Baba Padmanji: An Autobiography

Baba Padmanji: An Autobiography (Christian Literature Society, 1892, edited by J. Murray Mitchell) is the English translation of a first-person account, first published in Marathi at Bombay in 1888, of a nineteenth-century Marathi writer’s passage from Hinduism to Christianity. Padmanji was born in 1831 in Belgaum to a family of the Kasar, or brazier, caste — not Brahmin — and the social distance the neighbouring Brahmins kept from his family is a thread he returns to throughout the early chapters.

Educated at a mission school in Belgaum and later at Elphinstone College and the Free Church Institution in Bombay, he describes a change of mind that unfolded gradually rather than in a single moment. His chapter titles — “Gradual Change of Mind,” “Gradual Increase of Light” — are the book’s honest shape. He was baptized in 1854, was disowned for it, and was reconciled with his father only slowly over the years that followed.

The autobiography closes on the kindness he eventually met from his relatives, one of its quietest and best passages. Around this personal story stands a remarkable public life: Padmanji became the most prolific Christian author in Marathi, publishing more than a hundred titles and running his own press in Bombay, where he died in 1906.

Our public-domain edition of the 1892 Christian Literature Society text is mechanically cleaned from the original OCR and not yet fully proofread; we present it in a clean, readable format and link a free source as well.

This is a clean, modern reading edition of the autobiography of Baba Padmanji (1831–1906), the foremost Marathi Christian author of his century, first published in 1892. The text is in the public domain.

A note on language. The 1892 text uses "Mohammedan" where English today says "Muslim". The word appears twice, both times of the book-hawkers who carried religious publications from door to door in Padmanji's Maharashtra, and both have been updated, so that a modern reader meets the account in current language.

What we have not changed is as important as what we have. Padmanji's argument, his voice and his meaning are untouched — he was a brazier's son who weighed Christianity for years and was baptised in 1854 at the cost of his family and his caste, and none of that is softened. Personal names, place names and the Marathi and Sanskrit terms he uses of his own tradition are kept exactly as written, and so is the historical title.

The free source is linked from this book's page, so any reader can check our edition against the original scan.