Rama’s Labyrinth
Sandra Wagner-Wright’s big, totally absorbing novel Rama’s Labyrinth tells in fictional terms the life of Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati Dongre Medhavi’s remarkable life and times, from her unconventional childhood, during which her doting father made the unconventional decision to train her as a scholar and deep thinker. We follow her through the early years of her marriage, during which she loses her husband and finds herself a single mother.
A Reverend introduces her to Christianity, and she converts and begins missionary work in India, opening the Sharada Sadan in Bombay and later branching out to Pune. All the subsequent passions and complications of Rama’s missionary and spiritual life are played confidently and evocatively in five-hundred pages of atmospheric prose, a thoroughly convincing dramatic take on a strand of Indian history rarely touched on in fiction.
Wagner-Wright’s host of supporting characters are very well-drawn, Rama herself is a thoroughly commanding presence, and the novel as a whole is an immensely satisfying epic about the courage and persistence of faith.
