CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
For the last seventy years the Church of Christ has grown with great rapidity in India.
About 1860, after the Mutiny when the Government had passed from the East India Company to the Crown, this rapid spread of Christianity began.
'There were at that time about a million Indian Christians.
Nearly a third of them belonged to the old Syrian church on the Malabar coast, that claims to have been established by the Apostle S. Thomas. Nearly two-thirds were Roman Catholics, the fruit of three and a half centuries of Missionary effort, and a few were connected with various Protestant churches.
But during the last seventy years the million Indian Christians have increased to about five millions.
In some areas the progress has been startling.
In the Telugu country of South India there were in 1880 about 80,000 Telugu Christians, to-day there are about 850,000.
In the United Provinces the Indian Christian community increased over 300 per cent. in forty years.
In the Punjab between 1881 and 1921 it grew from Gooo to 315,000.
And this rapid increase in numbers has taken place entirely in the villages.
Of the 5,000,000 Christians it is estimated that about 93 per cent.
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
live in the villages.
The large majority of these village Christians have come either from the outcastes of Hindu society or from the aboriginal tribes.
The Anglican church is in this respect fairly typical of the whole Indian Christian community.
It numbers among its members about 500,000 Indians, and of these about 450,000 live in villages.
And of those in the villages about 280,000 have come from the outcastes and 50,000 from aboriginal tribes.
The Church in India, therefore, is essentially a village Church.
Its problems are village problems, its education needs to be adapted to the conditions of village life and its leaders must be men and women able and willing to live and work among village folk.
And it is the Church of the poor.
This fact has often been cast in its teeth as a reproach.
In reality it is its glory.
Psalmists and Prophets in, the Jewish church proclaimed that Jehovah is a God who cares for the poor. The Son of God, when he came into the world, was anointed to preach good tidings to the poor.
The crowning proof of His Messiahship was that the poor had the gospel preached to them.
What we see, therefore, in India is only one more illustration of a truth, fundamental in the revelation of God's will and character given through Jesus Christ. Throughout the whole course of the history of His Church God has always chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, the weak things to put to shame the things that are mighty and the base things and the things
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
that are despised to bring to nought the things that are highly esteemed.
The outcastes of Hindu society are the last people that human judgment would have chosen as material for the building of a Church that is to be God's instrument for converting to faith in Christ the races of India, with their rich heritage of religious thought and philosophy and their ancient culture and civilization.
The total number of these outcastes is about sixty millions. The majority are agricultural labourers, and in the towns and: villages they are the scavengers, servants and leather workers, doing all the work that is regarded, according to Hindu ideas, as defiling and degrading.
They are miserably poor.
It has been calculated that the average wage of an outcaste agricultural labourer in South and West India is about two shillings a week.
But what has degraded the outcastes more than anything else is the fact that the Hindu religion brands them as untouchable.
If a caste man touches an outcaste it is a sin, which has to be atoned for by religious ceremonies; and because the outcastes are untouchable they are not allowed to use the village wells or the main streets of the villages, or to send their children to the public schools.
In some parts of South India they are not only untouchable, but unapproachable.
They may not come within forty yards of a man or woman belonging to one of the castes above them.
A typical Travancore outcaste on the Malabar coast, in the south-west, has been described as " the picture of servile fear"; and a visitor to
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
Malabar, describing his experiences among some of the outcastes in these parts, said that " the shrinking fear was so abject and the cries of miserable fright were so piteous," that he dared not approach the wretched hovels in which they lived, though he was bent on an errand of mercy.
An enlightened Indian Prince, himself a Hindu by religion, the ruler of a Native State in West
India, gave the following account of the position of the outcastes.
" Our depressed classes stand in a position which has nothing parallel or analogous to it in the history of mankind.
Slavery is the worst form of injustice which humanity all the world over has known.
But the implications of untouchability, to which we in India have condemned a large section of our fellow-men, are in some respects worse than the worst form of slavery. We treat them as no one ought to treat any being, much less 'a human being. They are made to live outside the village, in an out-of-the-way-corner which is the dirtiest and filthiest part of the village, such as the most degraded of the caste Hindus would never dream of living in.
They are not to come within the limits of the temples of the gods, which are the common gods of all the Hindu community. They are not to draw water from the public wells of the villages. They are not to enjoy the benefits of the public rest-houses.
They may die of thirst, but they cannot touch the tank or pond of the village.
Even for service of the lowest kind they are not to enter the Hindu household.
Their very touch is
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
a sin to be avoided at all costs, and to be expiated by washing your body and the clothes covering it." !
The late Mr Gokhale, the ablest statesman that India has produced during the last century, spoke about the treatment of the depressed classes as follows :— "T think all fair-minded persons will have to admit that it is absolutely monstrous that a class of human beings, with bodies similar to our own, with brains that can think and with hearts that can feel, should be perpetually condemned to a low life of utter wretchedness, servitude and mental and moral degradation, and that permanent barriers should be placed in their way so that it should be impossible for them ever to overcome them and improve their lot. This is deeply revolting to our sense of justice.
I believe one has only to put oneself mentally into their place to realize how grievous this injustice is. We may touch a cat, we may touch a dog, we may touch any other animal, but the touch of these human beings is pollution!
And so complete is now the mental degradation of these people that they themselves see nothing in such treatment to resent, that they acquiesce in it as though nothing better was their due. * A visitor to Travancore says: "I was walking down a road one evening on the south-west coast
1 Memoirs of the Maharajah of Kolhalpur, vol. Tl, p. 484.
® See Speeches by G. K. Gokhale, pp. 898-9. Published by G. A. Natesan, Madras.
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
of India and a Brahman priest, a member of the highest caste, was behind me.
Turning a corner I came across about twenty outcastes, coming in from their work in the fields.
As soon as they caught sight of the Brahman they scattered about thirty or forty yards on each side of the road, cowered down in abject, servile fear in the mud and slush of the rice fields, put their hands to their mouths, lest their breath should defile the highcaste man, and cried out in harsh, pathetic tones,
' Unclean, unclean,' to give warning of the pollution of their presence."
A British official of long experience in Central India wrote recently: "I have received a petition from the Chamars of a village praying me to record in the village-customs paper their right to the undigested grain which they wash from the droppings of the bullocks which tread the threshing floors.
They spread the dung on a slope, pour water over it and the grain is left high and dry like nuggets."
This single instance will illustrate the depths of poverty to which these people have been reduced in some parts of India by the tyranny of their fellow-men.
Added to the tyranny of their fellow-men is the paralysing influence of their religion, a crude form of Animism.
It is a religion of fear.
The outcastes are, if possible, even more depressed and degraded by the terror inspired by their religion than by the fear of man.
They believe that the world in which they live is peopled by a multitude of demons, who are the causes of all unusual
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
events, especially of diseases and disasters. These demons surround their villages and are quick to take offence and inflict cholera, smallpox, fever, cattle disease and misfortunes of all kinds on the unhappy villagers. They lurk everywhere, on the tops of palmyra trees, in caves and rocks, in ravines and chasms.
They fly about in the air, like birds of prey, ready to pounce down upon any unprotected victim; and the poor people pass through life in constant dread of these invisible powers.
The sole object of their religious rites and sacrifices is to avert their wrath. To the outcastes religion is not a source of hope and consolation, but rather of terror and despair.
What strange material for the building of a Church in any land, more especially in India!
And yet these are the people whom God has chosen to be His witnesses.
It is estimated that during the last fifty years about 80 per cent. of the converts to Christianity have come from the outcastes in the villages.
They have come into the Church not singly or even in families, but in large groups. In some cases as many as 2000 have been baptized in a single day. In the large majority of cases the groups vary in size from 50 to 200. The main centres of these mass movements are the Telugu country, the States of Travancore and Cochin, the Punjab and the United Provinces ; but similar movements on a smaller scale have also
* See History of Missions in India, by Dr Richter. Eng.
Trs3 p2233.
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
been taking place in Tinnevelly and in the northern part of the Bombay Presidency.
Tue MovEMENT IN THE TELUGU CouUNTRY In one district of the Telugu country in South
India, which is now included in the diocese of Dornakal, the movement of the outcastes towards
Christianity began in 1849 with a man called Venkayya.
He could neither read nor write and, like the rest of the outcastes, he feared and worshipped a multitude of evil spirits.
Before his conversion he was head of a daring gang of outcaste robbers, who for many years were the terror of the whole district in which they lived.
Then his son fell ill. In spite of sacrifices offered to the village goddess the child died and Venkayya was in great sorrow.
But just at that time he heard from a member of his gang that a new religion was being preached in the district, which taught that the world was made and ruled by one God, a God of righteousness and love, who so loved men, even the outcastes, that He sent His only Son into the world to die for them.
In his grief for his own son this message touched his heart. So he gave up offering sacrifices to evil spirits and said every day a simple prayer that he composed himself.
" God, teach me who Thou art, show me where Thou art, help me to find Thee." He offered that prayer earnestly for three years, and apparently no answet came.
At last he went one day with some of his friends to a town called Bezwada, on the river
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
Kistna.
It was the time of a Hindu religious festival, when many thousands of pilgrims had gathered there and were bathing in the sacred river to wash away their sins. Venkayya stood on the bank watching them.
Suddenly a Brahman priest came up to him and asked why he was not bathing.
Venkayya answered boldly that he did not believe in it. "Are you, then, a Christian?" asked the priest.
"I am not, but I want to know God," was Venkayya's answer.
Then, strangely enough, this Brahman priest whispered to Venkayya that there was a European, living in a bungalow on the hill close by, who could teach him about God.
So Venkayya and his friends went off to the house where Mr Darling, a missionary of the Church of England, was living.
At the time when they arrived Mr Darling was praying in his study. He was almost in despair about his work.
He had just been preaching to the pilgrims by the river and they had treated his message with indifference.
For eight years he had been preaching to the caste people, and in the whole of that district he had not made a single convert.
After he had poured out his heart to God, he opened his study door and saw Venkayya and his friends kneeling, with their foreheads to the ground, in prayer before the bungalow. He asked what they wanted. Venkayya with outstretched arms went forward and said:
"O, Teacher, we are men without wisdom, we * The outcastes in this part of India are untouchable, but not unapproachable.
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
have come to see you to learn about God."
Mr Darling told them the simple story of Jesus Christ and His love.
When he had finished, Venkayya rose to his feet and exclaimed with deep emotion:
" This is my God, this is my Saviour, 1 have long been seeking for Him. Now I have found Him and will serve Him." Soon afterwards Mr Darling went to Venkayya's village and taught the outcastes the gospel story.
Their masters bitterly opposed him.
But, in spite of opposition and persecution, Venkayya and his family with some other outcastes were in due time baptized.
Venkayya himself was an ardent witness for Christ to the end of his life.
Even when he was blind, in his old age, he would sit outside his mud hut and tell the passers-by about Jesus Christ. And through his preaching more than 500 people were converted and baptized.
That was the foundation of the Church in the Kistna district eighty years ago.
In 1918 there were 43,500 Christian adherents of the Church of England in that one district, and in 1928 the numbers had increased to 122,500.
In May 1929 the annual evangelistic campaign was held in that area.
About 4000 Christians took part in it.
They bore their simple witness to Christ in nearly rooo villages, and over 125,000 non-Christians listened intently as they told the story of the crucified Saviour. Among their hearers were about 3000 Mahommedans and 62,000 caste people.
One caste woman, who owned a considerable amount of property, lent her cart to the
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
outcaste Christian women, and went with them herself, exhorting the caste people to accept Christianity.
Other caste people offered money, grain and fruits and cleared the ground for the preachers.
As a result of this campaign about
caste people gave in their names to be prepared for baptism, in addition to 2300 outcastes.
THe MOVEMENT IN THE PunjaB Equally remarkable is the account of the great movement in the Punjab, which started with the baptism of an outcaste of the despised Chuhra tribe in 1873.
His name was Ditt, "a dark little man, lame of one leg," who made a scanty living by buying and selling hides.
He heard of Christ from a Christian man of higher social position, but "a weak brother," and he determined to become a Christian.
So he walked thirty miles to Sialkot, went to the Rev. S. Martin, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary, and asked to be baptized and allowed to go back to his own people. Mr Martin hesitated.
It seemed a risky thing to baptize an outcaste and then send him away with very little knowledge to live isolated from all Church life or Christian fellowship among non-Christian relations and friends.
However, just at this time it became necessary for Mr Martin, who had been suffering from fever, to go to the hills.
But what was to become of Ditt?
To leave this outcaste at the mission station in the care of high-caste workers, was a doubtful course to pursue.
To take him to
CHRIST AMONG THE OUTCASTES
the hills was out of the question. A decision was soon made. Mr Martin baptized Ditt and sent him home to his own village with instructions to share his knowledge with his people.
Ditt had five brothers and the whole family numbered about sixty persons. At first they bitterly resented Ditt's lapse from the religion of the clan.
They abused him as a man " without religion," and threatened to excommunicate him from their society.
" One of your legs is broken, so may it be with the other,' exclaimed an angry sisterin-law.
Ditt met their taunts and curses meekly, but unmoved.
'" You may attack me and abuse me, but you will never induce me to deny Christ."
In three months he had the great joy of bringing to faith in the Saviour his wife and daughter and two of his neighbours. He taught them as well as he could and then walked with them the thirty miles to Sialkot and presented them to Mr Martin, who baptized them, and sent them back with Ditt to be witnesses to Christ among their own people.
Six months later Ditt brought four more of his neighbours for baptism.
From this small beginning, like a grain of mustard seed, the Presbyterian Church in that district has sprung up with marvellous rapidity, spreading from home to home and village to village. Almost every new convert became an evangelist, telling the good news of the Kingdom of God. To-day the United Presbyterian Church in the Punjab has a Christian community numbering 85,000, of whom
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
24,000 are communicants.
And over fifty of the congregations support their own pastors.
In the same area of the Punjab there are also 40,000 Anglican Christians drawn from the outcastes connected with the Church Missionary Society, and an equal number who are members of the Roman Catholic Church and the Salvation
Army.
In the whole of India, as a result of these mass movements among the outcastes, during the last fifty years nearly 2,000,000 'people have been gathered into the Church of Christ.
CHAPTER II
MIGHTY WORKS
Tue mighty works of Jesus Christ during His ministry, the healing of the sick and the casting out of devils, were signs to the Jewish people that the Kingdom of God had come upon them.
The preaching of the Apostles after the day of Pentecost was confirmed by similar signs and wonders, and by a striking transformation of life and character within the Christian community."
The same is true of the work of the Christian Church in the villages of India.
Devils are cast out, men and women are turned from the worship of demons to the worship of the one true God, thousands and tens of thousands are converted from sin to righteousness, and the lives of whole communities are transformed.
God bears withess to the message of salvation "both with signs and wonders and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost according to his own will." ®
It is true that the motives that lead people to become Christians in mass movements in the villages are often strangely mixed. Some become Christians because others do. The herd instinct is strong in 1 See Matt. xii. 28; Acts ii. 22.
2 See Acts ii. 43 ff.; iv. 8 ff., 21; v.14 ff.; viii. 6,75 xiv. 3.
8 See Hebrews ii. 3-4.
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
India. In one village where large numbers gave in their names to be prepared for baptism, they were asked why they wanted to join the Church. Several reasons were given, among others the desire for self-improvement and for the education of their children.
'' There is no school in this village," said one man, "all these children tend cattle and grow like asses."
Another said, " We are tired of worshipping these idols; they are no good."
In another village a group of new converts gave as their reason for becoming Christians:
'" Because we were bad and wanted to become better"; and that probably sums up the feeling that leads the majority to join the Church.
In a very real sense they long for salvation from a bad, degrading life, and see that large numbers of their own community have found it in this new religion.
Providential and supernatural reasons are sometimes assigned, too, as immediate occasions for accepting Christianity. There was a man who had been a Hindu devotee and priest and a hater of Christians.
While still a boy he had become an orphan and had been brought up by an old Christian aunt for whom he had great regard. Her one grief in her old age was that this nephew was such an unbending Hindu.
The man was a devout worshipper of the village goddess Gangamma. Every Saturday he fasted, and early on Sunday he broke his fast after making a meal offering at the shrine of Gangamma.
One night he dreamt a dream.
He saw some grand personage approaching him and taking tight hold of his arm.
He heard the
MIGHTY WORKS
command: "Go to the Christian Church."
He woke, but thought no more of it and continued as usual.
This was on a new moon night. On the next new moon night this dream was repeated.
Still he disregarded it. The dream was repeated on the third new moon night; and the august person would not loose his grip until the man gave him a solemn promise.
He yielded, but wanted three weeks' respite. He went to the chapel a week before the next new moon day.
He was converted: he gave up worshipping Gangamma and became a most regular worshipper in the Christian
Church at daily prayers.
In due course he was baptized and later was confirmed and is now a most faithful communicant and a keen witness to the living presence and power of the Lord.
Then, there are many who come out because in Christ they find rest from their evil past. "We were tired of that life of drink and robbery and we knew that our only hope was in this religion," is a familiar answer.
"In what ways are you different now from what you were before?" was asked of a man of a robber caste.
" Are we not different? " came the ready reply, "' men and women go to prayer every night; we do not now commit burglary; we do not drink; we enjoy heaven now: we were in hell before."
But what gives such a wonderful moral power to the movement, is the simple faith in the Fatherhood of God and the saving power of Jesus Christ that inspires the majority of the Christians. Nothing else but the power of the Spirit of Christ could
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
have produced the transformation that has taken place on a vast scale in their lives.
Dr Stanley Jones tells us that at a meeting of educated Hindus he once said: "Brothers, what can we do with those outcastes? They are a millstone around our
- national neck.
Our country will never be strong until we lift them.
How can we do it?"
A thoughtful Hindu arose and said, "It will take a Christ to lift them." And that is true.
The accounts given by missionaries working among the outcastes in different parts of India during the last fifty years are full of stories that illustrate this saving power of Christ. The courage and steadfastness of new converts under persecution is itself very wonderful, when we consider how little they know and how brief is their experience of Christ.
It has been often said that these poor people easily become Christians because they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by it.
From a worldly point of view that is often very far from the truth.
When the outcastes of a village first join the Christian Church, especially in the early days of a movement, they are often subjected to bitter and cruel persecution by their
Hindu masters; they are beaten, deprived of their land and cattle, if they have any, false charges are brought against them and they are thrown into prison.
Yet they stand firm.
A missionary in the United Provinces gives an account of a small band of inquirers in a village who were persecuted in various ways by their master.
"' Give up Christianity," he said, "and I
MIGHTY WORKS
will stop persecuting you."
"No," was their reply, "imprison us; hang us if you like; but we have taken hold of God and we are not letting go." }
A year afterwards they were baptized with great rejoicing.
One of the C.M.S. missionaries in the Telugu Mission tells the story of one man who came to him with his right hand terribly burned.
When he announced his intention of becoming a Christian the headman in his village called upon him to renounce Christianity. When he refused, the headman threatened to put his right hand into boiling oil. As he still stood firm, the threat was carried out, and he came to the missionary, having nobly stood fast under that trial, with his right hand charred and withered and utterly useless.
In another district an old man was baptized with the appropriate name of Job. When he said he was going to become a Christian the headman of his village took away his cattle; when he persevered, he took away his land. Then the old man came to be baptized, rejoicing that he had been thought worthy to suffer the loss of all things for the sake of Christ.
The people in another village were asked whether they knew of anyone completely changed by becoming a Christian. One man replied: " Yesuratnam in our village was a man like that.
The caste people asked him to offer as usual the sacrifice at the boundary festival and kill a chicken and pour
1 C.M.S. Mass Movement Quarterly, March 1927 and March 1928.
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
the blood on cooked rice, and then carry the blood-sprinkled rice round the boundaries of the land, to invoke the blessing of the goddess on the crop.
Yesuratnam refused to do this because he was a Christian.
They threatened to withhold all wages, and gathered round him with sticks and threatened to beat him if he was obstinate. Yesuratnam explained that as a Christian he could carry neither the rice nor the blood, nor offer the sacrifice ; but he would walk round the boundaries of the land and pray to the Lord Jesus for a good harvest.
They permitted him to do as he suggested.
Since then, the caste people respect our religion."
A woman added:
" There is one in our village also, Samuel. He gave up drink himself, made the whole village give up drink, then fought with the Sudras to get the liquor shop removed from the village. The Hindus afterwards acknowledged that Christianity was a good religion."
The power of Christ to save is often manifested, as in the case of Venkayya,! among the criminal classes. The following is an illustration.
Lakshikadu was a Yerukala, and did not belong to the outcastes.
He was a caste man—his touch was not pollution.
He could live near the caste quarters, he could take water from the caste people's well.
The occupation of this caste was basketmaking, mat - weaving, fortune - telling, house breaking and highway robbery.
His father died when he was only six months old and his mother brought him up by hard work.
Lakshikadu was 1 See Chapter II.
MIGHTY WORKS
sixteen years old when four Yerukalas happened to spend two days at his hut feasting and drinking.
When they left, they took the boy with them to a neighbouring village where they had planned a robbery.
His daring spirit soon won their confidence and he became a regular member of the gang and took part in many robberies.
It was an exciting life as long as it lasted: but the plunder was all spent in drink and riotous living and there were, of course, regular intervals of poverty and starvation.
At last Lakshikadu was caught by the police and sentenced to two months' imprisonment ; but in spite of severe pressure he stedfastly refused to betray his comrades. On his release he took to the forest and became a noted dacoit.
A body of police was deputed to track him down and one of them found him seated on a rock in the heart of the forest.
Lakshikadu seeing this man, slowly climbed down on the other side, but left his large turban on the summit of the rock.
The policeman fired and brought the turban down.
When he ran up to seize his man, Lakshikadu sprang upon him and tied him to a tree with his own turban, broke his rifle and decamped.
However, he was caught in the end and imprisoned for six months.
On his leaving the prison, he spent a night at a police station, where he met a Christian police inspector who advised him to give up his lawless life and become a Christian.
When he went back to his home he found that his wife had come under the influence of one of the Indian missionaries of the Dornakal Mission.
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
She begged him to go with her and hear the preaching.
For some time he refused in spite of her importunity, but at last she adopted the method of non-co-operation, and declined to cook or eat anything till he went.
This brought matters to a crisis and he gave way and began to attend Christian prayers.
He gave up drinking, learnt carpentry and began to learn Telugu letters so that he might read the Bible.
After some months he and his wife were baptized and took the names, Thomas and Prema (love).
All was not over yet. His caste pride would not let him present himself for confirmation, which, he knew, would be followed by Holy Communion, and he was not yet prepared to have communion with the outcaste converts.
After a year the husband and wife came and wanted to be confirmed.
They said they had thought over it and came to the conclusion that there was no pollution in partaking of "' the sacred food." It took another three years before they could reconcile themselves to make no distinction in social life. It was a hard struggle. At one time Prema said, "I know it is not right, but I cannot bring my mind to sit down to the same meal with these people.
But I am praying that God may remove this feeling from our hearts."
Even this was overcome later on, and Thomas and Prema have often been seen seated between Mala and Madiga converts and enjoying a wedding feast. Thomas has forgotten his old life, earns his livelihood by carpentry and freely witnesses to the power of Jesus Christ.
MIGHTY WORKS
His wife is a Bible teacher and has a very good working knowledge of the Bible. When the police saw the change in his life, they recommended that he be exempted from police surveillance.
He can now go anywhere without a pass. He is a member of the Parish committee and the local Church
Council and both Thomas and Prema are respected and loved by everybody in Dornakal.
In many similar cases true conversion comes long after baptism, not infrequently at confirmation.
Joseph belongs to one of the outcaste communities.
He had been a great drunkard and thief.
He continued to be so even after his baptism. He did not become a Christian from any religious motive.
He "joined the religion" and was baptized; he came up for confirmation, because everybody in the village was doing so.
But then came the change.
Two years after his confirmation he narrated his experiences :— " Four years ago I joined the religion when our whole village came over.
I had been a great drunkard.
I was in a gang who also occasionally committed burglary; there is hardly a crime or sin that I have not been guilty of. We came very near to murder sometimes.
When all the others in the village became Christians I became a Christian too; but I did not give up any of my bad ways.
We did give up idolatry and the worship of the old gods and goddesses.
But that was all. The whole village was prepared for baptism, so was I and we were all baptized together.
But even after
CHRIST IN THE INDIAN VILLAGES
baptism I continued to drink, to rob and to steal.
Once my comrades and I succeeded in removing our Christian teacher's cow from his house and led it many miles to a far off village over night and slaughtered it for meat before daybreak and returned to our village in the morning. When confirmation classes were held I also joined, but had not realized what it meant.
But I began to feel very bad:
I thought I was unworthy to receive the blessing of the Holy Spirit; and yet I kept on. On the day appointed for the confirmation the candidates of our village arrived late and we were all, therefore, seated last. I was glad of it, because I felt myself unworthy of confirmation.
We listened to the examination and address; but I was inwardly feeling very bad. I felt that I did not deserve to go up to be confirmed. When the time came, the pastor came to the last row and we stood up and I, who was sitting last, was made to go first. This was too much for me! I had been feeling that I deserved no blessing at all: I was certainly the greatest sinner in the crowd: to go last after all the rest might be suitable, but to go first, I was not ready!
But I could not refuse; I had to go.
Tears were running down my eyes, as I thought what a wicked life I had led these many years.
After confirmation I went back to my seat, knelt down and then and there gave myself to be a new man. I said, 'O God, Thy love to me the greatest of sinners is something I cannot bear.
For the sake of Jesus Christ who died for me forgive me!
Hereafter I shall be a different man.
Give me the
MIGHTY WORKS
strength and power of the Holy Spirit to live for Thee.' Instantly a great joy came over me and I felt a different man.
I went home and nothing happened for a week.
Then came the harvest and my landlord made a present of a pot of toddy for all the labourers and asked me to distribute it.
I said I did not myself drink and so preferred not to have anything to do with it.
He laughed.
He could not believe me.
I told him that ever since our Bishop came I had given up drink.
He pointed out that the Bishop was no longer there and there was no harm in drinking or giving others some toddy after a hard day's work. I said
I could not do that, because I had vowed before God that I would be a different man.
But there was another difficulty.
My annual wage was Rs. 36 (£2, 14s.) in cash, and about another Rs. 36 in grain. This had been sufficient because I made up the deficiency by stealing grain, vegetables, tobacco and all other supplies from my master's farm.
This I could no longer do, with the result that I was falling into debt.
I went to my master and said, "My wages are insufficient and I am falling into debt.
Please therefore let me go away so that I may do my own cultivation.'
He said, 'What? Do you tell me that after all those years your wages have become insufficient all of a sudden?' I said that was what I meant, and asked him whether he really thought we were all living on the wages he was giving us.
I explained how all the vegetables for our use came from his garden, all the tobacco we used was from his store, how
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I always brought home without his knowledge my share of his grain.
But now, I said, I could not do these things and the wages were inadequate.
My master laughed and said it was a strange story, though he quite believed it."
The master wanted time to consider his request, and for a month he carefully watched him at work, but at the end of the month he made him his head labourer and doubled his wages.
The teacher in charge of one village told the following story: "Four years ago Abraham was known to be the most wild and quarrelsome man in my village. He was an habitual drunkard. When the Deanery chairman came to the village for the Harvest festival, I went to Abraham's house to call him to the service.
He said he would come later. Again I went; he was not at home; he had gone to the liquor shop. I went to it and there was Abraham, very drunk and challenging every one to fight. I came away very sad. Four months later there was a confirmation for our Pastorate.
Four candidates were ready from my village.
Abraham wanted to go too. As he did not know any confirmation lessons, I left him behind.
After the Bishop's examination of the candidates was finished Abraham appeared in the chapel and sat down with the others, without my seeing him. So by mistake he was confirmed.
After we had all returned to the village, a radical change was noticed in Abraham.
He never touched drink, he was the first to come to Church services.
That was three years ago.
This year he has been elected by the
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congregation to be their representative on the church council."
The teacher was asked, "' What do you think effected the change?"
'' Nothing but the grace of the Holy Spirit," was his reply.
But the most impressive fact about this movement is the fuller and more abundant life, intellectual, moral and spiritual, that comes to the Christian community as a whole through the liberty of the Spirit. We see the same thing happening in India to-day that happened seventeen centuries ago in the Roman Empire.
Dr Glover points out that Christianity triumphed in the ancient world " because essentially it liberated the human mind and gave it a chance to develop to the full range of God's conception of it." 4
In this respect the parallel between the Church in the Roman and that in the Indian Empire is amazingly close: in both cases "not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called," 2 and in both cases there is the same wonderful "liberation of the human mind."
When we consider the oppression, the degradation and the starvation of body and soul to which the outcastes have been subjected for more than a thousand years we should naturally expect that it would need many generations of teaching and culture to raise them up to the intellectual and cultural level of their masters.
But that is very far from the truth.
In the second generation the 1 The Influence of Christ in the Ancient World, pp. 9, 10.
By T. R. Glover (Cambridge) University Press, 1929.
2 1 Cor. i. 26.
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transformation often is startling. A small outcaste boy, whose parents were Christians, was taken by one of the missionaries to the Telugu country and started by pulling the punkahs in the missionary's bungalow.
He was sent to the mission school and is now an able Wesleyan minister, greatly respected by Christians and Hindus alike over a large district, doing with singular wisdom and patience a most valuable work of rural uplift.
Another Tamil outcaste boy, minding cattle in the fields for a few pence a week, attended the primary classes of a mission school, rose in time to be one of the leading ministers in the Congregational Church of South India, mayor of the town in which he lived and a leader in the great movement towards Church unity in South India.
At the beginning of 1929 he died, and at his funeral there was a remarkable demonstration of respect and affection from all classes, Europeans and Indians,
Christians, Hindus and Moslems. The shops were closed and the leading men of the town attended the funeral service.
In the whole of South India there are more than 200 ministers and priests drawn from the outcastes; and in the village districts, where they work, they stand head and shoulders above the mass of caste Hindus in education, character and spiritual life.
In one of the Anglican stations in the Telugu country there is a High School in which for the last thirty years there has been approximately an equal number of pupils drawn respectively from
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the outcaste Christians and the high-caste Hindus.
If a comparison were made of the number of students from each of these two sections that have passed the final High School examination, conducted by the Government Education Department during the last thirty years, it would be found that there was no great difference between the outcaste Christians and the high-caste
Hindus.
Recently a Baptist missionary gave a remarkable illustration of this liberation of the spirit in a family connected with his mission.
A Madiga Christian woman, belonging to the lowest section of the outcastes, married a low-caste convert. They had two sons.
One is now a professor in a University college and the other is a learned Telugu scholar.
The effect of this new liberty, that is the gift of the Spirit of Christ, is even more striking among the women than among the men. A poor Madiga girl, whose mother would not have been allowed to touch the children of caste Hindus or even to be in the same room with them, is now the headmistress of a large girls' school attended by the children of both high-caste Hindus and well-to-do
Mahommedans.
In another school of this kind every single teacher is a Christian girl of outcaste origin.
In December 1929, after the baptism of a large number of converts in a village in the Dornakal diocese, some of the leading men from the Caste quarter of the village, which has a population of about 3000, asked that a Christian girl might be
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sent to take charge of a school for their girls. And a Christian girl in that district would necessarily be an outcaste.
In the large town of Bezwada in the Telugu country, when a municipal election was recently held, a number of educated women were needed to instruct the illiterate female voters how to fill up their voting-papers. The only women available were Christians.
And still more striking than these individual instances is the outburst of song and drama that has swept over the large Christian community in the Telugu country during the last few years.
Christian songs and lyrics are composed by large numbers of people and sung to Telugu tunes.
The women and children especially sing them with great delight by the hour together. Musical dramas are being composed on various subjects, such as the life and message of the prophets Amos and Jeremiah, the life and work of St Paul and the history of Joseph.
One of the most recent is on the life of Venkayya, whose story is given above.
During the annual Health Week at Dornakal the final item of the programme is a musical health drama composed by the school teachers and acted by the children.
These dramas are extraordinarily effective for their purpose.
Large audiences are held spell-bound for hours and receive an immense amount of useful teaching.
During one of these weeks last year, men and women eagerly bought and read 1500 booklets on sanitation, precautions
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against smallpox and cholera, and on other subjects connected with health.
No doubt they begin at a low level in these matters, but the significant fact is that they have the desire and courage to start on the upward path.