As she had ridden her pony Scamp on the beach of Millisle, Amy rejoiced to gallop Laddie on the quiet roads of Kotagiri.
Oh, that you could see us as we tear along, our solar hats discarded, if it is evening, our hair, or mine at least, flowing free! We are called the mad riders of Kotagiri, and I don’t think we much mind. This evening we came upon the elite of the little place, residents and visitors, congregated on the road. There was the good old Bishop and his sister, and the Bishop-to-be, his wife, and various old ladies and middles, and perambulators enclosing babies, and a dog or two. The small crowd parted with alacrity as we shot through, and we caught a fleeting glance of a gaze of astonishment and horror. There are two very mild old gentlemen who are fond of taking their walks abroad round the hill we consider our cantering-row. We delight to amble sedately past them, then, a yard or two ahead, break into our wildest gallop, and they remain behind in a state of apoplectic pie Once I ran over a man. I did not mean to—he wouldn’t get out of the way and one can’t stop short in mid-gallop. Lilian reported him not hurt, only somewhat surprised. All this will be over soon. When one is ready for work a bullock cart will be the order of the day. Just now I take it as an extra good gift which helps to keep me strong for the months of grind before me.
Amy, interested more in vocation than vacation, had taken along her helper, dear old Saral (her earlier helper having proved untrustworthy). This was a new departure. A British resort, remote from the sizzling plains three thousand feet below, was designed to provide refuge not only from the plains’ flies and smells and heat, but from its hordes of the poor and the ignorant. It was, above all things, freedom from contact with any Indians of any station whatever that most Britishers prized. This, to Amy, was a freedom earnestly to be avoided. “My Missie is as my child to my heart,” Saral said, and Amy refused to be separated from her. This caused consternation. Was this young Irish upstart going to have the old woman actually share her room? She was. And if Saral sleeps on the floor, why should I have a bed? was her argument. No, no, they could not hear of it. Amy gave in, for “our quarters are so very close together any vagaries would be speedily detected.”
She carried on with her Tamil lessons, and took Saral out visiting the Kota tribespeople, aborigines who lived as simply as aborigines anywhere, in houses which seemed hovels to the new missionary, eating strange foods, following strange ways. “Not one has as yet, we hear, been brought to Christ, yet He loves them and He died for them.” Saral spoke to them in her simplest Tamil. When a woman of the tribe died Amy and Saral went to the burning.
They had the Death Car there. . . . They piled the faggots round it. They lighted them, and a wild, wild wail rose up to the God who looked down and saw it all. Then the horn blew loud and long, and as the fire flamed, one part and then another caught, and as the terrible sound which they called the head-split cracked through the crackling of the wood, they seemed to put all the dread and horror of it into one intense yell.
Why do I tell it so? Why break through the pleasant scenes of home with this bit of the fiery barbaric? Why! Because it is true! It is true! It has gone on like that for thousands of years. It is going on today. Is there nothing in it which speaks? Has it not a voice for you? A voice, yes, and a Cry. The cry God heard when He said long ago, “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto Me f rom the ground. Some of you are not much giving, not much caring.
From Kotagiri she went to “Ooty,” short for Ootacamund, another little paradise of English order and cleanliness in the hills, with shaded streets, comfortable bungalows staffed by sashed and turbaned servants, gardens redolent of jasmine, heliotrope, and roses. Here she stayed with Mrs. Hopwood, mother of the Miss Hopwood described by Malcolm Muggeridge when he visited her some twenty years later:
A zealous evangelical lady of some wealth who maintained a house named “Farley” to accommodate missionaries on furlough. . . . We knew little of her own family circumstances, but she spoke sometimes of traveling about Europe with her mother, and attending musical festivals. Music was her only “worldly” interest; otherwise she considered all forms of entertainment as belonging to the Devil’s domain. Hymn-singing was a permissible indulgence of her taste for music, and whenever possible she threw herself into it with tremendous zest, often, in her own house, providing the accompaniment as well on a small harmonium she had. She must have been rather pretty when young, and even in late middle age, when I knew her, she had still a grace and charm and gaiety about her . . . I can see her now with her energetic step, going about the garden and in and out of the house; the chains and bracelets she was given to wearing jingling and tinkling with her movements. Always busy, always breathless, always smiling.2
The young Miss Hopwood, a missionary to Muslims herself, took Amy to visit the Todas, another aboriginal tribe who lived in “a collection of beehives.” The two ladies climbed a tree overlooking the village and talked of the desperate need for workers.
Miss Hopwood, zealous and evangelical, was not more so than her new friend Miss Carmichael. Amy rang the bell one morning to gather the servants for prayers. The cook’s small boy, pointing to the bell, said, “It’s a god.”
I looked at the thing, it had a scratched face on the handle, and the face, he declared, was Ram’s. I think the young scamp meant nothing more serious than a bit of mischief, but I knocked the bell handle off and pushed it into a fire which was burning near. He could never say that again! They all looked on, servants and coolies, and nobody said a word. Would a god let me do that? I asked them, and walked off, carrying the battered bell.
Walking on the hills with Saral she discovered three stones under a tree which Saral said were heathen idols. “To see those stupid stones standing there to the honor of the false gods, in the midst of the true God’s beauty, was too much for us. We knocked them over and down they crashed and over they rolled forthwith. Oh the shame of it! It makes one burn to think of His glory being given to another.”
Naturally there was an Anglican church in Ooty, “depressingly English,” Amy said, with the usual Gothic arches and stiff pews. The governor of Madras, in gray frock coat and top hat, attended when on holiday there, and occupied the front pew which was reserved for him and his ladies. Indians who for one reason or another could not be refused admission were restricted to the pews at the back.
Far more to Amy’s taste than riding to the English church in a proper carriage was trundling in a bullock cart to the convention held especially for missionaries. There she felt at home at once, away from the scenes of “fashionable Christianity” which were to her so strange and saddening. They sang the old Keswick hymns. “There was almost a Keswick feeling in the air. But the best of all was seeing the missionaries, specially the Tinnevellyites. Real Soldier-Missionaries.” Among them was a man Amy had been hearing about: Thomas Walker. “Oh, he’s a man by himself, very extreme, you know, a bit narrow-minded, but a scholar and a very fine man,” was what she heard. She formed a mental picture: white-headed, rather cantankerous with wisdom and learning written all over him. She had taken along her Tamil grammar in case the addresses should be dull. When Walker spoke, her book remained closed. He was thirty-six years old, jet-black hair, dark, earnest eyes, a nervous gesture, wisdom and learning in evidence, but not a trace of the petty narrow-mindedness she had imagined. Following the meeting she was introduced to him in Government Gardens. They talked of how she might best learn Tamil.
“I would much rather live in a mud hut with the people around me than among English people in a bungalow,” she told him.
“You could not stand it for long.”
“I would rather burn out than rust out.”
“That should be as God wills.”
There was not a glimmer of a smile in his eyes. “I don’t like you,” Amy decided, and withdrew into the deeps of herself. “I haven’t seen a Mr. Buxton yet,” she wrote to her family, “and I don’t expect to. There are not many on this side of the sea.”
She could
have no idea of how her life would be linked to the Walkers.
1. Philippians 2:7.
2. Malcolm Muggeridge, The Green Stick, Chronicles of Wasted Time Vol 1 (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 122.
Chapter 15
Company, Church, Crown, and Hindu
Throughout her time in Japan, Ceylon, and India, Amy had written her Scrap letters monthly when possible, sometimes less often, her rule being that she would never write when she could do anything else. Scrap Number 7 was begun on September 23, 1896, the tenth anniversary of the Glasgow convention, where
a door was opened for me into a new life and I took the first step in. . . . Today as I thought of all that has passed since then, of the little little one has learnt or done or been, I felt as if one had not taken even a step into the land which opened out before one ten whole years ago. Tonight in my evening reading this verse came: “In His quiver hath He kept me close.” I never noticed it before. It is the Revised Version of Isaiah 49:2. Is it not beautiful? And does it not fit into the verse linked always to me with September 23, 1886, “able to keep you from falling”? Dear friends, I don’t often write of these inner heart-things in my Scrapperies, but to the glory of His name let me witness that in far away lands, in loneliness (deepest sometimes when it seems least so), in times of downheartedness and tiredness and sadness, always always He is near. He does comfort, if we let Him. Perhaps someone as weak and good-for-nothing as even I am may read this. Don’t be afraid! Through all circumstances, outside, inside, He can keep me close.
Among the circumstances which called for trust in God’s keeping power were the illness of her co-worker Clare, the constant presence of idolatrous customs—tom-toms keeping her awake at night, blood sacrifices being made within earshot, festivals, processions—the daily Tamil grind (she still wished heartily that her fellow-workers would consent to her living alone somewhere with Indians), opportunities to witness of Christ to individuals, some in hospital, some in other places.
There were encouragements—two Anglo-Indian girls who came for instruction and gave themselves to the Lord, a child who listened eagerly to the story of Jesus, a high-caste patient who returned to her village full of the Gospel story. When a single opportunity was missed, Amy chided herself. It had not crossed her mind to inquire whether a certain hospital servant could read. He worked for days before anyone thought to give him a Gospel. When someone did, it was Lilian, the doctor, not Amy. She confessed her dreadful failure to home friends, begging them to pray harder.
Saral came one day with an idea for drawing the women to hear the Gospel. She would teach them to knit with some pink wool she had been given, “and they will love me more and like to listen when I talk about Jesus.”
Amy could not say yes to that. She explained that the Gospel needed no such frills. It is the power of God for salvation. Saral protested that there was nothing in the Bible which bore upon pink wool and knitting needles. Indeed there was—Zechariah 4:6, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts. There was no need for tricks which might open houses—houses were open. No need for methods of helping to humanize and fill bare and empty lives—“these women have a full day’s work.” To try to help God with pink fancywork was, she felt, plain unbelief.
At Ooty the Walkers had invited Amy to come to Tinnevelly to learn Tamil. Although she had not yet finished the examinations she was required to take in Bangalore, she made a visit in December of 1896, traveling by train from Madras to the hot plain. From the train window she saw temples in every village, idols under nearly every tree, people working in the fields with Siva’s ashes on their foreheads. “It makes you feel as if you couldn’t sit still. You must do something, try to do something, anything! . . . Oh to get into that stronger, calmer current, out of the feverishness of human haste. Do please, dear friends, ask that we may exchange the eagerness of the flesh for the earnestness of the Spirit and so move in the force of that Holy Wind that we shall be carried along by His great calm.”
Tinnevelly is the mangled English pronunciation of the Tamil Tirunelveli, “Hedge of the Holy Paddy Field,” a town and district at the southern tip of India, divided from the state of Travancore (modern Kerala) by a range of mountains called the Western Ghats or “steps.” The plain, blistering hot in the dry season, was very beautiful after the monsoon, “a great garden, green with the wonderful green of young rice, and set with the shining silver of water.” Other less-watered parts were barren with black soil, stunted trees, few palms. Its people formed an ancient and orthodox group of communities, with nearly three thousand Hindu temples, forty-two of them considered specially holy.
The Walkers of the Church Missionary Society arrived there in 1885. They were not by any means the first in that district to name the name of Christ. The Syrian Christians of the Malabar coast, whose records date from the fourth century, believed that the apostle Thomas brought Christianity to India. Roman Catholic missionaries landed in the fifteenth century, Saint Francis Xavier in the sixteenth. Far from wishing to transpose European culture to their converts, they went to great lengths to make themselves as Indian, that is, as Hindu, as possible. One Roberto de Nobili worked for forty-five years to convert “heathens,” proclaiming himself a Brahman, adopting the sacred thread of the holy man, abstaining from meat, and keeping ritual purity.
By far the most colorful character, whose notions of identification with the people differed in marked degree from those of nineteenth century missionaries like the Walkers, was a renowned Catholic named C. J. Beschi. Calling himself Veeramamuni (“heroic and great sage”), he wore a purple robe, a white and purple turban, pearl and ruby earrings, gold rings, and bangles. He traveled in the grand style of a guru, riding in a palanquin (a conveyance borne on the shoulders of men by means of projecting poles), seated on a tiger skin with two servants to fan him, two to march in front hearts great bunches of peacock feathers, and yet another to hold a silk umbrella. A large retinue accompanied him—men with drums, fifes, tents, and caparisoned horses. Yet for all that, he not only preached the Gospel but produced a tremendous body of Tamil literature by which he meant both to convert the heathen and instruct new converts. He was so revered that he was made an official of the small realm in which he worked.
In the eighteenth century great waves of conversion to Christianity, Catholic and non-Catholic, swept Tinnevelly. In 1706 from northern Europe came bands of men who were renegades from the orthodox churches of their own countries, bringing with them a pietist brand of Christianity that demanded of its converts a radical change of life. They taught individual responsibility before God, which required a knowledge of the Word of God, and hence Bible translation and literacy. In short order they translated the New Testament into Tamil, set up printing presses, began turning out avalanches of Christian literature, and established “prayer-school houses,” simple thatched buildings where people could congregate to learn to read and to pray and worship together. One wealthy converted Brahman widow had such a prayer-school in her home until it outgrew the space, whereupon she financed the building of a stone prayer-school.
This life-changing religion struck at the very heart of Tamil culture long before anyone dreamed of accusing missionaries of being colonialist or imperialist. The movement came from Germany and Denmark, while the East India Company was English and from the very beginning had kept a “low profile,” accommodating itself in every way to Indian culture, realizing that its political power (a handful of Europeans ruling millions of Indians) as well as its material success depended on its being in actual fact a Hindu raj. This meant that its officials propitiated local deities, reinstated devil worship in places where it had long since died out, participated in and subsidized festivals and ceremonies, funded the building and repair of temples, and supported practices which the Company’s constituency in England would have considered outrageous had they had any idea of them.
The growth of Christian congregations was startlingly rapid, doubling over an
d over for more than a century. The journals of Joseph Daniel Jaenicke, for example, in 1791 note “miraculous manifestations of divine grace” in conversions. Whole villages were often converted at once, and new villages founded, composed solely of new converts. Thus Christians became a power to reckon with, and, as the effects of their belief, particularly upon caste, became evident, intense opposition arose—intimidation, insult, violence, destruction of the prayer houses. This gave rise to the establishment of “Villages of Refuge,” modeled after the cities of refuge set up by Joshua in the Promised Land.
For half a century there had been clashes and wars in South India between local authorities, and increasing struggles between the higher powers and the Company for imperial sway. This necessitated the building of forts and caused devastation, famine, and pestilence. Strong-arm men were brought in to persecute Christians, who were stripped, beaten, robbed, and sent into the jungles to starve. As often happens, persecution fanned the flames, and a new mass conversion swept Tinnevelly in 1802. In November and December over three thousand were added to the church. Complaints about the treatment of Christians began to reach Company authorities—did they not represent a Christian nation? Had not the “Hindu Christians,” as they were called, a right to expect protection? The Company, while “officially” Christian as to its image in England, was, in India, unofficially Hindu in every meaning of the term—fully supporting a system of ideology, myth, ceremony, ritual, and institutions. Understandably, its opposition to the entrance of Christian missionaries was strenuous. It was not long before those authorities themselves were being accused of driving Christians from their homes, putting them in stocks, exposing them for as much as two weeks to broiling sun and chilling dews. To become a Christian, they declared, was an act of disloyalty to the Company’s raj.
A Chance to Die Page 11