The YMCA as a Locus for International and Interracial Relations
The YMCA as a Locus for International and Interracial Relations
As one of the few institutions in India that cut across international as well as national and subnational boundaries, the YMCA became an arena for expressing international and interracial disagreements and occasionally for effecting rapprochements. Many British YMCA leaders in India did not like the new methods and `enthusiastic, evangelistic, missionaryminded type of leader' exemplified by Americans like Eddy. Concerned to protect their relations with missionary societies in colonial possessions, many more reserved Britons preferred to hold their American counterparts at arm's length.102 The British hoped to reduce the freedom of the North American International Committee and its influence over the YMCA's worldwide activities by placing the American committee under the control of the relatively weak Central International Committee.
Although the British were ultimately unable to achieve this reorganization, this question of central oversight remained a source of tension in the YMCA for half a century.103 The YMCA in India was perhaps less aware of this conflict than the YMCAs in England and America. McConaughy, for instance, received a warm welcome and support from British missionaries and pastors in Madras, and worked amicably throughout his career with British YMCA secretaries.104 What had been a difficult conflict between Christians in the West was mollified greatly when transplanted into the Indian context. A similar relaxation of persistent western interdenominational tensions in the Indian setting was to become an important factor in the successful unification of episcopal and nonepiscopal Protestant churches in South India several decades later. Azariah does not appear to have felt the effects of the American-British YMCA conflict, except perhaps at the end of his YMCA career when the American leadership protested his entrance into Anglican orders.
The experience of working with young western laymen in the YMCA offered Azariah the opportunity for friendships that, by his own admission in his 1910 speech to the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, were sadly lacking between Indians and foreigners in the more established churches and missionary societies.105 The YMCA's policy of promoting In dians to leadership positions on terms of equality with Westerners created an atmosphere of goodwill between Indians and Westerners - particularly Americans - which was highly unusual for the period.'06
Eddy's friendship with Azariah also taught him much about the challenges and rewards of deep interracial friendships. Eddy met Azariah in Calcutta in 1896 and recounted later, for fifteen years he was my best friend, Indian or foreign.'107 Indeed, Eddy wrote in 1949 that Azariah was ,the best friend I ever had,' and in 1955 that Azariah was the greatest man whose life I was ever privileged to share.'108 Eddy's recollections of his friendship with Azariah indicate the extent to which it was exceptional for the time:
Extant reports of their preaching tours evoke a remarkably compatible and peaceful sense of common purpose that developed between the two young men of vastly different cultures. Eddy wrote during their 1898 tour of `dark Cochin':
At midnight our boat was waiting for the turn of the tide. It was a long rakish craft, fitted with a rude lateen-sail, made of thatch. In the stern was a little cabin, just big enough for three of us [Eddy, Azariah, and McConaughyl to sleep abreast.... Soon we were out on the backwater; the moon was rising over the palms on the shore.... We were slipping down with the tide towards Travancore, and the Equator. The low monotony of the boatmen's song was the last thing we heard as we fell asleep:
Azariah was genuinely touched by Eddy's gestures of friendship, writing to his wife Anbu in 1899: `Mr. Eddy subscribes (his) letter thus: "Your affectionate brother in Christ G. S. Eddy." How loving in tone is the letter ... we have fresh cause for thanksgiving this year!'111 In a 1909 letter to John Mott, Azariah wrote:
Azariah's experience of equality and close friendships across racial barriers in the YMCA prepared the way for his later comfortable relationships not only with western missionaries and clerics but also with outcaste Malas and Madigas of Telugu country. From an early age, Azariah equated racist attitudes with caste prejudice and regarded Christian love as the best solution to both evils. In 1896 he enjoined colleagues in the YMCA to practice this law of love with greater seriousness:
Azariah's vision for healing interracial and intercaste tensions - both to him different forms of the same fundamental hatred - was essentially evangelistic: to spread the `law of love and kindness' preached byje- sus but having no counterpart in India.' Racial sin did not emanate only from the West; India was also prone to it and, worse, lacked the Christian resources for healing it. It is telling that, although Azariah clearly understood the hurt feelings of the Indians he describes, he never described himself as a victim but rather as one equally capable of racial hatred. Nor did he idealize Indian practices, but rather he likened caste prejudices to the very western racialist prejudices he abhorred.
The solution to both interracial and intercaste conflicts was not, he suggested, to worsen them through self-righteous condemnation, but rather to solve them through self-examination, confession, and, ultimately, conversion. To this end, he began to turn his attention increasingly to the spiritual state of India and to the missionary responsibility of his fellow Indian Christians.
'hat was the proper Christian approach to spreading the faith when it was seen by growing ranks of Indian nationalists as subordinate to western political and economic interests? One approach was to discard Christianity or subordinate it to nationalism; another was to accept Christianity as a subordinate category of imperial control. Azariah had an altogether different perspective which involved both indigenizing Christianity within the vast Indian subcontinent, and transcending both in India and the world the divisions that blunted the central Christian message and confused those still in need of receiving it.
Far from rejecting the faith associated with his western rulers, Azariah actively recruited Indians to serve as Christian missionaries in India. He grew increasingly distressed by the lack of missionary zeal among Indian Christians during his YMCA years, and began to challenge his countrymen ever more insistently to evangelize their own land. Using census materials from 1891 and 1901 to demonstrate how many areas of India remained unevangelized, Azariah published articlesi and a book imploring Indian Christians to take missions more seriously.2 He wrote in 1904:
In his calls for Indian self-evangelization, Azariah was clearly influenced by the national consciousness that was growing in the country as a whole. He used the language of patriotism, nobility, and sacrifice familiar to young Indian nationalists of the period, mixed in with traditional missionary rhetoric about `heathen darkness.'
The nationalist critique of western missions has been so successful that many Indian Christians still seek to legitimize their experience as a subcontinental minority by exaggerating the nationalist credentials of their forebears. Yet, Azariah's campaign to replace European with indigenous missionaries was inspired more by evangelical than by nationalist zeal. This approach may have come as an unpleasant surprise to some Indian Christian nationalists. But it was the missionary enthusiasm of the Student Volunteer Movement and of evangelical missionaries such as Thomas Walker of Tinnevelly that inspired Azariah and most other Indian Christians of his generation to believe that they were themselves capable of, and responsible for, building a new India through Christian evangelism rather than through nationalist politics.
To be sure, the indigenous missionary movement was influenced by growing nationalism, and the Christian missionary enterprise itself helped fuel growing self-awareness of caste, ethnic, regional, and even national identities among Indian converts. Christian teaching contributed to the development of ethnic self-assertion among Tamil Christians; and this, in turn, contributed indirectly to the rise of other forms of regional and national consciousness in the rural South.
Links between Christianity and rising indigenous self-awareness among other groups have been observed in Africa where, primarily through the impact of vernacular translations of Scripture, Christian missionaries have `uncapped the springs of indigenization.' By stimulating cultural self understanding, the missionaries acted as agents of indigenous reconstruction rather than arms of imperial combat.4 In India Christian missionaries helped to stimulate the Bengali and Tamil renaissances via their historical, ethnographic, and linguistic work. The renaissance of Tamil language and literature probably began with the publication in 1856 of Irish-born missionary Robert Caldwell's A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, and the first Tamil novel was written by Indian Christian convert Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai (1826-89).
In both the African and Indian cases, the stated aim of the Protestant missionaries (to convert the natives) was in the short run less historically important than the inescapable cultural consequences of their work, and particularly their translations of the Bible and recording of other vernacular literature.6 Foreigners such as Caldwell, Pope, Mott, and Eddy stirred up awareness of ethnic and national identity among Indian Christians and other Indians who did not necessarily adopt their faith. The marginalization of Christian influence in much of India during the last decades of the Raj occurred at least in part because of the resourcefulness with which Indian society responded to the Christian challenge by revitalizing its own rival traditions and identity.
The young Azariah got his first real sense of what was meant by the Indian nation as a whole from his participation in YMCA and SVM conferences. As Mott wrote after his 1901-2 tour of India, The Indian Empire reminded me vividly of a continent rather than a nation.... In a field so vast ... the only way I could hope to touch the entire movement among the young men was through conventions.'? As a result of Mott's initiative, attendance at major national conferences was a regular feature of Azariah's YMCA career. He participated in four such gatherings in December 1901 alone.8
Such meetings helped Azariah and his young Indian Christian colleagues to achieve a sense of identity and unity as a pan-Indian, interdenominational and multi-caste community. John Mott's exhortations to assume responsibility for the evangelization of their nation helped to galvanize them into a national movement. As Mott wrote about the purpose of his 1901-2 tour: The problem in India and Ceylon to which I devoted more attention than to any other one thing was that of getting more of the strong Christian students to dedicate their lives to the evangelization of their own countrymen.'9 Mott, the foreigner, seems to have been at least partly responsible for persuading Azariah and his contemporaries that missionary work was itself an inviting field for national self-expression.
Azariah's inspiration for Indian missions also came directly from his daily studies of Scripture and from western Christian literature. He collaborated with Eddy in 1899 on a biography of the great evangelical preacher, Charles G. Finney (1792-1875), who emphasized dramatic personal confessions of belief and is often described as the `father of modern revivalism.' Azariah also translated portions of Finney's Lectures on Revivals (1835) into Tamil, and produced with Eddy several Tamil pamphlets on prayer, studies of Paul's Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians, and a brochure entitled `Divisions and Unity of the Body of Christ.' Azariah's early literary activity was almost entirely designed to make inspirational western Christian literature more accessible to Tamil Christians in order to excite the Indian church with missionary vision. As Azariah wrote to John Mott in 1906:
Azariah requested permission to translate portions of Mott's book The Pastor and Modern Missions into the Indian vernaculars, and remained throughout his life committed to including western Christian literature in the vernacular corpus of literature he was building for the Indian church.
Azariah envisaged the YMCA playing an evangelistic role in India similar to that of the Student Volunteer Movement in the West whose watchword he repeated frequently, seeking `to put before the Christian students the duty of the evangelization of India ... the calling out from the ranks of the young men volunteers who will pledge to devote their lives to carry the Gospel to the unevangelized regions of their country.'ll This vision eventually prompted Azariah to leave the YMCA and to become a missionary with an indigenous missionary society he helped to establish.
Throughout, Azariah saw his faith as a form of patriotism, conceiving of India's evangelization as an activity of surpassing value for his homeland. Contrary to Hindu nationalist charges that Christian missionary work in India was unpatriotic, Azariah argued that conversion to Christianity promised national as well as individual salvation. Although close associations with western missionaries often led outsiders to believe that Indian Christians were denationalized dependents of imperialism, the missionary enterprise was itself becoming an increasingly internal, Indian matter.