Ramabai Ranade

Founder

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Ramabai Ranade is the founder of Pune Sevasadan Society (1909)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, education and disability from Pune.

Ramabai Ranade (25 January 1862 - 25 January 1924) was an Indian social worker and one of the earliest campaigners for women's rights in India. She founded the Seva Sadan society at Pune on 2 October 1909, now the Pune Sevasadan Society, for the education and rehabilitation of women in distress.

Born into a society in which girls were not schooled, she learned to read and write after her marriage and went on to build institutions that trained thousands of women as teachers, nurses and clerks.

Early life and education

She was born Yamuna Kurlekar on 25 January 1862 in a village in what is now Maharashtra, and received no formal schooling as a child. At the age of eleven she was married to Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge and social reformer some twenty years her senior, and took the name Ramabai.

Her husband taught her to read and write Marathi and then English, along with history, mathematics and geography, in the face of opposition from within the household.

Career

In 1884 Ramabai and her husband helped establish the Huzurpaga girls' high school in Pune, among the earliest girls' high schools in India. She also founded the Hindu Ladies' Social Club in Bombay to train women in public speaking and organisation.

After her husband's death in 1901 she moved to Pune and devoted herself to work among women. On 2 October 1909 she founded Seva Sadan at her own residence, for the rehabilitation of widows, deserted wives and other women in distress. Gopal Krishna Devadhar served as its first honorary secretary. The society provided accommodation, general education, and training in nursing and other vocations at a time when nursing was regarded as an unsuitable occupation for Indian women.

By 1924 the Pune branch had trained more than a thousand women across its departments. The Pune Sevasadan Society today runs schools, a junior college, teacher training courses, a girls' hostel and facilities for children with intellectual disabilities across nine branches.

Ramabai published an autobiography and edited a collection of her husband's lectures. She died on her sixty-second birthday, 25 January 1924.

Recognition

Mahatma Gandhi described her as the embodiment of what a Hindu widow could be, and wrote that she had made Seva Sadan an institution without a second of its kind in India.[2][3][4]

Pune Sevasadan Society

Established on 2 October 1909 at Ranade Wada by Ramabai Ranade, pioneer of India's modern women's movement, with Gopal Krishna Devadhar, Pune Sevasadan Society began by training and sheltering distressed women — running nursing courses, hostels and schools that by 1924 spanned twelve hostels in and around Pune and branches across the old Bombay Presidency. More than a century on, the society continues from Laxmi Road with a girls' high school, a co-ed English-medium school, a working women's hostel, the Dilasa Kendra special school and Dilasa Karyashala workshop for intellectually disabled children and adults, an institute of foreign languages and a Solapur branch.

Pune Sevasadan Society reports the following, on its own site: