7. Broken Jewels: (1915-1927, The years of public outcry)
“A mother at nine years of age delivered by Caesarean section of a baby weighing less than two pounds.”
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1922
“The number of Hindu girls who are already widows at ten years of age or under is still over 96,000, while no fewer than 329,076 Hindu widows are fifteen years old or less.”
Census of India, 1921, vol. 1, part 2, p. 46
7
Broken Jewels
1915-1927, The years of public outcry
“So many, so young and all accursed,” was the unknowing remark of a Hindu woman as she saw thirty mission girls passing by on their way to church, draped in their usual white shawls. She mistook them for widows.
Although Amy’s work was not mainly directed against the evils of child-marriages, child-widows, suttee, or infanticide, she came into contact with those things many times. A book outlining her life would not be complete without mention of the child-jewels, many as young as five or six, who were broken by these customs and condemned to a life of suffering; five- and six-year-old child brides, ravished, diseased, broken in body and mind.
According to the Legislative Assembly Debates, each generation in India saw the death of 3,200,000 little mothers in the agony of child birth. It was common to marry a girl of three or four years and allow consummation when aged nine or ten.
Evidence that the above customs prevailed, especially in South India, was furnished by American, English, and Indian social reformers alike. At the same time Amy Carmichael began her work of rescuing children in danger of temple life, Katherine Mayo toured India, interviewing both British and Indians who were concerned about India’s children. Both Amy and Bishop Henry Whitehead, who had lived in India forty years, twenty-three of them as Lord Bishop of the Great Indian Diocese of Madras, confirmed her findings as true.
None were more vocal and more determined to right the wrongs than the Indian people themselves.
“Is it not a sin when they call a baby of nine or ten years, or a boy of ten years, husband and wife? It is a shame! Girls of nine or ten, babies themselves who ought to be playing with their dolls rather than becoming wives, are mothers of children. Boys who ought to be getting their lessons in school are rearing a large family of half a dozen boys and girls,” stated Sardar Bahadur Captain Hira Singh Brar of the Punjab.
“The curse of child marriage is sapping the vitality of thousands of our promising boys and girls on whom the future of our society entirely rests. It is bringing into existence every year thousands of weaklings—both boys and girls—who are born of immature parenthood” (Mahatma Ghandi, Young India, 26 August 1926).
Once again, religion demanded that the girl be married before puberty. After that, it was shame. C. V. Krishnaswami Ayyar, social reformer and writer, stated publicly that the Hindu believed marrying daughters after puberty was committing great sin. Caste made it possible, sometimes obligatory, for family members to marry each other.
Mrs. Arunadevi Mukerjei gave evidence from the Baroda Census in 1928: “Out of 28,000 marriages that had been consummated, nearly 22,500 were cases in which the first child is born when the wife was below thirteen years of age.”
The zenana (harem), an inner room in sometimes the center of eight other outer rooms in a well-to-do home, was nothing less than a prison for a little girl. “Of two places my child will know,” said a noble Indian. “This zenana in her home, and when she is twelve she will go in an enclosed litter to her husband’s home across the hills, to that zenana.”
“Sir, on behalf of the innocent, helpless, suffering girl children of this land, on behalf of millions of child wives, child mothers, and child widows, I appeal to all sections of the House.” No one was more vehement than Dr. Mutthulaksmi Reddi in her campaign to end abuses.
Often children were married to old men who died within a few years, leaving the little girl that most despised of all India’s creatures—a widow. For a widow is like a snake who devoured her husband’s life. Her sins in a past life are being punished by widowhood. “To force widowhood upon little girls is a brutal crime for which we Hindus are daily paying dearly. And does not the Hindu widowhood stink in one’s nostrils when one thinks of old and diseased men over fifty taking, or rather purchasing, girl wives, sometimes one on top of another?” asked Mahatma Ghandi, writing in Young India (5 August 1926).
The number of widows in British India for the period of 1914-1923 was 26,834,838 according to the Statistical Abstract, an official publication. Close to twenty-seven million widows—most of them children, locked up in houses and huts, disgraced, punished daily, treated as slaves, the object of curses, revilings. Remarriage was forbidden. Child marriages were eventually banned by the British in 1929.
At the time Amy opened a refuge for children in Dohnavur, an Indian widow and high-caste Brahman, Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati, toured the United States pleading for help on behalf of India’s children, beseeching Americans—even one—to champion the widows and women of India, but in vain.
Many of Amy’s rescued babies were the products of child marriages. Malnutrition began in the womb, and the baby born was undersized and sickly, having a little mother who was often negligent in her mothering, depressed and ill herself. Some of Amy’s babies weighed three pounds. The baby’s condition was made worse at weaning time when it was placed on watery buttermilk. The little mother had never eaten meat, since the cow was sacred, only cereal grains and the few vegetables the family was able to plant and tend. Only the Untouchables were better nourished; it did not matter what they ate!
If the baby survived that far it was in danger of malaria, in a land where 57 million people a year contacted the disease and 1 million died of it. Or, influenza, of which in October and November 1918 7 million persons died.
Jasmine was a child-bride of five years of age and at age twelve a child-widow.
“Your sin from another life ate your husband’s life as a vicious snake eats a squirrel!”
“What sin?” wept Jasmine. And because they could not tell her, she cried harder. What had she done?
Her relatives laid hands upon her to shave her head, as was the custom, but her father took pity upon her. “Let her alone until she is sixteen.”
For four years Jasmine was a child again and learned to read and write. At age thirteen her jewels were taken from her.
Jasmine’s father was a priest whose duty it was to go into the inner shrine and stand before Siva and chant praises and prayers, morning and evening. Little Jasmine went with him and learned all the prayers by heart.
Every morning she performed puja (worship), facing east and bathing in water.
“Oh mother river, forgive my sin which killed my husband. Comfort me.” At noon and night, the same prayers. “Mine be the refuge of thy lotus feet,” she always added, yearning for salvation.
In the evening Jasmine sat by her father in their pleasant little room by a brass lamp, a symbol of the god of fire, Agni. Her father read aloud from his ancient books or recited poetry, and the child’s heart longed to know the Supreme God, the Lord over all, He of the lotus feet. Already she loved Him whom she did not know.
Only one thing marred the contentment of those years. Jasmine’s mother had born fourteen children, of whom ten died. And of course it was the woman’s fault, her sins from a previous life.
Almost every day Jasmine’s father dragged his wife into the ander behind thick wooden doors and beat her without mercy. The woman had brought only a few dowry jewels to her marriage when she was thirteen, and so his anger flared every time he thought about it. Once she almost died from the beating.
When Jasmine was sixteen the “branding of the widow” took place. Her family embraced her, then threw her down, ripped off her silk sari, and dressed her in coarse white cloth. The village barber shaved her head, as he would do every month for the rest of her life. Now she was the butt of everyone’s exasperation and anger and abuse, for had she not caused the death of her innocent husband? Never-ending penance, scraps of leftover garbage for food, crushed with the feeling of always being in the wrong.
Her relatives wept for the poor child, her life blighted by widowhood at age twelve, now at sixteen a widow in every sense of the word.
All of a sudden, during the ceremony, she cried out to them, a sort of prophecy or half-remembered threads of literature from her father’s book: “Weep for yourselves, my people! You curse me, but I am blessed! I see a net and threads move as if alive! I see you caught in that net!”
So began a life of tedious seclusion, empty days and years, until she was twenty-seven and her father died. Three years of even more severe penance, fruitless prayers, and obedience to petty rules all in the hope of forgiveness for sin that had slain her husband.
Finally, she was considered old enough to make a pilgrimage, and she traveled all over South India, from one shrine to another, using up her small allowance of money. There were ten thousand people at each festival, so she prayed continually, “God of all, keep me safe.” Her shaven head and dress betrayed her, and a widow was fair game for any man.
Words from her father-priest came to mind. “Seek the Creator, the God of gods.” It began to occur to her that the idols of stone and wood were nothing, yet she bowed before them. Still, there was no answer to her prayer to God, the Creator, and she next prayed to die. Rivers and wells and water tanks abounded, and it was not unusual for bodies to be found in them.
“Oh, Thou of the lotus feet, I long for Thee.” Of course He had heard, but His plan was to answer her prayer at Dohnavur. So she was led there, worn and sorrowing, and the pilgrimage was over.
“They told me I would find Him here,” she said to Amy. “I sought Him in all the temples, but never did I hear a word of Him.”
Amy opened the Word of God and revealed to Jasmine Him whom she had ignorantly worshiped. They came to the verse in Psalm 51:16, “Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it,” and Jasmine was startled. “The only God I ever met Who said that.”
There were days when she almost turned back into unbelief, for cords of love bound her to her large family, and now she was triply accursed in their eyes. There were other voices. “I heard them [the old gods] calling me,” she said.
Jasmine was able to read, and mornings she and Amy read together the Old Testament, “the road of the Great Revelation.” Afternoons she and Arulai read the New Testament.
One day as Jasmine was reading Isaiah 53, she broke down weeping. “Stop! I cannot bear those words! They stab me as spears!”
That evening her New Testament reading was of the crucifixion.
The realization that God could suffer, and for her, was so powerful that from that day on all her doubts vanished.
“Oh, if only I had heard of Him before! How many years have I lost in not loving Him!”
And to Him she said, “See me at Thy lotus feet, O Lord of my life. Oh, that I had met Thee sooner on the road!”
Forbidden by the British in 1829, suttee nevertheless continued, sometimes openly, more often in secret. The little widow, a mere child, sometimes had to be drugged and tied to the funeral pyre. Older girls and women voluntarily threw themselves into the fire, believing in the promise of almost instant paradise for themselves and family.
The whole community longed for and loved a suttee. The moment a widow had so decided, all the neighborhood gathered to be blessed by her.
Amy also knew of the practice of infanticide to get rid of unwanted girl babies, but in her isolated place at Dohnavur was not in direct contact with it. The mere thought of another daughter for whom a dowry must be provided was enough to drive a poor father to leave the baby in a thorn bush where the crows would make short work of it.
A woman who bore only girls was stoned, beaten, or returned in disgrace to her father’s house. Sometimes impregnation by a priest was the remedy. The very thought behind the Eastern custom of dowry—that of paying a man to marry a woman—indicated the belief that woman was inferior.
The Sanskrit word for son is putra, a “deliverer from hell.” Without a son to light the funeral pyre, the father would go for a time to Put—hell—instead of being reincarnated.
Child brides, child widows, the helpless victims of infanticide—all broken jewels, but still jewels.
One of Amy’s co-workers, visiting a municipal hospital, spoke of Jesus and His love to a little Brahmin widow. The child was afraid to whisper more than a few words: “After my husband died I was kidnapped—locked up in the temple house—I had to obey—”
“If we could help you, would you like to live with us at Dohnavur?”
The child drew back. The very word Christian was a horror to her, signifying all sorts of abominations. But she nodded her consent.
The very brief conversation had been noticed by the child’s escort, and she was immediately taken away and sent to another town. All attempts to trace her came to nothing.
Such “failures” to save, humanly speaking, may be classed along with broken jewels. They are unfinished stories, whose end is not in sight.
Fawn, whose father had cursed her, was a jewel in the process of breaking down. Amy was returning from Madras after seeing Walker Iyer and his wife off for England. Arulai and Pearleyes (now grown up) were with her, and on the way back they searched for one person whose heart was prepared. “Lord, lead us to souls prepared.” They found no one who would even listen to their witness. Was the trip to be in vain? Only this. After dark, an Indian Christian woman met them and told them of Fawn, a child who came to love Jesus and wished to join the Starry Cluster.
Only that. For three months Amy heard no more, until she received a letter from the same Indian woman. “Fawn is so insistent in joining you that I shall send her at once. Her parents have agreed.”
Fawn arrived at Dohnavur and happily fit into the life, even winning a younger child to the Lord. Then one day the parents demanded her back, and since Fawn was under age, Amy had no recourse.
“Oh, hide me, hide me!” Fawn cried when she saw her father, but after a minute she controlled herself and faced all the family quietly.
“What does an infant like you know of religion? Are you wiser than your father and his father? Come, enough of this foolishness, come home with us.”
“I am a Christian. I cannot live at home.”
The father cursed and stormed, the mother wept, the younger sister screamed in a fit of anguish, until Fawn began to waver. Then her father said the wrong thing: “Only come home, and you shall read your Bible and pray, for all gods are one.”
Fawn closed her eyes but not in surrender, for she remembered a fire, a Bible thrown in, her two brothers beaten and locked in an inner room. After that, they had changed their minds about being Christians. And she knew the fire would be lighted for her, too.
“Forgive me. I cannot go home.”
They departed, but they waited outside the compound wall for darkness to set in. In the Hindu village nearby where no Christian lived, and where the people had never responded to the gospel, the father asked for help in raiding the bungalow and carrying Fawn away by force.
“We will not help you,” they all said. “We have no quarrel with the bungalow.”
Fawn was saved from her father, but homesickness, depression, longings, and temptations almost too strong to resist set in, and for five years she hovered on the line. After that, prayers and love won, and she grew to be a strong Christian.
Certainly those of any age who set their hands to the plow and draw back can be called broken jewels. So many were merely baptized Hindus, not genuine Christians. Once a man convert took an open stand for Christ, was baptized, and confessed Him to the village. So quickly that all were stunned, first his wife died of cholera, then all three daughters died, then their three husbands, leaving only a grandchild. The heathen around the man continued in good health and prosperity. The man drew back, “lest my little grandson die. He is all I have left.”
And the people said, “You have offended a Force whose powers you dared to underestimate. Cease to offend.”
In contrast to this sadness, a husband and wife turned to the Lord and burned their items of demon worship. Their four-year-old boy, always strong and well, developed sleeping sickness and paralysis. They brought him to Amy and the other Christians to be prayed for, but he remained unhealed. “Even so, we shall never turn our backs upon God.”