How a feminist flipped the colonial travelogue on its head
4/29/202654 min
In the 19th-century Pandita Ramabai travelled America delivering lectures on how the caste system and patriarchy shaped the trajectory of women’s lives. When she came back to her home India, the feminist explained America's customs around gender and race relations, and their experiment with democracy. IDEAS explores her rich life and legacy. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 10, 2025.
Guests in this episode:
Radha Vatsal is the author of No. 10 Doyers Street (March 2025), as well as the author of the Kitty Weeks mystery novels. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she earned her Ph.D. in Film History from Duke University and has worked as a film curator, political speechwriter, and freelance journalist.
Tarini Bhamburkar is a research affiliate at the University of Bristol. Her research explores cross-racial networks and international connections built by British and Indian women's feminist periodical press between 1880 and 1910, which sowed the seeds of the transnational Suffrage movement of the early 20th century.
Sandeep Banerjee is an associate professor of English at McGill University and a scholar of Global Anglophone and World literature, with a focus on the literary and cultural worlds of colonial and postcolonial South Asia.
Readings by Aparita Bhandari and Pete Morey.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPauline Holdsworth0:00
Who's your favorite writer of all time? And if you could sit down and have dinner with them, what would you ask? It might be tough to get a dinner date, but I can try to give you the next best thing. I'm Mattea Roach. On my podcast, Bookends, I sit down for honest conversations with some of today's literary stars, people like Zadie Smith, Ken Follett, RF Kuang, and Louise Penny. Whether you love books or just want a new perspective on your every day, check out Bookends with Mattea Roach wherever you get your podcasts.
Sandeep Banerjee· Guest0:31
[upbeat music] This is a CBC podcast.
Nahlah Ayed· Host0:35
[dramatic music] Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nahlah Ayed. March 3rd, 1886, 28-year-old Pandita Ramabai looked up from the deck of the British Princess, the ship carrying her from Liverpool to Philadelphia. They had just sailed through a storm.
Speaker 31:01
When the storm had abated, we got to see a great many flying fish soaring over the waves. Around 4:30 in the evening, we got our first glimpse of land, the North American continent of the Western Hemisphere, which in 1492, Christopher Columbus, thinking he had circumnavigated the Earth, concluded to be Hindustan.
Nahlah Ayed· Host1:23
Pandita Ramabai was born in India in 1858. Now she