13. To the India of the Raj
Chapter 13
To the India of the Raj
England was very good to me.” Thus Amy summed up in her autobiography the ten months spent there.
She neglected to mention that she became a published author. Marshall Brothers of London brought out during that year (1895) her first book, From Sunrise Land, a collection of letters from Japan with illustrations by the author and William Wilson, the D.O.M.’s son.
It was not her idea. She had to be talked into allowing the material to go into print. Persuaded at last, she explained her primary reason in the introduction:
“These little letters were written just for ‘home’; remembering this, your kindness will excuse mistakes and informalities. And the same plea applies to the little sketches scattered throughout. . . . Others could tell you far more, and far more worthily, of the showing forth of His hand in their part of the great Mission Trust. Will they believe that this thought presses, and that the more conscious of it we are, the more grateful we shall be for their prayer? Please pray! Please ask that the Master may stoop to use a thing so simple and so small, to lift even one into the Love wherewith He loves.”
Rereading the book later she was, like most authors, not happy with it. Tolstoy is said to have lamented, when he read War and Peace years after it first appeared, “This must all be done over.” In Amy’s copy of From Sunrise Land she wrote, “Bad rhymes in parts, bad writing all through.”
The D.O.M. was overjoyed to have her at home again, believing at first that she had been “given back” to him. He recovered from the stroke, but soon knew that he would have to relinquish her once more since she had no intention of staying. The doctors’ verdict that the tropics were not to be considered again did not in the least deter her. If any mission anywhere would take her, she was going.
In the spring a letter came from a friend in Bangalore, India. The climate there, she wrote, was healthy and delightful. Good news for Amy’s friends. Bad news for Amy—“it sounded much too easy.” On second thought, her going there would “lighten things for those who found it hard to see that I should go anywhere,” so she applied to the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and went to London in May for an interview. She was not an Anglican, but was warmly recommended by Keswick leaders who were Anglican clergymen. In an informal meeting on July 26 at Keswick she was accepted. The next day she spoke at a missionary meeting in the tent. “Who can forget,” wrote a clergyman, “Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael’s farewell address, ere she left for her life of sacrifice in India, as she unrolled a ‘ribband of blue’ with the golden words, ‘Nothing too precious for Jesus?’”
Amy was with her dear “Fatherie” on his seventieth birthday, but both had to face the imminent, wrenching, second parting. “Of the blistering days before I sailed and of the goodbye I will say nothing. We shall all be together soon in the Father’s Country.”
She sailed on October 11, “with many a backward look at Japan,” and a few wistful ones at China, the country to which she had felt drawn ever since hearing Hudson Taylor speak of its millions’ spiritual need.
The country whose shores she reached in November of 1895 had been under British rule since 1600. London merchants had had their eye on the riches of India’s spice trade, then under the control of Dutch privateers. Outraged when the price of a pound of pepper went up five shillings in 1599, a group of twenty-four merchants met to establish a small trading firm. The East India Company was chartered in December of that year by Queen Elizabeth I, giving them a monopoly of English trade with the “Indies,” which comprised China, India, and Indonesia. It was not only pepper they were after. Wondrous tales were told of gems the size of pigeons’ eggs, endless forests of pepper, indigo, cinnamon, and ginger, and potions guaranteeed to perpetuate youth and virility. In August of 1600 Captain William Hawkins anchored his galleon north of Bombay and set off inland to find the world’s most powerful monarch, the Great Mogul. The emperor granted him not only trading rights, but offered a beautiful girl (an Armenian Christian, it was claimed) from his harem.
Profits began to pour in, merchants flocked to other Indian ports, and, with Britain’s assurance that their object was “Trade, not territory, “they were welcomed. Predictably, conflicts arose with local authorities on whose territory the Company operated, and soon there were British forts in Bombay, Madras, Cuddalore, and Calcutta, to protect mercenary interests. England was “in over its head,” almost unwittingly committed to a policy of intervention in every aspect of Indian life. In 1757 General Robert Clive, with an army of two hundred English and three hundred Indian soldiers, defeated ten thousand Indian troops at Plassey, losing only twenty-three men.
For a hundred years conquest followed conquest, even though orders came from London to avoid “schemes of conquest and territorial expansion,” such schemes being “repugnant to the wish, honour, and policy of this nation.” Not all governors saw things in the same light. Social diseases such as gang robbery, slavery, infanticide, thuggee (the practice of murder and robbery by thugs) and suttee (the immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands) were taken by some of them as typical of the country’s life as a whole. Richard Wellesley, governor general from 1797 to 1805 and himself a campaigner against suttee, thought the natives “vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar, and stupid,” and therefore unworthy of any rights. “No greater blessing,” he held, “may be conferred on the native inhabitants of India than the extension of British authority, influence and power.” The modest trading company had become the sovereign.
While the Company regarded noninterference with Indian customs as most beneficial to its own interests, the Crown saw its responsibility to reform and civilize these “wily Asiatic intriguers,” men of “degrading superstitions,” as a divine assignment. Clash between Company and Crown was inevitable. If the British were going to “hew down the dense jungle of Hindooism” business might suffer, as the silver business suffered in Ephesus in New Testament times. Missionary work inhibited profiteering, so the Company forbade missionaries to evangelize. Yet the barbarous practices named above, together with the almost universal idolatry, offended the sensibilities of those Englishmen (among whom Radicals and Evangelicals were among the most influential) who had no immediate vested interests. These began to insist on reforms.
Certain benefits of British rule can hardly be denied—her legal, administrative, and educational institutions, her railways and, above all, her language, which became India’s common one. But like most of the “blessings” of civilization, they were mixed. English became the vehicle of revolutionary aspirations which reached a climax in the savage Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. The fuse that fired it was small but significant. Cartridges for the new Enfield rifle had to be opened with the teeth. Religious scruples of the influential Brahman element in the army were deeply offended, since the cartridges, it was claimed, had been lubricated with cow’s fat, sacred to vegetarian Hindus, and (for good measure) pig’s fat, unclean to Muslims. They refused. Nevertheless the perspective of history would indicate that the matter was infinitely larger. It was East against West, white against black, an ancient people seeking to maintain an ancient culture against a highly confusing admixture of materialism, European culture, and something which called itself Christianity.
Britain succeeded in crushing this uprising, but the existence of the Honourable East India Company was terminated on August 12, 1858 by Queen Victoria, who then (providentially, it was believed) became Empress to 300 million Indians, her authority represented by a sort of king called a viceroy. Under him were two thousand members of the Indian civil service and ten thousand officers of the Indian army whose authority was sustained by sixty thousand British regular soldiers and two hundred thousand native troops.
Theirs was the India of gentleman officers wearing plumed shakos and riding at the head of their turbaned sepoys; of district magistrates lost in the torrid wastes of the Deccan; of sumptuous imperial balls in the Himalayan summer capital of Simla; of cricket matches on the manicured lawns of Calcutta’s Bengal Club; of polo games on the sunburnt plains of Rajputana; of tiger hunts in Assam; of young men sitting down to dinner in black ties in a tent in the middle of the jungle, solemnly proposing their toast in port to the King-Emperor while jackals howled in the darkness around them; of officers in scarlet tunics scaling the rock defiles of the Khyber Pass or pursuing rebellious Pathan tribesmen in the sleet or the unbearable heat of the Northwest Frontier; of a caste unassailably certain of its superiority, sipping whisky and soda on the veranda of its Europeans Only clubs. Those men were generally the sons of families of impeccable breeding, but less certain wealth; the offspring of good Anglican country churchmen; talented second sons of the landed aristocracy destined to be deprived of a heritage by primogeniture; the sons of schoolmasters, classics professors and minor aristocrats who had managed to squander the family fortune. They mastered on the playing fields and in the classrooms of Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Charterhouse, Haileybury, the disciplines that would fit them to rule an empire: excellence at games, a delight in “manly pursuits,” the ability to absorb the whack of a headmaster’s cane or declaim the Odes of Horace and the verses of Homer. “India,” noted James S. Mill, “was a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes.”1
Travelers to India by ship noticed a strange transformation in fellow-passengers. Ordinary middle-class or lower middle-class Englishmen began to assume an air of superiority and self-assertiveness. Ladies affected the airs of grande dames. The vocabulary changed—instead of breakfast they now had “tiffin,” the call for a steward became, “Boy!” (derived from Hindi bhoi, Telugu boi, a term which had come to be applied to a carrier or domestic servant). The bartender served up not whisky and soda but “chota pegs.” When the ship reached Port Said out came the “topees,” the preposterous sun helmets believed to be indispensable for Europeans. When the ship approached the port it was met by British officers aboard a launch which flew the Red Ensign, a flag with the Union Jack in the corner. The arriving passengers became, with no credentials other than the passage they had bought to India, the lords of creation, acquiring at once the status of Sahib or Memsahib. By virtue of being English and white they were given preference on the railroads and in the shops. It did not take long to take such treatment for granted, so that if occasionally it was not accorded, they became first testy and then angrily insistent. Power corrupts. It corrupted soldiers, officials, planters, and their wives and children. It corrupted missionaries.
It was to this—in its later phase Rudyard Kipling’s romantic and picturesque India—Britain’s “rightful” empire for nearly three hundred years, that Amy Carmichael came. Perhaps it was not the climate only which made her feel it was “too easy.” We have no reason to think that she harbored any doubts about the ethical basis of the “raj” (rule), but we can be certain that her soldier-soul shrank from the thought of its British comforts and its aristocratic British society.
The Church of England Zenana Mission Hospital, taking its name from the Hindi word denoting the part of a house where women were kept in seclusion, was in Bangalore, a city of South India with an altitude of three thousand feet. Amy arrived there, not in the buoyant good health her time in England was meant to have bestowed, but with dengue fever, a malady characterized with pain in limbs and head so extreme that its nickname is break-bone fever.
She was too ill to write or think, and found herself feeling “low and gravelly, not in the least a soldier.” With excellent care from the English mission doctor and nurses, she recovered. The hospital was barracks-like, built high and dry in a sandy compound. “I am to be its ‘prophet’”—meaning the hospital evangelist I can’t help being as happy as happy can be.” She loved the work, loved the climate, loved her fellow-workers., the doctor—“a splendid girl”—and Clare “who is, well, just Clare!” These three lived together in the staff quarters. Twenty minutes away were five single women missionaries, two of whom codirected the work. The scenery was flat, “nothing to touch Japan,” the climate fine except in the long middle of the day, one almost forgets it is tropical. One can work hard in the morning, work fairly in the middle of the day, and work hard again (if allowed) in the evening, but this is not considered wise, for it is tropical after all, and this means a gradual substitution of water for blood in your veins.”
With a beginner’s aptitude for hasty generalizations she wrote that she found the Indian people “a series of contradictions. They are loving and lovable, cruel and needing-all-grace to love, bright and dull, eager and lazy to a degree perfectly incomprehensible at home. They are trustworthy and utterly the opposite, courteous and quite barbarous. They are everything you can imagine except, perhaps, straightforward. That the natural man in Eastern lands never, never is. In all sorts of trifles one is tried almost beyond endurance. Appointments are made to be broken, punctuality and speed are unknown—they don’t understand our foolish fondness for getting on—‘is there not a tomorrow?’” The comments are vivid and candid, meant for only a small circle who knew the character of the woman who wrote them. She acknowledged her own limitations when she added, “This is the average native character on the surface. Underneath there is much, much more, but one can’t get at it until one can speak and I am far off that yet.”
She praised God for Jeya, an Indian Christian woman whose name meant victory, “so dear and loving with me, calls me Sister, helps me with Tamil and interprets for me in the wards.” As usual Amy did not waste a day in getting down to business, speaking to the patients in the dispensary. “I wish you could see the strange dark faces and beautiful seemingly eager eyes, and the rich, bright colors and graceful forms—it is all a pleasure in itself, but then there is the sadness of knowing that very little is really going in. These meetings are a ‘sowing beside all waters,’ but I long to be led to the truly seeking soul.”
She had the luxury of a tiny room with its own “bath,” which meant a place where she could dip water from a tub and pour it over herself. She managed to squeeze in also a wardrobe and chest of drawers. She thanked God for the privacy and accepted the lack of quiet, which pulled one out of touch with God—banging doors, crying babies, barking dogs, squawking crows, perpetual noises “of all sorts and conditions all day long and all night long, up to strong and awful attacks of the devil, the Prince of Heathendom.”
Another luxury, taken for granted in the India of the raj, was servants. They worked, of course, according to caste—the house-boy dusted and swept, the cook cooked, the gardener brought the bath water, the dhobie came to collect the laundry, the “sweeper” emptied the latrines.
Amy’s daily schedule went like this:
6:00 rise
6:45 tea, toast, and plantain (banana)
7:00 review language lessons
7:15 munshie (language teacher) comes
8:15 prayers in hospital ward
8:30 language lessons
10:30 breakfast
11:30 rest
1:00 study
3:45 tea
4:30 exercise, pony riding, letter-writing
7:30 dinner
8:30 housekeeping and accounts
Amy’s Aunt Annie had little notion of the character of her missionary niece. She wrote to inquire if she read novels. “Do I ever read any novels?!!!! I have hardly time to read my Bible properly, much less anything unnecessary.’’
In keeping the household accounts she got tangled up in trying to sort out rupees, pies, and annas, but that was nothing compared to the battle of learning Tamil, “the Chinese of India,’’ as Amy called it. In March she was “in the throes of grim despair,’’ feeling she would never, never learn it. Somebody wrote from England, citing the story of Jericho, whose walls fell down after seven days’ “compassing.’’ “Fear went,’’ wrote Amy. “I felt as if I could never be afraid again. Someone had prayed the prayer that rises straight up, and God had sent the answer straight down in the form of this story.’’ By July the unfamiliar sound of the language was diminishing, but Amy chafed, wondering why she did not yet understand everything. She was thrilled to have succeeded in reading a Gospel in Tamil. The walls of Jericho were falling. In November, “it is bliss to be able to speak a little and to find that they understand. The next thing is to understand them.” She had finished the “most tiring half’’ of language study, but a month later she admitted that Tamil seemed an ocean in which she was not yet so much as ankle deep.
1. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), p. 15.