Azariah as a YMCA Secretary: The Impact of Eddy

Azariah became an active member of the YMCA and its missionary wing, the Student Volunteer Movement, in 1894 while he was a student at Madras Christian College.75 It was the year of Cherry's disputed conversion, and Azariah led YMCA Bible studies, prayer meetings, and organized open-air Preaching Bands in the streets of Madras.76 There is no evidence that he compromised his Christian evangelism in the face of increased resistance to YMCA activities by Hindu and other religious groups. Seeking conversions of non-Christians remained Azariah's central and unfaltering goal. By 1895, he was deeply involved in the association's evangelistic activities. He represented the village of Megnanapuram at the Indian National Convention of YMCAs in Madras in December 1894, and, shortly thereafter, he delivered an evangelistic address entitled `Why Am I a Christian?' to a `Reason Meeting' at the Blacktown (then Georgetown) branch of the YMCA.77

Azariah was chosen to manage the opening of the Madras association's third branch in Royapetta in 1895. In March, he became an Assistant Secretary in the Madras YMCA and embarked on a year's part-time training to become the first Tamil Agent of the Indian National Council of YMCAs and General Secretary of the association in Madurai.78 At the age of twenty-one, he was placed in charge of the YMCA headquarters in Madurai, from which he began a decade's work of developing the YMCA's smaller, more indigenous associations in the towns and villages of Madurai and Tinnevelly Districts. Thus Azariah began full-time employment as a YMCA secretary, not among western-educated elites in Madras, but among the much poorer Christian converts of rural South India.

In Madurai, Azariah is remembered even to this day for his missionary work and inspirational spiritual leadership. He held worship services in both Tamil and English, taught Sunday school, and delivered papers on topics such as biblical archaeology (one was entitled "`Stones Crying Out" or the Testimony of the Bible from Ancient Monuments,' delivered on 14 August 1896). Azariah was not content merely to advertise YMCA meetings; he relentlessly visited all members to ensure their attendance. After one meeting in 1896 on `Personal Bible Study for Spiritual Growth,' twenty-one signed a declaration that they would devote the first half hour each day to Bible study (the so-called `Morning Watch').79 He traveled extensively to visit YMCA branches, to establish new ones, to organize devotional and educational meetings on a wide range of topics, and to attend various conventions. In 1897, he covered 3,465 miles and delivered 126 addresses to both Christians and non-Christians.

His extensive travels led to disappointment at the spiritual apathy of association members.80 Apart from occasional references to India's great diversity, size, and difficult journeys by bullock cart over the worst specimens of public road,' his writings are dominated by penetrating criticisms of the Indian Christian community's lack of spirituality and missionary enthusiasm:

How sad to find Christians eaten up with pride of caste and wealth, sunk in worldliness and superstition, given in various instances to fashionable forms of vices, and lacking in zeal for the Master's cause.81

Focusing mainly on spiritual edification, his activities in 1897 included organizing a convention in Palamcottah during which 408 people pledged to observe the `Morning Watch.' He taught Sunday school to Hindu boys in Tinnevelly, gave lectures on astronomy, and in 1899 shifted his headquarters formally to the southern city of Palamcottah.

One reason for this shift was his marriage on 29 June of the previous year to Anbu Mariammal Samuel (1876-1950), one of the most highly educated Christian women in the Tinnevelly District.82 In their lifetime together, she would raise six children and become an active participant in women's education in the Dornakal Diocese. In 1898, Anbu and Azariah disregarded and reinterpreted various Indian marriage traditions - corresponding with each other during their engagement, not following customary dowry procedures, and marrying on a Wednesday. It happened to be an `auspicious' day for weddings according to Hindu tradition; but Azariah chose the date primarily because it was St. Peter's Day in the Christian calendar, and he desired his wife to be as helpful as Peter's.83 This provides a good example of the manner in which Azariah, as a young man, drew from differing Indian and western social and religious traditions. He rejected some commonly followed patterns of behavior, while often quietly attempting where possible to reconcile Christian and Hindu practices. As we shall see, the Christian marriage ceremony became the focus of Azariah's boldest liturgical experiments in synthesizing Christian and local Hindu traditions.

Despite the shift of headquarters to their native Palamcottah, Azariah and his wife saw relatively little of each other during their first years of mar riage. Azariah spent 151 days traveling a total of 1,973 miles in 1899, and he traveled more than 7,200 miles and attended eight conventions in 1900 and 1901. The demand for his participation in various conferences, summer camps, and further conventions increased. During the next eight years he delivered speeches and sermons, conducted Bible studies and prayer meetings, and arranged literary meetings, debates, lectures, concerts, social gatherings, and sporting events in YMCA branches throughout South India. In some locations he established YMCA reading rooms and libraries for which he also purchased books on a wide range of religious and secular subjects.

Azariah's principal partner - and friend - during these itinerant years was the American Congregationalist George Sherwood Eddy, who eventually became the YMCA's chief evangelist in Asia. A graduate of Yale University and Princeton Theological Seminary, Eddy arrived in Calcutta in 1896 to take up a position as Traveling Secretary for the Student Volunteer Movement under the auspices of the YMCA and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In 1911, he was appointed YMCA Secretary for Asia, but he returned to Europe during the First World War to work as YMCA Secretary with British and American armies in France, an experience that contributed to his becoming a pacifist.84

Eddy began his work in India with English-speaking Hindu and Muslim students. Failing to witness any lasting conversions, he decided in 1899 to switch his emphasis to the South Indian `masses': the outcaste and lower-caste groups which were converting to Christianity in rural areas - Azariah's native people. He learned Tamil and accompanied Azariah on frequent visits to YMCA branches, churches, and colleges throughout South India - to preach the gospel, to persuade young men to join the missionary cause, and to encourage them to abandon loyalty to all traditional social practices associated with Hinduism and caste.85 As Eddy wrote about their common purpose as they traveled:

Our objective was both individual and social. Seeking to work with all Christian forces as one team, we hoped to raise up Indian leaders for the Christianization of their own land, and ultimately to change the whole social order, building a new India as part of a new world.86

Azariah became one of India's most fervent promoters of the SVM watchword, writing in 1904 that "`Evangelization of India in this generation" ought to be written large on the walls of our YMCAs as well as on the hearts of our active members.'87 His commitment to seek conversions to Christianity inspired Eddy, who described Azariah in 1902 as `full of the Holy Ghost and of wisdom, and a man of much prayer ... I never met an American student at Northfield or in the colleges who has so deep a Christian life.'88

In time, Azariah and Eddy grew apart because of differing views on Christianity's social mission. Azariah did not share Eddy's later pacifism and his view that the Christian social vision was best expressed by the British Labour Parry under Ramsay MacDonald (a `successful application of Christianity to politics: all the idealism of Liberal Christianity without the sentimentality; all the realism of Marxism without the cynicism').89 Azariah steadfastly resisted association with any secular social ideologies. But in their early YMCA years, they shared the common dream that India's social regeneration would be brought about by Christian evangelization.

Employing the preaching techniques of American revivalism, Azariah and Eddy sought to bring about radical conversions to an evangelical faith similar to those seen in Northfield. During a month's visit to Jaffna,90 Eddy and Azariah held about a hundred meetings for Christians and Hindus. As many as 1,200 attended one of them, in which over a hundred Hindus and `many more' nominal Christians `publicly confessed Christ.'

They did not achieve such results in Jaffna immediately. An initial attempt to expose `Hinduism' for its `Pantheism, Polytheism, Idolatry, Caste and its incongruous Incarnations' in contrast to Christ provoked such opposition from the Hindu press and Hindu students that Azariah and Eddy moved from apologetics to more purely personal appeals for salvation. Their subsequent sermons focused on the themes of sin, conversion, consecration, service for others, and the evils of the caste system, and often provoked emotional responses from their audiences. At one college meeting, Eddy reported, `one prominent teacher rose and confessed his sin with tears, saying that he had never been converted, but that now, thank God, he was saved.'91

Azariah and Eddy claimed that a thousand conversions took place during their 1904 tour of 21 associations in South India, which involved 32 meetings in various schools, colleges, villages, and churches. A Harvard graduate who attended both the Northfield Conference and a 1903 South Indian YMCA Student Camp remarked on the striking similarity between the two meetings: the same general program (including Bible studies and evangelistic missionary appeals) ... the same mingled spirit of hard work and real fun ... the same ever deepening purpose as the conference drew to a close.'92 The spirit of revivalism seemed to be transcending international boundaries. This Christian revivalism was also mixed with a deepening sense of loyalty to India, as Azariah recalled after traveling to the Bombay area for a 1906 meeting:

Today we had a good meeting. They were having special meetings for the workers and they were all tender and broken-hearted. So God's word took hold of their hearts. Many wept. The meeting lasted from 8:00 to 12:35 a.m. Several wept and one rolled on the floor. Several women broke down as they confessed their indifference to the needs of India. There has been great rejoicing on account of God's work in this morning meeting.93

Azariah helped to `indigenize' the YMCA by adjusting its activities to the needs of smaller towns and villages where western influence was less pronounced. Several of Azariah's articles in The Young Men of India and speeches at YMCA conferences stressed the ways in which smaller associations of the YMCA differed from those in Madras and other urban cen- ters.94 Associations in Presidency cities were housed in expensive build ings and offered a full range of activities for a varied membership (European and Indian, Christian and non-Christian). Associations in the villages were led by local Christian catechists and tended to offer only prayer meetings and Bible studies to small groups composed almost exclusively of Indian Christians.

Azariah believed this spiritual work was central to the needs of the villages. His early village tours impressed on him an `appalling' indifference to spiritual matters and inordinate interest in temporal concerns among non- Christians.95 He was also disillusioned with the condition of many village YMCAs in Madurai and Tinnevelly Districts under those he considered to be mainly `nominal' Christians.96 Thus, Azariah tightened the rules governing active membership (requiring daily prayer and Bible study) and the foundation of village associations (requiring weekly meetings of the Bible and Prayer Union for at least a year before establishment).97

Azariah also worked to expand the activities of smaller associations to include all four areas of the YMCA ideal (spiritual, physical, intellectual, social). In district centers, he sought to widen the association's membership to include educated Hindus and Christians employed in schools and government. Hindu communities were not always pleased with the Christian emphasis in these smaller associations, and Azariah encountered resistance in trying to establish new YMCA rooms in the town of Tinnevelly during the period from 1898 to 1901. The District of Tinnevelly was wracked by communal violence during this period, much of which centered upon resistance to Shanar (Nadar) upward mobility.98 Despite Azariah's efforts to underplay his own Nadar background and to broaden the YMCA's membership to non-Nadars, his association may also have been perceived with some suspicion and resentment as yet another organizing forum for Nadar assertion.