Susan Billington Harper

ith regard to transliteration and translation into English, I have aimed at maximizing consistency with primary sources and easing comprehension for the reader. Spellings of Indian place names are those used most frequently in the sources and during the period under investigation: Tinnevelly rather than Tirunelveli, Pallamcottah rather than Palayamkottai, Bezwada rather than Vijayawada, and so forth. Archaic spellings are abandoned only when required for consistency. Azariah's father's name was commonly transliterated from the Tamil as `Vedanayagam' and from the Telugu as `Vedanayakam.' Although Azariah used the Telugu spelling in Dornakal, for the sake of consistency I have chosen to use the Tamil transliteration throughout. Spellings of caste names are also those in ordinary usage at the time and, where there is little agreement in the primary source material, variant spellings are given in brackets: hence Yerukala (Erukala), etc. All works are in English unless indicated otherwise by transliteration or in brackets. Non-English titles or texts that were translated or transliterated during Azariah's lifetime are presented unchanged in order to avoid the confusion of newer, albeit more exact, systems. Where original transliterations of Tamil and Telugu are required, I use the Library of Congress systems.

he scholar who opened my eyes to Bishop Azariah's importance was the late bishop and historian, Stephen Charles Neill. Neill challenged me shortly before he died in 1984 to fulfill his own dream of producing a critical scholarly biography of Bishop Azariah. It has been a privilege to carry out his request.

Executing this commission would have been impossible without the support of many people from around the world. Thanks and appreciation are due, first of all, to the late Bishop Lesslie Newbigin and Dr. Tapan Raychaudhuri, who co-directed my doctoral studies in history at Oxford University. Special thanks are due as well to my good friend Rukmini Banerji, who first introduced me to the rich history and culture of India during our early years together as Rhodes Scholars in Oxford.

My bibliography reflects the host of other people who cooperated with me by granting interviews and engaging in personal correspondence. The Azariah family kindly granted me access to the bishop's correspondence with his wife and to other rare documents and photographs. Ambrose Azariah and Grace Aaron, Azariah's last surviving children, each provided several fascinating days of conversation and warm hospitality in their homes in Madras and Ottawa. Generous assistance was also provided for me in India by Rev. Peter and Dorothy Millar, the Bishops of Tirunelveli (Rt. Rev. Jason S. Dharmaraj) and Dornakal (Rt. Rev. D. Noah Samuel), Rev. and Mrs. Manickam, Rev. and Mrs. Muthuraj, Dr. and Mrs. John, the Sisters of Vishranthi Nilayam in Bangalore, Alison Weaver, Rev. and Mrs. Victor Manuel Raj, and the Rt. Rev. P. Solomon.

Rev. Vinay Samuel, his wife Colleen, and Miss Jothi Parker are among the many friends who helped to make my research in India especially interesting and pleasant. I am particularly grateful to Rev. Samuel for his intellectual inspiration and for directing me to Vern Middleton's attack on Azariah. I am also indebted to Eleanor Jackson for her advice in India and her comments on an earlier draft. Immanuel David, Rosalind O'Hanlon, and archivists in Calcutta (Joyce Austin and Mr. Mandal) and Bangalore (Fr. M. K. Kuriakose and Dr. Joseph Patmury) also offered many helpful suggestions during my research. Dr. and Mrs. Rajmohan Gandhi, Professor K. Swaminathan, V. T. Rajshekar of the Dalit Sahitya Akademy, and Rev. Jeyasingh of the National Missionary Society all contributed important insights to this study. Then too, I am grateful to those who assisted me with Tamil and Telugu translations: Professors E. Diwakar Abraham, R S. Arulanandham, and Reginald of St. John's College, Tirunelveli, Mr. Edwin Joel of the Indian Missionary Society, Joy Tangayya, Mrs. B. S. Sharifa, Mrs. GeethaJohn, Vimala, and Danny Moses.

In England, the late Sister Carol Graham gave unstintingly of her time and provided me with a wealth of information about Dornakal and Bishop Azariah. I am grateful to librarians and archivists at the University of Birmingham (Dr. B. S. Benedikz), Rhodes House (Allen Bell), Yale Divinity School (Martha Lund Smalley and Sharon Laist), London's School of Oriental and African Studies (Rosemary Seton), the Library of Congress (Allen W. Thrasher), and Asbury Theological Seminary (Sylvia U. Brown) for their assistance. Rev. Charles Neill kindly permitted me to study Stephen Neill's private papers after his death; and the late Professor Bengt Sundkler generously lent me his entire collection of research notes, records of interviews, and personal correspondence for his 1954 study of the Church of South India. Several people with personal and family connections in India shared knowledge and resources with me, particularly Barbara Holmes, Sir John Lawrence, Peter Gwynn, and the Rt. Rev. James Matthews. I owe a special debt to Professor Robert Frykenberg and his wife Carol.

I am grateful to Judith Brown, the Belt Professor of Commonwealth History at Oxford University, for directing me to a book by almost the same title: In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir, by Ghana'syandasa Birala (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1953). It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Birala's book and mine have nothing in common other than the first part of their titles.

Generous financial assistance for this study was provided by the Rhodes Trust, the Oxford University Bryce Studentship, Balliol College, the Arnold, Bryce, and Read Funds, Oxford's Committee for Graduate Studies, the Belt Fund, and Mrs. James Clement. A Bernadotte Schmitt Research Award from the American Historical Association and a project for Research on Christianity within the Hindu-Muslim Context funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts also provided support for this work. Modified versions of several chapters have appeared in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, The Indo-British Review, and Pilgrim: The Magazine of the Friends of the Church in India.

Finally, it remains to thank my family - both immediate and extended - for their support and encouragement during the production of this book. Anne and Duncan Fischer, Jim and Julie Billington, Tom and Susan Billington, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Harper, John and Margie McCarthy and all the Harper sisters, Jane Brown, and my late grandmother Marjorie Brennan all stood by me faithfully. Caron Cadle assisted heroically with the final manuscript. My husband Charles and my four young children welcomed Azariah as a member of our family. I am profoundly grateful to them. And I especially appreciate the assistance and inspiration of my parents, James and Marjorie Billington, to whom I have dedicated this book.

Political Divisions of British India

Ecclesiastical Divisions of British India: Anglican Dioceses in India, Burma, and Ceylon

Dornakal Diocese

South India

edanayagam Samuel Azariah (1874-1945) was the most successful leader of grassroots movements of conversion to Christianity in South Asia during the early twentieth century. He was the first and only native Indian bishop of an Anglican diocese from 1912 until his death in 1945. As both an effective evangelist to Indian villagers and a respected bishop in the British church hierarchy, Azariah provided a unique bridge between ordinary Indians and British elites during the late phase of their imperial association. He was equally at home with the `untouchables' of rural India and the unreachables of the British Empire.' Azariah was a popular leader in rural Andhra, an esteemed builder of Protestant unification within India, and a pioneer in the Christian ecumenical movement globally. He was always in the middle - between different languages, different castes, different religious denominations, and different cultures.

Through it all, he was a successful architect of peaceful progress in the violent first half of the twentieth century.

Why, then, is so little known today about such a remarkable and influential Third World figure? The reason, in part, is that most modern historians neglect Indian history and are innately hostile to religion in general and to Christian missionary activity in particular. But in larger measure, the neglect of Azariah is a by-product of the enormous attention devoted to the rise of secular nationalism and to the charismatic figure of Azariah's contemporary and sometimes opponent, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Since Azariah was neither a defender of the old nor an apostle of the new political order, his extraordinarily consistent leadership of locally based religious transformations is simply off the radar screen of the modern university-media complex. If one must talk about either India or spirituality, it seems that Gandhi will cover the subject. Indeed, I have found that the only way to legitimize the study, let alone any public discussion, of Azariah in the university context is by stressing his relationship with Gandhi. Perhaps now that political ideologies seem to be losing some of their luster and religious movements appear to be showing unexpected strength, it may be possible to rediscover and to appreciate the importance, originality, and skill of a leader like Azariah. This book is an attempt to tell the life story of a humble yet effective leader who was one of the invisible builders of the world's largest democracy. It is also an attempt to rescue leaders who are rooted in religion and not focused on national politics from the arrogantly secular and narrowly political preoccupations of those who form public opinion.

I was introduced to this remarkable human being through several long conversations with the great missionary bishop and historian of Christianity, the late Stephen Neill. I felt the power and richness of religious and caste minorities in India while doing community fieldwork and study in India in 1984 and 1986. In the course of completing my doctoral dissertation in Commonwealth History at Oxford University under the magnificent co-supervision of Dr. Tapan Raychaudhuri and the late Rt. Rev. Lesslie Newbigin, I came to appreciate how this great evangelist combined extraordinary inner consistency with remarkable tactical flexibility.

In my study I found almost every cliche about Christian missionary activity to be incorrect. It was mainly westerners, not Indians, who pressed for the unprecedented elevation of a native Indian bishop; yet Azariah succeeded as a bishop far more with the Indian masses than with the missionaries or high officials of the Raj. He never fully embraced either of the secular ideologies then fashionable in India - nationalism or socialism. Nor did he use his unique position within the official religion of the British empire to become either an appendage of, or a rebel against, imperialism. He neither adopted all the amenities of western civilization nor theatrically flaunted his connection to the Indian villages in which he worked. He never identified himself irrevocably with any caste, social class, or ethnic group. In short, he had none of the `identity crises' that historians routinely expect to find when modernity clashes with tradition.

He was, quite simply, a committed Christian totally preoccupied with winning and saving souls. In an age electrified by secular ideologies, Azariah remained devoted to a traditional religion. He sought to create an indigenous Indian form of Christianity, not a Christianized form of nationalism. Yet he was not the simple quietist that all this might suggest. He was also a dynamic leader and organizer. He lived and died working largely at the local level, and with the poor - those ordinary people in whose name contemporary historians like to speak but whose actual beliefs they often choose to discount.

Unlike Thomas Carlyle's heroic figures who changed history by the force of their titanic personalities, Azariah displayed his greatest strength in personal integrity and spiritual consistency. He was thrust into an extraordinary number of prominent positions precisely because he maintained inner stability during an age of rapid external change. He did not suffer from deep psychological neuroses and obsessions, nor indulge in secret immoralities, the favorite subjects of modern biographers (sometimes more aptly called pathographers). He was a complex man living in an even more complex age who coped successfully with paradox, conflict, and persecution thanks mainly to a solid inner core of religious faith.

It is hard for the critical-modern analytical mind to accept that such people really exist. Since Lytton Strachey's publication of Eminent Victorians in 1918, we have stopped trusting religious conviction as a positive motivating force in human history. Most modern biographies take religion seriously only when debunking its many pretensions, hypocritical postures, and false illusions. Religious rhetoric is rarely believed, if it is considered at all. Yet the Christian faith played such an outstanding and central role at every stage of Azariah's career that it is impossible to imagine his life or to explain his effectiveness without it.

Azariah's personal life was relatively serene. He was a happily married father of six children2 who accepted wholeheartedly the basic doctrines of Christianity as defined by the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. He was the son of one of South India's first Indian Anglican priests and the uncomplicated product of the remarkably secure culture of South Indian Christianity. He shared with many British colleagues and Indian converts a general belief that British rule in India could fulfill a divine purpose by promoting the subcontinent's material improvement and, ultimately, spiritual redemption.3 Azariah's belief in the transcendent purpose of empire and his successful leadership of an Indian branch of Britain's established church won him such trust and respect from British colleagues that shortly after Azariah's death in 1945, a fellow bishop recalled that:

... in a discussion as to the possibility of an Indian being appointed Viceroy, one of those present remarked, "The only Indian who could possibly carry the job of Viceroy is the Bishop of Dornakal, but the Government would never have the sense to appoint him," an opinion from which none of those present dissented.4

Those who knew him would have trusted Azariah as the first Indian Viceroy and, although clearly not granting other Indians the trust they deserved, they also distrusted a government too conservative to appreciate Azariah's qualifications and to appoint him. One can only speculate as to how different the course of modern South Asian history might have been had an Indian like Azariah been appointed Viceroy. He became, in any case, his British associates' most trusted Indian advisor during the final tumultuous decades of the Raj, and a leader of efforts to `indigenize' the church in India and to promote the welfare of the emerging new nation's disadvantaged populations.

Despite his prestige during his lifetime, Azariah has been virtually forgotten today outside of a narrow circle of Indian Christians, and his life and legacy have never been subjected to serious scholarly assessment. The existing corpus of writings on the bishop is substantial but limited in both scope and objectivity. Several personal (and sometimes hagiographical) biographies have been written in English, Danish, Telugu, and Tamil, along with numerous shorter booklets, articles, and theses.5 Taken together, these provide a valuable cumulative picture of Azariah's character and accomplishments which this book seeks to summarize rather than to duplicate. However, none of these studies plumbed the depths of the primary sources available throughout many continents, including Azariah's private correspondence with his wife, his letters and reports to missionary societies and church organizations, government ecclesiastical records, or other varied materials scattered throughout Great Britain, India, and North America. Nor has the `oral history' (in story and song) of relatives, missionaries, church workers, and ordinary villagers in Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli), Dornakal, and throughout England and North America been systematically integrated into available studies. Nowhere has a complete bibliography of Azariah's writings been compiled. And nowhere has Azariah's life been interpreted in terms of the broader drama of South Asian history during the heyday and subsequent decline of the British Raj. This book attempts to fill in these gaps by providing the first comprehensive, critical scholarly study of Azariah's public life and legacy.

To understand the life of this neglected figure is to understand a new dimension of the complex period of transition between imperial and national rule in South Asia. The steadiness of Azariah's behavior and the constancy of his views are remarkable in light of the rapidly changing history of the institutions which he led, the regions in which he worked, and the nations between which he served as a trusted mediator. Azariah stands as a relatively fixed point of reference in the midst of stunning developments among upwardly mobile and mutually antagonistic untouchables and non-Brahmin castes,6 increasingly expressive and competitive Tamils and Telugus, hopeful but frustrated Indian nationalists, and idealistic but guilt-ridden western liberals. Subtle complexities in the process of readjusting caste, regional, communal, and national self-definitions at the end of the nationalist period are somehow made clearer when measured against the standard set by the bishop's personal stability and professional stature.

Azariah's life seems to embody, contain, and sum up many of the difficult tensions of his age between conflicting religious, cultural, and political ideals. It provides, in the words of Clifford Geertz, a metaphorical `human recapitulation' of the many social transformations which accompanied the transition from empire to independence.? This book is therefore less a conventional narrative biography of Azariah's personal life than an analysis of his public life as it reflected the changes and controversies of Indian Christianity in the late Raj.8

Despite his many public successes, Azariah was on the losing side of the great movement of twentieth-century South Asia: secular nationalism. He and his church were eventually overcome by the great onrush of Indian nationalist freedom fighters clad in khadi (or hand-spun cloth) who seemed to sweep more conciliatory sub-movements away in their wake. There is no trace of Azariah and his accomplishments in the voluminous literature on Indian nationalism, and he has been relegated to a mere footnote in the history of the modern Indian state.

His great contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, was of course the inspiration for, and the beneficiary of, this massive popular movement against British rule. His fame seems inversely proportional to Azariah's obscurity (at least outside Indian Christian circles). Azariah admired the towering figure of Gandhi and paid him all due respects. He even joined the Mahatma in a notable political battle against separate electorates. But their fundamental religious and political disagreements prevented them from joining forces in their common missions to India's poor and, eventually, brought them into serious conflict over religious freedom.

Thus, as the sun set on the British Raj during its twilight years, Azariah lived in an ever lengthening shadow cast by the Mahatma across the subcontinental landscape. It was a shadow that seemed to darken the brilliance of all of Azariah's life and work, and it was a shadow that seemed to grow with every British retreat. Gandhi and Azariah met only a few times, but Gandhi privately considered Azariah to be his `Enemy Number One,'9 and Azariah was never able to escape his powerful critic's negative campaigns against both his life's work of Christian evangelism and British rule. These criticisms saddened his last years in Dornakal and obscured his historical legacy. Azariah lives in the shadow of the Mahatma as much today as he did during his lifetime.

Late nineteenth-century India was the crown jewel within the global empire of Queen Victoria. However, the British Raj was more a continent than a country. It included today's Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, along with the many regions and languages of present-day India. India was itself an empire dominated by two of the world's major non-western religions: Hinduism and Islam. And what seemed to be a dominant Hindu majority contained within itself yet another bewildering array of minority castes and ethnicities.l

Nowhere were these social and religious groupings more varied and complex than in South India, where caste divisions were complicated and reinforced by racial distinctions between darker-skinned, indigenous Dravidian peoples of the lower castes and lighter-skinned, Aryan peoples of the invading higher castes. Here, in a small Tamil village composed mainly of Dravidian groups, Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah was born the man destined to become the leading Christian statesman of India and the most successful Christian evangelist among the untouchables.

The secret of his success lay in his spiritual purity and personal humility, and his stunning achievements were all the more remarkable for having occurred in a time of terrible tensions and unprecedented change. At every stage, he was a man with a mission. But he was at the same time a mediator in the middle. He was unique among successful Indians of his time in being able to communicate effectively with both the agrarian untouchables of India and the Oxbridge-educated elite of the British Raj.

To understand this unjustly neglected figure, we must re-create the remarkable community of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli)2 amid the and plains of Tamil country and the life of his distinctive caste in the multi-ethnic patchwork of southern India.

spectacular breed of palm trees, the palmyras, dominate this otherwise dry land south of the Tambiravarni River (`copper-colored' river) on the southeastern tip of the Indian subcontinent. The people who scaled the palmyras, known as `toddy-tappers' from the intoxicating alcohol made from the trees, came from the Shanar (now, Nadar) caste who spoke the poetic, ancient Tamil language of the region. On these red, sandy plains, one British missionary quipped, We have not the alternatives of being roasted one part of the year and frozen the other, but gently simmer over a slow fire the whole year round.'1

In this hot and sparse natural environment Protestant, or nonCatholic, Evangelical Christianity planted some of its deepest Indian roots. Christian missionaries arrived in Tinnevelly District before the British established direct political control over the area in 1801. Christianity was introduced in the eighteenth century by German Lutheran missionaries of the North European pietist tradition (in collaboration with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, or SPCK), and was further strengthened in the nineteenth century under the Anglican auspices of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).2 Both were voluntary societies for mission to non-Christians: the CMS expressed the `low-church' Evangelical side of Anglican spirituality and the SPG expressed the `high-church' Anglo-Catholic side. They worked side by side in Tinnevelly, where, despite their common evangelistic goals, they often fell prey to disagreements and rivalries. (Thus, their growing congregations tended to identify themselves as `CMS Christians' or `SPG Christians.')

Those most receptive to the Christian message in Tinnevelly were the semi-untouchable Shanars (now called Nadars, or `lords'), an energetic one-fifth of the district's population whose hereditary occupation was bringing down the sap of the lofty palmyras.3 By 1851, the Nadars of Tinnevelly and neighboring Travancore comprised more than half of the nearly 100,000 Christian converts registered with Protestant missions in India.4 Conversion to Christianity was part of a rising aspiration in India to change status in the caste-dominated South Indian social hierarchy. The Nadar caste community and its strong Christian core were to be key agents of this change.

Azariah's paternal grandfather, a Nadar merchant known as Gnaniyar (or `man of wisdom'), traveled through the countryside in a wagon, or bandi, drawn by bullocks or donkeys trading the coarse brown jaggery sugar from the local palmyra trees for grain and cotton.5 Although relatively poor,6 he was a link between the rustic villages of Tinnevelly and the newly installed English cotton companies in the larger city of Tuticorin and the more distant metropolis of Madras.?

Gnaniyar and his fellow Nadars occupied a middle position of `semiuntouchability' in the caste system: between `outcastes' and `Sudras' (pronounced `Shudras') in the caste hierarchy. Like the untouchables (here called Pallans and Paraiyans), they were barred from entering temples or courts of justice, and required to follow dress regulations forbidding women to cover the upper parts of their bodies. They were also forbidden the use of public wells and were subject to various prohibitions regarding spatial distance. Nadars were required to stay thirty-six paces away from high-caste Brahmins; their houses were limited to one story; they were forbidden to carry umbrellas and to wear shoes and gold ornaments. They could not milk cows, and Nadar women were not allowed to carry pots on their hips. Unlike the outcastes, however, many Nadars abstained from liquor and beef and disapproved of the remarriage of widows.8

As a merchant, Gnaniyar was not directly involved in the traditional, ritually polluting occupation of climbing and cultivating palmyra trees, and it is likely that his family held a relatively elevated position in the ranking of subgroups within his community.9 Nevertheless, in the eyes of other communities, he would have shared with all members of his caste the stigmas associated with their traditional occupation.

During succeeding generations, the Nadars became one of South India's most rapidly changing communities. By the year of Azariah's death in 1945, this formerly impoverished, semi-untouchable community had been transformed into one of the most economically and politically successful communities in the South.

The distinctive work of Protestant Christian missionary societies (the above-mentioned CMS, SPG, and the London Missionary Society, or LMS) spurred much of this change. Already by 1857, 43,000 converts had been received by the CMS and SPG missions in Tinnevelly alone.10 As one missionary observed of these predominantly Nadar converts:

Christianity and the Palmyra have appeared to flourish together. Where the Palmyra abounds, there Christian congregations and schools abound also; and where the Palmyra disappears, there the signs of Christian progress are rarely seen."

By the end of the nineteenth century, Tinnevelly had more Christians than any district in the Madras Presidency; and, among the Protestants, 95 percent were from the Nadar caste. Historian Robert Hardgrave has shown that the missions inspired spiritual and organizational unity in the previously fractionated community. Non-Christians Joined Christian pacesetters in bringing political consciousness to the caste and uplifting it to take advantage of economic and educational opportunities in British India.I2

The Nadar converts in Tinnevelly came primarily neither from the lowest sections of the caste (Kalla Shanars) nor from the highest (Nadans), but rather from the middle subgroups and particularly the climbers.13 Conversion provided a pathway to caste advancement for middle-ranking Nadars, who, after receiving Christian education, were able to leave their former, polluting occupation in great numbers.14 Christian missions helped Nadar women gain the right to cover their upper bodies during the violent breastcloth controversy of the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Nadar women were frequently attacked, stripped, and beaten - and chapels and schools were burned - for the offense of wearing the breast cloths previously worn only by higher-caste Nair women. The position and influence of the missionaries helped Nadars to challenge their indigenous superiors, and Nadar Christian converts became leaders in the movement for social change.15

Economic and political conditions in the wake of British victory in the Mysore and Poligar (Palaiyakkaram) Wars (1755-1801), which subdued the power of feudal chiefs, were also favorable to Nadar advancement. Nadar merchants (like Azariah's grandfather) and moneylenders were better able to take advantage of improved transportation and communication created by the Pax Indika than were the relatively disadvantaged and locally bound Palmyra tree climbers.16 Trading cotton and tobacco, Nadar merchants established prosperous communities farther north and generally sought to disassociate themselves from members of the same caste in southern Tinnevelly. From about the 1860s, they frequently tried to lift their social status simply by adopting higher-caste manners and attributes, a process known as Sanskritization.17 Although they were a family of merchants, Azariah's relatives did not seek advancement through Sanskritization but instead chose the different route of Christianization.

Like most of the palmyra-climbing Nadars, Azariah's ancestors were Saiva: a poor family of `toddy-drawers' belonging to `a very orthodox Hindu sect devoted to the exclusive worship of the god Siva, the de- stroyer.'18 Azariah's grandfather was remembered as a particularly religious man who, while traveling through the countryside by bandi, `always left the end of his bag of sweetstuff unfastened so that he could make an offering at any little shrine which he passed, or make a gift to anyone who asked him.'19 Although the Nadars worshipped some of the familiar gods of the Hindu pantheon, particularly a son of Siva named Subramanya (or Murugan), missionaries tended to describe the most prevalent religious practices as `demon-worship.' Many missionaries believed that Christianity was popular among Nadars precisely because it provided an attractive alternative to their former religion's `bloody sacrifices' and `devil dances.'20 Missionary Robert Caldwell noted that deities favored by the highest Brahmin social groups received little notice from most Nadars.21 Exclusion from Hindu temples contributed to the Nadar religion's decidedly anti-Brahmanical character. Indeed, some early Protestant missionaries to Tinnevelly denied that Nadars were "Hindu" at all because of the unorthodox nature of their religious practices.22

Azariah's father was born in 1821, probably in the village of Chettivillai.23 He was given the name Velayudham, one of the many names of the popular deity Subramanya.24 As a boy, he traveled with his father to exchange and to sell goods.25 During these trips, they observed different aspects of the quickening group conversion movements taking place among Nadars between 1820 and 1835 in response to the pietistic brand of Christianity that was being preached by the missionaries.26 In 1837, a young Welsh missionary arrived who would transform this part of the Tinnevelly District into one of South India's most self-sufficient Christian areas and the training ground for the future Bishop of Dornakal. John Thomas (1807-70) began his life's work in the village of Megnanapuram (village of `true wisdom'),27 one of Tinnevelly's many Christian `villages of refuge.' During Thomas's thirty-four-year tenure, a large mission compound was built, a school was opened, and, perhaps most notably, a semi-Gothic church with a spire 175 feet high was constructed on the site of a former Hindu shrine. Streets were straightened, houses were rebuilt in rows, trees were planted, and wells were improved.

The spoken tradition still preserved in Megnanapuram and surrounding villages describes his preaching against `demons' and `idols,' and his healing powers. `John Thomas told us not to be afraid of devils; Christianity was the answer,' remembered one great-grandchild of early Tinnevelly Christians.28 One story of Thomas's arrival in Megnanapuram recounts how he entered the village on horseback during an annual festival, fulfilling an oracle received by a pujari, or local Hindu priest, the year before, that the evil spirits would leave the place and go to the hills, because a white man would come here on a black horse, and the people would embrace the white man's religion.'29 Upon arrival, villagers claim that Thomas overpowered a viper which was biting a worshipper at the village shrine and applied some healing medicine. The story continues:

The news of the arrival of the white man on a black horse and of the miracle done by him brought all the villagers to the shrine. The white man was not such a fool as to let that opportunity slip away. He asked all the people to sit down, and ... told them that the god they worshipped was not the true God, as it was made of stone, and had eyes that cannot see, legs that cannot walk, ears that cannot hear, a mouth that cannot talk, and so on, whereas his God was an immortal God who cannot be known in the image of an idol but can be seen only with spiritual eyes.30

Before the village would abandon the practice of making supplications to the goddess Bhadrakali for protection against epidemics, it appears to have been crucial that Thomas demonstrated the superior healing and protecting powers of the new God. The CMS missionaries to Tinnevelly presented Christianity as a replacement for, not a complement to, the worship of village idols and the associated fears of demons and dis eases in very much the same way that Azariah and his colleagues would do in Dornakal seventy years later.

Thomas's missionary predecessor, Charles Rhenius, has also been credited with a miraculous healing. Christians in Megnanapuram like to tell the story of how Rhenius rescued the son of a Hindu priest from the deadly effects of a snake bite incurred while the boy's father was performing puja (worship ceremonies) beneath a Yelandai tree. The priest became a Christian, and Rhenius built a chapel on the site before the Yelandai tree, under which Azariah is also said to have prayed during his childhood.31

The repetition of certain themes in these oral accounts such as the healing of snakebites, the white missionary arriving on a black horse, and the practices of holy men beneath the Yelandai tree, suggests that general formulae guided these villagers in the construction of their historical stories.32 There is no reason to believe that these stories are not based on some historical fact, but it is important to realize that they may also have been constructed according to certain forms that are structurally relevant in themselves and suggest unstated meanings to the community of transmission. Just as Christian missionaries have adapted stylized formulae from traditional Indian folk-song patterns to make new Indian Christian folk songs more highly evocative to listeners, so these stories reflect certain patterns and themes which deepen their resonance within today's living Indian Christian communiry.33 A direct link is established between Rhenius, the missionary forebear, and Azariah, the successful native son, by their shared experience in the sacred space under the Yelandai tree where Rhenius conquered the devil and the false religion (symbolized by the snake and the neglectful Hindu priest-father) and built a chapel, and where India's rising indigenous Christian leader sought early spiritual communion with God.

In nearby Vellalanvilai, the village where Azariah's father was to become pastor, villagers still recount how John Thomas rode dramatically on his horse into their village, stopping to rest and to pray beneath their great banyan tree which sheltered a shrine dedicated to the goddess Essakiamman. Despite initial opposition to Thomas's preaching, the village munsif, or headman, decided to become a Christian and visited Megnanapuram continuously for three months to receive instruction for baptism. Under his leadership, four other families were baptized and formed the nucleus of a village congregation in 1841. Before long, all the Nadars of the village had embraced the new faith, dismantled the shrine to Essakiamman, and used the idol stones as the foundation stones for a new church.34

Azariah's father's conversion to Christianity seems to have been linked to his entrance into the British missionary school system. In 1839, at the age of eighteen, Azariah's father left his village to become a student at the recently opened CMS school in Megnanapuram. Shortly thereafter, he was baptized and given the new name `Thomas Vedanayagam,' which combined the surname of the Welsh missionary with the nearest 'Christian equivalent' of his Hindu name (Veda, meaning `Bible,' and nayagam, meaning `master' or' leader').35 Some versions of this story contend that in 1839 he came under the influence of Christianity and `ran away' to the village of Megnanapuram, where he begged admission into the new religion. John Thomas then admitted him as a student in the mission school, the story goes, and accepted him as a candidate for baptism after a waiting period during which Azariah's father was tested for his `sincerity.'36 Other accounts suggest that the boy was more interested in education than in baptism. One local oral tradition maintains that he went to the CMS school in Megnanapuram with his father's blessing and no apparent interest in Christianity.37

Whatever the real motives for Azariah's father's entrance into Christianity and the mission school, stories about this event also stressed the authoritarian role of the British missionary. Azariah's son Ambrose described how John Thomas selected children for admission to the boarding school in Megnanapuram:

We are told that [John Thomas] would line [the children] up and reject most on the ground that one had a narrow forehead, another a head too small, that there was no grace in his face, that he looked sickly, that he came from a family too poor, that his family was too backward socially, that he did not look intelligent, and so on! As Thomas Vedanayagam was selected by John Thomas for admission in the boarding school, we can presume he had a broad-enough forehead, a well-formed head, that he had a pleasant face, that he was healthy, looked intelligent, and was from a family not too poor or backward!38

To Azariah's family, the western missionary first appeared as a largerthan-life judge, and the missionary educational system as an exclusivist society dependent upon the mysterious whims of the all-powerful western missionary.

As far as we know, Azariah's grandfather (and presumably grandmother) never converted to Christianity; and, in this sense, Velayudham's baptism was unusual since most accessions to the church during this period in Tinnevelly involved whole families or even villages. This practice of group conversion tended to minimize social dislocation and provide protection from frequent persecutions.

Disincentives to conversion were strong in Nadar society during this period, particularly because of opposition to the growing influence of missions from upper-class Nadars, or Nadans.39 Missionaries provided protection for Christian converts from the oppressions of these wealthy and powerful Nadan landlords in addition to offering education, medical aid, and other forms of assistance. With their traditional dominance thus threatened, the Nadans became the missionaries' greatest adversaries. Many Nadans supported anti-Christian societies: the Vibuthi Sangam (the Sacred Ashes Society), established in 1841 and allied with the Sadur Veda Siddhanta Sabha (Salay Street Society) of Madras after it was established in 1845; and the Society for Diffusing the Philosophy of the Four Vedas, organized to stop the mass conversions of the 1840s.40 Confronted with such opposition, some converts sought the safety of Christian settlements; but most Christian families and villages were able to maintain their former community life largely intact after baptism.

After completing his education, Azariah's father chose not to follow his father's occupation but rather to enter the employ of the CMS, working for thirty years in most areas of Christian ministry from missionary preaching to pastoral care. At this time, Tamil catechists such as Azariah's father were employed by a European missionary `to go before him - when he purposes visiting a village - in order to invite the people to come and listen, and to follow up his address by instructing more fully, and in greater detail, those who are willing to learn.'41 Since Indian Christians were rarely ordained and promoted to positions of authority, the rapidly growing church faced a growing shortage of leadership. By 1842, John Thomas was responsible for visiting 500 communicants per month with the help of only one ordained Indian priest.42 Few Indians were considered qualified to complete the western-style theological training necessary for ordination to the priesthood (an English-medium theology course which involved the study of Greek and Hebrew).

To solve this dilemma, John Thomas proposed a scheme to promote Indian church leadership, of which Azariah's father was a direct beneficiary.43 In the face of considerable opposition from other missionaries, Thomas designed a new curriculum to meet the needs of local Indian Christian congregations. Experience in village ministry (at least fifteen years), loyalty to the church, and personal reputation, rather than academic accomplishments, became the criteria for acceptance in the training program, which included `intensive study of the Bible in Tamil, an outline of church history, Christian doctrine based on the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, preaching (of which they already had considerable experience), and pastoral care and village problems.'44 This innovation was similar to that instituted later by Azariah for training Telugu priests in Dornakal.

The fruits of Thomas's ideas were quickly evident. Five Indian deacons were ordained by 1851; ordinations took place again in 1856 and 1859; and Azariah's father was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Madras, Frederick Gell, on 31 January 1869, along with twenty-one other Indian deacons and twelve Indian priests.45 This ordination in Pallamcottah (Palayamkottai) was the largest ever for India and represented the culmination ofJohn Thomas's career as a missionary. The success of this Anglican scheme to train an Indian ministry contrasted sharply with a failed effort by French Roman Catholics to do roughly the same thing at the same time. Their inability to control the age of ordination (which they wanted to lower to help priests keep their celibacy vows), the lack of resources for a proposed seminary, and, above all, the seeming inability of French missionaries to adjust their conception of the priesthood to the simpler conditions of the Indian village - all contributed to the failure. In contrast, John Thomas was given the resources and support needed for training his priests, who, because they were usually older and married, were unencumbered by the problem of celibacy.46

Thomas Vedanayagam was subsequently ordained priest on 24 December 1871. He spent the years remaining before his death on 23 June 188947 as pastor of the congregation in Vellalanvilai. The village was composed mainly of Nadars employed by Vellalar landlords (hence the derivation of the name `Vellalanvilai') who lived in the nearby village of Manad. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Nadars purchased most of the land from the Manadu Vellalars, thus contributing to an overall increase of Nadar-owned land titles in the Tinnevelly District.48 The first Vellalanvilai Nadars became Christians in the early 1840s, and by 1987 the village consisted of 516 Christian families engaged mainly in the cultivation of coconuts, rice, and ba- nanas.49

Remembered for his piety and dedication, Thomas Vedanayagam adopted Anglicized models of religious practice (in liturgy, music, etc.) imported by the CMS. He built the semi-Gothic Holy Trinity Church upon the foundation stones taken from the preexisting shrine to the village goddess, Essakiamman. Apart from its location next to the village's giant banyan tree, there was little to distinguish his church and much of the liturgy within it from Anglican churches in England.

Azariah's father was married first to a Nadar wife about whom little is known50 and, after her death, to a Christian from Kuppapuram (near the SPG center at Nazareth in Tinnevelly) named Ellen, who became Azariah's mother. His two sons by his first wife were men of considerable achievement. The first son, Ambrose V. Thomas (1850-1911), became the headmaster of the CMS High School in Megnanapuram which today bears his name. He taught himself both Greek and Sanskrit and placed great emphasis in the school on memorization of the Bible. This high school is believed to have produced more ordained Christian ministers than any school in the East.51

The second son, Samuel Vedanayagam Thomas (1855-90), was ap pointed to a series of academic posts (teacher at the SPG College, Tiruchirapalli, in 1876 and, subsequently, headmaster of three schools: Wesleyan High School in Mannargudi, American High School in Madura, and Wesley College High School in Royapettah, Madras),52 and became a noted Sanskrit scholar despite his early death at the age of thirty-five. After receiving BA and MA degrees in mathematics and English respectively, he undertook Sanskrit studies in response to the following experience, recounted by his grandson:

It is said that one day while traveling with some Brahmin Pundits who were reading some slokas from the Vedas in Sanskrit, S. V. Thomas questioned them about the meaning of the slokas, and was told that they were too difficult to be understood by Non-Brahmins. He took this as a challenge and immediately started studying Sanskrit, and soon took the MS degree in Sanskrit coming first in Madras University and winning the University Gold Medal for Sanskrit that year.53

In the year of S. V. Thomas's death, it is believed that he was being considered for appointment as Professor of Sanskrit at Cambridge University.54 That both of Azariah's elder half-brothers would have learned the sacred language of the Hindus and succeeded in following prestigious academic careers hardly one generation after their family's removal from semi-untouchable status indicates the degree to which their Christian education had provided a means for rapid social mobility.

Their eagerness to learn about Brahmin traditions was matched by a great reverence for British culture, with which their faith was intimately linked. S. V. Thomas was an avid reader and stylistic imitator of Thomas Babington Macaulay. He contributed articles to Christian periodicals such as The Madras Christian College Magazine and The Harvest Field on subjects ranging from South Indian missionary work to the Indian National Congress, of which he was harshly critical.55 It was said that this writings were often mistaken by the press for those of an English gentleman, and were quoted as such.'56 Thomas even produced a colloquial Tamil translation of Milton's Paradise Lost whose continuing popularity is reflected by its recent republication in Madras.57 Azariah was to follow in his halfbrother's steps by translating various Christian works into Tamil, notably Charles G. Finney's Lectures on Revivalism (1902), Andrew Murray's Humility: The Beauty of Holiness (c. 1902), St. Augustine's Confessions (n.d.), and selections from Bishop Andrewes' Devotions (1933).58

Thus, conversion to Christianity stimulated a process of advancement in Azariah's family, largely through educational achievements. Whereas Azariah's grandfather was a trader with, at most, a minimal elementary education, Azariah's father completed high school and ministerial training, and Azariah's elder half-brothers gained higher degrees and important positions in the missionary educational system. Azariah did not pursue any advanced degrees, but he was awarded an honorary degree from Cambridge University in 1920 and brought with him to Dornakal a deep appreciation for literacy and education.

Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah, the subject of our study, was born to Ellen and Thomas Vedanayagam on 17 August 1874 in the church rectory at Vellalanvilai and was baptized on 4 October. He was Ellen's first and only son, arriving thirteen years after the birth of their only other child, a daughter.59 They chose the name Samuel after the Old Testament prophet whose parents, Hannah and Elkanah, had also waited many years for the birth of their first son.60 It is less clear why he was given his other biblical name, Azariah.61 He did not use the name until entering Madras Christian College in 1893, when he had an exchange (as related by his son) with its renowned Scottish principal, Wil Liam Miller, that was somewhat reminiscent of his father's humiliating introduction to missionary education:

Dr. Miller: What is your name, boy?

Father: Samuel, Sir.

Dr. Miller: It is too common a name. Have you any other name?

Father: Vedanayagam is my father's name.

Dr. Miller: The name is too long and it is too much of a tonguetwister. What other name do you have?

Father: Azariah, Sir.

Dr. Miller: That is a good name. We will call you Azariah, Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah.62

Thus, the power of the western missionary educator extended even to the Adam-like renaming of his students.

Azariah passed his earliest childhood years in Vellalanvilai, where he attended the village church school and first learned to write by tracing letters in the dirt.63 Years later as a bishop, Azariah credited his mother with instilling in him a deep appreciation of the Bible and of Christian prayer:

My own earliest recollection of my mother is that she used to disappear suddenly on occasions: I used to cry and search for her and find her on her knees in an inner room in prayer. My mother had sanctified herself for the sake of her child. She taught me that my relationship to God was of far more importance than anything else, and she repeatedly impressed on me that I was born in answer to prayer and dedicated to the service of God.64

By the age of ten, Azariah had committed to memory substantial portions of the Bible. `All my love for the Bible and my knowledge of it came to me from my mother,' he claimed later.65

In 1885, Azariah became a student at the CMS High School in Megnanapuram where his half-brother Ambrose was both teacher and headmaster, exerting enormous influence over his young charge.66 Azariah recalled later that:

Many of us are what we are because of his influence, his prayers, his example. Yet there were many days when the time-table was forgotten; inspiration would make him devote one whole afternoon to Euclid, another to Algebra, again a whole morning to Scripture. These days are gone for ever ... and with them is passing away the old Guru- Shisya (Master-Disciple) relationship between the teacher and the taught.67

The influence of Ambrose became even more important after the death of their father in 1889 when Azariah was only fifteen years old. As a surrogate father, Azariah's older half-brother inspired the future Bishop to place particular emphasis in later years on his role as a teacher in the Dornakal Divinity School and as an author of Telugu textbooks for seminarians.68 In the year of his father's death, Azariah's mother moved to Megnanapuram to become matron of the CMS girls' school,69 and Azariah matriculated at Church Missionary College, Tinnevelly (today: St. John's College, Palayamkottai). Here he took his F.A. (First in Arts) degree in 1892 and then served for a further year as a `pupil teacher' to raise funds needed to complete his education.

During his tenure as a student in Tinnevelly, he is remembered primarily for establishing the Christian Brotherhood Association, which was dedicated to fighting rising caste spirit in the student hostels and to inspiring spiritual renewal. In addition to organizing prayer meetings, the organization published a Tamil journal, Jeeva Thannair (Living Water), whose purpose was mainly devotional and evangelistic.70 Late nineteenth-century Tinnevelly had witnessed an increased awareness among Nadars of their caste rights and privileges and a corresponding growth of competition with other caste groups. Although Christian churches were officially opposed to caste, caste divisions still existed within most congregations. The social and economic mobility made possible through Christian education led, ironically, to heightened caste self-awareness and ambition. By 1894, Christians had widely adopted the title of their most virulent aristocratic Nadar opponents, the Nadans. Some literate Christians claimed that they were really Kshatriyas, or members of the warrior or ruler caste described by the ancient Hindu sage Mann. Azariah was not impressed by Indian Christians who helped to create and disseminate a new mythology of Nadar greatness, antagonizing other castes such as the Nadars' historical adversaries, the Maravars, and heightening caste consciousness within the Christian community itself 71

Azariah, therefore, began his student activist career by taking aim at the sins of his own people rather than at the sins of his British rulers. The Christian Brotherhood Association opposed caste in order to advance Christianity; but this was not an easy position to take in late nineteenthcentury Tinnevelly. In 1893, an SPG missionary, J. A. Sharrock, established the Voluntary Society for the Suppression of Caste, but it attracted only three members in its first five years.72 In choosing to take a stand against caste rights and privileges in his school, Azariah was beginning a long career of resisting dominant practices and opinions of his day on the basis of his confessional beliefs and western influences.

From February 1892 to January 1893, Azariah served as a monitor at the CMS High School in Palamcottah. His records reveal, not an extraordinary intellect, but a diligent student whose

zeal, goodness, ability and industry ... have been of great service to this Institution. To the students he has been kind and firm and has settled their differences without bringing them to other teachers. He has also been an example in study.73

By the age of eighteen, Azariah had risen to the top of the missionary educational system in Tinnevelly and formed the ambition of becoming a Sunday School teacher.74 His upbringing had exposed him to a conservative evangelical theology propagated by the CMS, and his faith found comfortable expression within the boundaries of the traditional Church of England and its associated institutions.

The following year, Azariah left the relatively parochial environment of Tinnevelly and ventured northwards to urban Madras. From February 1893 to March 1896, he was a student of mathematics at Madras Christian College, one of the colleges founded by the Church of Scotland's educational missions to privileged groups in India's cities. Here Azariah was exposed to a whole new type of liberal theology and a different, more elitist mission theory.75

Established in 1837 as St. Andrew's School by Church of Scotland missionary John Anderson, the college affiliated with the University of Madras by 1867 and was renamed Madras Christian College ten years later.76 Anderson was inspired by the success of his fellow Free Church of Scotland missionary in Calcutta, Alexander Duff, to establish an Englishmedium school for the `influential classes.'77 Duff and his followers believed that Christian education of the urban elites was the first step in the conversion of India. They accepted a 'downward filtration theory' whereby education and, it was hoped, conversion of the top groups would have a leavening effect on the masses.78

This mission strategy was not successful in producing conversions, although the Scottish colleges became wildly popular among India's most educated classes. By the time Azariah arrived at Madras Christian College, most educational missionaries had rationalized their failure to convert students by reconstructing the meaning and purpose of their Indian experience altogether. No longer was their mission to produce high-caste converts who would exit Hinduism and serve as inspirational leadership for a larger, multi-caste Indian Christian community; rather, it was to prepare Indian society as a whole for the reception of Christianity in the future by penetrating the mind of Hinduism and changing the thoughts and values of the entire culture. To achieve its goal of preparing India for the gospel through education, the so-called praeparatio evangelica, Madras Christian College sought to expose students to Christianity indirectly through the fruits of western culture and civilization, rather than directly through evangelism.

Azariah attended the college during the tenure of Principal William Miller (1862-1907), perhaps the most influential missionary in South India during the late nineteenth century.79 Miller was educated in the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh before being ordained in the Free Church of Scotland and taking up his position as Principal in Madras. He became a prominent figure in the Madras Presidency and was appointed to the Madras Legislative Council in 1893, the year Azariah entered the college. Miller became the leading spokesman in India of the praeparatio evangelica strategy, seeking to influence the whole non-Christian world with the message of the gospel without concern for immediate conversions.80 By removing evangelization from the mandate of his college,81 Miller began a movement among Christian colleges from about 1870 to turn their attention away from the problem of the salvation of non-Christian students to focus more fully on the task of training a highly educated Christian elite - of which Azariah was a part - and of `enlightening' wider Indian society more indirectly.82

The aims of Madras Christian College as described in its prospectus were:

... simply to convey through the channel of a good education as great an amount of truth as possible to the native mind, especially of Bible truth. Every branch of knowledge communicated is to be made subservient to this desirable end.

However, the college curriculum included a broad range of subjects which extended beyond the narrower confines of more insular Christian educational programs:

English, including reading, grammar and composition, writing and accounts, history, geography, arithmetic, mathematics, and algebra; the elements of astronomy and political economy; logic, moral philosophy, and natural theology; the evidences and doctrines of Christianity, etc.83

Under Miller, the school increased its enrollment, sharpened its academic standards, and further broadened the scope of its curriculum to include new subjects. Azariah arrived less than a decade after the introduction of a new course of studies for B.A. degree examinations which featured increased specialization and more advanced instruction in the physical and natural sciences.84 Increased enrollment of students from the provinces - the relatively rural areas known in British India as the mufassal necessitated the building of student hostels, which, interestingly, offered separate accommodation for students of different communities: Brahmin, Non-Brahmin, and Christian.85 Coming from the rela tively conservative missionary schools of Tinnevelly, Azariah was thrust into a more cosmopolitan liberal environment, and into a student body which represented a wider range of socioeconomic and religious backgrounds.

This attempt by the Scottish missions to influence the cultural, moral, and spiritual beliefs of India through education was generally welcomed by Indians as a net benefit. Many non-Christian Indian students were willing to accept the teachings of Jesus without becoming members of an organized church via public confession and baptism.86 However, a widespread revival and reinterpretation of Hinduism also took place in India during the nineteenth century, largely in response to the Christian missionary challenge. Isolated instances of conversion and a general suspicion of Christian intentions led to a period of heightened tension between Christians and Hindus immediately before Azariah's arrival in Madras.

The so-called `Christian College Disturbance' of 1888 reflected the full intensity of the disagreements.87 The college disturbance, which was provoked by a Brahmin conversion and, according to missionaries, by outside anti-Christian agitators, led to student strikes and wholesale chaos. The disturbance both reflected and worsened fears on the part of conservative Hindus in Madras that their customs and traditions were being undermined by the new religion. Reformist movements in Madras such as those that attempted to legislate against infant marriage owed much to the effects of western education upon Hindu social practices. However, the disagreement among the western-educated classes during the Age of Consent Bill controversy of 1890-91 dispelled the popular myth that these classes were necessarily in favor of reforms.88

The Hindu revival increased hostility to Christianity during Azariah's student days in Madras, but it did not seem to dampen his en thusiasm for Christian evangelism. Nor did the ecumenical atmosphere at Madras Christian College, where professors and students held many different and opposing opinions on religious, social, and political issues. The college did not encourage or enforce conformity to any single orthodoxy, as the varied debates and opinions expressed in the Madras Christian College Magazine demonstrated.89

In Madras, Azariah was able to make personal contact with many people of diverse views. In addition to meeting Hindu reformers, Azariah met Christians who were to be greatly influenced by nationalism, such as his classmate and future colleague in the National Missionary Society and the YMCA, K. T. Paul (1876-1931).90 Among Azariah's other classmates were A. P. Patro, future leader of the non-Brahmin justice Party and Minister of Education in the Madras Government from 1922 to 1927, and K. Venkata Reddi Naidu, Development Minister from 1922 to 1925 and then agent in South Africa and Law Member of the Madras Govern- ment.91

Significantly, young Azariah does not appear to have been involved in or influenced by the National Church of Madras, which was established during Azariah's student years by S. Pulney Andy and which, under the influence of growing nationalism and western liberal theology, attracted over one hundred members.92 In Madras, Azariah was exposed for the first time to growing nationalism and protonationalism: his apparent general indifference to these developments is already striking at this young age.

Little is known about the details of Azariah's college career or why he chose to study mathematics.93 He was probably influenced by his brother, S. V. Thomas, who completed a B.A. in mathematics in 1880,94 and by CMS missionary to Tinnevelly in the 1890s, Thomas Walker, who received a mathematics degree at Cambridge in 1882 and argued that there was `nothing like Mathematics for mental training and discipline.'95 In the end, Azariah never completed his B.A. degree. He passed final examinations in English (ranking twelth in his class) and in Tamil, but he was struck by a sudden illness, probably an attack of influenza, on the day of his final mathematics examinations.96 He had the opportunity to take the mathematics exams after his recovery six months later, but Azariah chose not to - perhaps simply because of a'lack of funds'97 or because he had already committed himself (by March 1895) to a Job as a YMCA secretary.98

Azariah's decision not to finish his B.A. may prefigure his later educational policy in the Dornakal Diocese, where he deemphasized the importance of higher learning as a form of skills relevant to village ministry. This policy was sharply criticized by many Telugus, who felt that Azariah had blocked their aspirations, in part because of his own alleged insecurity at not having attained a B.A. degree. His defenders countered that Azariah's policy rightly placed a holistic concern for village uplift (both spiritual and material) above the more individualistic ambitions for advanced degrees for a minority that would probably leave the villages. Azariah's son remembers that the bishop criticized people for flaunting their B.A.'s when they were not themselves B.A.,' that is, `Born Again.'99

Azariah spent much of his time as a student engaged in Christian evangelistic activities sponsored by the YMCA: prayer meetings, Bible studies, and street preaching. By 1895, he was leading YMCA spiritual meetings and preaching bands in Madras, had attended the Third Indian National Convention of the YMCA as a delegate from Megnanapuram, and directed the opening of a new YMCA branch in Madras. When Azariah received an honorary degree from Cambridge University in 1920, an admirer wrote:

I remember how you willingly sacrificed your BA degree for the sake of the master as a student of the Madras Christian College, and the Good Lord has rewarded you with a distinction that has not, to my mind, fallen to the lot of any other Indian Christian.100

Although we have no record today of Azariah's achievement (or lack of achievement) in his college classes, we do know that he was influenced by the `high Christian ideals' of the faculty, whom he regarded with `reverence and inspiration.'101 Azariah always remembered William Miller's parting address to students in March 1896, when he `committed us to God and with intense earnestness charged us to be faithful to the ideals of character and conduct that, through many years, the College had endeavored to place before us.'102 Madras Christian College seems to have reinforced Azariah's admiration for the many values associated in his mind with both Christianity and the West. It also provided him with his first sustained exposure to people and ideas of widely differing traditions within India. Perhaps most importantly, it provided him with an introduction to the nondenominational Christian organization which was to broaden his horizons and serve as his vocational home for the next fourteen years: the YMCA.

or the first two decades of Azariah's life, he was the parochial child of a subculture within a subculture of the Indian world. Secure in his native Anglican Tinnevelly, Azariah was suddenly thrust into contact, not so much with the rest of India or other Christian communities, as with the entirely new emerging reality of pan-Asian and worldwide Christian youth organizations seeking to break through all preexisting denominational boundaries to create a new Christianized world. Through these movements, Azariah developed a personal vision and sense of mission which transcended both the Anglicanism of Tinnevelly and the nationalism so popular with his student contemporaries.

The cosmopolitan city of Madras brought him into the ecumenical, student-generated attempt to break through all traditional denominations, religions, and caste boundaries. The Young Men's Christian Association provided the institutional base from which Azariah emerged as one of Asia's foremost ecumenical mission leaders. During his career with the YMCA from 1895 to 1909, Azariah's instinctive sense of the importance of missionary work acquired in the evangelical environment of Tinnevelly crystallized into a more fully developed ecumenical commitment to evangelism. Compared to the relatively insular atmosphere of Tinnevelly Anglicanism, the YMCA's multi-national scope and broad religious and social objectives expanded Azariah's intellectual and spiritual horizons beyond the confines of both his denomination and his nation. A brief look at the origins of the international YMCA movement during its high tide of missionary optimism will help to explain how the organization often known today as a domesticated social and gymnastic club became an important vehicle for transmitting the faith in distant India.

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