
- "In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the educated men of this country are opposed to female education and the proper position of women." — her evidence to the Hunter Education Commission, 1882
- If you remember one thing:
- A famine orphan who had memorized eighteen thousand Sanskrit verses out-argued Calcutta's pandits at twenty, told a royal commission the truth at twenty-four, and then — having converted to a Christianity she refused to let bishops define — taught herself Hebrew and Greek and translated the entire Bible into Marathi, finishing as the proofs came off a press worked by women she had carted out of famine.