India at the time Amy arrived (part 4 of 4)
A cry from the Zenanas, ‘No Without’703
The ‘murmur of the world’ outside had never reached her. Her range of vision, mental as well as physical, bound only absolutely by the wall that surrounded her house. It is true that the call that wakens often comes from within, but oftener surely it comes from without. This woman’s world knew no without, and much of the meaning of the within was hidden for her. We do not realize until we think about it, how much we owe to the largeness of our environment.704 In these striking words, Amy, in few sentences, gives us a description of the position of women in India as she saw them. The women she met in south India knew almost nothing of their own religion, nor even thought about it:
A South Indian wife and mother rarely feels her need of God. […] We pleaded with her; but no. ‘My heart is stone when you talk of your God; talk as far as you may, not an atom moves within me’.705 In traditional India, among the high and middle castes, the entire training of a girl was meant to make her a good daughter-in-law and wife, in that order. She had to master domestic work including cooking and she was trained to obey her mother-in-law, who was, in many ways, especially in the first few years of her married life, far more important than her husband was. A daughter-in-law had to bear children, in particular sons, to continue her husband’s lineage. If she failed to do this, she was liable to be set aside for another wife.706 Amy went to India in 1895 as a CEZMS missionary. This Anglican women’s auxiliary emerged since its beginning in 1880 as Britain’s largest and best-funded female missionary society.707 This society tried to elevate the women’s situation, many of whom lived in seclusion. Most missionaries at that time were men and purdah restrictions forbade them to visit the women. Male missionary doctors were also forbidden from attending female patients suffering various gynaecological problems about which most of the doctors were woefully ignorant anyway. This left women in labour at the mercy of the local dai, usually an elderly woman with no medical training who relied on traditional lore passed down from her maternal forebears.708
702. Cf. Ploughed Under, 40–41.
703. Overweights of Joy, 11.
704. Overweights of Joy, 11.
705. From the Fight, 33.
706. Cf. the discussion about the position of women in India after independence in I. Kendra, ed., Women in India and in the Church (India: Indore, 1978).
707. For information on the birth of the CEZMS and its development, see Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands, 93–110.
708. In 1885 Lady Dufferin opened in Delhi the first hospital run by women for women. It started as a medical dispensary in 1876 on the Chandri Road in the very heart of Old Delhi and later on was known as St Stephen’s Hospital. See Barr, The Dust in the Balance, 87–90.
The missionary meeting at the 1930 Keswick Convention welcomed Mrs Sircar, who spoke of the great need of India, which, she said, ‘is so great’. Caste was according to her the great curse of that land. People were living and dying in darkness. ‘I stand here from the east to plead with you to come over and help us.’ Still the women in India at that time had no privileges; many lived their whole life in zenanas.709 By an old law in some parts of the country ‘a family was allowed only one daughter to a family (any others must be killed)’. This system had sometimes drained a clan of women, so that clan members sometimes were forced to have their sons marry women outside the clan.710
An Indian woman, according to the earliest arguments in favour of sending women missionaries to the mission field, was oppressed and degraded. She was:
[S ]hrouded in darkness […] cut off from all sweet endearments of family intercourse, put down from her proper position as the friend, the councillor, the comforter of man, to a situation the most abject and humiliating.711 At the time, Amy came to India very young girls were often married to older men. In Hindu families, it was the duty, under the pain of sin, according to the laws, to marry a daughter before her menses. Most of the girls were married before the age of 5. In 1881, in spite of violent street protests in Calcutta the Indian government passed the Age of Consent Act under which cohabitation with a wife under the age of 12 was prohibited. The 1901 census reported that over 12 million girls were married before the age of 13. When the (mostly) elderly husbands died, their widows were often still children, and these children were doomed to a life of humiliation and shame. If such a child-widow had no protection, she had no future. ‘An unprotected widow in India stands in a dangerous place.’712
Under the benign stewardship of Lord Bentinck, the law, a tacit affirmation of a woman’s individuality and her right to live even if her husband had died before her, abolished the inhuman custom of sati. Ancient Hindu texts prohibited the remarriage of widows. The Marriage Act of 1955 expressly legalises the remarriage of Hindu women. In Fuller’s The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood, she explains the Hindu law as it was practised before 1955 and in the margin, Amy has written ‘This is the Law which shredders Indian wheels today’. ‘Dear brothers and sisters, you are responsible for India. Come to us, not as rulers, but as loving messengers of Christ’, was Amy’s plea for India.
The position of women in many Indian states meant they were often in a disadvantaged position in areas such as education. By contrast, we see nowadays that in India a large proportion of women go to colleges, universities and have high positions in Indian society. Many people in India in those days did not want to put up with that situation. Today many in India remember Pandita Ramabai713 whose Christian social efforts and school for widows and children still flourish. The reason for her to become a Christian was that she had been attracted to the Christian belief because of its attitude to women and this fitted well when she was searching to find a way to relieve women’s oppression. She observed that a wife who had not borne her husband a son was considered ‘worse than a demon’. She helped to
709. Zenana is a Persian word, derived from zen, meaning ‘women’. In India, the inmates are called purdanashin, or curtain women, i.e. sisters behind the curtain. The word zenana means the women’s apartments.
710. See Ploughed Under, 121.
711. Female Education Society (FES), Female Agency Among the Heathen, as Recorded in the History and Correspondence of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East (London: Edward Sutter, 1850), 3.
712. Things As They Are, 290.
713. For Pandita Ramabai Dongre (1858–1922), see Helen S. Dyer, Pandita Ramabai, Her Vision, her Mission and Triumph of Faith, (London: Pickering n.d.); A.C. Kwantes, ‘A Women’s Voice in India’, in She Has Done a Beautiful Thing for Me. Portraits of Christian Women in Asia (Manilla: OMF Litt. Inc., 2005), 121–140.
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organise the Arya Mahila Samaj (the Aryan Women’s Society), a society that was established to develop women’s education and social reform, and was especially aimed at eliminating prejudice against widows. One day a Brahman widow, 12 years old, was brought to Pandita Ramabai. She writes:
She was very dark, had cross eyes, and was very unattractive in many ways. […] She had been given in marriage when five years old, but the boy husband died a few days after the marriage was performed. Her mother-in-law would not look at her. She said the girl had eaten up her son and was a great demon. As I looked at that little figure my vague thoughts about doing something for my sisters in similar conditions began to take shape […] I began to place (before my countrymen) a plan for starting a Home for Hindu widows and to ask for their help. […] I tried my best to get help, but could not.
In 1883, Pandita Ramabai went to England with her daughter and was accommodated at St Mary’s Home, Wantage, Berkshire. Here she read the Bible and saw that Christ could transform and rescue downtrodden women. Through the Bible, she found that Christian religion treated women, including widows and fallen women, with respect and compassion. She and her daughter became professing Christians.
In 1887 she published in the USA The High Caste Hindu Women. Back in India she established in Kedagon, outside Poona, the ‘Mukti Sadan’, House of Liberation, for the welfare of widows and children of all castes and religions. For more than 20 years she worked on her translation of the Bible into Marathi, her mother tongue. For this reason she studied Greek and Hebrew, to be able to read the Bible in the original languages. Her Bible was printed in 1924. She is the only woman in the world who has translated, single-handedly, the whole Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew. Ramabai is seen as one of the founding Indian women of Indian Christian theology study, especially concerning the position of women in Indian society:
It was clear now to Pandita Ramabai what she must do. It was her guess that, at that time, there were 23 million widows in India, fifty-one thousand of them below the age of nine, and ten thousand of those under the age of four.714 When she died in 1922, the Times of India called her one of the ‘makers of the modern India’.715 Several of her organisations – organised into one umbrella organisation, the Mukti Mission – continue to care for orphaned children and abandoned widows. In discovering the essential Hindu thought about women, she has helped others, like Amy, to further research and action. Amy saw the custom and caste in Hindu India as oppressing for women:
Think of the system which shuts her down, fastens her on the rack, holds her there, kills her, should she wish to be free. We take it all too easily, far too easily. We see them perishing, and we know they are perishing; but yet we go about our ordinary avocations as though there were no such thing as perishing people, and as though we could not do infinitely more than we are doing to try to save them! […] Caste is a thing with an iron hand: it grips, and it grips to the death.716 She was well aware of the situation of women in India for she had read a lot about it. From Ashby’s My India, she learned about the festival of Holi, India’s Saturnalia:
Holi is an occasion of licentious joy, drunkenness, singing, and dancing. It has its origin in an ancient legend. A terrible female demon, Holaka, was accustomed to make a daily meal of children.
Amy marked the following passage:
The custom has survived with new meanings incorporated from other religions which have successfully swept over India, but women have continued to be the butts. During Holi, no respectable woman would venture on the streets to be subjected to the insults and obscenities.
714. Kwantes, She Has Done a Beautiful Thing for Me, 130.
715. Kwantes, She Has Done a Beautiful Thing for Me, 140.
One woman said:
I don’t want to be abused and have all my clothing stained red. Today the men upbraid us for being women, the cause of bringing men into the world, thus creating sin.717 She agreed with Thomas Walker who once wrote about custom: ‘Many of these so-called customs are truly grave clothes. They bind our people fast, and keep them back from the life and liberty of Christ.’718 Apart from her inward possessions, a woman had little indeed on earth that gladdened existence. Was it not then thanks to God’s grace and mercy that they received the saving Gospel, which also uplifts the lives of women, vindicates the truth and worth of their lives, and reveals how truly he had made women share in his grace. The Gospel gave them back their dignity by overwhelming them with experiences of heavenly beauty. Instead of the dark well, sometimes their only escape from their dark existence, the Lord gave them the loveliest meadows on its earthly side. At the dawn of the 20th century, the day for better conditions for India’s women came nearer, for the work of Amy Carmichael and many others brought a stir through the amazing apathy of the land over the woes of its women.
‘“The evangelisation of the world in this generation” is an inspiring motto, but how are you to evangelise people when you cannot get at them’?, Amy thought one day.719 Missionaries trying to reach Indian women soon realised that they were not the persons for that work. Missionary wives did some evangelisation among women, but many more were urgently needed. James Thoburn (1836–1922), missionary and later Methodist bishop in India, wrote to his sister Isabella to start a boarding school for girls. She responded positively and in 1869 she was sent, together with another female missionary, to India.720 Isabella settled in Lucknow. Her work was recognised and in 1892 at the Third Decennial Missionary Conference in Bombay, she spoke on ‘Christian Women’. She did not hesitate because she had much to say. ‘The work of mission is circular, she emphasised, for evangelism leads to education which, in turn, leads back to evangelism’.721 Amy had seen the sufferings of women. ‘It is hard for the widows and wives; it is harder still for the girls’.722 For one of them to become a Christian and to be baptised was seen as destroying the caste and would bring disgrace to the community.723 Amy knew from experience, that:
[T ]he Indian woman is loving. She can love and she can hate, and so she can suffer too. She suffers in silence often – dumb, like the animals. She will not unveil her heart to the gaze of curious eyes. But when she knows you, and trusts you, she will let you look in through clear windows, and see her as she is.724
717. In L.L. Ashby & R. Whatley, My India (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1938), 126–127. The last quotation on page 126. The book is in the Dohnavur library.
718. This One Thing, 142.
719. Ploughed Under, 85.
720. James Mills Thoburn (1836–1922), missionary to India, later became the Methodist bishop of India and Malaysia. For more on Isabella Thoburn, see James M. Thoburn, Life of Isabella Thoburn (Cincinnati, OH: Jennings and Pye/New York, NY: Eaton and Mains, 1903); A.C. Kwantes, ‘The Law of Service, Isabella Thoburn’, in She Has Done a Beautiful Thing For Me, 99–120.
721. Kwantes, She Has Done a Beautiful Thing for Me, 114.
722. From the Fight, 12.
723. From the Fight, 14–15: ‘Baptised! That is always the crux, because it involves loss of caste. She shall burn to ashes first. She may go out dead if she likes. She shall go out living – never’! ‘The wife, who did seem to come – Has she gone on? For a little while, she did, but her husband frightened her back. One night she felt him stirring beside her; she opened her eyes, and saw a dagger gleaming. “‘Turn Christian – and expect this!” he whispered in her ear.’
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Amy was in India to open the window. Had not Jesus said ‘I am the Light!’? The utter emptiness of Hinduism struck her intensely, and gave her the sense the worshippers were straining away into emptiness instead of meeting God. The utter absence among them of the idea of holiness is terrible. The beauty of holiness a phrase very far removed from Indian idolatry. Amy was convinced that India, ‘this land of cruelty in dark places’,725 is God’s India. God wanted her to live under the southern sky.
A missionary in India: ‘But all through life I see a Cross’
Lord Jesus, for me crucified,
Let not my footsteps from Thee slide.
For I would tread where Thou hast trod,
My spirit tender of the glory of God.
In her itinerating work, the bandy went along the roads where Amy was sure the Lord Jesus has been before. This land was his and she felt to fight for her master and to reclaim for him those now bound by Satan. For the honour and glory of her God whose name would be praised by many, Amy was willing to suffer everything for his great name’s sake. In these years, she would discover her life’s work. At that time, it was a habit for itinerating evangelists to receive batta, a kind of salary. The women who itinerated with Amy refused that money; they said that they did not need it and did not want it. More important for them was the question: ‘How much can I do without, that I may have more to give?’726 Amy saw that ‘India is a land where it is fatally easy to live easily’.727 In this country, missionaries could have an easy life and around her, she saw many Christians living in dullness, in dimness, not bothering about the things that have eternal value. ‘We have done so much, and so little will remain!’728 Here she quoted Traherne who wrote in about 1674:
’Tis death, my soul, to be indifferent;
Set forth thyself unto the whole extent,
And all the glory of His passing prize,
Who for thee lives, who for thee dies.
Most Western women viewed the people of India from a considerable distance. Language was a barrier, but even if they spoke a native language fluently, it ‘was extremely rare for genuine friendships on an equal basis to develop between the races’.729 From Victorian times women married to British high-ranked government officials and those living with their husbands, managers of big tea farms and railway managers, lived in a kind of ‘red-carpet world’, filling their day with tea parties, excursions, hunting, tennis, polo, a chat at the club and dinner parties with balls. Clothes were a daily preoccupation and the coming of the motor car broadened the horizons for those who could afford one. Ayahs prepared everything for the comfort of the children and the numerous staff in and outside the house eased daily life at home. One, going out to India in 1906, wrote that it was ‘a romance from morning to night […] a continual kaleidoscope of colour and movement’. This was not so for all. For many other women,
725. Lotus Buds, 221.
726. Roots, 7.
727. Gold Cord, 10.
728. Gold Cord, 10.
729. Barr, The Dust in the Balance, 129. married to unfortunate policemen, mining engineers, surveyors and foresters, never came to the redcarpet way of life and often had to live in extremely isolated regions without having any access to a doctor, dentist, schooling for the children and other things they would have had in their home country. However many the cares, they had a free life and several managed to enjoy their ‘jungle’ life.
Missionaries were more or less isolated from the mainstream way of life the British nationals led in India. Usually they did not smoke, drink or dance, and were not involved in obligatory social entertainment whose aim was to see and to be seen and which in their eyes contained many useless frivolities. Their focus was another, not in making money, not in striving for status or ambition, but in serving Christ Jesus. ‘Their efforts to convert Indians to Christianity were considered a thorough waste of time’ by the secular majority at that time. A woman missionary, working in Bengal, said in the mid-1930s: ‘I soon discovered that we were regarded as the lowest form of animal life in the district’.730 However, Amy saw, that once missionaries had settled in an area, routine often crept in and many lost their first duty: to evangelise. Maintaining buildings, water pipes, administration, connections and parties with government officials, travel arrangements and many, many more things: these all bothered her.731 Even ‘mission agents’ was an odious word for her, for should we not be colleagues?’ Mission agencies, secretaries and other officials in service of the mission can easily become targets themselves and the spiritual side is easily lost. Never should missionaries forget ‘the hungry sheep’.732
Amy experienced that it was hard to find a Spirit-taught man or woman of real quality and stature. She met many nominal Christians for whom the earnest tone was largely lacking. The church services were formal and so were the Christians – formal, listless and without much heart. For Amy the Gospel of Jesus Christ always marked the line of demarcation and her attitude was always one of sternness: there must be no compromise. Hearts where Christ gets his seat can be established by the love of God as revealed in the Cross of Christ Jesus. The background of God’s love is holiness; his is not a compromising love. In an atmosphere where idols surrounded the people, Amy sharply drew the line, not in a legalistic way, but as an outcome of the fear of the Lord and the biblical appeal: ‘You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy’.733 There is much that was and is admirable in the ancient Vedic wisdom, but she saw deeper. In all human achievements and wisdom, there is no promise. Christ came to alter people first, and therefore the first duty of a missionary is not to meet the needs of the people among whom the work has to be done, but to do the will of the Saviour. It is easy for a missionary to start all kinds of social reform – which is part of ordinary honourable humanity and a Christian does it because his worship is for the Son of God – but remember the counsel of the Lord, given from the centre of his own agony, ‘Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.’ An appeal to keep steadfastly true to what we know is God’s order. Amy kept her eyes on the Lord in watching and praying while continuing to worship God while she did her duty in saving the children, in giving them a life of hope and real future. In Amy we see a missionary who had been made conformable unto Christ Jesus’ death, being identified with the things in which her Lord had an
730. Barr, The Dust in the Balance, 90.
731. Cf. the situation of the newly posted missionary Rev. Graham Miller when he came to the New Hebrides in 1940 and heard that the ideal missionary was a ‘chap who was good at pottering about with engines’. Miller soon found out that the work had developed into a routine of missionary activities: pulling teeth, giving endless injections for yaws, keeping a launch afloat and running, supervising the life and education of the people, doing your own building and repairs, and trying to maintain the Christian tone and church life’ (Miller, A Day’s March Nearer Home, 42).
732. Gold Cord, 7.
733. Leviticus 19:2; also 1 Peter 1:16.
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interest. She threw herself into the language study, which for her was the key to relationships and acceptance. ‘You must learn to think Tamil’, was her advice to a new missionary later on.734 Thomas Walker was a very good teacher in Tamil. For her he was the ideal teacher, straightforward, clear and patient. On 30 July 1896 she finished reading the Gospel of Matthew in Tamil.735
Amy was happy with the fellowship of the Walkers. Walker himself used to call her Tungachie, younger sister. To practise the language, she improved her conversational use of the language and welded relationships with the people, who gave her access to their daily gossip and private thoughts. Every day she learned a new Tamil proverb, in order to understand better the background of people’s talk and customs better. Her final Tamil exam was Saturday morning, 12 February 1898.736 Due to her knowledge of Tamil she was able to understand the conversation between the women in the temples,737 which was very important for her children’s rescue work. In meetings with Indian scholars, Amy knew how to answer them and to quote – like Paul – their own poets.738
Amy’s life in India was no ordinary missionary’s life and work. Her work would be for not only her rescued children, but also her sweet simple unselfishness was a continual inspiration to other missionaries to be wholly devoted. Always she avoided the sensational and held a high standard of motive and of being true to God. Amy did not agree with all the foolish fever in mission circles. Organising this, organising that; a fever of intense activity for God. What she wanted was the baptism with the Holy Ghost to know how to live with God. To live in the heavenly places while here on earth doing the will of God day by day, always eager to be in conscious touch with God. What has made her a real missionary was her simple heart relationship to Jesus Christ.739
The problems of human life that she saw around her she could not face without Jesus Christ. It takes only the Cross of Jesus Christ to put them right. Without him, she could do nothing! With the grace of her Saviour, she faced the present-day problems with the old Gospel. Christ’s own followers were poor, and did he say to them, ‘Seek ye first and then not all kinds of earthly things will follow’? No, ‘the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’. Amy knew that she would be judged by her relationship to her heavenly Father. And this is an implicit relationship. Is not it fatal to live this life without preparation for the life to come? This was the underlying principle she had in mind in saving
734. In N.E. Robbins, Not Forgetting to Sing. The Modern Story of Amy Carmichael’s Dohnavur Mission (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1968), 34.
735. See in Amy’s Bible (1895) at the end of Matthew 28.
736. See in Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Jeremiah 23, 8–9.
737. She put a lot of effort in her language study. Next to Ecclesiastes 10:10, ‘If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength’, she wrote: ‘Language study’ (in Amy’s Bible, 1895).
738. See Things As They Are, 93.
739. Amy’s thoughts were in line with Thomas Walker who wrote in 1902: ‘There may be zeal for Christianity, without there being spiritual life. There may be liberality in giving, and yet no life. There may be church-going, and lyric singing, and street preaching, and all the time no life. Let us confess it on our knees before the living God – we have been too much occupied in outward organization and missionary routine; we have not sought for our Indian brethren, as we should, a Spirit of life from God; we have not loved them, wept over them, wrestled in prayer for them as we ought to have done. Lord, we blame ourselves today. We are verily guilty, we missionaries, before Thee in this thing. Our strength has often been expended over the externals of our work; and we have failed to attain, in any adequate degree, the main object of our mission, that immortal souls might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. From this time, help us all to make a fresh start. And, O Spirit of life, breathe upon our congregations. Breathe upon these slain, that they may live’ (This One Thing, 134). children not only for the danger of moral destruction, but also to prepare them for a life to glorify God and finally to be with him in heaven. In January 1935 Amy wrote in Margaret King’s Vision:740 ‘A beautiful book. God give us of the DF that tender burning love for souls’. And in 1941 she received Rosalind’s Goforth’s Climbing741; after having read the book she wrote, ‘Thank God for such soldiership. God saves us of the DF from its awful ease of Indian life’. God’s true emissary is a ‘Nazarite’. For Amy it meant that missionaries have to avoid ‘trivial profanities’. Recreation is good for body and soul, if by recreation we mean a pastime that will re-equip you for future work, and will not cause a leakage of spiritual power. For us, missionaries, it is important to know: ‘Where are we to find our fresh springs of life?’742
The legitimate joys of the world had to be for us ‘as a thing to be touched at a distance’. By too much involvement in the secular things:
[W ]e will lose our sensitivity to the very breath of the Highest and will no longer receive the manna that falls from heaven to feed our souls. [Avoid] the traps set there for us, reserving ourselves for a higher way. The world is not for us. We are called to live daily in a higher Kingdom, where we are touched, and our souls drink from the Spirit of God.743 When she first arrived in India, it did not give that impression. The way Amy behaved, dressed and lived among the Indians was an exception. Denying herself in her dress, she wore the Indian sari to get more in touch with the people, especially with the women – those with whom she worked and those she tried to reach. In wearing native dress, as in Japan, she was possibly the first white woman in south India doing so. Yet, neither white women nor Indian women dressed as she did. With a solar hat and long sleeves to protect her pale skin, she became the object of curiosity. Her contemporaries in India thought of her as ‘controversial’; as someone who ‘caused a stir among fellow missionaries’. Some of her fellow missionaries and Indian Christians started the ‘Get-Amy-out-of-Indiamovement’.744
The cry to get her out of India became stronger after the release of Things As They Are, when a committee was formed who formulated the proposal for Amy to leave the country. Several years after that, Amy met the man who had convened that committee, and who was at that moment very sorry and asked Amy for forgiveness. ‘This was the first I had heard of that committee, not of Hindus but of Christians.’745 She was ‘something of a firebrand’.746 Amy did not behave in the expected way by the India ‘red-carpet society’. She disliked the upfront glitter; her inner compass led her to the people of India whom the others just viewed from a considerable distance. Her way of living in Dohnavur was as much as possible Indian, especially to be equal to the Indian women:
It is well-known that we of Dohnavur follow Indian customs in so far as they are good and possible; our Indian dress, little simple sign of kinship with the women of India, would be a mere farce and wholly
740. H. Taylor, Margaret King’s Vision (Philadelphia, PA: CIM, 1934). The book is in the Dohnavur library.
741. R. Goforth, Climbing, Memories of a Missionary’s Wife (3rd edn., Nappanee, IN: Evangel Publishing House, 2008). The book is in the Dohnavur library.
742. You Are My Hiding Place, 42 and 43.
743. You Are My Hiding Place, 43 and 44.
744. Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden, 94 and 95.
745. In Roots, 6.
746. Kent, Converting Women, 224.
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useless, and even hindering, if we ignored the customs of women. […] We live in glass houses in India [and there are] the eyes that watched me across the stone.747 No wonder that within the established mission circles Amy’s often insulting, puritanical approach to her mission began to make her enemies. Her way of working was different from what she saw around her. So many were caught up in the whirl of the wheels of missionary machinery. Was only this mission life – a turning of wheels, and often in a questionable direction? Was this what the call meant, the call it had cost so much to obey? To her came the touch of influence that knew no hesitation and the result was a life set free to serve in steadfastness. Her view is expressed in Smith’s poem:
But all through life I see a Cross, where sons of God yield up their breath.
There is no gain, except by loss, there is no life except by death, and no full vision but by Faith, no glory but a bearing shame, nor Justice but by taking blame. And that eternal Passion saith; ‘Be emptied of glory and right and name’.748 Amy went on in her own way, not distracted by other voices. In Bangalore, while reading Isaiah 42:14 she learned her important lesson: marked in that chapter she wrote in the margin, ‘Bangalore. 1896. His lesson. Be Still. Wait’.749
Itinerating work: India 1897–1904
Leaving Bangalore to enter itinerating work, she started with a lot of fear. Was she able to do it? Would the people listen? Would they understand her Tamil? She was comforted by Psalm 34:4, ‘I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears’. In the margin of this psalm, she wrote:
September 1896. Fears. Fears of failure. Fears of future. All my fears. There is a balm for every pain, a medicine for all sorrow. The eye turned backward to the Cross and forward to the morrow. The morrow of the glory.750 She thought about the people she would meet. Would the Mohammedans listen? She prayed for them and was comforted by Matthew 9:18 where she changed the words a little and wrote ‘But come and lay Thy hand upon them, and they shall live. Bangalore 1896’.751
From 1897, Amy was involved in itinerating work, a work with one fixed purpose. In her own words: We were an itinerating band, furnished with a flag made of folds of black, red, white, and yellow sateen, a most useful text for an impromptu sermon; and we found Eastern musical instruments useful too. Being the first women’s band of its kind in the district, we walked circumspectly. I used to feel like a cat on the top of a wall, the sort of wall that is plentifully set with bits of broken bottles; for there seemed to be no end to the occasions on which ‘it was necessary to be careful’. […] And our manner of life was ideal: we had one thing to do and one only; there could be no perplexities as to which was the duty of the hour – there was only one possible duty. […] Sometimes we all went street-preaching together, with a baby organ by way of attraction. […] Once, for a
747. From the Forest, 108 and 112.
748. In W. Chalmers Smith, Poetical Works (London: Cornell University Press, 1902), 86. The book is in the Dohnavur library.
749. In Amy’s Bible (1896) in the margin of Isaiah 42:14.
750. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 34:4. See also in the margin of Matthew 6:25: ‘Jan.25.97. Trusted about Tamil Exam’.
751. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Matthew 9:18. period, which seemed ages long, we were shut out of the homes of the people, because some of them had believed our report. When we went to the villages where this had happened, we were pelted with ashes and rotten garlands from the necks of the idols. […] ‘If India were as Japan is, how different it would be!’ I used to say (t)ruefully, after a battering of spirit in some vociferous village. There they are not compelled by any idiotic social code to turn believing members out of their community, and fall upon those who want to help them. And one day I looked at a great spider’s web several feet in diameter, and saw the mighty Caste system of India.752 […] Oh, for an enthusiasm for Christ that will not endure to be popular when He is unpopular; that will be fired rather than be quenched when His claims are unrecognized and His word is slighted; that will thrill us with joy if He allows us to share in the faintest measure in His dishonour and loneliness; that will set every pulse throbbing with exultation as we go forth unto Him.753 Meanwhile in England, the Keswick Mission Council officially decided on 07 July 1898: ‘Appointment of Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael to engage in Village Mission Evangelization Work with Mr and Mrs Walker’.754 The Walkers were a godly family that really understood the Hindu religion and the tremendous need of reaching out to these people.
In the hospital in Bangalore, there were people who spoke Urdu and Canarese, but nobody could speak Tamil. Amy had to learn this language but Bangalore was not an ideal place to learn Tamil and the doctor in the Zenana hospital suggested that she go to Tinnevelly and learn the language there. Just before leaving Bangalore, she almost had two accidents with a dogcart (a light carriage high from the ground):
These two almost-accidents – I have always felt they were purposeful – made me feel that a Force, powerful but not all-powerful was resisting my going South. So you will know how the words in Daily Light for the morning I left Bangalore (30 November 1896) spoke to me: My Presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. And he said unto Him, if Thy presence not go with me, carry us not up hence. For wherein shall it be known here that I and Thy people have found grace in Thy sight? Is it not in that Thou goest with us?755 She encountered opposition every day, but in the heat of the day and of the ‘battle’ she turned to her Bible and found strength. Next to Psalm 140:7 ‘O God The Lord, the strength of my salvation, thou hast covered my head in the day of the battle’, she wrote: ‘March 31.97 Palamcottah’.756
Before she left Bangalore, she wondered why doctors and nurses were not the people to evangelise there. They had eased pain and had the key to the hearts of patients. People from outside should not do the work, she meant:
I had said nothing about it but I had often wondered why I had been sent there. Bangalore seemed much like a blind alley, and yet it is not the way of our Lord to lead His followers in blind alleys.757 The Walkers asked Amy to stay with them to assist in evangelising the Hindus and insisted that she could do something for the Christian women. Her friends in Bangalore agreed. ‘In this simple way the road turned the corner that led to you’, she wrote for her children in Dohnavur.758 Itinerating work at
752. In Ponnamal, 12,13,15,16, and 17.
753. In L. Trotter, A Life on Fire, quoted in B.A.F. Pigott, I. Lilias Trotter (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott Ltd., 1930), 54.
754. In KCMMB, 07 July 1898.
755. Amma’s Book, 46.
756. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Psalm 140:7.
757. Amma’s Book, 46.
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that time was ‘pioneer work’, not work that had been ‘prepared’. Some people had never seen white women. ‘We live in the heart of Old India – it is a dark Old India, very sinful, very needy, needing God’. The work was done with her motto:759
Love through me, Love of God;
Make me like Thy clear air
Through which, unhindered, colours pass
As though it were not there.
Thomas Walker told Amy that when you want to know Hindu life and religion, itinerating work is not an option, but a must.760 In 1891, the CEZMS had sent out two women to serve in south India, working together with Thomas Walker in his itinerating work. Both died within a few years.761 From 1897 to 1905 Amy itinerated with a band of women and girls who gathered around her, known by the Tamil name meaning the Starry Cluster. They were inspired by the verse:
[S]o that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life.762 Ponnamal was the leader of the itinerating band.763 The roads they had to travel were far from easy, and with the bullocks it also went very slowly. Amy made a rhyme for bandy-goers:
Two Annachies set out in a bandy, but at riding they were not very handy.
As they bummed to and fro, they shouted Ai-yo
Who’d go for a ride in a bandy?
Said the one with a cry, I am ready to die
Every bone seems breaking, I in this terrible heat
There’s no room for my feet, with laughter my ribs are all aching.
So to shorten the time, They’ve written this rhyme
Let travellers by bandy take warning, if you start out with smiles
You’ll go many miles, if not you will end up mourning.764
Their home base was the Pannaivilai bungalow. The Indians recognised the sincerity and the light that shone from them. The members of the band had no salary but looked to God to supply their needs. Just as in Japan, Amy took on the habit of wearing Indian dress, which she continued during her lifetime. The Walkers approved of her wearing Indian dress, but at that time, she wrote, everyone in India disapproved.765 It was wonderful work for her, to belong to the ones to break the silence in which God had been loving the people all the time. It was a private matter, but slowly – it was in 1898 – one by one the members of the Starry Cluster (Figure 10) laid aside their jewels. Especially in the Tinnevelly district, the women wore many jewels, and Amy thought it wise not to interfere with the Indian custom.
759. Mountain Breezes, 248.
760. ‘To know what real indifference to true religion is, you must itinerate in a heathen country’ (Thomas Walker in This One Thing, 60).
761. In Walker of Tinnevelly, 178.
762. Philippians 2:15 and 16.
763. Lotus Buds, 219.
764. In the Logbook of the Dohnavur Fellowship 1931–1941 (December 1933). In the Dohnavur library.
Source: © Dohnavur Fellowship. Permission to reproduce was obtained from Jeremiah Rajanesan. Photographer unknown. FIGURE 10: Amy with some members of The Starry Cluster on village outreach.
The Holy Spirit, so the Starry Cluster members thought, had led them to these actions.766 Jewels were a married woman’s dowry, so by this action the girls showed their longing to stay together with Amy and that they would not agree to a marriage proposal.767 A practical side effect of this action by the girls was that now the bandy could travel at night with no fear of robbers. The Starry Cluster had a flag with the colours black, red, white and yellow: the four colours of the wordless book so often used to tell the story of salvation. The women went around in an area where robbers were always active, and other dangers awaited them during their wanderings.
She toured in this itinerant ministry through the villages in the south tip of India in the state of Tamil Nadu. The band of women evangelists were striving to reach the women of the villages and prayed that by the light of the Gospel, which shone forth from them, many women would be reached. Next to the language, she learned a lot about the Tamil mind during the seven years which went by, nearly undisturbed. ‘I have often thanked the Lord for those seven years.’768 She knew Tamil life more
766. One of the girls, Sellamutthu, said: ‘If I had loved my Saviour more, I should have loved my jewels less’ (Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 100).
767. Later Ponnamal wrote in her journal: ‘I could not have done this new work [assisting Amy in Dohnavur], if it had not been for the new courage that came with that break with custom, and from bondage to the fear of man. […] I saw Him, naked in this world’s glory, stript to the uttermost; and I went and made an ash-heap of my pride (Ponnamal, 26).
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and more from the inside. Once she made a visit to a Hindu festival, and looking back on what she had experienced she wrote:
Does this sound intolerant and narrow, as if no good existed outside our own little pale? Surely, it is not so. We are not ignorant of the lofty and the noble contained in the ancient Hindu books. We are not of those who cannot recognise any truth or any beauty unless it is labelled with our label. We know God not left Himself without witnesses anywhere. But we know – for the Spirit of Truth Himself has inspired the description – how desolate is the condition of those who are without Christ. We dare not water down the force of such a description till the words mean practically nothing. We form no hard, presumptuous creed as to how the God of all the earth will deal with those masses of mankind who have missed the knowledge of Him here; we know He will do right. But we know with a knowledge which is burnt into us, how very many of the units live to compose these masses. We know what they are missing today, through not knowing our blessed Saviour as a personal living friend: and we know what it means to the thoughtful mind to face an unknown tomorrow.769 One of the seven years was spent in Dohnavur with Ponnamal and Sella Mutthu and other women. They travelled and preached in the Tinnevelly770 area around Pannaivilai where Amy and the Walkers lived. Three miles from Tinnevelly town is Palamcottah. It was here that in 1874 CEZMS work started among the women. She would lie awake at night worrying about the fate of those who died unconverted. One night she was comforted by the words: ‘I have the keys’, because:
Today Rajpool’s woman died. Burnt. Cried day and night: ‘Ram!’ Died unreached. Her brothers gave me her beads. She clung to them through all her pain. Her prayer-beads. God hold the key of all unknown. And I am glad. March 20. 1896.771 While itinerating, Amy by letters stayed in contact with her family and with the Keswick Convention. A letter from Amy was read by Mr Wilson at the convention of 1898 in which she wrote:
For the good of the meeting, that those should stand up who were prepared to offer themselves to the Lord’s service in the foreign field when the Lord should open the way, and that they should be prayed for; and also that parents should be made willing to let their children go.
Mr Wilson added, ‘I know well what a self-sacrifice it is. But the words have often been repeated to me: “Nothing too precious for Jesus”.’
After the letter was read about 200 stood up, mostly young ladies, with a ‘sprinkling of young men here and there. […] Parents stood up saying they were willing to offer their children. The scene was touchingly impressive.’772 Amy herself used to read her English letters ‘as it were with the Lord Jesus, because there was no one else who understood English. I had never known before what the Presentness of the Presence could be’.773
769. Lotus Buds, 49–50.
770. Tinnevelly, or Tiruneveli, means the Sacred Rice Hedge (Tiru=holy, nel=rice, veli=fence or hedge). ‘It is a fiery red, sandy plain stretching out to the horizon. […] The great plain of desolating distances is a part of the densely populated land of Dravidian India, for each clump of trees usually indicates the existence of a village, and the clumps are not far apart, “so thick do towns stand in heathendom.” The South is the stronghold of Brahmanism, priest ridden and fast bound in the chains of the world, the flesh and the devil. It is also the cradle of the Christianity of those parts. […] There are about 1400 villages in the district of North-Tinnevelly’ (A.D, Until The Shadows Flee Away, 201–202).
771. In Amy’s Bible (1895), in the margin of Revelation 1:18.
772. In KCMMB, 28 July 1898, 189–190. In the KCMMB a remark was added: ‘Keswick never has to depart from its apostolic simplicity of character and aim’.
Ponnamal especially was of exceeding value and was fully involved in the preaching work. The preaching was clear, and always focused upon the awakening of the spirit. Is a militant attitude wrong? ‘We were never able to discover a way by which the captives of the devil could be delivered without offending that person.’774 While on tour, Sunday by Sunday, Thomas Walker preached and people started to listen, because as Amy revealed ‘vital religion was preached’.775 The band roamed through the vast Tinnevelly district and sought for ways to enter the houses and especially visit the women. From Pannaivilai she writes:
Here we are out in the jungle – so to speak – with thorny scrub, and tall, straight palms, and wastes of sand all round us, and strewn about in casual fashion – villages. … There is a tremendous need all round us. First among the Christians; many a village fort, like the Shah Najaf of the mutiny days, has to recaptured. For backsliders are everywhere to be found; whole hamlets full sometimes… These souls must be re-won. Many were never converted at all, but ‘came over’ in masses in the old days; and their children are harder by far than those who have never heard. Then there are true Christians who need quickening. Here they are in the midst of dense darkness, and their light is burning dim. Only when they are on fire for God will the masses of heathen be reached. […] Our hope is to go, as the Lord may lead, to these few sheep in the wilderness, turning from place to place, and through them gaining the Hindus. […] Some weeks ago we went in force (though only a dozen to thousands!) to a Hindu festival, celebrated in a dried-up river bed before a demon temple. Thousands of goats were sacrificed. The people were much excited. But by the good hand of our God upon us, we had quiet groups and a good chance to tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is God. We sold over a hundred Gospel portions, and we know these seeds must live.776 During these years, there were hundreds who for the first time heard the Gospel, who would never have heard it had not the itinerant work continued for some time. Here was virgin soil and limitless scope for the legitimate work of the pioneer, which is to drive the Gospel ploughshare through the tangled roots of ignorance and superstition. Many welcomed them; at other times they were ‘pelted with ashes and rotten garlands from the necks of the idols’.777 Sometimes they met openhearted people, and at another time they could only touch the very fringe of these villages. Still many doors stayed closed for them, and certain strongholds of Hinduism remained un-entered. During this itinerating work, Amy saw so much of the darkness and the nearby spiritual and physical need of these beautiful and attractive people, that the burning desire to help them remained unquenched during her whole life.778 Did their work make any difference? Were any people converted? She wrote:
And thoughts of India’s millions who are as though the Saviour of the world had never died on Calvary, had never risen, was never to return, swept over me. And thoughts came too of unrecognised love of Him who said, ‘All day long I have stretched forth My hands’. […] So few heard, so few turned, so few cared to know those words, and I was sorrowful, never dreaming that in the town nearby, that night there was a child who could not sleep for awe and wonder.779
774. Ponnamal, 17.
775. Ponnamal, 7.
776. See A.D., Until the Shadows Flee Away, 207 and 208.
777. Ponnamal, 16. Next to the spiritual attacks, the physical situation during the visits to the people was not always easy. ‘There are always small infants who cry, and bigger infants who laugh, and there are noises, of course, of every conceivable kind without much intermission.’ Also Amy relates this event: ‘One evening I was sitting on the doorstep of a house, with a dozen women round me, when suddenly a beast appeared, and without a moment’s hesitation it walked straight over me, and in’ (Ponnamal, 25). On 09 February 1897, while in Palamcottah, she was overwhelmed by fear and wrote in her Bible: ‘With all my heart! […] A great deliverance […] from all my fears. […] Thou knowest my frame’ (in the margin of Psalm 86:12 in Amy’s Bible, 1895).
778. Cf. Robbins, Greater is He, 23.
779. Ploughed Under, 27–28.
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The child here mentioned was Arulai who prayed to know the living God. She had met Amy at a well. After much trouble, struggle and anguish, Arulai finally came to be with Amy. Later her sister Mimosa would also join Amy in Dohnavur.
The path of the itinerant preacher, going forth in Christ’s name and strength, preaching Christ crucified in order to save people for eternal life, is an arduous one. One can imagine that the hardships and privations associated with this type of work had deep emotional significance for Amy and her team.780 It was especially difficult for the Walkers who so strongly opposed, like Ragland, the Anglican ‘ceremonialism’ and ‘ritualism’. Therefore, they preferred the Anglican Low Church and dissenting traditions, which emphasised ‘heart’ religion and sought to set forth the glory of God and of Christ Jesus.
Often the women went travelling at night to evade the heat of the day. Or when they camped near a village they got up very early to be at the well where the village women would come in the early morning to fetch water and where also children gathered. Children were especially attracted by the stories of the missionaries, and for Amy it was sad when a mother forced her child to go home or forbid them to listen because this meant for the children, those little souls, that the village and all its sins and idols lay before them. The Starry Cluster prayed so much that days of open doors would last. One day could be completely different from another, so it could be that everything seemed to fall into irregularity.781 Their itinerating work met with the usual difficulties:
He said ‘Go, tell’, and we have come and are telling, and we meet Him as we ‘go and tell’. But, dear friends, do not, we entreat you, expect to hear of us doing great things, as an everyday matter of course. But what we say to you is this: Do not expect every true story to dovetail into some other true story and end with some marvellous coincidence or miraculous conversion. Most days in real life end exactly as they began, so far as visible are concerned. […] And now we have told you a little of what is going on. There are days when nothing seems to be done, and then again there are days when the Terrible seems almost visible, as he gathers up his strength, and tears and mauls his prey. And so it is true we have to fight a separate fight for each soul [author’s own emphasis].782 God’s love within her was so powerful a magnet that during her life many were drawn irresistibly to her. No wonder that Hindus began to call her ‘the child-catching Missie Ammal’. Amy’s love for those she tried to win was pure and those who sought refuge with her were sheltered with great love and they felt at home with her so nearby, who was as a mother to them. A girl once heard Arulai’s prayer: ‘Don’t let me go back to the dark, please, Lord! O let me live in the light!’783 In God was Amy’s strength and to him she made known all her desires. ‘Lord, all my desire is before Thee’; next to this verse from Psalm 38:9 she wrote ‘Aug. 1899’.784
Often converts from Hinduism to Christianity were put outside their community. This made Amy furious. She was sure that this practice would not happen in Japan. There, she argued, they were not
780. An interesting note is that in this kind of evangelism Amy and her missionary colleagues were more or less walking in the footsteps of the itinerant mendicants and sannyasins (a homeless wandering ascetic), who centuries ago carried their particular doctrines to south India and Sri Lanka. Cf. C.R.A. Hoole, Modern Sannyasins, Protestant Missionary Contribution to Ceylon Tamil Culture (Frankfurt: am M.; New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1995).
781. Cf. here too Lilias Trotter: ‘One comfort is that regularity is not the mark of a battlefield. Every battle of the warrior is with confused noise’ (in Pigott, I. Lilias Trotter, 137).
782. Things As They Are, 24.
783. Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur, 107.
784. In Amy’s Bible (1895) in the margin of Psalm 38:9. compelled by any idiotic social code to turn believing members out of their community, and fall upon those who only wanted to help them:
And now, what have you to do? Tell the glad tidings gladly to the hearts that are glad to hear? That is ideal, truly, but the real is not like that. Not one is keen to hear. Not one is longing or hungry. They like you to come, it is true. You come as a break in the day. And they will listen a little – but care? Ah no – not yet. […] The husband sees us home. He is like polished marble. Nothing seems to go in. He knows the truth, but meets it with a smile. […] Oh, these Jericho walls of strong superstition and sin! Sometimes it seems as though the soul is a city walled up to heaven, and a city roofed over, too, for the gentle grace of the Lord seems to fall upon cold grey slate.785 The opposition was fierce and Amy felt that mission work was in reality a fight. ‘It is a real fight – this India fight for souls! We must have a daily re-inspiration, or we shall lose courage and fail.’786 The woman’s band tried to talk with many Hindu women, whose husbands’ minds were blinded by the god of this world and whose only concern for their wives was not their well-being and happiness, but the fertility of their bodies instead of the immortality of the soul. For these women, living in darkness, Amy and her team were there to open a window, that Jesus’ words would become a reality for them, when he said: ‘I am the Light of the world. He who follows Me, shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.’787 During her itinerary work Amy taught the women from the Bible, in order to win them for Christ. There were women missionaries from Protestant Zenana missions who, along with Bible study, began their own institutions to instruct Indian women in needlework, childcare and other practical issues. However, others reported that they never taught needlework in the Zenanas but relied ‘solely on God’s Word’. Kent writes that:
Amy Carmichael of the CEZMS in Tirunelveli deplored the suggestion of one of her Bible women, Saral, that she could attract more women to hear the gospel by teaching them to knit. When Carmichael refused the suggestion, Saral objected that ‘there was nothing in the Bible that bore upon pink wool and knitting needles’. Carmichael’s thunderous reply, ‘Indeed there is! Zechariah 4:6, “Not by my power but by my spirit”’ reflected a growing missionary consensus that Zenana education ought to be more serious, more explicitly evangelical, and concentrate more on Bible study.788 The band travelling with Amy consisted of women who all had decided not to marry. Ponnamal too was of the opinion that India needed the service of unmarried women as well as of the married.789 Not that this group had a special type of holiness or devotion, but because some type of work in the church could better be done by unmarried women. Each one of the band freely had decided not to marry in order to be free to be ‘absorbed in her duties towards her Lord’.790 In 1947, Amy wrote a short memoir for her Indian friends about the DF, in which she also raised the question:
785. From the Fight, 8 and 9. In the cities it was extremely difficult for missionaries to do the work and see results of evangelistic effort. Helen Dyer says that after missionaries had laboured in the city of Bombay for 75 years, statistics showed that in 1888 there were less than 1000 Protestant Indian Christians, including children. Bombay in 1888 had approximate 800 000 inhabitants (H. Dyer, A Life for God in India. Memoirs of Mrs. Jennie Fuller of Akola and Bombay (New York, NY: Fleming H. Revell Co., n.d.), 99).
786. From the Fight, 20.
787. John 8:12.
788. Cf. E.F. Kent, ‘Tamil Bible Women and the Zenana Missions of Colonial South India’, History of Religion (1999): 129.
789. Ponnamal, 76.
790. Quotation from A. Way’s translation of 1 Corinthians 7:34.
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Why are some of your men and many of your women not married? Because they feel that for them the care of the children and the care of the ill is a Call to whole time service, in other words, to serve without distraction. Without some so dedicated, the work could not be done. Do you feel there is a special virtue in that way of life? No, it is simply a matter of a Call and of obedience. The blessing of the Lord is upon both ways of life. What about your Indian workers when they grow too old for work? All who wish to do so stay with us here. They are greatly valued.791 Rev. F.B. Meyer visited India in 1899 as a KMC delegate, and met Amy in Dohnavur. In the KMC yearbook of 1900, we read the report of his visit:
For the first time in his life he came in contact with heathenism, and never before realized the debasing effects on idolatry. […] He witnessed on every side of the corridors the signs of obscenity which would not for a moment be tolerated in our own country. Romans 1 is a reality there. Masses sunk in sensuality, he saw their utterly need for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. […] For the missionaries the very atmosphere sometimes were dense with evil spirits resisting the soldiers of the cross. […] He also saw Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael. Then Mr Wilson added, that he was very weakened by an illness, referring to his adopted daughter, he said Miss C. had a very warm place in her heart for Keswick, and wished her love to be conveyed to the dear brethren and sisters there. She has the work of the evangelization of the heathen very much at heart, and whilst there were circumstances which might have called her home, she felt for Jesus’ sake her place was there with Mr and Mrs Walker, unless some call should come from God Himself to make it otherwise.792 Itinerating months could be very hard and take away all energy. Many of the band were attacked by accidie, in the ‘dullest and dustiest of dull and dusty days’, in a month when opposition had turned to stagnation. The women of the band were un-jewelled, for the Indian mind an eyesore, an offence against custom. In south India, a woman’s life down to its merest detail is governed by the law universal, called ‘custom’.793 ‘To run the race that lay before them’, some women laid off all the jewels and returned them to their families or gave them to the CMS ‘for China’. This ultimate act for a woman was, as one reports, ‘because I saw Him, naked of this world’s glory, stripped to the uttermost; and I went and made an ash-heap of my pride’.794 The furore passed and the violence diminished at length; but it left its mark:
The women who had braved the storm had made a new discovery: they were no more mere biscuits in a biscuitbox thereafter, cut to correct pattern, fitted in rows, each the duplicate of the other; they had found a new thing, even their individuality; and in finding it they had gained in courage and in character. Things first impossible, were now undertaken without a thought; they were free from a thousand trammels that before had entangled their feet with invisible threads. And going deeper, those who for love of the Crucified had counted all things loss and vanity loved Him now with a new love, rejoiced with a new joy.795 The flies of criticism buzzed as they pleased about the band, but Amy was strengthened by the words ‘walk before Me and be thou perfect’. In their evangelistic work, Amy and the band alike looked for
791. In The Starry Cluster, 10.
792. In KCMMB, 1899, 172–173.
793. From the Fight, 25.
794. From the Fight, 26. conversion, a complete renunciation of the past life of the convert and a turning in faith to Christ. In 1900, a letter was read at the Keswick Convention in which she wrote:
Dear Christian friends: pray first for a revival of vital religion amongst Christians; then for open doors and definite conversions amongst the heathen; and for us that we may be good soldiers. […] Again we will start new work and again we need your help. Will you praise Him for what He has done, and will you pray again?796 There was prayer for true revival, but due to nominalism in most of the churches in Tinnevelly District, Amy was afraid that if the Lord would come down the churches were not prepared to receive the new converts. One day she wrote, ‘We have no church here fit to receive Hindus when a big revival comes’.797 Amy could not foresee when she wrote her request to the Keswick Convention that the new work she wanted to start would turn in another direction and that the work God gave her to do would lead to her life’s work in India. Still travelling with the Starry Cluster from one place to another, she got an extensive knowledge of daily Indian life and often could look behind the scenes. The fact that the women did not have any jewels made it possible for the band to travel at night, for robbers were not interested in following the group. In Dohnavur, in ‘an open compound in jungle-land’798 protected under angels’ wings, they camped for a year, while their belongings were at Pannaivilai. It was there that a little girl sought refuge and felt Amy’s arms around her. The stories were so shocking and never did Amy forget that day nor the child’s story, which was terrible beyond imagination. The date was 07 March 1901, the date too of the beginning of her rescue work of children who had been dedicated to the temple gods, which ultimately led to the founding of the DF.799
This child told Amy several things. Things too awful to be written down. Amy was confused and told Ponnamal what that child had told her. Amy was very close to Ponnamal, and from her she heard of ‘the people in the village’ near the bungalow, and of the secret things done among them, as they were done in every village in India.800 Not knowing immediately what to do, Amy began the search to know the details and find out the conditions that governed this traffic in children. Their constant itinerary work helped them, because they came to many places and in contact with many people. Amy just kept quiet, but with ears and eyes open, she tried to discover the things that were hidden away from the public eye. As Alice in Wonderland, only it was a different wonderland. ‘Alice in Underland would have to be its name; and I was Alice, or who?’801 She secretly entered the inner courts of the huge temples and:
[F ]ar inside this Underland, deep in the recesses of some great temple court with its towering walls all around, or sitting among the friendly garland-makers as they strung jessamine and oleander into wreaths and flower balls for the gods, I heard much unknown to me before, and gradually to me it was given to see into the heart of the matter, and to know how the laws were being evaded and the children polluted. Word fail from such discoveries: they ask for deeds, not words.
796. In KCMMB, 1900, 192.
797. Dohnavur letter no. 4, December 1924 (PRONI D/4061/30/1), 6.
798. From the Fight, 31.
799. In England at that time at the Keswick Mission Committee it was reported: ‘Miss Amy Wilson Carmichael and Miss Eva Carmichael, have been preserved in health and are able to do good work’ (in KCMMB, 1901, 218). At that time Amy’s sister Eva was in Nkanga, Pondoland, South Africa.
800. From the Forest, 23.
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This was for her ‘the mouth of hell’.
These children who could help them? She saw, and added ‘but we had yet to learn that nothing is too good to be true’.802
During the beginning years of the DF, it was proposed by some that they start something in the line of a sisterhood or a Deaconess Home. Indian girls, conscious of a vocation, might find welcome, shelter, and guidance. This was not in the mind of Amy. The DF looked like a convent, but Amy herself ‘feared anything in the nature of vows, expressed or understood’. She knew India and said the country was not ready for it. The girls accompanying her and working with her had to have the full freedom to choose whether, for instance, to marry or not, whether to stay in Dohnavur or choose to live elsewhere. ‘We never let any of the girls bind herself in spirit.’ Her aim was that the children from their earliest days should be:
[S]urrounded by wholesome, healthy influences, and brought up in absolute straightforwardness. […] If only these little ones grow up reliable and true, openings will not be difficult to find for them in the great needy field of missions.803
‘A woman or such a thing’
In travelling around, Amy saw a lot, especially the situation of the women, trapped in their own houses. For many generations it had been the same life for them and the duties done according to their caste code. What was happening in the big world, the ‘murmur of the world’ outside, had never reached them. The wall that surrounded their houses bounded almost their range of vision, mental as well as physical. It is true that the call that wakens often comes from within, but more often, surely, it comes from without. These women’s world knew no without, and much of the meaning of the within was hidden from them. We do not realise until we think about it how much we owe to the largeness of our environment. Amy felt compassion for the women living in ‘the littleness’ of their lives. These women needed a voice from outside. In Amy’s time, the only thing that bought an Indian wife a place in the sun was when she gave birth to a boy. The whole idea of marriage revolved simply around the conception of life; that only justified the existence of a wife. If she did not fulfil her expected duty, her mostly short life was one long tragedy. For the temple girls it was the same. Amy saw many of the huge Indian temples:
Books have been written about the temples of South India, photographs of their marvellous towers and carven stone courts and corridors can be bought for a few rupees, but no books, no pictures, can give even a breath of the air of those mighty monuments of a people’s faith, nor can descriptions show them to one who has never stood alone in the silent space before the sacred symbol far within.804 Amy had seen more, hidden from visitors’ eyes; things too bad to write down. One day in a forest, Amy had a talk with a forester. He told her of the dangers in the forest, especially the way tigers took their prey. Talking about man-eaters in the forest he referred to what had happened one day to a ‘woman or such a thing’805 as he called it. That night Amy could not sleep. The forester’s story was
802. From the Fight, 35–36.
803. The Continuation of a Story, 44 and 45.
804. The Widow of the Jewels, 28.
805. The Widow of the Jewels, 28. running in and out of her head, ‘A woman or such a thing’! She saw the temples, to which they should have belonged:
[T ]hose hateful temples with their huge towers and ancient tremendous masonry, their secret ways, their cruel ways, and the solid age-old feeling of Hindustan behind. What did it matter how many little woman-children those ways ensnared, those stone wall smothered’? […] And the Dohnavur nurseries, and many other places where hard fights are being fought, came to mind then; and I rejoiced as I remembered what the children mean to the Lord Who redeemed them, they are not ‘things’ to Him.806 In Amy’s time, the cruellest things were said about wives and widows in India. The words in the Sanskrit Catechism are shocking:
What a cruel?
The heart of a viper. What is crueller than that?
The heart of a woman. What is the cruellest of all?
The heart of a soulless.807
When she first heard from the lips of a little girl about her life in a temple house, she was advised to collect facts and she started to write down in a blue notebook808 everything she heard, saw and read about the secret traffic of small children to be used there for bad purposes. After three years of research, Amy discovered that premeditated trading and commerce were occurring. It was part of a huge sinister system that was ostensibly religious, based on the ancient temples customs. Amy more and more saw the reality of the devadasi system. In the 19th century, devadasis were widely reputed to be prostitutes, ‘and were recognised essentially as temple equipment’.809 In short it was the secret system ‘by which the temple altars were supplied with little living victims’,810 and ‘it was that which we existed to fight’.811 The practice involved grooming girls, some of them only babies, for a life of ritualised prostitution. These girls were a valuable commodity since they would become the sex slaves of the Brahman priests who ran the temples. Considered as property of the gods, the girls had no rights of their own and could be sexually abused and tortured without censure. Parents giving children to the temple were taught it was meritorious and since there were often financial rewards to the parents who did so, many children were – even before birth – dedicated to the temple.812
Numerous young girls were sent away by their parents, and were forced to spend the rest of their beautiful young lives as sex fodder in the darkness of the huge temples. The traffic of the girls was worked upon religious lines, and very difficult to outlaw. Even when it was forbidden by law, it went on secretly. A characteristic of the system is its secrecy – its subtlety. This Amy wrote in Things As They Are, where a whole chapter813 revealed the terrible things little girls underwent. Like chattels, little girls were
806. See the whole story in From the Forest, 92–98; quotation p. 98.
807. In J.K.H. Denny, Toward The Sunrising. A History of Work for the Women of India Done by Women from England, 1852–1901 (London: Marshall Brothers, ZBMM, 1902), 49. The census of 1891 counted 22 657 429 widows in India, 13 878 under 4 years of age, 238 572 between 4 and 14. See ‘Wives and Widows’ in Toward The Sunrising (Chapter V, 49–61).
808. Lotus Buds, 250.
809. See K. Mayo, Mother India (London: Butler & Tanner, 1930), 52.
810. Lotus Buds, 71.
811. From the Forest, 100.
812. Lotus Buds, 257.
813. Chapter XXV, ‘Skirting The Abyss’, 223–248.
Chapter 9
sold to the highest bidder. What could she do against an age-old custom? Many knew about it, but did not openly talk about it:
There are men and women in India to whom many a day is a nightmare, and this fair land an Inferno, because of what they know of the wrong that is going on. […] The medical workers – God help them! – are those who are most frequently forced to look down, and I, not being a medical, know infinitely less of its depths than they. But this I do know, and do mean, and I mean it with an intensity I know not how to express, that this custom of infant marriage and child marriage, whether to gods or men, is an infamous custom; that it holds possibilities of wrong, such unutterable wrong, that descriptive words concerning it can only ‘skirt the abyss’, and that in the name of all that is just and all that is merciful it should be swept out of the land without a day’s delay.814 Thomas Walker, with whom Amy had worked for several years, refers to Amy’s books in which these evils are revealed:
In St. Paul’s days, immorality formed part of the worship of many temples, as it does in India still. […] Readers of Miss Carmichael’s books will not need to be reminded that the same grave is rife in India. Dancing-girls (deva-dasis) are employed in the temples, prove an attractive part of car-festivals, since they are decked with silk and jewellery and placed on the cars beside the idol, and are sent for to sing and dance at Hindu weddings. Hindu social reformers candidly acknowledge these evils and deplore the inviting of such ‘servants of gods’ to social functions, as they know full well that many a young man owes his first step on an awful downward path to their influence and attractions.815