Itinerating work
Ole_link1
‘The dust shown – The whole of the actual never’
What Amy knew, heard and saw – she just could not describe everything that she had discovered. Some things she knew and saw had to be ‘covered with silence’.816 So many men ‘do the devil’s work today, branding on little innocent souls the very brand of hell’.
A few days ago we had a little child-wife here as a patient. She was ten or eleven, I think, just a scrap of creature, playing with a doll, and yet degraded unmentionably in mind ….. But oh, to think of the hundreds of these little girls! ….. It makes me feel literally sick.
Then Amy adds, ‘where the dotted lines come, there was written what cannot be printed’. With her book she appeals to the Western world, an appeal
[M ]eant for our comrades at home, but it may come back to India, and so we have spoken straight from our hearts to our Indian brothers here. Oh, brothers, rise, and in God’s Name fight; in His power fight till you win, for these, your own land’s little girls who never can fight for themselves.
Who can stop a system that has existed for ages and ages? In 1004 the great temple of the Chola king Rajaraja at Tanjore had attached to it 400 women of the temple, who ‘as servants of the gods [devadasis], were subsisting by dancing and music and involved in the oldest profession in the world’.817
814. Things As They Are, 233.
815. Thomas Walker in his explanation of Acts 15:19–20, 22–29, in Missionary Ideals, Missionary Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (3rd edn., London: IVF, 1950), 90–91.
816. Things As They Are, 135.
817. Things As They Are, 226, 229, 234.
Devadasi or temple slave:
Devadasi is an institutionalized system of exploitation of women in many parts of India. It is actually religiously sanctioned prostitution of economically and socially deprived women. These women are mostly untouchables, lower castes or socially deprived women that are exploited by feudal lords, high caste superior men as well the priest of that arena. This system inherits the concept of exploitation of a social and economic section of society by upper class people. The priests who have a strong hold on the mind of innocent people and have a right to dictate their way of life use their power to religiously sanction prostitution under the name of ‘sacred tradition’. Devadasi means gods servant in which young pre-pubertal girls are given away or married off to a local deity of the village or that particular area. They are not allowed to marry or keep any children. She serves the temple, priest and the local feudal lords in every manner, and even other men with money and power in that area. The service which she provides to priest and other men is considered equal to the service of god. She has no way to escape and even if she escapes society will not accept her. The first legal step to outlaw the Devadasi system dates back to the 1934 Bombay Devadasi Protection Act. This act pertained to the Bombay province as it existed in the British Raj. The Bombay Devadasi Protection Act made dedication of women illegal. According to this act marriage by a Devadasi was to be considered lawful and valid, and the children from such a wedlock were to be considered lawful and valid and the children from such wedlock were to be treated as legitimate. The Act laid down grounds for punitive action that could be taken against any person or persons found to be involved in dedications, except the woman who was being dedicated. Those found guilty of such acts could face a year’s imprisonment, a fine or both. The 1934 Act provided rules to protect the interests of the Devadasis. Whenever there was a dispute over ownership of land involving a Devadasi, the local Collector was expected to intervene. In 1947, the year of independence, the Madras Devadasi Prevention of Dedication Act outlawed dedication in the southern Madras Presidency.818 The devadasi system was once considered as a holy calling but further study shows that becoming a devadasi is a direct path to sexual exploitation. Amy knew what was happening and how the young girls were trafficked from one place to another:
Through our open windows in festival times come the glimmer of its lights and the sound of its tom-toms. From the rocks above we can count five or six temple towers, each the centre of a system stretching to the east where by the sea great temples rise; and over the mountains to the west where, in the beautiful Travancore country, things go on that are never told in books; and south, to Ceylon, connected by invisible lines across the sea with this same traffic; and to the north how far only God and the good angels and the bad demons know. So even here we cannot ever forget why we are in India, and our forest life is in its way as much part of the warfare of life as any other part.819 All these things happened to women and young girls and are ‘so often seen in a land where childhood ends almost as soon as it begins’.820 Amy tried to awaken the people in India and abroad:
But this I do know, and do mean it with an intensity I know not how to express, that this custom of infant marriage and child marriage, whether to the 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.821
818. http://amara.org/v/31X: Deva or male deity, devi or female deity. See also Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘Devadasis, girls ceremonially married to the deity in the temple, an ancient ritual which degenerated into prostitution’. See http://www.irelandempire.ie/schools/India_Education_Carmichael.html
819. From the Forest, 100.
820. The Continuation of a Story, 37.
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For Amy it was clear, that whatever people might think about this devadasi system, for her it was all the same: immorality under the shelter of religion and custom. She knew that the dedication ceremony, Pottukattu, resembled a marriage ceremony, and that ultimately a devadasi is forced into prostitution. William Borden on his journey through India in 1914 saw from nearby something of Hindu worship and practices in Madurai:
All the large temples we have seen and innumerable small shrines are dedicated to the worship of Siva. You probably know something about this already – but if you don’t I can’t tell you, as it is too awful. The fact that this vile teaching is the most universal and popular thing in Hinduism is enough to offset everything that Hinduism may have done for the people, if it has done anything but degrade them. It makes me tired to have a person who knows little or nothing about it say that these people are as well off with their religion as we are with ours, or rather that theirs is as good as ours. Five minutes’ explanation of facts in any one of a dozen temples I have visited would disillusion such a person. He would not put in plainer language the things these temples stand for – the deification of lust, the actual worship of symbols of vice, and the slavery of tens of thousands of women and girls ‘married to the gods’.822 It was very, very difficult for Amy to get a finger behind this system and to get knowledge of what was really happening with the children in the temples. Even government officials found it difficult ‘to discover or verify facts’. The moment a government official ‘walks down an Indian street every blind, metaphorically speaking, is drawn, and no man ever sees behind those blinds’. Bills were framed but none became law. ‘The powers against it proved too strong. […] Those who know India know why’.823 In one of the books in the Dohnavur library, I found Amy’s thoughts about this gross evil in a poem by her hand, and next to it, she wrote: ‘Before Things As They Are was written’:
I cried and said, O God, my words are cold! The frosted frond of fern or feathery palm on whitened window wrought, as near to burning are, as these my words;
Oh that they were as flames.
God answer me. Thou shalt have words. But at this price, that thou must first be burnt, burnt by red embers from a secret fire, scorched by fierce heats and withering winds that sweep through all thy being, carrying thee afar from old delights.
Doth not the ardent fire consume the mountain’s heart before the flow of fervent lava? Wouldst thou easefully, as from cool pleasant fountains flow in fire?
Say, can thy heart endure, or can thy hands be strong In the day that I shall deal with thee? For first the iron must enter thine own soul. And wound and brand it, scarring awful lines indelibly upon it, and a hand resistless in a tender terribleness.
Must thoroughly purge it, fashioning its pain to power that leaps in fire.
Not otherwise, and by no lighter touch are fire-words wrought.
Amy knew the Hindu culture very well and that this terrible practice of selling children into temple prostitution was a devilish influence upon the culture. Originally this practice was a foreign element introduced by a different kingdom that once invaded India. She gives us the reason why she is writing upon these things:
It is not allowed in the Vedas (ancient sacred books). It is like a parasite, which has settled upon the bough of some noble forest-tree – on it, but not of it. The parasite has gripped the bough with strong and interlacing roots; but it is not the bough. […] The true India is sensitive and very gentle. There is a wisdom in its ways, none the less wise because it is not the wisdom of the West. This spirit which traffics in children is callous and fierce as a ravening beast; and its wisdom descends not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish […] And this spirit,
822. H. Taylor, Borden of Yale, rev. D. Bentley-Taylor (London: CIM, 1953) 20.
823. In Nor Scrip, 8. alien to the land, has settled upon it, and made itself at home in it, and so become a part of it that nothing but the touch of God: ‘Touch the mountains, and they shall smoke’. That is why we write. For we write for those who believe in prayer – not in the emasculated modern sense, but in the old Hebrew sense, deep as the other is shallow.824 It was difficult for Amy to conduct her enquiry and go ‘into the polluted places’. What happened with the girls and women she said in a short sentence: ‘It is that evil which defiles a woman.’825 For Helen Barrett Montgomery ‘this connection of religion with immorality is one of the most cruel wrongs against womanhood of India’.826 All these things were unknown to many missionaries and government officials. When they were known, many turned a blind eye, turned themselves into ostriches mentally and ignored them completely. In 1834 the missionary Anthony Norris Groves visited a German couple, named Weibrecht, who were running a school in the neighbourhood of Calcutta. The Weitbrechts were ‘very concerned about the plight of little girls sold into a life of ritual prostitution, wondering if they should establish an orphanage’.827 Amy did not turn aside, and her books still show signs of intense study on this subject. In her bookcase are some books from or about Pandita Ramabai.828 Ramabai read the Hindu Vedas, Upanisads and the Dharmashastras and discovered the Hindu view about women, according to their sacred books. She read that all Hindu pundits and people agreed on two things: all women are bad, worse than demons as unholy as untrue, and they cannot get moksha or salvation. The only hope for them was to get salvation through the worship of their husbands. A woman had no right to study the Vedas. Ramabai was determined to change the miserable condition of women.
Of many of these issues Amy wrote about in Things As They Are and Lotus Buds.829 The first book is called a ‘battle book’ by Amy, written from the battlefield where the fighting is not ‘pretty play but stern reality’.830 It is an honest book, causing much opposition, but the book had to be written as it was, because many in India and the Western world were according to her ‘systematically misinformed’.831 She was not believed, even by missionaries, and remarks as ‘No such children in this city’, ‘Have you seen a myth?’ or ‘Temple children are creations of an imagination’832 reached her. It would not be possible for her to bring about any change in a system already ages old, and she was ‘just knocking her head against a rock’.833 Amy continued and, little by little, it began to dawn what really was going on in the temples. Friends from the American Madura Mission and people of the ICS also
824. Lotus Buds, 89 and 90.
825. Lotus Buds, 285.
826. Barrett Montgomery, Western Women in Eastern Lands, 66.
827. In Dann, Father of Faith Missions, 221.
828. Pandita Ramabai Dongre (1858–1922). Pandita: the name for a female Sanskrit scholar.
829. Published in 1903 and 1909.
830. Things As They Are, 4.
831. Sharpe, ‘The Legacy of Amy Carmichael’.
832. The Continuation of a Story, 5.
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came with evidence, which proved the reality of the things Amy had revealed. It was Pandita Ramabai herself who wrote that what was written in Things As They Are is true:
I can honestly corroborate everything said in regard to the religious and social life of the Hindus. I came from that part of the country, and I am very glad that the book has succeeded in bringing the truth to light.834 Nearly 20 years later Katherine Mayo would call the work of Amy in Dohnavur ‘extra-ordinary’ and mention Lotus Buds and Things As They Are as ‘too-reticent’.835 In Amy’s bookcase, I found Gairi R. Banerjee’s Sex Delinquent Women and their Rehabilitation.836 Amy knew everything about the evil practices and did not turn aside. She longed to help:
Oh to care, and oh for the power to make others care, not less but far, far more! Care till our eyes do fail with tears for the destruction of the daughters of our people!837 It was impossible for Amy to write the full story of what was happening with the children.838 So deeply was she hurt by the fate of these children, ‘perverted at the very spring of being’, that it was ‘the shame that burns, the wrong that stings us as we are forced to regard it’. It is ‘awful perversion of sweet to bitter, pure to vile, this deliberate defacement of the Lord’s image in the soul of an innocent child’.839 The scope of her book is this: that ‘it touches the Dust, but its purpose goes deeper, stretches wider, has to do with the Actual and our relation to it’.840 Revealing what was happening to the children in the temples was as if a stone had been thrown straight at a mirror. Amy saw the children as God’s creatures, and not meant for a life in shame and moral destruction:
To be a temple child means cruelty. It means a worse thing, even the turning of that child’s mind, from all that is good to all that is bad: it means killing the soul. And of all killings in the whole world, that is the worst.841
834. In confirmatory notes of Things As They Are, VIII.
835. In Mayo, Mother India, 53. Mayo writes straightforwardly about the consequences of child marriages and all the physical damages for these girls and about the sexual behaviour sanctioned in Hindu religion. Mayo quotes a surgeon who said to her, ‘For the vast majority of women here, marriage is a physical tragedy’ (p. 60). It was discussed in 1922 in the Legislative Assembly to raise the age at which a girl was allowed to marry, because due to the very early marriages of girls it was estimated ‘that in India each generation sees the death of 3.200.000 mothers in the agonies of childbirth’ (p. 49).
836. Research from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay.
837. Things As They Are, 221.
838. ‘Once more we repeat it, to write the whole fact is impossible’ (Lotus Buds, 291).
839. The Continuation of a Story, 10.
840. Things As They Are, 3.
841. From the Forest, 87. Amy was very reluctant to speak plainly about what happened with little girls; Katherine Mayo however used plain speech in revealing the living facts as they were in the 1920s in India. In her Mother India (Appendix, pp. 365–366) she gives the shocking outcome of medical evidence brought to the floor of the Indian Legislative Assembly of 1922. The evidence from the medical research was compiled in 1891, but still remained beyond challenge in 1922. In the report, evidence from women’s hospitals goes as follows: A. (Aged 9) Day after marriage. Left femur dislocated, pelvis crushed out of shape, flesh hanging in shreds; B. (Aged 10) Unable to stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated; C. (Aged 9) So completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair; E. (Aged about 9) Lower limbs completely paralysed; G. (Aged about 10) Very weak from loss of blood. Stated that great violence had been done to her, in an unnatural way; I. (Aged about 7) Living with husband. Died in great agony after three days; M. (Aged about 10) Crawled to the hospital on her hands and knees. Has never been able to stand erect since her marriage. This is just some evidence from the list presented. ‘The practice of early marriage is not confined to any province or class of society, but is practically a universal custom in India’, in Young India, 09 September 1926, 318 (quoted in Mayo, Mother India, 63).
One day Amy saw a little child with two men on the road, and she writes:
I was coming home from work a few evenings ago when I met two men and a child. They were Caste men in flowing white scarves – dignified, educated men. But the child? She glanced up at me, smiled, and salaamed. Then I remembered her; I had seen her before in her own home. These men belonged to her village. What were they doing with her? Then a sudden fear shot through me, and I looked at the men, and they laughed. ‘We are taking her to the temple there’, and they pointed across through the trees, ‘to marry her to the god’. It all passed in a moment. One of them caught her hand, and they went on. I stood looking after them – just looking. The child turned once and waved her little hand to me. Then the trees came between.842 Amy knew that the little one would join the temple women who danced and sang in processions and feasts. In a way that shocks us Amy describes her agony at seeing an innocent girl drawn into these evil practices. She gives us a pathetic picture of a sweet little Hindu girl, a child she knew, very affectionate and petulant. One day she had sung some Christian verses to her and the little woman with a pout replied in the Indian sing-song manner with an Indian psalm, declaring that she liked hers best, as her religion had been in existence hundreds of years before that of Amy.843
It is often suggested, that Amy herself was not fully aware of what was really going on with the girls and what was done with them and what they suffered. Elliot even says that she never fully knew the details of sex. I oppose this idea. Amy was fully aware! She withheld from writing the full truth and the details due to her upbringing in a time when people were of the opinion that it would be inappropriate to write openly about things referring to sexual issues. Also, too shocked by what she heard from the victims, she thought it not proper and wise to give all the details. Amy followed the ethical code of her time, but she knew everything:
There is an old, old man living near here, with a little wife of ten or eleven. […] Our present cook’s little girl, nine years old, has lately been married to a man who has had already two wives. In each of these cases, as in each I have mentioned, marriage means marriage, not just betrothal, as so many fondly imagine. Only today I heard of one who died in what the nurse who attended her described as ‘simple agony’. […] What must it be to those little girls, so little, so pitifully little, and unequal to it all. What must it be to these childish things to live on through it day by day, with, in some cases, nothing to hope for till kindly death comes and opens the door, the one door of escape they know, and the tortured body dies? And someone says, ‘the girl is dead, take the corpse out to the burning ground’. Then they take it up, gently perhaps. But oh, the relief of remembering it! It does not matter now. Nothing matters any more. Little dead wives cannot feel.844 Looking at the lotus buds floating on the water in a temple pool, she saw in them the young innocent faces of the children who were sacred to the gods. It flashed through her mind: ‘All souls are Mine’! Now ‘an alien power has possessed them, counted them his for so many generations, that we have almost acquiesced in the shameful confiscation’. ‘The children of the temples of South India are His – His and not another’s.’ Now Amy saw that it was her work ‘to go forth with the Owner Himself to claim His own
842. Things As They Are, 217–218.
843. Things As They Are, 219–220.
844. Things As They Are, 230 and 231.
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possession. There is hope in the thought, and confidence and the purest inspiration’.845 That moment the following song sang through her846:
Drop Thy still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.
Saving these children is ‘temple service versus Christianity’. Due to the wealth of the temples, they could offer huge sums of money and this persuaded many a mother to hand over her child to the temple. Saving these children was for Amy ‘work which our Father had given us to do’.847
The devadasi system is – according to Amy – ‘something alien to the old life of the people’. It is not allowed in the Védas (ancient sacred books). ‘It is like a parasite which has settled upon the bough of some noble forest tree – on it, but not of it.’848 Even the high-minded Hindu ‘revolts from the degradation and pollution of this travesty of religion, and will abolish it where he can’.849 The temples are polluted places, the evil, which she reveals and describes in her books, is the evil in novels and newspapers people read for their own amusement. ‘It is the destroying evil that we have refused so much. […] It is that evil that defiles a woman’.850 Temple women were defending this system, they were raised in this system from infancy and had not had any chance to escape from this system.
‘The Traffic is worked upon religious lines; and so in trying to save the children we have to contend with the perverted religious sense.’ Amy saw this system like a net spread over the country, ‘and the net is alive: you can feel it’.851 It has been said, that Amy, due to her Victorian upbringing, knew nothing or very little about the sexual exploitation of the girls in the temples, but she knew about the practice of ‘the oldest profession in the world’852. Because temple women were brought to the temple when they were very young, even as babies, ‘she is taught all evil and trained to think it is good’. She lives ‘along lines which lead far away from the freedom and innocence of childhood’.853 Married to the gods means they are tied or, as the Tamil idiom has it, ‘tied to the stone’. ‘Oh, she is tied indeed, tied with ropes Satan twisted in his cruellest hour in hell!’854 When Amy saw these children in danger, she thought: ‘Poor little allunconscious illustration of India’s need of God. […] God pity them; for, like those of old, they do not know what they do.’855
845. Lotus Buds, 4.
846. Lotus Buds, 5.
847. Nor Scrip, 9.
848. Lotus Buds, 89.
849. Lotus Buds, 254.
850. Lotus Buds, 285.
851. Lotus Buds, 250. See ‘The Secret Traffic’, in Lotus Buds (Chapter XXVII, pp. 249–254).
852. Lotus Buds, 257.
853. Lotus Buds, 261.
854. Things As They Are, 218.
855. Lotus Buds, 338 and 339.
This rescue work was very trying and opposition was severe. It demanded everything from her. When after many difficulties a little child was saved in Dohnavur it was often difficult to keep the little one alive. Babies were sometimes but a few days old, some of them seriously ill and all needed appropriate food. Indian women were not easily inclined to breastfeed a child that was not theirs, and babies need mother’s milk. Amy managed to find some who were willing, but it remained every time difficult to get the right help. God’s hand was over the nurseries. Once she wrote:
Yes, God’s Glory is our plea, highest, strongest, most impelling and enduring of all pleas. But oh, by the thoughts of the myriads who are passing, by the thought of the Coming of the Lord, by the infinite realities of life and death, heaven and hell, by our Saviour’s cross and Passion, we plead with all those who love Him, but who have not considered these things yet, consider them now! […] Do you think we are writing like this because we are discouraged? No, we are not discouraged, except when sometimes we fear lest you should grow weary in prayer before the answer comes. This India is God’s India. This work is His. […] So, though we sympathise with everything that tends towards life and light in India, and rejoice with our brothers who bind sheaves, believing that though all is not genuine corn, some is, yet we feel compelled to give ourselves mainly to work of a character which, by its very nature, can never be popular.856 Just a few years before India got its independence, the system was still going on. Eddy describes the situation in 1945:
The servants of the gods, who subsist by dancing and music and the practice of ‘the oldest profession in the world’ are partly recruited by admissions and even purchases from other classes… The rise of the Caste and its euphemistic name seem to date from the 9th and 10th centuries. Inscriptions show that in the year 1004 the great Temple at Tanjore had attached to it, four hundred women of the Temple, who lived in free quarters in the four streets round it.857 Since India’s independence in 1947, legislation limited the activities of the devadasis and prohibited the traffic of children. The State Legislative Assembly in Madras passed legislation prohibiting the dedication of female infants to Hindu temples. Dr Mutthu Laksmi put forward in 1947 the Devadasi Act for implementation.858 This Act forbade the devadasi practice in the temples in the Southern Madras Presidency. This prohibition was extended in 1954 nationwide by the Central Government in Delhi. For the proponents of the system, it was keeping alive India’s very old venerable art and culture; those who wanted to do away with it talked of the dangers of this practice in which religion indirectly gave sanction to prostitution and child trafficking. The Bill passed in the India’s Parliament and made this system illegal. It took a long time to put it fully into effect but in another way, this kind of child abuse still flourishes in this 21st century.859 Since 1988 the devadasi practice has been forbidden all over India, but health and social workers think that in this second decade of the 20th century there are about 45 000 devadasis, so prostitution with its allied evils has not been ended by legislation.860 In common with most
856. Things As They Are, 302 and 288.
857. Eddy, Pathfinders of the World Missionary Crusade, 126.
858. Margaret Wilkinson one day visited her at Adayar in the south of Madras. The first thing that caught her attention in Laksmi’s room was a small photo of Amy hanging on her wall. Asked, why that photo was there, Laksmi answered that it was ‘through Amma, that she had first seen the temple women were a blot on her religion. After her study in Europe, she decided to seek election to the legislature in Madras. Her special concern was to see an Act passed which would really deal with the evil of the Devadasi system and put an end to the giving of children to temple houses’ (Wilkinson, At BBC Corner, 91).
859. Cf. Robbins, Not Forgetting to Sing, 152–153.
860. Cf. C.R. Kermorgant, Servants of the Goddess. The Modern Day Devadasi (India: Vintage Books, Random House, 2014).
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countries, also India still has problems with child abuse and child exploitation. In poor communities a succession of girl babies in a family is a disaster. These redundant daughters must be fed and later an appallingly expensive dowry must be paid to get them married. The government takes measures to stop infanticide but still it is difficult to stop this widespread problem.
The focus of the work in Dohnavur was the saving of the children, but continually women were in need of protection and shelter. Several of them were brought to Dohnavur. Here since 1937 about 40 women of mixed ages, of very mixed backgrounds and castes have lived together. All of them could tell stories, which shocked Amy and the others. Several of them were deserted wives, others were forced into prostitution and wanted to escape, and some had run away from home because there they were continually beaten and tortured, even in the presence of the children. It was not always easy to live together, because a few were totally undisciplined, usually illiterate, or rebellious or quarrelsome. In Dohnavur, the Place of Confidence was built for them in 1937 where they received love. Amy wrote:
I had a letter asking me if we really could possibly love these with whom life had dealt so hard that ‘broken things’ is the only word to describe them. […] Often things happen that drain human love dry. Nothing but the divine is any use of them. God give us Calvary love, love that cannot be tired out of loving, love that never says, ‘I have borne enough, done enough, suffered enough’. The agony of crucifixion could wring nothing from our Lord’s heart of love but the cry, ‘Father, forgive them’. Perhaps one has to reach the very end of one’s natural human love before one realizes what ocean depths of love were in that cry.861 This is one of the reasons why Amy wrote her books:
For we write for those who believe in prayer. […] We believe there is some connection between knowing and caring and praying, and what happens afterwards. Otherwise we should leave the darkness to cover the things that belong to the dark. […] We stand on the edge of the pit, and look down and tell what we have seen, urged by the longing within us that the Christians of England should pray.862 At that time newspapers like the Indian Times, the Christian Patriot of the south and the Bombay Guardian of the west reported about the existence of the evil and the need for its removal. The Indian Times wrote about the little ones being ‘steeped deep from their childhood’ in all that is most wrong.863 Amy never blamed the temple women for their immoral behaviour. These women did not choose this life:
Let us deal gently with the mishandled flower. Let hard words be restrained where the woman is concerned. Let it be remembered she is not responsible for being what she is.864 Secret India does not easily reveal what is really going on and few have ever felt the scorching fire of grief over children spoiled:
Some would have escaped if they could, but they could not, and they grew up to be like the gods whom they were forced to serve. These things would break our hearts if we did not believe that the God of gods looks upon souls not as we see them, debased because they never had a chance to grow up pure, but as they would have been if they had had a chance. But do you wonder that we burn?865
861. Fragments that Remain, 115: A note by B. Trehane about the ‘Place of Confidence’.
862. Lotus Buds, 90.
863. Cf. Lotus Buds, 274.
864. Lotus Buds, 284. Cf. too The Beginning of a Story, 8: ‘She did not choose the life. She was doomed to it from infancy, nothing else ever opened before her. She is the result of her environment, an environment for which she is not responsible.’
865. Windows, 41.
The driving power in Amy’s life was her whole-hearted love of Christ, which was inexorably translated into obedience to his will. For Amy it meant rescuing the most helpless; the children in great danger and need found in her a real mother. Amy saw the potential witnesses for Christ in India. Infuriated at what Satan was doing to these lovely children, Amy declared war. When God chose her location, the battle came. In India she fought many battles on her knees, risking her life on more than one occasion and facing arrest and imprisonment in order to snatch some pleading child from the jaws of defilement and destruction. People often wondered why she did not speak out openly about what was really happening to the children. Along with the reasons already mentioned, Amy followed Thomas Walker, who never wanted to talk about impure things. ‘Those unutterable things which were in his mind when he said briefly, “Better not”. These words “coloured” all his thinking. “They sacrifice to devils” said St. Paul’.866 In early mission work of Christian Schwartz and others they saw a growing number of young men joining the Christian faith, so the need to seek female converts continued to increase because men should have pious companions and because of the great influence of women at home, the vital role they play in the education of the children, and therefore because of the favourable influence they could have on society through converting to Christianity. While missionaries needed women converts to build Christian homes, the women themselves remained largely beyond the reach of hearing the Gospel. It became a formidable difficulty in having any form of contact with wives, mothers and daughters, particularly those of the higher castes, who seemed confined in the most rigorous cloister-like seclusion with all its ignorance, frivolity and narrow-mindedness. The reason why it was so difficult is because the cloistered interior of the house is to a Hindu a protected womb, as sacred as the womb in the inner sanctum of the Hindu temple, and as such is protected from the disordering forces as it is believed, which brings great blessings to the family, including the birth of many sons.867
866. Roots, 25.
867. Cf. S. Wadley, The Powers of Tamil Women (New Delhi: Manohar, 1991): ‘The status of women in South Asia, is related to Hindu belief. Women, who like the goddesses are feared, must like the goddesses, be kept under control. Through male control and her own chastity, the Hindu woman controls her dangerous sacred powers and is able to use them for the benefit of the family’ (p. XXII). The need for protection and social control arises from the woman’s alleged propensity to create disorder which led to the enforcement of a decree from Manu that she should never be independent: ‘In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent. Though destitute of virtue, seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife. In reward of such a conduct, a female […] gains in this life highest renown, and in the next world a place near her husband’ (The Laws of Manu, sacred Hindu text, v. 148, 154 and 166).
It was marvellous to see it all coming to life – the Fellowship that I had heard and read and prayed so much about. One had to realize that under God there was only one boss and that was Amma. She would not proceed with any course of action until everyone had agreed, but who dared oppose her? We are awed – perhaps excessively so – by her wisdom and experience. She was a remarkable, alarming to a raw recruit, with a sort of aura around her.
You sensed at once that she walked very close to God. Quite apart from her spirituality she was a highly gifted person – she was very widely read and had an amazing knowledge of Tamil and of Indian ways. Mercifully, she had a sense of humour, which saved the day many a time. Hugh Evan Hopkins’s first impression of Dohnavur in 1931. In K. Makower, Follow My Leader. A Biography of Murray Webb- Peploe Including his Years of Service with Amy Carmichael at
Dohnavur (Eastbourne: Kingsway, 1984), 127.