One of the sitties felt liberated in a personal way. “We were sisters now,” she said, “Indian and European. It was wonderful. I no longer resented everyone’s knowing everything about me anymore. Before, I had held onto my British culture—I liked to be alone.”
Amy did not think it was wonderful. A woman of her generation, she could not think that independence was a good thing, although she may not have shared Rudyard Kipling’s view of Britain’s divine appointment: “The responsibility for governing India has been placed by the inscrutable design of providence upon the shoulders of the British race.” It is doubtful she felt pained for the same reason Churchill did: “The loss of India would be final and fatal to us. It could not fail to be part of a process that would reduce us to the scale of a minor power.” Amy’s thought was not for Britain’s loss so much as for India’s. She believed India was not ready for self-government and would suffer far more than she could benefit. Amy was tremendously loyal to her own people. She knew the worth of Britain’s control, as did many Indians who looked with misgiving on the end of the raj and had fought hammer and tongs to prevent it. There were men in the civil service for whom she had great respect, men of honor who saw themselves not as conquerors but, like Amma, servants to the Indian people. The price of freedom was a terrible one—partition, war, murder, and pillage.
In the quiet gardens and lanes, in the lively cottages of the compound, things went on more or less as usual. Rice, by the ton, was pounded by hand, parboiled in the great pots, cooked daily, and eaten. Babies were fed and bathed and changed and rocked and sung to and carried out to play. Bottles were prepared, diapers washed, nurseries scrubbed, walks swept, tiles and brass vessels polished, gardens weeded. The children bathed under the pumps, ate their curries, learned their lessons. The bells of the Prayer Tower called the Family to prayer and rang out the evening hymn.
In the Room of Peace lay the mother, nearly eighty years old now, interviewing people for five hours a day, writing her love letters, working on a book—a simplified biography of Thomas Walker, This One Thing—writing always in longhand on the writing stand, giving the pages one by one to Neela her helper, who typed them and passed them on to a sittie for final draft.
It seemed to Amy that the Family had let up a bit on their prayers for healing.
“For years patiently the prayer meeting went on praying for me,” she wrote in her private notebook. “It does not seem to do so now. I was feeling the need of prayer very much, but to ask for it would be selfish. So I had settled that I would not do so, when this word came: ‘I have prayed for thee.’ My dear, dear Lord.”
Daily Amma called in one of her doctors, Nancy Robbins, to give her background in Hinduism, customs, histories of DF people. Nancy was writing a book, Greater Is He, for which Amma made suggestions and, to Nancy’s surprise, humbly asked for suggestions on her own book. Dr. Robbins believed that the strongest psychological element of Amma’s illness was her fear of the domination of pain over mind and spirit. This she managed to conceal from nearly everyone, but it was revealed again and again in Rose From Brier and her poetry, such as:
Before the winds that blow do cease,
Teach me to dwell within Thy calm:
Before the pain has passed in peace,
Give me, my God, to sing a psalm.
Let me not lose the chance to prove
The fulness of enabling love.
O Love of God, do this for me:
Maintain a constant victory.
“She never complained,” Nancy said, “and was reluctant to discuss her symptoms with anyone, even her doctor.”
At least one or two of the Indian women who cared for her saw a different side. Neela once said to Amma, “Your last word will be pain, pain, pain.” Tired of hearing about Sennacherib and Goliath and Apollyon and the rest of her aches, she told Amma she ought to be thanking God instead that most of the ordinary functions were still functioning.
Nancy wondered at the large number of people who always seemed to be about, waiting on Amy. It made a strange impression at first, “but I realize that this attention was largely imposed on her by her anxious family, and that most of these ‘attendants’ were selected by Amma because no one else could cope with them and she felt they needed her help. So it was a complex situation.”
The family thought of everything. Philip England, who built everything, designed a brick platform reaching from her verandah out to a place under the trees where she could sit without having to negotiate steps. Jeevanie brought powder for cooling and comforting, but when she put it on Amma’s face, Amma said, “You must not think you can put powder on when you go to the House of Prayer.” Powder for an invalid was one thing. Powder for vanity quite another.
Jeevanie was annoyed when Amma would have her open the bird cage so that the birds could fly through the room.
“She would be beckoning them—’Come, come, little birds!’—and I would be standing behind her shooing them away—’Go, go!’ They landed in her hair, on her sheets—such a mess. I was very cross with her. But she loved them.
“Sometimes Amma imagined that I had bumped her bed. She chided me. I was angry with her. I threw the hot-water bottle at her and ran away.”
Bee brought a bottle of cologne.
“Last night I used you to help toward sleep,” Amma wrote in her thank-you note. “You are in a bottle with a red top, you know, close at hand. Nothing helps me more sometimes, and to have this extra means that I can use it without counting the drops.”
Then someone thought of face cream. It was well timed—a gift from heaven.
“A few days ago I saw an advertisement for cream in the paper and thought, ‘If I went in for buying such things I would try that stuff—it sounds cooling’—and here it comes! Did our angels (yours and mine) laugh?”
Besides the pain, heat and sleeplessness were constant torments. Before an electric fan was installed the seven-and eight-year-old girls would come in twos to “do punkah,” pulling the rope that swung the fan for half an hour at a time. “If I got slow Amma would say, ‘Oh darling child, are you asleep?’ Then she would give me a sweet and give the other one a turn.”
At night she asked her nurse to read to her. Jeevanie read John 14, 15, 16, Revelation 7:9-17, and chapters 21 and 22 so many times that she had them memorized, as well as the whole of Rutherford’s hymn, “The Sands of Time Are Sinking.” Then she would massage Amma’s legs until she nearly fell asleep herself.
“Oh darling, what would I do without you?” Amma said. “You always make me sleep.”
“She would make me take dictation in the middle of the night, and throw it all away next morning. ‘What a waste!’ I said. ‘Never mind, darling, the Lord has given me something else,’ she said.”
Jeevanie was one of those who as a child had not believed Amma loved her as much as the others. She was very dark, not the coffee-with-cream color of Tara and Leela that Amma loved.
“But when she was sick I cared for her. I had to love her then, and I learned. I told her she had caned me often. ‘Did I, darling?’ she said. ‘Yes, Amma.’ ‘Oh darling, I loved you dearly,’ she said. All bitterness went. She was not at all a difficult patient. If Amma had not rescued me, where would I have been? She took me to a temple once so that I would know, but I saw the beautiful girls and their jewels and thought to myself, ‘I would like that.’ Now I understand. She saved me.”
One of the tasks Amma had set herself very early in her illness was to write a letter to each member of the Family to be put into a box and kept until after her death. She did not keep a careful record of what was in the box, so some received several letters and probably there were some who got none. To Neela, who was both nurse and secretary, she wrote of the way the Lord had brought her to Dohnavur, through impossible barriers. “It was then our Father, yours and mine, said to me, ‘No purpose of Mine can be hindered.’
“I don’t want you to become so wrapped up in the work of this room,” she went on, �
��that when it is empty you will feel your life is empty. So don’t think of me, ever, in a way which would make it too hard if you had not me to help. Think of yourself as belonging first to your Lord and then to all, Servant of all. . . . Never, never let any human love come first.”
To one of the sitties she wrote:
Margaret, for whom I thank my God, if ever you read this I shall be among the cloud of witnesses, looking with a deepened love and understanding upon you as you run your race.
I hardly know what to say to you. I think you know all I would wish to say, but you may not know how I count on you for the future—if there be a future—and how I thank God for the preparation of the years.
I remember your first letter coming and I remember your cable . . . and now you are deep in what seems to us a peculiarly selfless service. The spiritual training of children must be that. You work for the years you will not see. You work for the Invisible all the time, but you work for the Eternal. So it is all worth while.
Then follow words of encouragement for discouraging days, strong words for loneliness, and “Goodbye, my steadfast Margaret.”
The letters I have been allowed to see follow a similar pattern—thanks to God, reminiscence of how they came, heartening words to help them toward faith, hope, and, beyond all, love.
This was her prayer for her children:
Father, hear us, we are praying,
Hear the words our hearts are saying,
We are praying for our children.
Keep them from the powers of evil,
From the secret, hidden peril,
From the whirlpool that would suck them,
From the treacherous quicksand pluck them.
From the worldling’s hollow gladness,
From the sting of faithless sadness,
Holy Father, save our children.
Through life’s troubled waters steer them,
Through life’s bitter battle cheer them,
Father, Father, be Thou near them.
Read the language of our longing,
Read the wordless pleadings thronging,
Holy Father, for our children
And wherever they may hide,
Lead them Home at eventide.4
1. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), p. 288.
2. Ibid, p. 198.
3. Katherine Makower, Follow My Leader, p. 162.
4. Toward Jerusalem, p. 106.
Chapter 49
The River Breaks Out
It may be that decisions which seem to change the character of the work will now have to be made,” Amy wrote in 1946. “But if the principles which have grounded us from the beginning are held fast there will be no real change. The river may flow in a new channel but it will be the same river.”
Something told her that things could not go on forever exactly as they were, and it was as if she were bracing herself for the time when others would broach the subject they knew she dreaded. If the prediction came from her, their duty would not be quite so disagreeable. The education of the children had been often questioned in the past, and Amy had rejected suggested changes as an altogether different “river.” When Arul Dasan, her faithful helper, arranged for his son David to attend the Walker Middle School nearby, the eight-year-old was excited. The first day of school arrived. All was in readiness. David had the books his father had bought for him and was about to leave the house when a message came. Amma wanted to see Arul Dasan at once. David was not told what Amma said to his father. He was simply told he was not going to the Walker School. In the early days Amma’s children had attended the little mission school. Later she found that they did not learn to be truthful there, “rather the opposite,” so began to educate them at home.
When Dr. MacDougall of the Women’s Christian College of Madras had tried to persuade Amy to send her girls there, she consented at first but none went. For one thing, she was not sure the standards of the Indian teachers met hers. She had heard a conversation among missionaries from different parts of India, lamenting that the type of Christians turned out from their schools lacked certain qualities which make for character.
“I could not help wondering, as I listened to the talk of these seniors, how a new type could be expected to evolve from an old mould.” Amy had set about changing the mould, and she meant to stick with that one.
Agnes Naish, to whom Amy had delegated responsibility for the children’s schooling, took a hard line against college. After all, if the girls’ primary calling was to be the care of children, was not a college education, leading perhaps to medicine and other ambitious professional fields, not only unnecessary but likely to eclipse the call? She reminded Amy of Amy’s own words:
Our goal is service. It is not worth while to spend time, strength, money and energy on anything less. Settle it in your minds: our way of education is planned so as to prepare in spirit and in mind our boys and girls for the Service of the King of Kings. It must therefore from first to last be spiritual education. . . . And the result? No one need fear about that. I could give many proofs that an education such as our children have is indeed true education. The kind of letter a person writes is an index of mind. A letter written in a foreign language is a very searching test. Our children pass that test.
I was given some idea of the inflexibility of Agnes Naish ( three thousand years behind the times”) when I asked why Amy Carmichael had stated adamantly that: no American would be acceptable in the DF. The first answer: She did not believe Americans were prepared for the kind of sacrifice the DF asked. The second: There was no one known to Amy in America who might screen candidates. The third: “It was felt that a certain standard of the English language must be taught, and Agnes Naish dogmatized firmly on syntax and pronunciation (as she did on everything else). You said ‘different from’ and not ‘different to,’ kilometre was to be pronounced keelo-meeter.”
It is to be wondered where the splendid Agnes Naish learned “American”—but then perhaps “different to” was used by some Americans in her day. It also needs to be said that when Dohnavur girls finally began going outside to school they found that they could speak neither Indian English (they spoke English English) nor Indian Tamil. Their Tamil was distinguished by a peculiar singsong such as often develops within a close-knit community. Possibly the accents of some of the foreigners lent their odd cadences, so that teachers in the outside schools had more difficulty understanding the Dohnavur girls’ Tamil than the foreign DFs’.
One of Amy’s most trusted older workers, Pappammal, who had come from a well-known Christian family and was in charge of the smaller boys, strongly disagreed with Amma about their education and finally left because of it. A close friendship of long standing came to an end and Pappammal was “erased.” For the sake of example to the children, her name was not spoken again. Once more, “Dohnavur is a sign that is spoken against.” So Amma, in spite of extreme sensitivity to any possible misrepresentation of her work, wrote, “like our Master we must hold our peace and answer them nothing.”
India’s independence began to impinge on the life of the compound far more powerfully than Amy had foreseen. New laws were passed, one of them bringing great joy to Amy and the rest—the devadasi (temple prostitute) system was outlawed. Its illegality did not stamp it out at once. It went underground for a few years and more recently has surfaced again.
Certain kinds of training which Dohnavur could not provide were now required by law for certain degrees. If they were to have government recognition for the teachers in Dohnavur they must have school-leaving certificates. Amy was able finally to see the necessity of a major change in educational policy. Thyaharaj was the first to break the boundary when he sat for the Senior Cambridge exams. Amy approved the boys’ attending the Middle School in Dohnavur and the girls going to Tiruchchirappalli, though she wept when they left. She called the boys Gideons,” for a man who had courage and faith, and the girls “Timothys,” for
a man who learned to endure hardness. One of the sitties and an accal went with the girls to make a home, but the transition, not surprisingly, was less than smooth.
The relative freedom, so heady after the strictures of all their former years, was too much for some of the girls and, as Amma had feared, they rebelled. Furthermore it was discovered at first that Agnes Naish’s system was not superior after all, and some of the girls did poorly in school. But the release into education in the public system was to lead into a new future for the work, with college graduates and other trained personnel moving into careers, often in Christian institutions in India and other countries. Some are now among the leaders of the present work in Dohnavur.
Studies in child psychology were brought to Amy’s attention and she was able to accept the recommendation that children ought to be in mixed age groups in the cottages. They had always been divided into peer groups, ages two to six, six to eight, eight to ten, and so on. This meant that the children experienced several times, as they grew up and were moved from cottage to cottage, what amounted nearly to the death of their mother (their accal). Though the leaders had tried to make these moves gradual, having the children go first to play at the new house, the final transfer broke the children’s hearts. It also broke the mothers hearts. It took a long time before anyone recognized the reason for many of the difficulties that resulted.
Margaret Wilkinson, a university-educated woman from northern Ireland, felt strongly the need for some sort of a “break out’’ from the time-honored ways of Dohnavur. It was an out-of-the-way place. They were cut off not only by the war and by Amma’s illness, but even, to a much greater degree than in Amma’s early days, from other missions. They needed to establish links with the outside. There simply were not enough choices. Margaret’s conviction was that the character of a young person is developed through learning to choose. She saw that they needed something other than spiritual training and proposed that Dohnavur girls be allowed to join the Girl Guides movement, of which she had been a leader in Ireland. She presented, for the consideration of Amy and the other leaders, her reasons:
A Chance to Die Page 33