Work in Bishop's College, Calcutta
A, J. APPASAMY
On account of a severe economic depression in the West the funds which came from abroad to' support my literary work dried up and my appointment came to an end in 1932.
WORK IN BISHOP'S COLLEGE, CALCUTTA
'We should like a man here to teach Philosophy of Religion and History of Religions.
Could you.come and help us?'
So wrote Bishop Herbert Pakenham-Walsh, the Principal of Bishop's College, Calcutta, to me in 1932.
I was not a stranger to the College.
In 1923 I had spent a term in the College giving a course of twelve lectures on the Gospel of St John and Hindu Bhakti Literature.
The Principal of the College at that time was the Rev. R. L. Pelly.
He and the other three members of the staff had welcomed me.
I had enjoyed my work, This was the Theological College for the Church of India, Burma and Ceylon.
About twenty-five men who had completed their College education, or who possessed a good general knowledge, were sent to the College in preparation for their ordination. They came from many parts of India. Some of them were Anglo-Indians.
We had also students from the Jacobite Church and from the Mar Thoma Church of Kerala. We followed the syllabus of the Serampore B.D.
I had heard much about the saintliness of Bishop Pakenham-Walsh.
I gladly accepted his invitation.
Wake The Bishop was a man of outstanding spiritual gifts.
He and his wife, whom he married late in life, threw themselves heart and soul into the work of the College..
There was a deep spiritual affinity between' them.
Even while living in Calcutta they led ascetic lives, wearing the simplest dress, eating the plainest food which Mrs Walsh' herself cooked, riding only on bicycles even through heavy traffic, and giving away a good deal of their salary to help the poor, Sometimes they were a prey to the dishonesty and greed of the people who begged for their charity.
Stories went round of meh asking for the funeral expenses of the same person two or three times over!
The Bishop was kind and
WORK IN BISHOP'S COLLEGE, CALCUTTA
affectionate and a spirit of love prevailed in our little community of staff and students living on the same compound.
There was an impression that students took advantage of his kindness and that there was slackness of discipline.
But an impression of that kind is often inevitable if love, and not discipline, is the main note in the life of a College.
The College was well-endowed and all the students were given scholarships.
'The chapel was spotlessly clean and had the atmosphere of worship.
The living quarters of the staff and students were comfortable though the buildings were old and needed repairs from time to time.
There was an excellent garden with beautifully mown grass and a variety of flowers.
Dahlias, Petunias, Chrysanthemums, Canas and Sweet Peas were in bloom in their seasons.
The Bishop was a keen gardener.
Sometimes he and his wife dug and pruned.
They invited the staff and the students to help them when they needed extra labour.
The rules of the College about flowers were generous.
Every other morning the gardeners changed the flowers in our rooms.
We were told there was no objection to the grown-ups picking flowers now and then.
But children in the compound (of whom there were about twenty) must not gather them and throw them away.
'There were tennis, badminton and volley-ball courts which were well-maintained and well-used.
Teaching regular habits of prayer, both private and public, was one of the principal aims of the College.
6 a.m.
Sandhya 6.30 a.m.
Meditation 7 a.1n.
Morning Prayer and Holy Communion I2 noon Intercessions 4.30 p.m.
Evening Prayer 9.30 p.m.
Compline or Prayer before going to bed Our students were expected to serve in parishes in which Catholic or Evangelical traditions were strong and their training had to be ecumenical.
Sandhya means meeting.
It is.a prayer offered in India for many centuries at the meeting of night and day i.e. at sunrise and at sunset.
The Principal and his wife went up to the roof of their bungalow at early dawn and invited others to join them.
After
50,
A. J. APPASAMY
some time of silence, a prayer for the illumination of the soul was offered.
This is a helpful practice in India and may well be taken into the Christian Church, Some of the critical students in the College spoke of this as. sun worship.
This was quite unfair.
Christians who practise Sandhya do not worship the sun.
We only worship the eternal and infinite God Who. is the Source of all light.
We need guidance every moment of our times.
We should pray that God may shine in our hearts and give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).
At sunrise and at sunset the splendour of the sky and the beauty of the sun give intensity and depth to our prayer for light.
In India even women and children, who know nothing about the Sanskrit prayers prescribed for such occasions, are often in the habit of standing in silence for a moment with clasped hands before the newly-risen sun.
Meditation is practically ignored in the Indian Church.
Very few of us know how to meditate.
No serious effort is made in our churches or schools to teach us meditation.
All the patterns of our worship are wholly Western.
Bishop Pakenham-Walsh tried to remedy this by instructing some of our future clergy in the art of meditation.
This practice of Meditation, in which considerable experience has been accumulated in India as well as in the Christian Church, should certainly be taught in our Churches and schools.
Meditation helps us to listen to the voice of God speaking in the depths of our soul.
In order to give intercessions breadth as well as depth topics for intercession covering the whole world with its many and vast needs were continually brought before us.
The intellectual equipment of ministers is another important objective of the College.
We had men who made a deep study of the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The Principal himself lectured on Christian Doctrine, particularly as it had developed through the ages in the long history of the Church.
My subjects were Philosophy of Religion and History of Religions; both the subjects fascinated me immensely. About that time Archbishop William Temple's Nature, Man and God was published and I drank deep from that fountain of learning and piety.
WORK IN BISHOP'S COLLEGE, CALCUTTA
We had an interesting time trying to understand modern religious movements in India.
Calcutta proved a good centre for such study.
During my earlier visit to the College in 1923 I had met Dr Radhakrishnan several times.
He was at that time Professor of Indian Philosophy in the University.
He was quite friendly and gave a lecture to our students' on his interpretation of Hinduism.
He was a quick reader and had even then read widely in Christian Theology.
He borrowed some more books from our College Library and studied them.
Raja Ram Mohun Roy, Keshub Chander Sen, Devendranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo were all Bengalis.
This list includes practically all the modern religious leaders in India.
The only exceptions are Mahatma Gandhi of Gujarat and Dayananda Saraswati of the Punjab.
Most of the leaders in Calcutta were dead, but their followers were active.
We met some of them.
They came to our College, had friendly cups of tea with us and told us what their movements stood for.
I suggested to the students that they see for themselves the work of these men and write essays showing both the weakness and the strength of their movements.
This field work was an effective link between the classroom and the Hindu world of the day.
There were many outlets for our service. Bishop V. S. Azariah said to me, 'In the Dornakal Diocese today we have thousands of caste converts.
We have no handbook of Christian teaching which we could use with them.
Could you write for us a book of that type?'
This invitation attracted me much. I spent several months writing the book.
For some years I had been studying the Christian religion in close connection with the spiritual background of India.
I had been trying to show how when thus studied together some new emphases came to light, some new glimpses of truth, some new insights.
The work in Bishop's College had been an education to me. In explaining difficult ideas to our students I had learnt to be less abstract and more concrete and to use plenty of illustrations.
When the manuscript was finished I sent it to the Bishop who decided that it was not the sort of book which would help his people.
This was very disappointing to me. But the Editor of The Guardian (then published
A. J. APPASAMY
in Calcutta) agreed to publish it as a series of articles in his weekly journal. The book was then published under the title Christ in the Indian Church. It was also translated into Urdu and Hindi.
In 1934 I received an invitation to Allahabad to take six classes for students in an All-India $.C.M. Conference held once every four years.
I had an alert class of about one hundred college students who followed my lectures with interest.
It was quite evident that they needed guidance on this problem: How can we be good Christians and at the same time keen nationalists, though not necessarily in the political sense?
What should be our attitude towards the great religious leaders of the past and the present in India?
Is there anything of permanent value in their religious experience, in their social ideals, in their cultural outlook? Should
Indian literature, whether' religious or secular, mean anything to us?
Or should only Wordsworth, Browning and Tennyson count?
Such questions perplexed young men and women of that generation.
I gave them the substance of my book, Christ in the Indian Church, and it seemed to help them.
Some keen missionaries who spent their summer holidays at Darjeeling on the Himalayas organized on their own initiative a summer school of religions in 1934.
They asked the Rev. J. A.
Subhan (now a Bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church) and Prof. J. N. Rawson of Serampore College to lecture. They asked me to give fifteen lectures on the Bhakti Saints in India.
I traced the steady growth of Bhakti in India through the ages and cited various books to show the different stages of its development.
These were Katha Upanishad, Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavata Purana, and the writings of Ramanuja, Tulsidas and Rabindranath Tagore.
I closed the series with lectures on the Validity of Hindu Bhakti, the Weakness of Hindu Bhakti and the Survival Values of Hindu
Bhakti.
'These lectures are being printed now.
The invitation to give these lectures gave me and my family a wonderful holiday.
A lovely photograph of the snowy peaks as seen from Darjeeling hangs in our-sitting room in Coimbatore and reminds us constantly of the beautiful Himalayas, our priceless heritage as Indians.
Our life in Calcutta came to an end in 1936. I fell ill and had to be taken to the Presidency General Hospital on two occasions.
The humidity of the climate did not agree with me.
Much to
A SCHOOL OF HINDUISM IN BENARES
my regret and the regret of my family, I resigned the appoint ment.
We had, alas, to say farewell to the friends we had made, the beautiful garden in Bishop's College, the Cathedral with its great preachers and lovely music, the intellectual circles in the University and the attractions of a great city.
A SCHOOL OF HINDUISM IN BENARES
What was God's plan for my life?
I was quite sure He had a definite plan for me, as for all people in the world.
The abrupt way in which my life in Bishop's College came to an end raised this problem in an acute form.
My students and. fellow-teachers were affectionate and showed much love, particularly during my illness, When I had to give up this appointment, so congenial and so worthwhile, I was continually trying to see what pattern of life
God had for me.
Looking back I am now convinced that it was God's will that I should no longer live in a large city but must labour in rural areas.
From 1936 till my retirement in 1959, for a period of twenty-three years, my work lay in rural parts.
Keen missionaries like Bishop Caldwell buried themselves in remote country places for more than forty years for building up schools and churches.
It was Gandhiji in modern times who drew the attention of the country as a whole to the immense needs of the masses.
There are seven hundred thousand villages in India.
Over ninety per cent of the people are engaged in agricultural pursuits.
Much needs to be done to educate them, to give them better wages, to help them raise more food, to give them such amenities as are possible in scattered hamlets.
My father took considerable interest in the village of Rajaputhukudi, sixteen miles from Palayamkottai and built there a substantial church and a small single-teacher school.
He asked me to continue this work and provided the necessary funds.
For the next few years I spent much time and energy in this work.
The school had to be raised to a higher standard and the building enlarged. Today there are over two hundred children here receiving instruction from eight teachers.
A flourishing Cooperative Credit Society gives loans for agricultural purposes.
A. J. APPASAMY
Many old wells have been deepened and enlarged; some new wells have been sunk; when the monsoons are delayed or become weak, the water from these wells saves some crops.
During the summer months when the local tank dries up, the wells serve as excellent swimming pools, giving the village folk much enjoyment.
The water from one of the newly deepened wells proved to be sweet and fresh and was set apart for drinking purposes.
'The services in the church are taken Sunday after Sunday either by laymen or by priests from the neighbourhood.
Though my main work now was research, writing and social service in this village, I went out occasionally to give courses of lectures.
One such course was given in Benares in 1940 and another in 1941.
There were at that time over two hundred and fifty millions of Hindus in India and much evangelistic work was done among them.
In many ways Christians were brought into intimate contact with Hindus.
Christians in India should have a sympathetic and accurate knowledge of Hinduism.
Some friends felt that a new beginning should be made in this direction and a School of Hinduism was run in Benares from January 6 to February 11, 1940.
We had seventeen students in the school.
Of these thirteen came from outside, travelling from five hundred to a thousand miles.
Two were Englishmen, two Australians, four Americans and the rest were Indians.
We had district missionaries, pastors, evangelists, teachers and theological students.
The daily work began with prayers at seven-thirty; at eight o'clock the students left with a competent guide to study the beliefs and practices of Hindus in the city. The bathing ghats, the main temples, monasteries and religious institutions, the Benares Hindu
University, the new Buddhist Temple and the old Buddhist relics at Sarnath were visited.
Benares was an excellent centre for a practical study of Hinduism.
All the sects of Hinduism were represented there.
The evenings were devoted to lectures.
The Rev. R. C. Das was our leader.
He was teaching for several years in St Paul's College, Calcutta and then in St John's
College, Agra.
Himself a convert, he felt the call to do evangelistic work, resigned his educational appointment in 1931 and took up work in the Benares United City Mission.
He had a wide knowledge of Hinduism, both in its practical and philosophical sides.
A SCHOOL OF HINDUISM IN BENARES
He had also many contacts with the pilgrims as well as the leading Hindus of the city. He lectured on aspects of popular Hinduism, such as image worship, bathing in the Ganges, caste, the worship of Krishna and Hindu culture.
Among other lecturers was the Rev. H. H. Presler, an American Missionary who had made an independent study of Hinduism from a fresh angle, its social problems throughout its long history.
The Rev. A. C. Chakravarty, a Brahman convert, lectured on the Bhakti saints of India.
Eight leading Hindus in the city spoke to us on different phases of Hinduism.
My subject was the Gospel and India's Heritage and I used the manuscript of a new book on which I was then working.
I pointed out that as Indian Christians we must use all that is good and true and noble in the heritage of India.
There are some genuine difficulties in the way, such as the vastness and complexity of the subject, the indifference and even hostility of some Christians and the real fear of compromise with Hinduism.
Provided these dangers are safeguarded much that is of value can be learnt from Hinduism, I took the doctrines of God, Forgiveness, Fellowship with God and the Church, and showed how Christian thought and experience could use the Indian heritage. I stressed the importance of studying the inner life of Jesus, which was so deep and profound. We generally dwell on the outer aspects of His ministry,
His ministry of service and unparalleled suffering.
In my earlier books I had pointed out the relevance of the Fourth Gospel to the spiritual quest of India.
In this book I dealt with the relevance of all the four Gospels to India.
S.P.C.K., London, published my manuscript in 1942, under the title The Gospel and India's Heritage.
There was a multitude of widows in the city of Benares.
Through their hardships and sufferings they were often led to engage seriously in the religious quest.
One of the saddest sights in the city was the Widows' Home where, through the twentyfour hours of the day, singing praises to Krishna was kept up by relays of widows.
In the mornings there were crowds of them.
The large room and the adjoining verandah were filled with more than two hundred women, seated before a picture of Krishna.
They sang vigorously and fervently with cymbals and drums, and at 10.30 a.m. received small quantities of rice, dhal and ghee,
A. J. APPASAMY
provided by the generosity of the founder; they then returned to their houses.
It was Christmas Eve. The Ramakrishna Mission had arranged a Christmas celebration.
In a large room in the hospital on the wall a picture was hung of the Virgin Mary holding the child
Jesus in her arms; a beautiful garland of flowers was placed around the picture, which was illuminated with electric lights.
Under the picture were arranged lovely chrysanthemums.
About two hundred people, men and women, were present.
After the story of Christ's birth was read from St Luke's Gospel, four brief addresses were given about the meaning of Christmas, the first two by the swamis of the Mission, the third by a professor at Benares Hindu University and the fourth by myself.
The celebration was followed by the distribution of light refreshments.
Many educated Hindus today are willing to regard Jesus as an incarnation and worship Him.
We met a typical old Sanskrit pandit, one of the half a dozen leading Sanskrit scholars in the whole of India.
He began speaking of Jesus as an incarnation and wanted to know exactly what the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation meant.
We requested a Hindu Sadhu, the active head of a widespread organisation, to expound the Hindu religion.
He was very old.
He wore a long saffron robe, and a pile of long, uncut hair on his head was tied up into a knot.
He reclined on an easy-chair and discoursed fluently about the charts on the walls, which he had prepared to illustrate different Hindu philosophical doctrines.
We began talking about Jesus, and he said:
'The Christian Church survives today not because of its followers but because of Jesus.'
Educated Hindus, while attracted by the figure of Jesus, are not willing to accept Him as the only Incarnation.
There was, however, a general readiness to hear about Jesus.
_ Benares is a most important centre for Christian work, There are hundreds of Sanskrit scholars in the city, some of them men of enormous learning.
Pilgrims come to the city from every part of India, and among them many are genuine seekers after truth.
The Christian work in Benares must surely be strengthened.
Benares is particularly valuable for Christian scholars who want to study both the theory and the practice of the Hindu religion,
The memory of the C.M.S. missionary, Pandit Johnson, and of the Brahman convert, Nehemiah Nilakantha Goreh Shastri, both