who established the sharda sadan? what social reforms did she advocate?
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Answer:
On 11 March 1889 the Indian activist known as Pandita Ramabai opened her Sharada Sadan (or Home for Learning) in Chowpatty, an area of Mumbai (which was then, under the British Raj, known as Bombay). She designed this institution to further a cause dear to her heart: security and an education for Hindu women who were widowed young. With this, after spending five years abroad in England and the USA, Pandita Ramabai launched her mission to improve the lives and opportunities of Indian women.
She was born as Ramabai Dongre, a high-caste Brahmin. While she was still very young her family fell into poverty and took to the roads as religious vagrants, travelling the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent and learning many of its languages. When she was sixteen both of her parents died of starvation, closely followed by her sister. Only she and her brother were left. Despite these horrors, her taste for reading enabled her at the age of twenty to become the first woman in India to earn the titles of pandita (the feminine of pundit, or Sanskrit scholar) and sarasvati, after examination by the faculty of the University of Calcutta. She then married a Shudra, a man of a labouring caste who were debarred from education.
Such a marriage would have been impossible before the Civil Marriage Act of 1872. Put together with Ramabai’s scholarly achievement it represents a remarkable commitment to the questioning of tradition, The marriage seems to have been happy, but it was brief. Ramabai’s husband died less than two years afterwards, leaving her with a daughter. In the first year of her widowhood she did three highly significant things. She founded the Arya Mahila Samaj, a society of high-caste Hindu women working for the education of girls and against child marriage. She published her first book, Morals for Women, or in the original Marathi Stri Dharma Niti. And she testified before the Hunter Commission on Education in India, an enquiry set up by the British government. (Her testimony, which was later printed, is said to have influenced the thinking of Queen Victoria.)