7. Into India
7.
INTO INDIA
Robert Wilson had suffered a stroke!
Within an hour of receiving the news, Amy had explained to her friends at the mission what had happened and had departed for Colombo. On December 15, 1894, the day before her twenty-seventh birthday, Amy was met by her mother in London. By December 21, she was at Broughton Grange comforting the D.O.M., who by now was almost seventy years old. Already he was recovering, but Amy had no regrets about her hasty return. She would stay with him at Broughton Grange.
“You must write about your experiences,” urged the D.O.M.
“Oh, but I have. I’ve written letters home, some in the form of the newsletter Scraps. I’ve written letters to the Keswick magazine, too.”
But soon she was synthesizing it all into a book. She even had her own line drawings for it. Robert Wilson’s son William added some appropriate sketches of his own. Would anyone be interested? Yes, after several months it was accepted for publication by the Marshall Brothers of London. The title would be From Sunrise Land, the intent a prayer for the heathen of Japan. Amy did little else that winter, except attend to Robert Wilson and ponder her future. In Japan she had failed as a missionary on two fronts. Her health was too fragile, and her facility for the language was lacking. But her stay in Ceylon had given her new hope. Perhaps there were places she could stay without being sickly. Perhaps there were languages she could master.
IN JAPAN SHE HAD FAILED AS A MISSIONARY ON TWO FRONTS. HER HEALTH WAS TOO FRAGILE, AND HER FACILITY FOR THE LANGUAGE WAS LACKING.
A letter from a friend in Bangalore, India, intrigued her—especially because the friend was a sister at the Church of England’s Zenana Hospital and knew medicine. Amy noted:
She said the climate was healthy, delightful, in fact; it might be possible to live there even if China and Japan and the tropics were taboo.…1
It pleased her mother, Robert Wilson, and all the other Carmichaels and Wilsons, too, for they had sensed that Amy was determined to “go forth” again. At least the locale in India appeared to be a congenial place. The British maintained a huge presence in India. And the climate seemed the kind that would not destroy Amy’s health. So Amy agreed, although this time she received no specific “call” from the Lord. Bangalore was simply a convenient place to go.
For the first time in a very long time, Amy remembered that the dear Reverend Mr. Beatty of Millisle had a brother who had been a missionary to India. During one of the missionary’s furloughs, he and his wife lived near the Carmichaels in Millisle. On Sunday afternoons, the wife regaled neighborhood children with stories of India. Amy—a young child at the time—was so fired by them that she didn’t want to leave the woman’s side. She didn’t want the stories to end. But her childhood was so rich, and the stories had become lost in her great treasury of stories. “Now to think: I might be going to India.”
As usual, Robert Wilson, the D.O.M., could facilitate almost anything. In May, Amy was given an interview in London with the Church of England’s Zenana Mission Society. By July 26, they had notified the Keswick Mission Committee that Amy was accepted for duty in Bangalore. At a meeting the next day in the large tent at Keswick, Amy expressed her gratitude and said her farewells. She sprang the unexpected by unfurling a banner with golden words on a field of blue: “Nothing is too precious for Jesus.”2
Her departure was yet several months off. In the meantime, whether she liked it or not, she was instructed in the ways of India. Because it was Britain’s crown jewel, it seemed everyone had an opinion of India, even though its immensity defied generalities. In size, it was twenty times greater than the British Isles. The land teemed with mountains, jungles, plateaus, yawning rivers, and arid deserts. India’s population—an estimated three hundred million inhabitants—was ten times greater than Great Britain’s. The subcontinent was home to many languages and religions. The suffering in India was overwhelming. Several men sought to explain Indian politics to Amy. Britain, the great world power, had controlled India since the 1600s, over the centuries steadily increasing their influence. But in 1885, educated Hindus organized a nationalist movement, embodied in the Indian National Congress. Intrigue increased. Even now, the British were encouraging the formation of a Muslim League. This, reasoned the devious British, would split the native effort into bickering between Hindus and Muslims.
“Before long they will be fighting each other instead of Britain,” offered one man with a shrug.
Another informant seemed just as depressing. “British India is made up of more than 560 native states. Each native state is ruled by a prince or ‘maharajah,’ who has absolute power within his own state. In return for stupendous wealth and power within his own state, the maharajah pledges support for Britain in time of war. And he also allows the British government at New Delhi to control all interstate and international relations.”
Then dreadful news swept the Keswick community. The Robert Stewarts, whom Amy was going to accompany to the province of Fukien back in 1892, had all been murdered in that very province! That saddened everyone and reminded most of all her mother and Robert Wilson just how dangerous Amy’s missionary work was.
But on October 11, 1895, she once again endured the heartbreaking good-byes and sailed for the East. Aboard a mediocre steamer in second class, she again noticed the peculiar transformation of the British passengers at Port Said. Because she was traveling this time to India, where class distinctions were deeply ingrained in the culture, the other passengers sought to “educate” her.
“You are most fortunate, Miss Carmichael,” said one male passenger, “that you are arriving in India in ‘cold weather.’ That’s when we party for several months.”
“Oh, I don’t think I’ll be doing that.”
“So much the pity then,” sniffed the man, snapping his fingers at a waiter. “Boy! Billyatapani! Burra peg!”
Amy discovered that this imperious command was for three fingers of whiskey with soda water. Apparently social drinking in India had regressed from genteel clarets and brandies to head-numbing whiskey, gin, and cocktails. She prayed she would see little of that where she was going. Nor did she want to experience their frantic social calendar they called “cold weather.” As she heard more and more talk, she realized that their claims of partying for several months were not too much exaggerated. On numerous occasions, the British assembled to party day after day. “We had a bashing good party every day for fourteen days during Rawalpindi,” bragged one red-faced passenger over his gin.
“Just who are the heathens in India?” Amy asked herself.
Her destination was Madras, a port on the southeast coast of India. From there she would travel about 150 miles west into the highlands to reach Bangalore. Bangalore rested on the Mysore Plateau at an elevation of three thousand feet. The great city of more than one million inhabitants was known for its mild, dry climate. To grasp the enormity of India, Amy had only to remember that Bangalore was more than nine hundred miles from Calcutta to the northeast and nearly twelve hundred miles from Delhi to the north. On November 8, the ship anchored at Madras, and she disembarked. Naked poverty raged. Families were living on the streets, the better-off ones lying on mats made of palm leaves instead of the bare dirt. Virtually naked, many of these natives nevertheless wore bracelets and anklets with rings dangling from their noses and ears.
“JUST WHO ARE THE HEATHENS IN INDIA?” AMY ASKED HERSELF.
An Englishman near Amy saw her gaping. “The cities of India are like this,” he explained. “These poor wretches flood in from the countryside looking for a better life. Thousands of them die on the street.”
“This is our crown jewel?” blurted Amy. “What have we done?”
“I say, madam,” he countered, “that’s not fair. Look at the magnificent buildings we’ve put up here to show the superiority of our ways.”
Madras had once been the focus of British power. Enormous Italianate buildings displayed massive columns and arches near the harbor. Although British power had shifted mainly to Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi, Madras was still very important for the administration of southern India. Amy discovered that the story of maharajahs who administered the more than five hundred native states was a half-truth. Much of India had been annexed by the British outright. Although her destination, Bangalore, was in one of the native states, the entire eastern half of southern India was ruled by the British through subdivisions called “districts.”
Amy soon learned that all European men were called sahibs, all European women were memsahibs. In every instance, native Indians deferred to a sahib or a memsahib. If a sahib or memsahib wanted something at a shop, the shopkeeper would abandon a native customer without hesitation. “Memsahib!” he would say, giving the palms-together salute of respect. Even on a crowded street, a native had better not brush against a sahib or memsahib. European travelers were whisked to a hotel and offered curried chicken and rice. Not so with an Indian. A native Indian was insane to think he might ever dine in English clubs or ride a horse on their polo greens.
“How profoundly depressing,” said Amy, startling her informant. “And where is the Church Mission Society located?”
From Madras, Amy should have taken a train west to Bangalore. But the Church Mission Society official in Madras, Mr. Arden, asked if Amy would stay with his daughter Mary while he visited an outstation at Ootacamund—which they all called “Ooty”—with his other daughter, Maud. Of course, Amy agreed.
November was the rainiest month of the year in Madras, with many drenching downpours. Still, she was assured, the temperature reached only about eighty-five degrees in the afternoon, compared to one hundred degrees in the summer; and in December, the monsoon rain abruptly tapered off—just in time for all the parties. In the week or so before Mr. Arden and Maud left, Amy learned much more about India.
“Don’t you know the apostle Thomas came to India right after the Resurrection?” chirped the daughters. “He may have gone to China, too, but he returned to India before he died. He was martyred at Malabar. He is buried at Mylapore just outside Madras.”
The daughters pointed out the very spot south of the Aydras River. The thought of one of the Lord’s disciples—even his castoff shell—being so nearby was stunning. India was so rich in history. Of course, Amy had experienced such feelings before. She had been impressed by realizing a worthy like John Wesley had done this or done that in a certain place she was standing on. But Thomas of the Twelve? It made her head swim with delight! Yet she remained very proper with the daughters.
The daughters were not ignorant about later Christianity in India. “Christians arrived at Kerala from Syria in the sixth century. At Kerala the Christians even retain a Syriac order of service. Of course in 1542, Francis Xavier, the Jesuit from Portugal, arrived at Goa. Protestants quickly followed suit. Both the Dutch and English established themselves in the Bengal area by the early 1600s. Of course you know all about the Baptist missionary William Carey, who worked near Calcutta and translated the Bible tirelessly into every language of India.…”
The daughters also breezily discussed the religion of the Hindus. “Their behavior is far simpler than their beliefs,” said one. “They don’t eat meat, especially their sacred cows, although they do eat eggs and fish. And they marry within their own caste. Probably few of them actually understand the complexities of their religion.”
“Their caste system is very old,” volunteered the other. “Originally there were four main castes—with another group of people excluded completely: the ‘Untouchables.’”
“Oh, the system is so insidious,” cried one of the daughters. “They believe in being reincarnated as another life-form. The catch is that one can be reborn into a higher caste only if one stays strictly within that caste in this life. So you see it is very hard to get a Hindu to ‘break’ a caste. They are gambling with their souls.”
“THERE SEEMS NO HOPE FOR THE UNTOUCHABLES.” EXCEPT THE HOPE OF CHRIST, THOUGHT AMY.
“And the castes have been subdivided and subdivided until now there are thousands of castes,” cried the other. “Yet there seems no hope for the Untouchables.”
Except the hope of Christ, thought Amy.
Finally one of the daughters said reproachfully, “You have been here for a week, and you haven’t said one word about the Lord Jesus Christ.”3
Amy was flooded with shame. Later she wrote:
It was true I had not said one word. The girls were like butterflies, pretty and dressy, and I had been shy of them both. I had no idea they cared for the things of Christ and had thought I should wait until I knew them better before speaking of these things.…The friend who had led them to Christ had said I would be coming by the next boat and that I would help them. So all the time I had been thinking of them as pretty butterflies they were really hungry lambs…[oh,] the shame of that hour. But we have a forgiving Lord. He gave us a wonderful time together. We rode together, read together, prayed together. We became fast friends.…4
The first week in December, Amy was aboard a train rumbling west into the highlands. Rice paddies were replaced by fields of millet carved into tropical forests. Usually the countryside was peopled only in rough huts or drab mud-brick buildings. But Hindu temples of all sizes were a frequent sight. Muslim mosques, flagged by their distinctive Byzantine minarets, could be seen less often. Rarest of all was the sight of an enormous palace, so Italian she could have been in Rome. Was that the way of all India? The few very rich and the many very poor? At Bangalore Amy’s train was met by the friend who had written her about the healthful climate. Almost immediately Amy was confined to bed with a raging fever.
“Oh, my bones ache so,” she told the doctor at the mission hospital.
“That’s Madras for you,” he said sourly. “You’ve picked up dengue fever.”
No! Dengue fever was also known as “breakbone” fever. Amy now knew why. She ached everywhere. The only good thing about dengue fever was that the severe pain ran its course in one week. However, several weeks were required to fully recover. It was during this recovery period that Amy had her twenty-eighth birthday. She was lying in a lounge chair by an open window. No one knew it was her birthday, yet suddenly a garland of flowers flew through the window to land on her lap.
“Why did you do that?” she called out the window.
“I don’t know,” answered the puzzled thrower.
Amy was quickly discovering that these Bangalore missionaries were the “verandah” type that the great Dr. Livingstone had held in such low regard. They spent a great deal of time enjoying the status of being British colonials. They hired natives—usually Muslims—to teach in their schools instead of mastering the languages and delivering the Good News themselves. They sat about, prattling and complaining and speculating. “Would these natives ever do anything for us if we didn’t pay them?” queried one missionary cynically. No one disagreed, and no one offered a solution. In Japan, Amy had mulled over the question of whether Mr. Buxton of Matsuye was too much in love with British ways to be a good missionary, but Barclay Buxton was far superior to these missionaries in Bangalore. At least he had mastered Japanese so he could deliver the Good News.
The missionaries in Bangalore often gossiped about a missionary named Thomas Walker. He was a bit of a renegade, working far to the south, down in the hot lowlands of Tinnevelly. “I heard he’s about ready to resign,” said one missionary with relish.
“Oh, he won’t resign,” said another. “That’s just his way of getting attention.”
Yet the missionaries quoted Mr. Walker so often that Amy concluded that they really respected him. Amy tried to fathom this Thomas Walker. He sounded like a scholarly but very opinionated old person, who was cranky besides.
One of the other young women at the Bangalore mission came to Amy because she had heard that Amy wrote articles for mission magazines. The young woman said, “I sent a story to our mission magazine in England about a young Muslim girl who very much wanted to convert, but her parents prevented it. They wrote back that the ending was too discouraging. Should I invent a happy ending?”
“Heavens, no, you mustn’t change the truth to please anyone!”
This righteous attitude did not endear Amy to some of the other missionaries. And they let her know it. But Amy accepted the hostility as whittling away at her self, a process she welcomed. And no complacency among others was going to keep her from serving Christ. As much as Amy had loved Misaki San, this time she was determined to remove the language barrier between herself and the local people. This zeal found her a vocation; she would be the one missionary at the hospital who spoke Tamil, one of two common languages in the province of Mysore. Tamil will prove more valuable, thought Amy, because the other language, Cannarese, is more provincial. Tamil was some kind of ancient, classical language for southern India, similar to the way that Latin formed the foundation for the European Romance languages. If Amy could master Tamil, she reasoned, she could make herself understood throughout southern India, even northernmost Ceylon. Perhaps it would also ease the learning of other southern Indian languages. She tried to ignore the raised eyebrows of other missionaries when Tamil was mentioned; apparently it was the most difficult language on the Indian subcontinent!
“They say it’s worse than Chinese,” gasped one skeptic.
Still, Amy began to study Tamil six hours a day. The hospital even provided her regular lessons with a native language teacher, called a moonshee. It was a comfort when she first realized Tamil’s symbols—in fact, all the languages of India—were written horizontally from left to right, like English. Words were separated from each other by a space, too.
AMY BEGAN TO STUDY TAMIL SIX HOURS A DAY.
But the alphabet!
“It is rather different from what I’m used to seeing,” she volunteered lamely to her moonshee.
“Ah! You see Tamil was originally incised into palm leaves with a stylus.” He noticed her blank look. “In contrast to the northern languages of India that are written on paper with ink.”
“Well, actually, I meant it is different from the English alphabet. How many vowels are there?”
“Only twelve.”
“So many?”
“You see the Tamil alphabet is phonetic. Long and short sounds then must have their symbols. Yes, you have more letters to learn, but once you master the sounds of the alphabet, you master the sound of any word in Tamil.” He added wryly, “Unlike English.”
“How many consonants are there?” she went on doggedly.
“Consonants and vowel-consonant combinations,” he corrected. “Only thirty-two.”
“So I must learn forty-eight symbols in all?”
“Well, there are some sounds of the alphabet that require more than one symbol.”
So Amy attacked Tamil. Some variations in Tamil were obvious, even pleasing. For example, the long and short a’s differed only by an added squiggle, as did the two o’s. But the two i’s were completely different. And symbols for some sounds were exasperating. Kau required three symbols. And learning the alphabet was only the first step. She knew no vocabulary, no grammar. Still, she had once experienced something mystical with the Sinhalese spoken in Ceylon. She had prayed fervently for help, and the Sinhalese symbols that looked like so many worm tracks within a very short time became an alphabet.
“Oh, Lord, please help me with this Tamil language,” she prayed. “With Your help I can do anything.”
Such a severe regimen demanded a release of tension. Even though Bangalore had a rather peculiar two seasons of rain, in summer and fall, the rainfall was much less than along the coast, and the temperatures were much milder. There were only a few days when outdoor activity was marred by the weather.
Amy liked few things better than riding a pony at breakneck speed. She always started out with good intentions, riding sidesaddle. She sat in the saddle primly, her right leg hooked over the pommel of the saddle, her left foot in a stirrup, skirt modestly covering her legs. Because she could not squeeze the sides of the pony to increase her speed, she carried the customary whip for riding sidesaddle. Well, Amy detested the use of a whip. So who could blame her—after a few minutes of “walking” the pony—for swinging her right leg into the other stirrup and gently kneeing the pony in the sides to attain a trot. And if a trot, why not a canter? And if a canter, why not a gallop?
“Do you think it wise, Miss Carmichael,” asked one of the missionaries at dinner one evening, “to race the carriage of the chief British official in Bangalore?”
“Was that the carriage of the Resident?” asked Amy, not particularly disturbed by her action. “Is his nose out of joint?”
“How disrespectful,” said another missionary, almost hysterical. “Don’t you think the Resident has enough to worry about with the development of the new gold fields at Kolar?”
“Amy is Irish,” explained another missionary.
The attitude of some missionaries that they were in India to protect British interests disturbed Amy very much. But she had to admit she herself did not feel very British. She never had. She didn’t feel particularly Irish, either. Not even Scottish. She was, in the haunting words of Moses, “a stranger in a strange land,” no matter where she went. Her only true home was sometime in the future: with God. As she learned more and more of the British rule of India, she became certain the British also had a caste system. It was impossible to miss. At the highest level were the government officials—and their wives, of course. At the next level were the professional Army officers. Below them were the businessmen. And at the lowest rung were the common soldiers. And where were the missionaries?
“WE ARE THE ‘UNTOUCHABLES,’” CONFIDED ONE NOT-VERY-DISCREET MISSIONARY.
“We are the ‘Untouchables,’” confided one not-very-discreet missionary. “Most British don’t want us here. We interfere too much with their very pleasant lives.”
Not enough, thought Amy.
A letter from Keswick cautioned her not to “cool.” “Look to Him to keep you burning and shining.”5 Her old friend from Manchester, Ella Crossley, visited her early in 1896 and gushed over how well Amy spoke Tamil. But Amy was unhappy with her comfort—yes, even her wild pony rides—in Bangalore. The atmosphere was far too congenial. Once again she had spurned a marriage proposal. And the sad truth was that the large staff of missionaries were converting almost no one! When she got a chance to go out to Ooty for a meeting of people from the field missions, she jumped at it.
It was there she finally met Thomas Walker of Tinnevelly. His wife was there, too, a very pleasant woman.
Mr. Walker himself, however, was not very pleasant.