20. A Small and Desolate Mite
Chapter 20
A Small and Desolate Mite
On March 7, 1901, something happened which “caused a new thing to begin and I was rooted for life.”
Amy and the Starry Cluster had been itinerating in Tinnevelly District for about a year. One of the villages where they camped was Dohnavur (“Rhyme Doh with No, na with Ah, vur with Poor”). Dohnavur had been established in 1827 by Charles Theophilus Ewart Rhenius, a man of powerful influence in the missionary history of Tinnevelly. Although a Prussian Lutheran with pietist leanings, Rhenius had been sent to India by the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society in 1811 when English volunteers were few and far between. He has been called one of the ablest, most clear-sighted, practical, and zealous missionaries India has ever seen. He was the first to promote the education of women, establish Christian societies for charitable purposes, assemble the people of every Christian village for morning and evening prayer.
Wary of encouraging a merely nominal Christianity, Rhenius saw to it that every individual was drilled in doctrine, memorized Scripture, and was examined before being baptized. He helped to found organizations such as the Native Bible and Tract Society and the Native Missionary Society which sent local people to villages where there were no Christians. Congregations developed independence and a thoroughly Tamil, as distinct from colonial or European, cultural idiom. Perhaps most significant of all, he saw the caste system, on which India’s entire culture and economy rested, as incompatible with Christianity and tried to influence believers to break it. Wherever the Gospel of Christ is preached, believed, and scrupulously obeyed, there is trouble. Rhenius’s stand caused trouble. Christians were (quite justly) accused of intolerance, and became themselves simply intolerable. Persecution reached such a pitch that Villages of Refuge were needed. Some of Rhenius’s friends in Europe sent funds to support such villages.
Suddenly, twelve years after his arrival, the CMS dismissed Rhenius and took over his work. The reasons for such a drastic step lay in his being a Lutheran who ordained Indians in violation of apostolic succession as defined by Anglicans. Not wanting to hinder in any way the work of God, he bowed out. Later, at his people’s urgent request, he returned and struggled on, attempting to complete his Tamil grammar and his Bible translation, but died six years later before he was fifty.
Dohnavur was one of the Villages of Refuge. Rhenius named it in honor of a certain Count Dohna who had sent money for the persecuted Christians.
When Amy and her Band came upon it, it was “a bare sunburnt spot out on the plains under the mountains to the west, a huddle of huts and small houses round a fairly big, whitewashed church with, beyond low mud walls, an old ramshackle bungalow built of mud bricks and visibly falling to pieces.” Many of the Christians there were nominal ones, descendants of those who had “gone over” during the sweeping Christian movements early in the previous century. This was not the sort of Christian Amy and her Band, any more than Rhenius, wanted to multiply. They were laying down their lives to see true faith born—in mere churchgoers as well as in Hindus, some of whom seemed to be earnest inquirers.
On March 4 the Band had left Dohnavur, traveling by night as usual, to return to their old “battlefield” in the east, the village of Pannaivilai. Not far from there, in Great Lake, was a Hindu temple. They had often tried to speak to the devadasis, women who served in the temples. Swami Harshananda, in All About Hindu Temples,1 describes their function: “This system was opposed by the brahmanas. However, due to the pressure of the kings and noblemen it came to stay. The girls chosen to become devadasis would be married to the deity in the temple in a ceremonial way. Their main duties consisted of cleaning the temple, fanning the image, carrying lights, singing and dancing before the deity and devotees and so on.
“The system might have started some time during the third century A.D. It soon degenerated into prostitution, thanks to the notorious human weaknesses.”
Sometimes the Band had seen little girls, bought as infants from their mothers and reared in the temple-women’s house where, by precept and example, they learned the “trade.” These children were “gracious little maidens, winsome in their ways, almost always more refined in manner than ordinary children, and beautiful.”2 Amy and her comrades longed to reach over the wall, but the procuring of these children was always a hole-and-corner operation, heavily guarded, and they could only pray that He to whom no wall is an obstacle would somehow show them a way.
The bullock bandies carrying Amy and her Indian friends rumbled up to the old bungalow in Pannaivilai on the evening of March 6. That very evening in the village nearby a strange thing took place.
Preena was a child of seven who lived in the temple house. Her father was dead. Her mother had been persuaded to devote her to the gods. Once she had managed to slip out and return to her mother, a twenty-mile walk to Tuticorin, “one of the Sodoms of the province.” The temple women traced her, and the mother, threatened with the wrath of the gods, tore the child’s arms from around her neck and gave her back to them. They branded her hands with hot irons, effectively burning into her young mind the heinousness of her crime. She had run away from a sacred calling.
One day Preena overheard a conversation about “tying her to the god.” She imagined being bound with ropes to the idol in the dark recesses of the temple. Anything would be preferable to that, so she resolved to escape, no matter what the cost. Like the other little girls, she was under constant surveillance. She could think of only one way out. In desperation she went to the idol, threw herself down before it, and prayed that she might die.
On the same evening that Amy’s bandy reached the bungalow in Pannaivilai, God sent an angel to the temple house. So Amy interpreted it. If He could send an angel to the prison in Jerusalem to deliver the apostle Peter, why not to a temple house in an Indian village to deliver a little girl? Amy wrote that the angel simply took her by the hand, led her out, across a stream, through the woods. There seemed no other possible explanation for her having eluded the all-seeing eyes and finding her way to safety. Preena’s version was that she had heard the temple women call Amy “the childstealing ammal,” hoping to frighten her. The child made up her mind instead that that was the very ammal she wanted to find. The late afternoon of March 6 was the time she chose. (Was it God’s angel who chose? Or perhaps both? For God works often through human choices.) A Christian woman named Servant of Jesus came upon the “very small and desolate mite with tumbled hair and troubled eyes” standing in front of the church in Pannaivilai. It was late, so instead of taking the child back where she belonged the woman kept her for the night, intending to return her next morning. But Preena insisted that she wanted to go to the child-stealing ammal.
Early the next morning Amy was having her chota (early tea) on the verandah when Servant of Jesus, looking astonished, suddenly appeared with Preena. “She did not know about the angel, I expect, and she could not understand it: at all.” The child ran straight to the white lady, climbed into her lap, and began to chatter away. “My name is Pearl-eyes, and I want to stay here always. I have come to stay.”
Preena’s memory years later of her precious “Amma” (mother), was of her taking her into her lap and kissing her. “I thought, ‘My mother used to put me on her lap and kiss me—who is this person who kisses me like my mother?’ From that day she became my mother, body and soul.”
If it had not been late afternoon when Servant of Jesus found Preena, she would have taken her back at once to the temple house. If the Band had not arrived at the bungalow that night, there would have been no one to take her to. If Preena had succeeded in making her escape earlier, Amy would have been fifty miles away. Surely all this was a wonder of providential timing. When she told the story for the first time in Things as They Are, Amy began the chapter with David Livingstone’s words, “It seems to have been a mistake to imagine that the Divine Majesty on high was too exalted to take any notice of our mean affairs. The great minds among us are remarkable for the attention they bestow upon minutiae . . . ‘a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without your Father.’ ”
Slowly they grew to know the child and delight in her. “We watched her wonderingly. She was perfectly at home with us. She ran out, gathered leaves and flowers, and came back with them. These were carefully arranged in rows on the floor. Then another expedition, and in again with three pebbles for hearthstones, a shell for a cooking pot, bits of straw for firewood, a stick for a match, and sand for rice. She went through all the minutiae of Tamil cookery with the greatest seriousness. Then we, together with her doll, were invited to partake. The little thing walked straight into our hearts, and we felt we would risk anything to keep her.”
Preena was followed, of course. The temple women (“We are servants of the gods!”) came to the bungalow, crowds gathered, there was an enormous fuss. Preena would not go with them, and Amy would not force her. Amy dared not go near the child then lest they think she had some power to bewitch her. Arulai, one of the Band, took her away out of sight and the child clung to her and sobbed, imploring her not to let them take her. Their punishments were cruel—Preena had scars to prove it. Arulai managed to soothe her and took her back to the angry crowd. The little girl stood bravely before them all. Would she go with them? “I won’t!” was her answer, and they went off, declaring that they would write to her mother who had given her to them.
For a while the Band continued their work as before, but when they returned to the bungalow in the evenings, there was a child to welcome them. “I remember wakening up to the knowledge that there had been a very empty corner somewhere in me that the work had never filled; and I remember, too, thanking God that it was not wrong to be comforted by the love of a child,” Amy said. She was soon nicknamed the Elf. One morning the Elf asked Amy, “Can you be good without God’s grace?”
Amy replied that she certainly could not.
“Well, I can!” said the Elf. “I want to pray now!”
“Now? It is eight o’clock now. Haven’t you had prayer long ago?” Six o’clock was rising time.
“No. That’s just what I meant. I skipped my prayer this morning, and so of course I got no grace; but I have been helping the elder Sisters. Wasn’t that right?”
“Yes, quite right.”
“And yet I hadn’t got any grace! But I suppose,” she added after a moment’s thought, “it was the grace over from yesterday that did it.”
Amy Carmichael learned things from this child that “darkened the sunlight.” She heard firsthand of the secret traffic in the souls and bodies of little children, things unthinkable, impossible at that time to write about. Rumors which had reached Amy from time to time during their travels she had tried to dismiss as utterly preposterous. When she had (in the most delicate and circuitous terms, no doubt) tried to broach the subject to missionaries who might know the truth, she was squelched with remarks about her vivid imagination, “more ardent than informed.” The rumors could not be true. They could not possibly be true.
There is some question as to whether the most elementary facts of life had ever been explained to Amy Carmichael. The word sex was unmentionable earlier in this century. A missionary who worked with her many years later insisted that Amy not only did not then know the truth about sex, but never learned. Whether her ignorance can be said to have been quite so abysmal is doubtful, but it is clear enough that her Victorian mind refused to admit thoughts which were so unpleasant and certainly unnecessary. Did she understand just what she was saving little girls from? “She did not know,” said the above-mentioned missionary. “She only knew it was horrible.”
Just how horrible it was she did her best to put into words. Things as They Are has a picture of a half-naked holy man. “This photo is from death in life,” she writes, “a carcass, moving, breathing, sinning. . . . I knew something about the man. His life is simply unthinkable. Talk of beasts in human shape! It is slandering good animals to compare bad men to beasts. Safer far in a tiger’s den than that man’s monastery. But he is a temple saint—earthly, sensual, devilish. Now put beside him a little girl—your own little girl—and leave her there—yes, leave her there in his hand”
The evidence for emotional and physical cruelty within sex, in India, whether marital or extramarital, has always been strong. The high rate of suicide among young women today supports this. Amy needed only to imagine the details. The overwhelming desire to save the children became a fire in her bones. “Sometimes the broad smooth levels of life are crossed by a black-edged jagged crack, rent, as it seems, by an outburst of the fiery force below. We find ourselves suddenly close upon it; it opens right at our very feet,”3 wrote Amy, and Walker corroborated it, “We are skirting the abyss, an abyss which is deep and foul beyond description, and yet is glorified, to Hindu eyes, by the sanctions of religion.”4
But how were they to track down these children? “The helpless little things seemed to slip between our fingers as we stretched out our hands to grasp them, or it was as though a great wave swept up and carried them out to sea. In a kind of desperation, we sought for a way. But we found that we must know more before we could hope to find it. To graze upon the tips (of herbage) is the Tamil synonym for superficial knowledge. If we were to do anything for these children it was vain to graze on the tips of facts; it took years to do more than that.”5
1. Swami Harshananda, All About Hindu Temples (Mysore, India: Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education, 1979).
2. Things as They Are, p. 160ff.
3. Things as They Are, p. 188.
4. Amy Carmichael, Overweights of Joy, p. 35.
5. Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord, p. 22.