Abstract

Pandita Ramabai provides an instructively complex example for a transcultural biography, a life extending over different and distant cultural spaces, times and practices. After travelling around India, from south to north, east to west, in the function of an itinerary religious story reciter, she went and lived in England, spent two years in America, returned and settled in India. In the process of living across countries, Ramabai converted to Christianity, yet her autobiography documents that her conversion was socially not livable and conceptually problematic in the entangled history of India and Europe. Her own words reveal the traces of her self-imposed or historically determined silences or criticisms. For the research it leads to insights into religious and political challenges of her historical set up and allows for conceptual inquiries into transcultural conversion.