15. Company, Church, Crown, and Hindu
Chapter 15
Company, Church, Crown, and Hindu
Throughout her time in Japan, Ceylon, and India, Amy had written her Scrap letters monthly when possible, sometimes less often, her rule being that she would never write when she could do anything else. Scrap Number 7 was begun on September 23, 1896, the tenth anniversary of the Glasgow convention, where
a door was opened for me into a new life and I took the first step in. . . . Today as I thought of all that has passed since then, of the little little one has learnt or done or been, I felt as if one had not taken even a step into the land which opened out before one ten whole years ago. Tonight in my evening reading this verse came: “In His quiver hath He kept me close.” I never noticed it before. It is the Revised Version of Isaiah 49:2. Is it not beautiful? And does it not fit into the verse linked always to me with September 23, 1886, “able to keep you from falling”? Dear friends, I don’t often write of these inner heart-things in my Scrapperies, but to the glory of His name let me witness that in far away lands, in loneliness (deepest sometimes when it seems least so), in times of downheartedness and tiredness and sadness, always always He is near. He does comfort, if we let Him. Perhaps someone as weak and good-for-nothing as even I am may read this. Don’t be afraid! Through all circumstances, outside, inside, He can keep me close.
Among the circumstances which called for trust in God’s keeping power were the illness of her co-worker Clare, the constant presence of idolatrous customs—tom-toms keeping her awake at night, blood sacrifices being made within earshot, festivals, processions—the daily Tamil grind (she still wished heartily that her fellow-workers would consent to her living alone somewhere with Indians), opportunities to witness of Christ to individuals, some in hospital, some in other places.
There were encouragements—two Anglo-Indian girls who came for instruction and gave themselves to the Lord, a child who listened eagerly to the story of Jesus, a high-caste patient who returned to her village full of the Gospel story. When a single opportunity was missed, Amy chided herself. It had not crossed her mind to inquire whether a certain hospital servant could read. He worked for days before anyone thought to give him a Gospel. When someone did, it was Lilian, the doctor, not Amy. She confessed her dreadful failure to home friends, begging them to pray harder.
Saral came one day with an idea for drawing the women to hear the Gospel. She would teach them to knit with some pink wool she had been given, “and they will love me more and like to listen when I talk about Jesus.”
Amy could not say yes to that. She explained that the Gospel needed no such frills. It is the power of God for salvation. Saral protested that there was nothing in the Bible which bore upon pink wool and knitting needles. Indeed there was—Zechariah 4:6, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. There was no need for tricks which might open houses—houses were open. No need for methods of helping to humanize and fill bare and empty lives—“these women have a full day’s work.” To try to help God with pink fancywork was, she felt, plain unbelief.
At Ooty the Walkers had invited Amy to come to Tinnevelly to learn Tamil. Although she had not yet finished the examinations she was required to take in Bangalore, she made a visit in December of 1896, traveling by train from Madras to the hot plain. From the train window she saw temples in every village, idols under nearly every tree, people working in the fields with Siva’s ashes on their foreheads. “It makes you feel as if you couldn’t sit still. You must do something, try to do something, anything! . . . Oh to get into that stronger, calmer current, out of the feverishness of human haste. Do please, dear friends, ask that we may exchange the eagerness of the flesh for the earnestness of the Spirit and so move in the force of that Holy Wind that we shall be carried along by His great calm.”
Tinnevelly is the mangled English pronunciation of the Tamil Tirunelveli, “Hedge of the Holy Paddy Field,” a town and district at the southern tip of India, divided from the state of Travancore (modern Kerala) by a range of mountains called the Western Ghats or “steps.” The plain, blistering hot in the dry season, was very beautiful after the monsoon, “a great garden, green with the wonderful green of young rice, and set with the shining silver of water.” Other less-watered parts were barren with black soil, stunted trees, few palms. Its people formed an ancient and orthodox group of communities, with nearly three thousand Hindu temples, forty-two of them considered specially holy.
The Walkers of the Church Missionary Society arrived there in 1885. They were not by any means the first in that district to name the name of Christ. The Syrian Christians of the Malabar coast, whose records date from the fourth century, believed that the apostle Thomas brought Christianity to India. Roman Catholic missionaries landed in the fifteenth century, Saint Francis Xavier in the sixteenth. Far from wishing to transpose European culture to their converts, they went to great lengths to make themselves as Indian, that is, as Hindu, as possible. One Roberto de Nobili worked for forty-five years to convert “heathens,” proclaiming himself a Brahman, adopting the sacred thread of the holy man, abstaining from meat, and keeping ritual purity.
By far the most colorful character, whose notions of identification with the people differed in marked degree from those of nineteenth century missionaries like the Walkers, was a renowned Catholic named C. J. Beschi. Calling himself Veeramamuni (“heroic and great sage”), he wore a purple robe, a white and purple turban, pearl and ruby earrings, gold rings, and bangles. He traveled in the grand style of a guru, riding in a palanquin (a conveyance borne on the shoulders of men by means of projecting poles), seated on a tiger skin with two servants to fan him, two to march in front hearts great bunches of peacock feathers, and yet another to hold a silk umbrella. A large retinue accompanied him—men with drums, fifes, tents, and caparisoned horses. Yet for all that, he not only preached the Gospel but produced a tremendous body of Tamil literature by which he meant both to convert the heathen and instruct new converts. He was so revered that he was made an official of the small realm in which he worked.
In the eighteenth century great waves of conversion to Christianity, Catholic and non-Catholic, swept Tinnevelly. In 1706 from northern Europe came bands of men who were renegades from the orthodox churches of their own countries, bringing with them a pietist brand of Christianity that demanded of its converts a radical change of life. They taught individual responsibility before God, which required a knowledge of the Word of God, and hence Bible translation and literacy. In short order they translated the New Testament into Tamil, set up printing presses, began turning out avalanches of Christian literature, and established “prayer-school houses,” simple thatched buildings where people could congregate to learn to read and to pray and worship together. One wealthy converted Brahman widow had such a prayer-school in her home until it outgrew the space, whereupon she financed the building of a stone prayer-school.
This life-changing religion struck at the very heart of Tamil culture long before anyone dreamed of accusing missionaries of being colonialist or imperialist. The movement came from Germany and Denmark, while the East India Company was English and from the very beginning had kept a “low profile,” accommodating itself in every way to Indian culture, realizing that its political power (a handful of Europeans ruling millions of Indians) as well as its material success depended on its being in actual fact a Hindu raj. This meant that its officials propitiated local deities, reinstated devil worship in places where it had long since died out, participated in and subsidized festivals and ceremonies, funded the building and repair of temples, and supported practices which the Company’s constituency in England would have considered outrageous had they had any idea of them.
The growth of Christian congregations was startlingly rapid, doubling over and over for more than a century. The journals of Joseph Daniel Jaenicke, for example, in 1791 note “miraculous manifestations of divine grace” in conversions. Whole villages were often converted at once, and new villages founded, composed solely of new converts. Thus Christians became a power to reckon with, and, as the effects of their belief, particularly upon caste, became evident, intense opposition arose—intimidation, insult, violence, destruction of the prayer houses. This gave rise to the establishment of “Villages of Refuge,” modeled after the cities of refuge set up by Joshua in the Promised Land.
For half a century there had been clashes and wars in South India between local authorities, and increasing struggles between the higher powers and the Company for imperial sway. This necessitated the building of forts and caused devastation, famine, and pestilence. Strong-arm men were brought in to persecute Christians, who were stripped, beaten, robbed, and sent into the jungles to starve. As often happens, persecution fanned the flames, and a new mass conversion swept Tinnevelly in 1802. In November and December over three thousand were added to the church. Complaints about the treatment of Christians began to reach Company authorities—did they not represent a Christian nation? Had not the “Hindu Christians,” as they were called, a right to expect protection? The Company, while “officially” Christian as to its image in England, was, in India, unofficially Hindu in every meaning of the term—fully supporting a system of ideology, myth, ceremony, ritual, and institutions. Understandably, its opposition to the entrance of Christian missionaries was strenuous. It was not long before those authorities themselves were being accused of driving Christians from their homes, putting them in stocks, exposing them for as much as two weeks to broiling sun and chilling dews. To become a Christian, they declared, was an act of disloyalty to the Company’s raj.
The Company’s position was impossible. Since the India Act of 1784 it had become increasingly a public institution, more and more under the control of the British government. This meant, of course, that it could not escape the scrutiny of the “Lords Spiritual” of the Anglican establishment. The king himself was officially the head of the Church of England. Its bishops were members of the House of Lords. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, a British organization, attempted to obtain religious toleration for Christians equal to that enjoyed by Hindus and Muslims, but whatever the official response, the practical result was nil. Between 1806 and 1812 the Great Evangelical Awakening stirred up a vocal element of the Anglican church. Here was a whole country, by far the most important of the Empire, given over to what Anglicans could only call heathenism, with all its deplorable practices of child marriage, demon worship, widow burning (suttee, meaning “true wife”), and temple prostitution. Something had to be done about it. The Company was not without high officials who were Christians. These combined their influence with men like William Wilberforce, the abolitionist. Evangelical chaplains began going to India and new missionary societies demanded entrance and freedom to propagate the Gospel, not merely as a special privilege but as the right of any Englishman under the Crown.
In 1813 the Church of England refused to support in Parliament the renewal of the Company’s charter unless the ecclesiastical establishment was admitted into British India. This was a powerful lever. It worked. In 1816 a Cambridge man obtained a military chaplaincy in the Company in Tinnevelly. He was James Hough, an ardent disciple of a leader of the Evangelical Revival in the Church of England named Charles Simeon. Under Hough a new phase of mission-minded Christianity began, resulting in the establishing of fifty-three congregations. Two years after his arrival came the Church of England with all its panoply, terrible as an army with banners. Groups outside the pale of the establishment became conscious of a sort of pecking order, with the Churches of England and Scotland at the top, and the earlier movements in descending order, according to the social classes from which they had come.
Hindus brought grievances to Company officials again and again as they saw their own way of life interrupted and obstructed by these meddlesome foreigners. In Calcutta, thousands signed “The Sacred Petition” of 1828 to His Majesty in London on the question of suttee. They felt that a widow’s “voluntary and devout act” was a matter which was “altogether of too high and sacred a nature to admit of interference or question even from rulers of another Faith.” The British were between Scylla and Charybdis. Only nine months later five hundred Christians from forty-seven villages in Tinnevelly District addressed a petition to Parliament expressing first of all their gratitude for “the removal of the darkness of heathenism from these parts through the providence of our Lord, and the generous assistance of the people of Europe,” then begging to put before the British public a list of deeds “being done in support of heathenism and in injustice to the poor by the Honorable Company.” The list included the subsidizing of Hindu temples and exempting them from taxation. The Company had not only contributed “not the smallest sum” to help erect churches, but taxed them besides, giving rise to the reasonable conclusion that to the Company Hindu idols were the true gods. The petition mentioned also that since only those of highest caste could hold office or even enter the courts to make complaint or obtain assistance, Christians were nearly all excluded from entering. They had to stand afar off like any others who were “unclean” and call out, “as men invoke God, saying, ‘Swami, Swami!’ (Lord, Lord!)”
From Tinnevelly, one of the most important centers of old and wealthy Brahman power and pride, had come many of India’s most orthodox and scholarly pundits. Hostilities smoldered and flames broke out. Hindu rights were being violated by some of the European officials who had appeared to be on the Hindu side, and by missionaries whom Hindus saw as their “declared and implacable enemies. Hindus were obsessed with fear since Tinnevelly had become “the emporium of missionaryism and proselytism.” A society was formed dedicated to smearing sacred ashes, Siva’s sign, on every forehead. Christians refused to be smeared. Mobs attacked villages, pulled down prayer houses, raped women, stripped and beat men. One missionary fortified his compound and posted guards. Government forces were sent in. In 1847 the use of the term “heathen” to refer to Hindus or Muslims was officially banned from all government documents.
Ten years later in North India the Great Rebellion took place, recognized by Queen Victoria and the rest of Great Britain as far more than a fanatical outburst against the greasing of cartridges with animal fat. Arguments over the meaning of the rebellion broke out and have continued ever since. Some saw it as a total rejection of British rule as represented by the East India Company. Whatever the case, the mutiny symbolized the end of Company raj and the formal taking over of rulership by the British Crown. The queen noted in her journal in November 1857 her feeling in the matter, which she believed was shared by her countrymen, “that India should belong to me.”
The transition from Company to Crown rule, while enacted by Parliament, was formalized by the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858. She rejected the first draft of this document as being too cold and unfeeling. Despite her distance from India and India’s cultures, she had great sympathy for the Indian people.
All the romance she had felt since childhood for brown skins, all the advice she had received from Indian travelers flooded her mind—the iniquity of a “fire and sword” system of government, the “immense field for improvement among the natives,” the lies about mutilation of women and exaggeration of all kinds, the superior manners of the Indian “lower orders” compared with ours, the ill-treatment and insulting references to natives as “niggers”—out it all poured and was translated by royal alchemy into the moving words of a rewritten Proclamation:
“Firmly relying ourselves on the truth of Christianity we disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our convictions on any of our subjects . . . but all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law.”
As she wrote to Lord Derby, it was a female sovereign” speaking from the heart to a hundred million Eastern peoples.1
In 1858 the existence of the Company which had operated in India for two and a half centuries, and had ruled for a century, was terminated by royal decree. The destiny of India now lay in the hands of the thirty-nine-year-old queen. She became Empress of India, her representative, the viceroy.
1. Elizabeth Longford, Queen Victoria (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 281.