India at the time Amy arrived (part 1 of 4)
Chapter 8
India at the time Amy arrived
Britain’s ‘rightful’ empire
It is perhaps the most complex nation in the world: India with its unimaginable pluralism and contrasting diversities. There are often contrasts as well as affinities at various levels. In Amy’s time, before the partition in 1947, hundreds (565) of princely states, also called native states, existed in India which were not fully and formally part of British India but enjoyed a British protectorate and indirect rule. These were the parts of the Indian subcontinent that had not been conquered or annexed by the British, often former vassals of the Mughal Pashah (Emperor).566 Nowadays, India consists of 29 states and today’s population, living in a country nearly as large as a continent, is far more than one billion. ‘The years 1900–1945 were tumultuous times in India. The massive British colonial enterprise in India was experiencing resistance in the various nationalisms that were developing during the period.’567 Amy, from 1895 in India, was caught up in all of this. However, though she was not directly involved in Indian politics, she was a part of a colonial power that over the course of time released its hold on the situation. India, since 1947 an independent nation, now in this 21st century is a country with economic power to reckon with and on a military scale one of the world’s superpowers with nuclear capacity. Indian IT professionals are sought all over the world and in the last few years a successful space programme has been in operation. Amy lived in India during the first half of the 20th century. She knew the real India, she knew the habits of the people among whom she lived, she knew the Tamil language, and she saw deeper, she saw the real thinker. ‘The thinker after the unknown God, with his wistful eyes […] and we cannot help loving as we look.’ She really loved the country and the Indian people. ‘We see the spirit of the old land there; and it wins us and holds us, and makes it a joy to be here to live for India.’568
566. Cf. Wikipedia, List of princely states of British India, accessed 30 November 2016.
567. D.B. Daughrity, Bishop Stephen Neill. From Edinburg to South India, American University Studies (AUS) series VII, vol. 267 (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008), 1.
568. Lotus Buds, 89.
How to cite: Kommers, J. (Hans), 2017, ‘India at the time Amy arrived’, in Triumphant Love: The contextual, creative and strategic missionary work of Amy Beatrice Carmichael in south India, pp. 155–166, AOSIS, Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2017.tl41.08
Just 200 years ago, it was the opposite way around. For many British government officials, traders and missionaries in the 19th century, all roads led to India. When in 1895 Amy arrived in India, the British Queen Victoria had as empress reigned over India since 1876.
India’s history is a fascinating one, especially the history of Christianity in India, since, as many believe, the apostle Thomas set foot on its soil. ‘For India is quick to recognize the footprints of the Divine.’569 The arrival of Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese in Calicut in 1498 and the conquest of Goa in 1510 inaugurated the Roman Catholic mission enterprise in India, under the royal patronage system.570 After the peace of Westphalia in 1648 the Protestant missionary obligation awakened. Lutheran missionaries under the patronage of the Danish King started in Tranquebar (Tarangambadi), in Tamil Nadu in 1706 and at the end of that century William Carey arrived in Serampore, a Danish settlement near Calcutta, in 1793.
India, on the brink of the 20th century, was at home in two worlds, a world of its own, where life was going on as it had for centuries, and at the same time a world open to the wider world in which situations were changing radically. Traders of the East India Company (EIC) discovered that there was a valuable market for high-quality opium in China and they transported it from Bengal (Bangladesh) to China and sold it at great profit. By the 1800s this trade had run so high that it became a problem in China and they started to stop the opium traders, which resulted in the first Opium War. Britain ‘won’ this war and under the Nanking Treaty, signed in 1842, China was forced to allow foreigners to live and work in five south-eastern cities. The EIC got the monopoly of English trade with the ‘Indies’ for the countries China, India and Indonesia in December 1599 from Queen Elizabeth I. The Anglicans did not have enough chaplains for the various settlements and then the Lutherans were ready to serve under the Anglican Church. With the arrival of Christian Friedrich Schwartz (1724–1798) the first Lutheran missionary entered India in Tranquebar.
Since the EIC had been granted royal charter in 1600 many British settled in India; the number increased when the British took over power in the whole country, and many soldiers and government officials with their families settled all over the country. After the ban on mission work was lifted in 1813, many missionaries from various denominations entered the country. In his second volume of The History of the Church Missionary Society, covering the period 1849–1872, Eugene Stock devotes full 232 pages to the work of the Gospel in India and Ceylon, and the remaining 217 pages to all other countries in the world.
The EIC opposed the missionaries whom they accused of imposing the Christian faith on the native population. Around 1793, William Wilberforce ‘regarded the British abuse of the Indians as “next to the Slave Trade”, the fullest blot of the moral character of our country’. Wilberforce ‘referred tenderly to the East Indians as our fellow-subjects’ (nay, they even stand towards us in the closer relation of our tenants). He denounced the EIC’s reprehensible refusal to lift a finger ‘to enlighten and reform them’ while they suffered ‘under the grossest, the darkest, and the most depraving system of idolatrous superstition that almost ever existed upon earth’.571
At first, it was trade, and not territory, but gradually it changed and the EIC was chartered. It controlled and administered British territory in India up until 1857, the year of the Sepoy Mutiny. It was an entity organised around profit in trade and was originally much opposed to missionary work. British rule in India had originated in trade. ‘The gentlemen of the EIC had not originally intended to
569. Ploughed Under, 158.
570. The Patroado was an arrangement between the Holy See in Rome and the Kingdom (later Republic) of Portugal.
571. Metaxas, Amazing Grace, 227.
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govern India, but merely to make money there.’572 One of the most important chaplains sent out by the EIC was Henry Martyn, who arrived in Calcutta in 1787.573 The great break in British rule in India came with the mutiny of 1875. Although localised in the north of India, it shook the structures of British rule to their foundations, and resulted in the assumption of direct rule by the British government.
By the 1780s, Anglican evangelicals had begun to find their way to India as chaplains to the EIC. Especially the evangelical campaigner William Wilberforce sought government patronage for mission work.574 The British rule created a way of life among the Westerners. An air of superiority and selfassertiveness among the British grew with the years. Ladies affected the airs of grand dames. They had power, as Elliot records:
Power corrupts. It corrupted soldiers, officials, planters, and their wives and children. It corrupted missionaries. It was in this Britain’s ‘rightful’ empire for nearly three hundred years – in its later phase Rudyard Kipling’s romantic and picturesque India – that Amy Carmichael came.575 The missionaries were well cared for; the whole mission community was backed by the British government and its military. For missionaries there were still many challenges. Education and medical care was non-existent for the very poor. The Indian upper class had many prejudices, which prevented missionaries from associating with high-caste people. For men it was impossible to approach Indian women with either the gospel or medical care. Amy read and listened a lot when she was in India and often there was a prayer in her heart that once the Lord would reveal his glory in this country:
And the heart breaks into the old, old cry, Oh that Thou wouldest rend the heavens, that Thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at Thy presence! Most righteous God, o God of Love, so let it be.576
Sorrow and sunshine
At the height of British rule in India, Amy, as one of ‘the daughters of the ruling race’, sailed to India. Physically frail, mentally alert and spiritually indomitable, with a serious head on her young shoulders, 22-year-old Amy arrived in Madras (Chennai) and crossed the threshold of India on 09 November 1895. She had gone with a heart of conviction, and – not foreseen at the time she went – a one-way ticket for making it reality, going in 1951 from India to heaven. Amy did not need a long answer when asked for what reason she was in this country. ‘I am here on business for my King.’577 Soon after her arrival, she contracted dengue fever, a dangerous virus that causes a skin rash, joint pains, fever and headaches, which laid her low for a period of time. She was sent to a more healthful place to recuperate. One friend came to visit her there and said, ‘You look fresh as a daisy.’ It was just the opposite: her temperature was 105 and, in her own words, she felt ‘wormly’.578 She had the inclination for self-pity, but in her own words:
572. See J. Morris, Heavens Command (Westminster: Penguin Books, 1979), 72.
573. Henry Martin (1781–1812). See B. Eaton, Letters to Lydia (Cornwall: Hypatia Publications Ltd, 2005).
574. See Seton, Western Daughters in Eastern Lands, 3–6.
575. In A Chance to Die, 88.
576. Ploughed Under, 120.
577. This she wrote in W.Y. Fullerton, At the Sixtieth Milestone. Incidents of the Journey (London: Marshall Brothers, 1917). The book is in the Dohnavur library.
[O ]f all things on earth self-pity is, I think, the most insidious and most pernicious. God is to us a God of Deliverances. We need not to be consumed by self-pity.579 There is a feeling (I can only call it worminess) that can come especially in the night. All the fight seems to be drained out of you, and all power to endure. It is really a very horrid feeling, but the word of our wonderful God is equal to anything - even to this. Last night, through the sense of oppression and worminess, came this: Fear not, thou worm! Truly it was quite startling. It was so exactly right. There was no smooth pretence that things were not what they were. They were wormy. I was wormy. Well then, Fear not, thou worm! Our God meets us just there where we are. But He does not leave us there. There is a power in the word of a King to effects what it commands. In the Fear not of our God, repeated from Genesis to Revelation, there is power to give us just what we lack at that moment. Rotherham translates that verse: ‘For I, thy God, am firmly grasping thy right hand … am saying unto thee, Do not fear. I have become thy helper. Do not fear, thou worm’. Do not fear, but sing. Praise the Lord upon earth … beasts and all cattle: WORMS (Ps 148:7–10, BCP).580 In the CMS house in Madras she heard a story of a Muslim girl who wanted to become a Christian. The story that girl wrote to her parents was very interesting and with a happy ending. For Amy this was toying with the truth:
Does God wish His people to be ‘encouraged’ in this way? […] At that night I resolved that if ever I had to write a story I would not change one word to please anybody. I would not ‘make – up’ however much more interesting a made-up tale might be. God helping me I would be very careful about truth.581 She also saw that there were few conversions. Was it because Muslims and unconverted Christians were used as teachers?:
This became a heavy burden to me. A word came to her from Ezra, ‘Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted off’? To men who were so much her seniors in goodness as in years, even they were not to be accounted of in comparison with Him who had long ago spoken so solemnly through the book of Ezra about the kind of builders who alone could build the temple.
This would not have happened in Japan. There, nobody would ask a Buddhist to build a house for the Lord. The truth was inescapable. ‘At last I took courage and spoke.’582 ‘Pray that my life may be all Alleluia and obedience’, a French missionary once said.583
She is known to have had a buoyant spirit, been a little bit headstrong and sure of the promises of God. For her God’s grace was sufficient. It was here in India that she worked out her vision with determination, serving God and breaking fresh ground in reaching the lost through a wide-ranging and creative project. Where the millions were looking for the meaning of life, Amy would see them looking for the experience of being alive in Christ Jesus. She felt surrounded by millions living in darkness, but for her it was not a threat. She knew whom had sent her, and that in him she had victory and in the very end all will kneel before the king of kings. Christ would not be overcome by the darkness. For her it was to stand out from the darkness around to be noticed. The word ‘impossible’ had ceased to exist for her, for she saw barriers as surmountable objects for they had the divine promise to mount up with eagles. She would become the founder of the DF, located in the south of India. Her roles during the uninterrupted 55 years she would be in India were as Amma (mother), missionary, preacher, author and intercessor.
579. Amma’s Book, 43.
580. Whispers of His Power, 05 June 124.
581. Amma’s Book, 41.
582. Amma’s Book, 43.
583. Charles Eugène de Foucald (1859–1916).
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Her great aim was to lift up Jesus Christ, and so winsomely did she do this that her influence extended far beyond the southern Indian hemisphere. She believed herself to have been commissioned for this work by the suffering Son of Man, kneeling in Gethsemane. Faithful to him she would stay the rest of her life in Dohnavur, where in 1951 she was laid to rest. The work in Dohnavur continues, and that gives us in this 21st century a deep appreciation of what Christian life really means.
A world of fashionable poses
‘India is a complex land, and her people are not like the open page of a book, to be read at a glance.’584 It is home to the Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires. The Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. The first impressions India gave Amy were the hardship and discomfort of men and women. A country where all the energy of men and women was expended in the arduous business of keeping alive. The very deep problems of human society could be touched daily. The universal corruption and profligacy of times due to the sin of men has extended its baneful influence and destructive poison all through the religious system Amy met in India. The danger of famine and pestilence was never far away. There could never be remission for more than the briefest period from the daily drudgery of toil. In short, it was always a strange mixture of splendour and squalor. The poverty could strike the newcomer like a blow and another time the beauty of the flowers and the flowering trees burdening the air with fragrance captured the eye. She could see the elderly people and was shocked one day when she saw an old lady ‘stripped of all’. ‘God had meant her to have better when he made her,’ she thought.
Missionaries often saw that some Indians were converted, but that they had no liberty and continuing power:
The secret of failure everywhere is the neglect of private communion with God. India lives too public a life to have a deep Christianity. Indian Christians will have to alter many of their customs before they get deeper. These were the findings of the well-known Tinnevelly missionary Thomas Walker.585 The necessity of living made man creative; joy in life spilled over and clothed the materials of living in beauty. However, this beauty persisted because it was functional, as having an inner relation to the needs of the people and to what they want to express. The scene at the village well in the early morning, as the women came out in their many-coloured saris, gracefully carrying their brass water pots on their hips, was one of scintillating beauty. The labour, however, was hard. Life was tolerable for the farmers and for those who had their own piece of land. The first year, she honestly writes, were not very easy for her. Deep a heavenly voice spoke in her heart: ‘see in it a chance to die’.586
India is the seventh largest country by geographical area, the second most populous country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world. Amy did not involve herself in political issues, but during her work she was confronted by the unscrupulous ways the court system functioned:
Nothing is more wretched than a Court case. The scales are weighted beforehand. Anything may happen. ‘You haven’t a chance in a thousand, for you have to fight with clean weapons and they are free to fight with poisoned weapons’, said an Indian Christian lawyer to one who was forced to go to court in defence of a helpless girl.587
584. The Widow of the Jewels, 12.
585. Walker of Tinnevelly, 247.
586. Thou Givest … They Gather, 179.
587. This One Thing, 92.
She underlined this sentence: ‘The institution of the jury is wholly out of place in India, and is most noxious’.588 In Amy’s time in India evidence in court was a thing bought and sold. The practice of ‘himsa’ (torture) was feared by all who came in the hands of the police:
Yet the word ‘himsa’ is a word which sends shivers of fear down the spine of those who hear it. To this day [Hopkins wrote the book in 1938], it is one of the hidden sores of India, forbidden by authority, yet carried on in secret. It is torture for the purpose of extracting false evidence, and takes many forms.589 Cursed by wicked devices a person was doomed to court life and the end was death. A lot of injustice was done to persons under ‘himsa’. In the case of Raj, the brigand chief, Amy saw the destructive influence of ‘himsa’. ‘Surely, then, there is hope, that this wretched thing in all its forms, blackmail included, will soon be effectively dealt with, this cancer of the country wholly eradicated.’590
Religion: Carved in stone
Almost inextricably religion is woven into the cultural setting of India. The Hindu ideology as well as the social system affect every area of life and thought. Hinduism espouses the division of people into hierarchically placed groups, the ‘castes’.591 In Amy’s time from the high castes, like the Brahmin, to the very low Dalits, ‘the untouchables’, everyone had to follow the ordained caste professions and marry only within their caste through arranged marriages. This kind of social structure has oppressed the Indian people for a very long time. ‘Caste system really ruined India more than a thousand tsunamis could have done.’592
Amy had learned a lot about Hindu life from the work of Monier Williams (1819–1899), a professor in Sanskrit at Oxford University who studied, documented and published much about Asian languages. Before going to Oxford, he taught at the EIC College in Bombay. Several times in her work Amy refers to Williams.593 ‘Each nation has its gift. India’s is the gift of an intensely religious nature.’594 India is known as birthplace of many religions but Hinduism is the most significant one. We can say that India is Hindu and the south ‘is manifestly religious. The huge temples attest the fact.’595 For more than 2000 years, Hinduism had held the heart of India. The first story has no word record. It lies carved in stone by
588. In A.L. Carthill, The Company of Cain (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood, 1929). Amy got this book in 1929 and wrote on the front page: ‘Many things which we read are true in this book’. The book is in the Dohnavur library.
589. Cf. H.A.E. Hopkins, Raj The Dacoit (London: Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd, 1938), 36. Henry Martin said as the inner world of India began to unfold before him: ‘I shuddered as if in the dominions of the prince of darkness. The fiends of darkness seem to sit in sullen repose in this land’ (Hopkins, Raj The Dacoit, 85).
590. Raj, Brigand Chief, 306.
591. A lot is written about the caste system in India. See G.S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 2000); J. Keay, India. A History: From the Earliest Civilisations to the Boom of the Twenty-first Century (London: Harper Press, 2010), 52–55, 145, 189, 279, 432, 586–587.
592. In Y. Davuri, ‘Caste and Christianity: A Study of Caste System in the Churches of Guntur District of Andrah Pradesh’ (unpublished thesis, NTC, 2005), 1. See Matthews, ‘The Theological Contributions of Amy Carmichael’, note 13, 18.
593. In Things As They Are, 80, 92.
594. Lilavati Singh in her address at Allegheny College ad Meadville, Pennsylvania, on the 50th anniversary of Bishop Thoburn’s going to India in 1859. In Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade, 95.
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hands ages ago gone to dust. Sherwood Eddy, who knew Amy personally, came to the conclusion when speaking about Hinduism in his time that this religion contained many spiritual values; it had almost unlimited powers of assimilation, but it sadly lacked in the power of eliminating the grossest evils. Only Christianity can tear up the whole from the lowest depths.596 ‘India is a cabinet of drawers, and secret drawers.’597
Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, the religious situation in India is as follows: the total population in India is 1 028 610 328 of which 85% follows the Hindu religion and tradition. In Tamil Nadu, the province where Dohnavur is situated, the Hindu population is even higher than the average, 88%.598 From about the 12th to the 18th century, a considerable part of India was subject to Muslim rule. With few exceptions, Muslim rulers were intolerant of Hinduism and they considered it their religious duty to encourage the conversion of large sections of their Hindu subjects to Islam. Often such change of faith was made at the point of the sword, and not always in consequence of a change of convictions. On the eve of Independence, they successfully split the subcontinent of India into the new state of Pakistan and what is known now as India. The division became effective on the principle of religion. Almost the first thing the national government did was to give up the principle of communal representation and actively discourage the growth of purely communal organisations and institutions. Free India sets for itself the ideal of a secular state, but as the greater majority professes Hinduism, it is still regarded as a Hindu state.
We write about these issues trying to look through the eyes of Amy, as she saw the things in south India in her time, as the present situation may be completely different.
Hindu leaders take the position that Christian evangelistic work may be tolerated if the intention is to convert and not to proselytise. According to Paul Devanandan, this concession is suggested and based on two assumptions: that genuine conversions are very few and far between and that proselytism is associated with unworthy motives and unfair methods.599 As we will see, Amy, like Thomas G. Ragland and Thomas Walker, always stressed a genuine conversion, which as a result often meant complete separation from family, home and living place. In Overweights of Joy, there are two pages of references to this issue, and the outcome is that ‘no Hindu will ever be allowed to lead a consistent Christian life’. Christians are ‘out-casted’ from their Hindu homes and families. Someone said: ‘If anything is impossible under the sun, it is this.’600 Amy wrote this above the chapter ‘Entangled’ and concludes: ‘The seductive influence had worked. […] A coma settles upon the soul that, however sorely pressed, disobeys, and goes on disobeying.’ At the dawn of the 20th century, the time Amy started her work in India, caste feeling was very strong, especially in the kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin. So strong was the caste feeling that some said ‘caste is the religion of south India’. To convert a Hindu was nearly impossible. ‘Get his caste out of him? Can you? You would have to drain him of his life-blood first.’601 Nobody is wanted as a Christian in a Hindu family. A women told Amy:
596. Cf. Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade, 97.
597. Ploughed Under, 118.
598. These figures from 2012, in http://www.indiaonlinepages.com/population/hinu-in india.html.
599. In P.D. Devanandan, ‘The modern Hindu attitude toward Christian evangelism’, in J. Wietzke (ed.), 1987, P.D. Devanandan, Volume II, United Theological College, Bangalore, 5.
600. Overweights of Joy, 116–117.
I cannot live here and break my caste; if I break it I must go […] unless you will compromise. Compromise is the one open door back into the old home.602 It ‘may’ be possible for a boy to return home after his conversion, but for a girl never, and this has happened: the girl will be a total ‘wreck’ after several years. Here in India we ‘need more of Abraham’s type of faith’.603
To become a Christian and to live the Christian life for a Hindu is really a ‘fight’ and the only thing that helped them through is that ‘He endured as seeing Him who is invisible’. Amy talks about the ‘snare’ of Hinduism and refers to Pandita Râmabai at Agra. People see only ‘the dreams of delight’, but now, show me the dungeons underneath! A single voice is speaking from the dungeon underneath:
I beg of my Western sisters not to be satisfied with looking on the outside beauty of the grand philosophies, and not to be charmed with hearing the long and interesting discourses of our educated men, but to open the trap doors of the great monument of Hindu intellect, and enter into the dark cellars where they will see the real working of the philosophies which they admire so much.604 When a Hindu boy or girl wants to become a Christian, the community will try to withhold them, then they will scourge them, then when seeing someone does not give up the intention to become a Christian, they will beat their breasts in an abandonment of dismay, disgust and horror. ‘He has fallen into the pit.’605 If possible, they would punish in a severe way, locking up someone in a dark inner room, rubbing cayenne pepper into his or her eyes, etcetera.606 It was an open secret that many secret things were done in every village in India.607 When sin is exposed, it is drudged. ‘Here, nothing is too unseemly to discuss, life holds no sanctuary.’ Compared with a Christian country and expressed in Christian language, you cannot express what is really going on here. ‘The blackest words are too pale to paint even the faint undefined shadow of that strong contrast’s shape. […] Can we sing on and not care?’
‘Oh, if our brother’s blood cry out to us, how shall we meet Thee who hast loved us all, Thee whom we never loved, not loving Him?’608 She underlined the words of S. Pierce Carey who quoted William Carey:
No people can have more surrendered their reason. In business, they are not deficient, but in religion, they seem without understanding. However, people can hardly be better than their gods. They have made themselves idols after their own hearts. Hindus have not the fierceness of American Indians, but this is abundantly made up for by cunning and deceit. Moral rectitude makes no part of their religious system: no wonder, therefore that they are immersed in impurity.
Here Pierce Carey adds: ‘Perhaps, depression made him severe’, but in the margin, Amy wrote ‘No, he was merely being truthful’.609 In one of the books Amy read, she underlined a sentence of Mr
602. Things As They Are, 284–285.
603. Things As They Are, 285, 277, cf. 266: ‘To wreck a person completely, strychnine was often used’.
604. Overweights of Joy, 202.
605. Ploughed Under, 97.
606. Cf. Ploughed Under, 93; From The Forest, 19.
607. From The Forest, 23.
608. From The Forest, 210.
609. In S. Pierce Carey, William Carey (London: Hodder & Stoughton, n.d.). The book is in the Dohnavur library.
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Malabari who said about Hindu custom, ‘in human custom, caste is more potent in its secret persecutions than was the inquisition of Spain’.610 The Christian message, with its claim of complete surrender to Christ will always encounter fierce opposition of the living faith of non-Christian creeds. There is also the fear that the Christianisation of India will lead in the end to the rooting out of Indian culture. It must be granted today that Hindus form the major part of the Indian population, and that their culture is the most influential in national life. India is a country where an aspirant Christian has to cut every sacred tie to become a follower of Christ Jesus, and literally forsake parents, wife, and often children. It has to be preached there: ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house’. Family ties are one of the greatest hindrances for people in India to confess Jesus their Lord.
In the past 200 years, group accessions to Christianity have come from low-caste and outcaste Hindus. The idea of a transforming community is alien to the genius of Hinduism because of its basic belief about the nature of God as the eternal and the nature of man as essentially that of Brahman itself. There can, therefore, be no such community, as the church claims to be a community, where there is an inflow and outflow of personal influence, because the Holy Spirit provides the real bond of fellowship, who draws the members of the church together in communion with God as revealed in Christ Jesus. Christian missionary outreach and preaching invariably leads to a point where a decision is called for.