India at the time Amy arrived (part 2 of 4)
The need of India
Hendrik Kraemer brought in 1938 the question of the Christian message to the non-Christian world in force at the Tambaram (India) meeting of the International Missionary Council.611 His book makes a stand against syncretistic thinking. The Gospel stands for something, which God has done in Christ Jesus for the salvation of man. He is unique, the Incarnation is final and the Christian claim is to absolute truth. It is this Gospel, the good news of God in Christ, that we preach.612 India needed it and seeing all the superstition, Amy said, ‘We live in the heart of old India – it is a dark Old India, very sinful, very needy, needing God.’613 Western missionaries have often been accused of patronising un-evangelised peoples, but one of the most striking characteristics of Amy’s writing is her transparent affection for and understanding of the Hindu people. She tells many stories of individuals and caste groups that bring their personalities to life. Once she said, ‘I love the old native customs. I cannot bear the foreignising element so common in much mission work in India.’614 Amy had a broad knowledge of the people she worked among and their religion. ‘The Indian is quick to detect a sham, and equally quick to recognize holiness’, or ‘the Indian deep down is loving’. She could also trace the whole system of this religion back to the old Babylonian Mysteries.615
610. In M.B. Fuller, The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood (Edinburgh: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1900), 64.
611. H. Kraemer, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (6th edn., Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1963).
612. Cf. The Indian Journal of Theology 6(3) (July–September 1957): 74–79.
613. From the Fight, 4.
614. In Elliot, A Chance to Die, 126.
615. Overweights of Joy, 154, 158.
There are many who talk of the beauty of Hinduism. But from outside the untold cruelties that abound in Hinduism are not seen. ‘The tyranny of caste leads to evils which are beyond words to tell.’616 Hindu philosophy: ‘fog-wreaths of doubt, in blinding eddies drifted, that is what it really is’:
There is, over and above the natural apathy common to all, an immense barrier of accumulated merit gained by pilgrimages, austerities, and religious observances, and the soul is perfectly satisfied, and has no desire whatever after God.
Thomas Walker, Amy’s colleague and language teacher, confirmed this: ‘It is true, absolutely true, that indifference to the glad tidings of the Gospel is the order of the day among the multitude of non- Christians who surround us here.’617 In her eyes the ‘fashionable Christianity in India is a strange saddening thing’.618
Amy experienced when talking with Hindus, that adults as well as the children were soaked in the Hindu doctrines. Children who live ‘in a land where childhood ends almost as soon it begins’.619 ‘The arrogance of centuries was stamped upon their little faces.’620 Since caste imposed barriers against commensality, Christians regarded it to be the greatest obstacle to the progress of the Gospel.
From the mid-1950s of the 20th century onwards, some years after Amy’s death, we see few genuine conversions from Hinduism to Christianity.621 Since India became independent in 1947, there has been a great open mind of inquiry among the multitudes in India. The Christian belief, they see, is not just the religion of imperial rulers; they see that Jesus is a Saviour for all. However, the major part of the Indian Church is made up of merely nominal Christians. Liberal theology has taken away the sense of authority, and many who profess to be Christian ‘pastors and people alike are unconverted’.622 The Gospel is not mere information; it is an offer of salvation. This it is what India needs. The abovementioned words of Lilavati Singh have to be completed with what she also said: ‘None but Jesus, none but Jesus, none, I say, but Jesus ever deserved this precious diadem, India; and Jesus shall have it.’623
The Gospel asks for a change of the heart and the belief that Christ is the one and only Saviour! A Christian cannot continue being involved in Hindu religious practices. The power of the Holy Spirit is at work in every nook and cranny of the Hindu world. The opposition towards Christianity is fierce. The Bible clearly shows that human nature is one vast strike against God. This big, massive ‘strike’ against God began and has gone on all through the generations. The disobedience against God continues
616. Thomas Walker in the preface to Overweights of Joy, VIII: ‘It is true, absolutely true, that here in Southern India, we are “skirting the abyss,” an abyss which is deep and foul beyond description, and yet is glorified, to Hindu eyes, by the sanctions of religion.’
617. In preface to Overweights of Joy, VII.
618. In a letter from Kotagiri, 31 May 1896 (PRONI D/461/1/1-D; D 4060/6/8).
619. The Continuation of a Story, 37.
620. Ploughed Under, 123.
621. See Union Quarterly Review 12(3) (1957).
622. Rev. Sobodh Sahu from India in his message to the missionary meeting at the Keswick Convention in 1962. In the same meeting was Mr Thyaharaj Ananda from Dohnavur. He was one of the first Hindu children to be cared for by Amy Carmichael. A man seeking to earn Amy’s favour kidnapped him. He stated that still there was the need for the Home at Dohnavur. ‘In one city alone, according to an official figure, there are 13 000 women making an immoral livelihood. Babies born to such women either disappear or are in grave moral danger’ (TKW [1962]: 155).
623. In Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade, 95.
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to this day. Sin, as the Bible states, is not a disease; it is revolt against the living God, pure anarchy. Hindus fear that Christianity will lead in the end to the rooting out of Indian culture, in this case Hindu culture. Amy emphasised from the beginning she was in India not to compromise on the absoluteness of the Christian revelation in which alone is salvation. So spiritual warfare and principalities are strong here. Hinduism has a grip on many of the people’s hearts, strangling out the Gospel before it has a chance to take root. To be honest, Amy encountered the culture with a certain respect and was always ready to talk with Brahmans and other scholars about their religion. Near the end of her life she wrote: ‘For though the gods of the heathen are nothing yet we should not be rude to anything another respects’.624 She knew what was written in their old books, for instance, the Ramayana.625 In her writings we cannot trace if she followed the deliberations and the outcome of the 1938 Tambaram meeting of the International Missionary Council.
The few years in Japan had given her deep insight into actual mission work. She recalls a time when she was distributing little books, and as they walked, they sang ‘a somewhat revised version of “Bringing in the Sheaves” as “Bringing Japanese, Bringing Japanese, Yes, we’ll come rejoicing. Bringing in the sheaves”’. Amy was honest and knew that her Japanese colleagues had to do the work, because of the language, but ‘one could help to sing them through the fight’. And the reactions of the people? ‘How dull seemed each unresponsive face!’ We feel our calling is to hold up the Christ of God, that his very purity in contrast may condemn, and that he may convict men of their need of him.
At the time Amy arrived in India, missionaries were usually kept away from the large population centres. Mostly they worked in the rural areas and often among ‘the tribal’. In India, all over the country, there was a great contingent of British men and women working in several secular services, but generally the missionaries were isolated from the mainstream of British society – which had little contact with or sympathy for their work.626 As a reason, Barr mentions that missionaries usually didn’t smoke, drink, dance or hunt, they travelled second or even third class in the trains, they did not come from much of a background and their efforts to convert Indians to Christianity were considered ‘a thorough waste of time’ by the secular majority. As one missionary remarked after her arrival in Bengal, ‘I soon discovered that we were regarded as the lowest form of animal life in the district.’627 Most missionaries managed successfully to ignore their lack of status; often they lived in close-knit communities of like-minded people and through intense mail contact knew their families and could count on their support. Also, most of them came from a ‘warm’ church background, had been active in Sunday school work, counted on the prayer support of those they had left behind, or had been active in student Christian movements and married missionaries or clerics – if they married at all.628
Lord Lawrence, Viceroy of India, testifies: ‘Notwithstanding all that the English people have done to benefit that country, the missionaries have done more than all other agencies combined.’629
624. Amma’s Book, 49.
625. Overweights of Joy, 7.
626. Cf. Barr, The Dust in the Balance, 90.
627. Barr, The Dust in the Balance, 90.
628. About mission work of women in the 19th century, see Latourette, A History of Christianity (New York, NY: Harper Collins 1975 [1953]), 407; Griffiths, Not Less than Everything, 10; Tucker & Liefeld, Daughters of the Church, 311; Kommers, “A flame of sacred love”.
629. In Wells, Stewart of Lovedale, 253.
The women who went as missionaries in the 19th century exercised an authority on missions that few women of our era can match. The characterisation of the ‘Victorian lady missionary’ as ‘resourceful, self-sacrificing, dedicated, and wilful’,630 meant that the influence and impact of their work was felt for decades in the countries where they served and within the whole world of missions. We cannot deny that the Christian missionaries, men and women, have been the real pioneers of civilisation in India.631 Did not the frontier advance on the stepping stones of missionary graves? Amy Carmichael was prepared by God to act as the advocate in India for those who suffered most and could not defend themselves against the evils hidden in the religious system.
630. Kent, Converting Women, 103.
631. Cf. this remark concerning Africa: ‘Civilisation without Christianity only teaches the black man to add the white man’s vices to his own.’ ‘Darkest Africa’, says Captain R.N. Hore, of Tanganyika [Tanzania], ‘is where the white man has longest been.’
We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.
2 Corinthians 4:10 (NIV).
I cannot forget the flints on my own path and the thorns.
But looking back, I know I would not have chosen any other if I could have known when first I began to walk in it what it would mean of His companionship, and also of the power to enter into the grief of others. It was all
worthwhile, ten thousand times worthwhile.
Candles of the Dark, 98.
A voice crying in the wilderness. Well, it is something to be
allowed to be a voice. Thomas Walker in Walker of Tinnevelly, 182.
Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbour’s
garden. A Hindu saying.
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Itinerating work
Bangalore experiences
Amy’s involvement in Christian mission predominantly took place in India, although her missionary work and training began at home. Unlike the recommendations of mission organisations today, Amy did not undergo an organised training regime prior being led further afield. Nevertheless, her exposure to and experience of working with a variety of different people within different contexts in the UK helped prepare her for the challenges that she would inevitably face in a completely different culture.
A friend632 had written to Amy in early 1895 that the climate in Bangalore was very healthy; in fact, it was delightful to live there, so if other places in the tropics were taboo for her, here in Bangalore she could stay very well. This proposal was discussed by the Keswick Mission Council and they gave full consent, so her appointed place in India was Bangalore where she was with some other CEZMS missionaries doing regular mission work from the mission station there. In particular, the CEZMS hospital was the place where she was asked to do evangelistic work. Eugene Stock, the CMS secretary, during his visit to Ceylon and India in 1913, noticed the devotion, ‘the noble and self-denying work of the ladies of the Zenana Societies’. Although not specifically mentioning Amy, he could not find words to ‘honour them sufficiently’.633 In the Keswick mission report of 05 August 1896 we read:
Miss Wilson-Carmichael, being unable to resume work in Japan, has been sent to Bangalore. Accounts of her arrival, and impressions of work there have from time to time appeared in the Life of Faith. Constant prayer is asked that the many opportunities allowed her may result in blessing, not only to the heathen, but to native Christians also, and that health may be preserved in this new climate.634 Amy was not the first Irish missionary who became a legend in south India. Nearly 70 years before she arrived in India another missionary from Belfast, Robert Caldwell (1814–1891), an Anglican, had
632. This friend was in charge of the CEZ Hospital in Bangalore. Later married to Rev. E.S. Carr (CMS) of Palamcottah.
633. Stock, My Recollections, 358–359.
634. In KCMMB, misson report, 05 August 1896.
How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘Itinerating work’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 169–214, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.09 arrived in Madras in 1838, and worked as a pioneer for higher education, in the Tinnevelly district for half a century. In 1883, the Bishop Caldwell College opened its doors in Tuticorin.635
Amy arrived in Bangalore unwell. After her arrival in India she contracted dengue fever, also known as ‘breakbone fever’; she felt ‘low and grovely, not in the least a soldier’. With good care from British medical personnel she recovered. Her work in the hospital would be, as she said herself to be its ‘prophet’, which meant to be the hospital evangelist. She loved the work and the people she had to work with, especially with Clare, the doctor in the hospital. Once settled in Bangalore she felt the absence of her family, especially her father. The first letter from Bangalore to her mother and other family members runs:
Here I am – and the first book I opened after I arrived was Dr Whitla’s, Dictionary of Treatment, – this man was the family doctor during the years the Carmichaels lived in Belfast. Can you imagine how it carried me back to the old house with all its many, many memories. How good he was to us. I shall never care for any doctor as for him. Do you remember how he used to carry Ethel in his arms from one room to another? And how he watched over Walter and pulled him through many a touch-and-go. But he is connected with other times, closer still in our hearts – Well – Like. I stopped, and I don’t know what I was going to say so must leave it and go on. Wilkinson questions whether Amy was writing here about her father when she was interrupted. She finally finished her sentence with, ‘Oh let us one and all “fight under Christ’s banner” with heart and soul until He comes – as father put it ten years and nine months ago’.636
By correspondence, she knew what happened in China at that time. Missionaries, also from the CIM, were threatened, driven away, even murdered. In her Bible we find a reference when she read Jesus’s words in Luke 12:4, ‘be not afraid of them that kill the body’, to the killing of missionaries during the Boxer rebellion. As often happens with inexperienced missionaries, they tend to form their opinions within a few days, and are very vulnerable to express themselves in hasty generalisations. Amy fell into the same trap. She wrote home that the ‘Indians were a series of contradictions’:
[T ]hey are loving and lovable, cruel and needing all-grace-to-love, bright and dull, eager and lazy to a degree perfectly incomprehensible at home. They are trustworthy and utterly the opposite, courteous and quite barbarous. […] This is the average native character on the surface. Underneath there is much, much more, but one cannot get at it until one can speak and I am far off that yet.637
635. See about Caldwell: Y. Vincent Kumaradoss, Robert Caldwell: A Scholar – Missionary in Colonial South India (Delhi: ISPCK, 2008).
636. In Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 23. I disagree with Sarah Curtis’s suggestion that in Amy’s behaviour, her way of life in India and the way she expressed herself is ‘based on metaphor’ or remaining in a state of ‘fixation that refuses meaning’, based on ‘metomyny’. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept. The words ‘metonymy’ and ‘metonym’ come from the Greek: μετωνυμία, metōnymía, ‘a change of name’, from μετά, metá, ‘after, beyond’ and -ωνυμία, -ōnymía, a suffix used to name figures of speech, from ὄνῠμα, ónyma or ὄνομα, ónoma, ‘name’. Curtis writes: ‘In Carmichael’s case, a “fixation that refuses meaning” can be seen as a state that she was prone to and which was exacerbated by her father’s death in preventing her from obtaining satisfaction. It could be argued that her life was lived in a frustrating and exhaustive way because she was caught up in the process of mourning him without ceasing.’ Curtis examines Amy as a woman, captivated in Victorian ideas about being a woman and sexuality, using Freudian terminology. Under this magnifying glass of psychoanalysis, the outcome of having been a ‘hysterical character’ can be expected. In Amy Carmichael’s Aesthetic Lecagy and Lacan’s Other Jouissance (Melbourne, Australia: Lacan Circle of Melbourne, n.d.), 15 and 19, Curtis uses the theory of Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), a French psychoanalyst with his theory of ‘Back to Freud’. In 1997, A. Sokal and J. Bricmont, in Intellectual Deceit, write that behind a complicated jargon often meaningless and wrong ideas are hidden. (Cf. Wikipedia, Jacques Lacan).
637. In Elliot, A Chance to Die, 89.
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We see that she was aware of her own limitations, and later on, she learnt what she yet did not know. Once deeply involved in their daily life and thoughts we see that she could speak with respect and treat the Indian people with dignity. There were days for her that were difficult, but had not God said to her ‘Go ye’? And in her Bible she wrote next to Psalm 56:11 and 12: ‘Thy vows are upon me, O God. What can men do unto me?’638
The church in Bangalore was very active but Amy noticed that there were few changed lives and nobody seemed to bother about that. Reading Romans 10:16, ‘But they have not all obeyed the Gospel’. For Isaiah said: ‘Lord who has believed our report?’, she wrote in the margin of that verse:
How real here today in its measure here in Bangalore. Seven years Zenana visiting. No souls! And whatever has been true prayer and love! Lord give it to me to Expect great things to Thy glory. Lord give it to me to know deeper into the Fellowship of Thy sufferings.639 She detested the meetings with the other missionary women drinking their tea and gossiping, but showing little concern for the eternal souls of those who were trusted in their care. She, who longed to talk with people about Jesus and pray with them, wondered why she met so much apathy among missionaries. She was shocked by their conduct, and especially by their ‘stretching’ and adjusting of the truth. They did not want to tell stories, which might discourage their supporters. Here Amy resolved, whenever she might write something, to tell the truth and the truth only.640 She was always clear in her motives and views about mission work, whether in Japan, here in Bangalore, or later on during her itinerary work and in Dohnavur. Any half-heartedness, any coldness and nominalism could expect her reaction; she detested any compromise in the life of holiness. The clinging to the external form of religious adherence, either is without or does not match internal conviction. She often heard colleagues say: ‘We have had such a nice missionary meeting’. But people had no idea what these words meant to her:
‘Such a nice meeting’, to hear of sin unchecked, need unmet, woes uncomforted, death unlighted. Perhaps the tea and cake which (possibly by way of benediction) closed this little entertainment, the curio- examining, interrogation showering, the interchange of sentiment regarding the heathen in general and their representative now on view, in particular, were exceedingly ‘nice’. But it is puzzling. […] Who will listen to Jesus when He said: ‘Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it’. Will you? Many are glad with a soulless gladness. A scentless camellia flower. […] One can see its pretty round of sociabilities; afternoon teas, tennis parties, concerts, and lectures; kindly little interests in beings, doings, and dressings. Permeated pleasantly, doubtless with the odour of sanctity, for we go to church, teach in the Sunday –school, visit a district, take a great interest in missions. […] Dear one, it is for you, to you the master speaks, forgive me for pressing it so. Will you not face these things with Him now? What will you wish you had done, when the King comes?641 For three weeks Amy stayed in Madras, where the CMS secretary Mr Arden asked her to stay with his daughters. There, Mary and Maud Arden challenged her about her love for Jesus Christ. First Amy felt attacked by them and in her eyes they:
[W ]ere like butterflies, pretty and dressy and I had been shy of them both. I had no idea they cared for the things of Christ and had thought I should wait until I knew them better before speaking of these things.
638. See in the margin of Amy’s Bible (1895) of Psalm 56:11–12.
639. In Amy’s Bible (1895).
640. Cf. here too J.E. Williamson, Amy Carmichael. A Life Well Placed (Milton Keynes: Authentic Media Ltd, 2014), 15–16.
641. From Sunrise Land, 174. Here Amy quotes Ruskin.
She could help them. ‘As pretty butterflies they were really hungry lambs.’642 Together with these girls, she read the Song of Songs, the book the D.O.M used to read every Sunday evening. Even Mr Buxton loved it ‘and I had learned to love it’.643 Here Amy learned that to tell the truth you have to be straightforward and there is no need ‘to invent a happy ending’ in a story:
And that night I resolved that if I ever had to write a story I would not change one word to please anybody. God helping me, I would be very careful about truth.
Of the two girls, Mary, died young, and Maud, her younger sister, became one of the first helpers for Amy in Dohnavur:
Maud, the younger sister, became one of the dearest of the many dear friends who gathered round this work in its earliest days and prayed for you. ‘Give me the naughtiest ones’, she used to say; and I gave her the naughtiest. They are not naughty now but valiant in love and service. One of the last joys on earth was hearing about them. A little while ago she too passed on. What a lovely company is There – all loving, all beloved.644 Here among so many friends Amy still felt alone. For missionaries at that time, especially for single women, it was uncommon to form interracial friendships. At larger mission stations, the missionaries were expected to live and to entertain in a more colonial style. In the latter part of the 19th century, Western women missionaries, showed ‘insolence and arrogance’.
In the last two decades of that century many ‘daughters of a ruling race’ began to arrive in India, eager to take education to women, many of them from the CEZMS, and they often had difficulties in adjusting in their expected roles.645 Amy, one of them, did not feel at home in the situation in which she now was. She brought into question the accepted practices of most missionaries of her day. She wanted to meet the other people, to make friends with them to have possibilities for deeper contact in order to serve more usefully for the Lord. One day she fell on her knees in despair, and a verse that she had learned long before floated into her memory: ‘He that trusteth in Me, shall never be desolate’; she found that to be true throughout her long ministry in India. In October 1896 she wrote in the margin of Job 1:10: ‘Want of strength to do all one longs to do. Wishes of others – when they cross mine.’646
‘The beautiful air of Bangalore’, with its many English people, ‘delightful amenities’, as they were called, and everything that made red-hot evangelism seem a thousand miles away, was alien to her spirit. Amy wondered why there were no converts among Muslims of Bangalore. Where was the missionary zeal to reach the group who was completely not in focus with the missionaries? Amy began to feel ‘like a fish out of the water, and such a fish is a discouraged creature’. She disagreed with the mission that in the language school non-Christians as teachers were contracted and also saw that Muslim teachers were employed in the mission schools. She read in Ezra 3, where the builders refused to have builders for the temple who were not Jewish. Could a Muslim or a Hindu build the Church of God?
642. Amma’s Book, 42–43.
643. Amma’s Book, 43.
644. Amma’s Book, 43.
645. Cf. Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands, 77–78.
646. In Amy’s Bible (1895).
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She expresses her grief in sharp words:
Compare our answers as missionaries in India. We are not so narrow minded as these builders of the Lord. We do not even wait until they are asked by us, we bribe them to come. […] Then we wonder the wall not yet built. Or we pretend we do not wonder, or we so lose expectation, that we do not wonder at all.647 At that time she got a letter from some Keswick friends who wrote, ‘Do not cool, look to Him to keep you burning and shining’.648 She also had a lot of fun in Bangalore, and it was here that they called her ‘Madcap’.
When she was in Kotagiri, a popular hill station about 20 miles south-east of Ooty, she made some excursions riding on her pony, Laddie. She knew how to do it: while in Millisle as a young girl, she had ridden her pony Scamp on the beach. The other missionaries had been very considerate to the new missionary, but Amy was not altogether happy there. One of the group was:
[U ]nfair and curiously dominating in certain ways and words. One day I felt the ‘I’ in me rising hotly, and quite clearly – so clearly that I could show you the place on the floor of the room where I was standing when I heard it – the word came, ‘See in it a chance to die’. To this day that word is life and release to me, and it has been to many others. See in this which seems to stir up all you most wished were not stirred up – see in it a chance to die to self in every form. Accept it as just that – a chance to die.649 Here she learned a basic principle, which is if education is to be truly Christian, a principle she also followed later in Dohnavur when she had to choose fellow workers. ‘Would an Indian, working for the church, do the work for the Lord without any payment?’ was the question in one of the meetings. Nobody gave an answer, and this shocked Amy, as she noticed that people wanted to do the work only when they were paid for it and this did not even bother the other missionaries:
But I felt as if a thunderbolt had fallen in the midst of that pleasant company. It wasn’t that I thought the question referred to those who could not work unless their expenses were paid. To have one’s expenses paid if one had no money of one’s own is apostolic. No, it was not that; it was that no one in that room knew any one (whether they had pay or not) were working purely for love of their Lord, who loved Him enough to work for love’s sake only.650 For love’s sake she wanted to work among India’s people and tell them the saving Gospel. In February 1896 she prayed: ‘Lord make me utterly hard on myself and utterly tender to others’.651
She started to learn Urdu, but because no one in the hospital staff could speak Tamil, it was decided that she should begin to learn that instead – in order to be the hospital evangelist. In Japan, it had been very hard for her to master the Japanese language and during her short stay in Ceylon she had started with Singhalese. Again the change must not have been easy for her but the Tamil study was taken up seriously, and little by little she could talk a bit; she noticed they understood what she said, but her main problem was to understand them. Perhaps she knew the remark of the missionary and linguist Henry Martin, who, nearly 100 years earlier than she did, had arrived in India and had seen that language study ‘was the rock on which
647. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Ezra 3:3.
648. Amma’s Book, 45.
649. Amma’s Book, 45.
650. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 87.
651. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Romans 14:11. In the margin of Romans 16:21 she wrote ‘198.000.000 are left unreached’. She too refers to the waste of time and of ‘overlapping of effort on effort’. missionaries had split, that they had attempted to write and preach, before they knew the language’. She, however, took it seriously, for to reach the hearts of the people they needed to be addressed in their own language. When she read Hebrews 11:30, ‘By faith the walls of Jericho fell down’, she wrote in the margin ‘My language text, 1896’.652 One day the language ‘walls’ would fall, she believed. It was hard for her to master the Tamil language and we read her prayer to learn the language well in the following poem:
Father, give the Tamil language
Hour by hour to me,
As thou givest let me use it
All for Thee.
Quicken courage, faith and patience,
Help me, Lord, today,
Let me study to Thy glory,
In Thy way.
Let the brightness of Thy presence
Make me glad and strong;
Let me learn the language singing,
Be my song.653
In Amy’s time 55 million people spoke Tamil, and this language is one of India’s two languages of antiquity:
One of the distinguishing features of Tamil is that it has three different forms of the sound ‘I’. In fact the correct pronunciation of ‘Tamil’ sounds like ‘Tamizh’ for which there is no phonetic equivalent in most other languages.654 The first known book in the Tamil language using the Roman script was a Tamil catechism, printed in Lisbon in 1550.
Tamil, this old, rich language seemed for her to be an ocean in which she was not yet so much as ankle deep. She continued her language study in Kotagiri and then in Ooty. In a letter from Kotagiri, written 31 May 1896, she gives her reasons for studying the Tamil language: because ‘I can understand and be able to bring eternal things so very near to them’.655
Here in Ooty she first met Thomas Walker. She had just heard of him and when she went to a convention where he had to speak, she took her Tamil grammar book with her, expecting a dull address, but the book remained unopened. This man would become her language teacher, a trustful friend, her guide and adviser, until his death in August 1912. He was also the cause that the Tinnevelly District was to be her home until she was called into glory in 1951. In Ooty Amy found a lifelong friend in Mrs Hopwood, a missionary to the Muslims herself, who had a great house called ‘Farley’:
A zealous evangelical lady of some wealth who maintained a house named ‘Farley’ to accommodate missionaries of furlough. […] We know little of her own family circumstances, but she spoke sometimes of travelling about Europe with her mother, and attending musical festivals. Music was her only ‘worldly interest’; otherwise she
652. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Hebrews 11:30.
653. Unpublished poem of Amy Carmichael in a typed version of Wings. In the author’s library.
654. In A. Frame, I. Hyder & S. Bray, ed., The Dohnavur Fellowship (in the DF office), 6.
655. In PRONI D/4061/1/1-D and D 4060/6/8), 7.
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considered all forms of entertainment as belonging to the Devil’s domain. Hymn-singing was a permissible indulgence of her taste for music.656 The young Miss Hopwood, a missionary to the Muslims, took Amy to visit the Todas, an aboriginal tribe who lived in the Nilgiri hills in ‘a collection of beehives’ or in ‘nestlings in the hollows at the edge of the great jungles’.657
She had also hoped to find a Tamil teacher in Bangalore, but good Tamil scholars were difficult to find; in God’s providence she met one who could teach her. This was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with one of the most prominent CMS missionaries and a Tamil scholar called Thomas Walker. She left Bangalore on 30 November 1896,658 going to the south to start itinerating work.659 She really did not like the scenes of ‘fashionable Christianity’, but enjoyed the more unconventional Keswick atmosphere and to sing the Keswick hymns. She liked ‘real soldier missionaries’, people like Thomas G. Ragland, Henry Martin, David Brainerd and Thomas Walker. Of her Bangalore time, Amy wrote, ‘There were burning hours, and dark hours, and often difficult hours; but there was always, or nearly always, a bird singing in my heart.’660 Already in 1891 Thomas Walker had drawn up a practical scheme for itinerating work, ‘for we are just on the eve of going into the district’.661 Amy eventually followed him to the south. Afterwards it became clear to her, that this was ‘the appointed service’ for her.662 She went around with a band of women who joined the mission enterprise of Rev. and Mrs Walker. During the time they itinerated with their preaching bands through Travancore in the south of India, they found out that they were not the first ones to bring the Gospel to the people in this part of the country.