Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India by Alice B. Van DorenA Study of Conditions Among Women in India (page 2)

his own accord decided for the latter. Later we see him a Sanskrit student in Benares, where he married his wife, a fifteen-year-old Brahman convert.

The Christian couple moved soon to the Central Provinces, where Mr. Vincent entered upon his twenty-five years of service as a Christian pastor, using his Sanskrit learning to interpret the message of Christianity to his Hindu friends. Yet it was in lowlier ways that his life was most telling. Settling in a peasant colony of a thousand so-called converts, only half-Christianized, the story of his labors and triumphs reads like that of Columba, or Boniface in early Europe. Through perils of robbers and perils of famine he labored on, building villages, digging wells, distributing American corn in famine days, reproving, teaching, guiding. All this I am telling, because it explains much of the daughter’s quiet strength. One of ten children, she has spent many years in earning money to educate the younger brothers and sisters, and she is finishing her college course as a mature woman. Miss Vincent hopes that the American fellowship may one day be hers; and already her plans are developing as to the ways she will contrive to pass on her opportunities to her fellow countrywomen. Her heart is with those illiterate village women among whom her childhood was passed; her longing is to share with them the truth, the beauty, and the goodness with which Lal Bagh has filled her days.

Has Lal Bagh been a paying investment? One wishes that every one whose dollars have found expression in its walls might come to feel the indefinable spirit that pervades them, filling cold brick and mortar with life energy. For centuries philosophers searched for that Philosopher’s Stone that was to transmute base metals into gold. In the world to-day there are those who have found a subtler magic that transforms dead gold and silver into warm human purposes and the Christ-spirit of service. That is the miracle one sees in daily process at Lal Bagh.

IN THE SECRET OF HIS PRESENCE

ELLEN LAKSHMI GOREH (_Lucknow College_)

In the secret of His presence how my soul delights to hide! Oh, how precious are the lessons which I learn at Jesus’ side! Earthly cares can never vex me, neither trials lay me low; For when Satan comes to tempt me, to the secret place I go.

When my soul is faint and thirsty, ‘neath the shadow of His wing
There is cool and pleasant shelter, and a fresh and crystal spring;
And my Saviour rests beside me, as we hold communion sweet:
If I tried, I could not utter what He says when thus we meet.

Only this I know: I tell Him all my doubts, my griefs and fears;
Oh, how patiently He listens! and my drooping soul He cheers:
Do you think He ne’er reproves me? What a false friend He would be,
If He never, never told me of the sins which He must see.

Would you like to know the sweetness of the secret of the Lord?
Go and hide beneath His shadow: this shall then be your reward;
And whene’er you leave the silence of that happy meeting place,
You must mind and bear the image of the Master in your face.

[Illustration: SHELOMITH VINCENT]

LAL BAGH ALUMNAE RECORDS SHOW THE FOLLOWING:

The first Kindergarten in India.

The first college in India with full staff of women and residence accommodation.

The first Arya Samaj B.A. graduate.

The F.Sc. graduate who became the second woman with the B.Sc. degree in India.

The F.Sc. graduate who later graduated at the foremost Medical College in North India as the first Muhammadan woman doctor in India and probably in the world.

The first woman B.A. and the first Normal School graduate from Rajputana.

The first woman to receive her M.A. in North India.

The first Muhammadan woman to take her F.A. examination from the Central Provinces.

Probably the first F.A. student to take her examination in purdah.

The first Teachers Conference (held annually) in India.

The first woman’s college to offer the F.Sc. course.

The first college to have on its staff an Indian lady.

The first woman (Lilavati Singh) from the Orient to serve on a world’s Committee.

The first woman dentist.

The first woman agriculturist.

The first woman in India to be in charge of a Boys’ High School.

A Lal Bagh graduate organized the Home Missionary Society which has developed into an agency of great service to the neglected Anglo-Indian community scattered throughout India.

The Lal Bagh student who took an agricultural course in America and is now helping convert wastes of the Himalaya regions into fruitful valleys.

Miss Phoebe Rowe, an Anglo-Indian who was associated with Lal Bagh in Miss Thoburn’s time, was a wonderful influence in the villages of North India and carried the Christian message by her beautiful voice as well as her consecrated personality. She traveled in America, endearing India to many friends here. She is one–perhaps the most remarkable, however–of many Lal Bagh daughters who are serving as evangelists in faraway places.

FROM A STUDENT AT MADRAS WOMEN’S COLLEGE

“Your letter was handed to me as I returned from my evening hour of prayer, prayer for our school, special prayer for the problem God has called us to tackle together. I believe that the solution for many of our problems at school is to put things on a Christian foundation. We want workers who are real Christians and who love the Master as sincerely as they do themselves and serve Him for their love of Him. This may not be easy work for us to do, but if God is transforming the whole globe and moulding it from the ‘new spiritual center,’ namely,–Jesus Christ, it is certainly not hard for Him to accomplish it in this place. How He is going to do it I am blind to see. Let us put our feet on the one step that we see with the faith expressed in ‘One step enough for me,’ and the next step will flash before our eyes. One question that used to trouble me is, how we are to do the work. The poem by Edward Sill in ‘The Manhood of the Master’ cheers me up now as then with the thought that a broken sword flung away by a craven as useless was used by a king’s son to win victory in the same battle. God will use it and perform His work. We have dedicated ourselves for His duty which is gripping our souls. He will use them according to His purpose.”

CHAPTER FOUR

AN INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCE

Education and World Peace.

While statesmen discuss disarmament and politicians and newspaper editors foment race consciousness and mutual distrust, certain forces that never figure in newspaper headlines, that come “not with observation,” are working with silent constructive power to bind nations together in ties of peace and good will. Among these silent forces are certain educational institutions. Columbia University has its Cosmopolitan Club, at whose Sunday night suppers you may meet representatives of forty to fifty nations, Occidental and Oriental. In the Near East, amid the race hatred and strife that set every man’s hand against his fellow, the American Colleges at Constantinople and Beirut have stood foremost among the forces that produce unification and brotherhood.

During the war-scarred days of 1915, while nation was rising up against nation, there was founded in the city of Madras one of these international ventures in co-operation. Known to the world of India as the Women’s Christian College of Madras, it might just as truthfully be called a Triangular Alliance in Education, for in it Great Britain including Canada, the United States, and India are joined together in educational endeavor. America may well admire what Britain has been doing during long years for India’s educational advancement. Among England’s more recent contributions to education in India none has been greater that the coming of Miss Eleanor McDougall from London University to take the principalship of this international college for women. Under her wise leadership British and American women have worked in one harmonious unit, and international co-operation has been transformed from theory to fact.

Where Missions Co-operate.

The Women’s Christian College is not only international, it is also intermissionary. Supported by fourteen different Mission Boards, including almost every shade of Protestant belief and every form of church government, it stands not only for international friendship, but also as an outstanding evidence of Christian unity.

The staff and the student body are as varied as the supporting constituency. In the former, along with British and American professors are now two Indian women lecturers, Miss George, a Syrian Christian, who teaches history, and Miss Janaki, a Hindu, who teaches botany. Both are resident and a happy factor in the home life of the college. Among the students nine Indian languages are represented, ranging all the way from Burma to Ceylon, from Bengal to the Malabar Coast. From the last named locality come Syrian Christians in great numbers. This interesting sect loves to trace its history back to the days of the Apostle Thomas. Be that historical fact or merely a pious tradition, this sect can undoubtedly boast an indigenous form of Christianity that dates back to the early centuries of the Christian era; and it stands to-day in a place of honor in the Indian Christian community.

[Illustration: A road near the College]

[Illustration: The Potters’ Shop
STREET SCENES IN MADRAS]

The Sunflower and the Lamp.

Perhaps much of the success which the College at Madras has achieved on the side of unity is due to the fact that her members are too busy to think or talk about it because their time is all filled up with actually doing things together. Expressing this spirit of active co-operation is the college motto, “Lighted to lighten”; the emblem in the shield is a tiny lamp such as may burn in the poorest homes in India. Below the lamp is a sunflower, whose meaning has been discussed in the college magazine by a new student. She says, “To-day the sunflower stands for very much in my mind. It is symbolic of this our College, for, as our amateur botanists tell us, the sunflower is not a flower, but a congregation of them. The tiny buds in the centre are our budding intellects. To-day they are in the making; to-morrow they will bloom like their sisters who surround them. Nourished from the same source, their fruit will be even likewise.

“Around these are the golden rays–each a tongue of fire to protect and inspire. There is none high or low amongst them, being all alike, and these are our tutors, and the sunflower itself turns to the sun, the great giver of life, for its inspiration, ever turning to him, never losing sight of his face. A force inexplicable draws the flower to the King of Day, even as our hearts are turned to Him at morn and at eve, be we East or West.”

In a Garden.

It is fitting that the sunflower should bloom in a garden, and so it does. This time it is not a walled garden like that of Lal Bagh; the Women’s College is situated out from the city in a green and spacious suburb, where the little River Cooum wanders by its open spaces. The ten acres have much the air of an American college campus,–the same sense of academic quiet, of detachment from the work-a-day world. The whole compound is dominated by the tall, white columns of the old main building, which confer an air of distinction upon the whole place, as well they may, for have they not guarded successively government officials and Indian rajahs?

Nearby is the new residence hall, as modern as the other is historic. Three stories in height, its verandahs are in the form of a hollow square, and look out upon a courtyard gay with the bright-hued foliage of crotons and other tropical plants. Beyond is the garden itself, filled not with the roses and chrysanthemums of winter Lucknow, but with the perpetual summer foliage of spreading rain trees, palms, and long fronded ferns, with fluffy maidenhair between. In their season the purple masses of Bougainvillea, and the crimson of the Flamboya tree set the garden afire. In the evening when the girls are sitting under the trees or walking down the long vistas with the level sunbeams bringing out the bright colors of their draped _saris_, it brings to mind nothing so much as a scene from “The Princess” where among fair English gardens

“One walked reciting by herself, and one In this hand held a volume as to read.”

Student Organizations.

Yet life in the Women’s College is not a cloistered retreat such as “The Princess” tried to establish, nor are its activities confined to the study of classics in a garden. Student organizations flourish here with a variety almost as great as in the West. There is, first of all, the College Committee, which corresponds roughly to our Scheme of Student Government. Its members are chosen from the classes and in their turn elect a President known as “Senior Student.” She is the official representative of the whole student body. Communications from faculty to students pass through her, and she represents the College on state occasions, such as visits from the Viceroy or other Government officials. Various student committees are also elected to plan meetings for the Literary and Debating Societies, to organize excursions for “Seeing Madras,” and to plan for athletic teams and contests. How well the last named have succeeded is proved by the silver cup carried off as a trophy by the College badminton team, which distinguished itself as the winner in last year’s intercollegiate sports.

An unusual organization is the Star Club, which has been carried on for several years, with programme meetings once a month and bi-weekly groups for observation. No wonder that astrology and the beginnings of astronomy came from the Orient, or that Wise Men from the East found a Star as the sign to lead their journeying. Night after night the constellations rise undimmed in the clear sky and fairly urge the beholder to close acquaintance. A knowledge of them fills the sky with friendly forms and gives the student a new and lasting “hobby” that may be pursued anywhere, and kept through life. The Star Club has popularized its celestial interests by presenting to the College a pageant in three scenes, a “Dream of the Sun and Planets,” in which the Earth Dweller is transported to the regions of the sky and holds long and intimate conversations with the various heavenly bodies. As the final scene, the planets slant in their relative positions, and the Signs of the Zodiac with shields take their places on each side of Father Sun.

The Natural history Club has interests ranging all the way from the theory of evolution to the names and songs of the common birds of Madras.

The Art Club not only does out-door sketching, but has entered upon a wide field in the study of Indian art and architecture. India is reviving a partly forgotten interest in her ancient arts and crafts and has much to offer the student, from the wonderful lines of the Taj Mahal to the Ahmadabad stone windows with their lace-like traceries; from the portraits of Moghal Emperors to the fine detail of South India temple carvings. Study in the Art Club means a new appreciation of the beauty found among one’s own people.

The Dramatic and Musical Societies unite now and then in public entertainments, such as “Comus” which was given in honor of the women graduates of the whole Presidency at the time of the University Convocation. The Society repertoire of plays given during the last five years includes a considerable variety–dramatists so far apart as Shakespeare and Tagore; the old English moralities of “Everyman” and “Eager Heart”; the old Indian epic-dramas of “Sakuntala” and “Savitri”; together with Sheridan’s “Rivals” and scenes from “Emma” and “Ivanhoe.” The Musical Club specializes on Christmas carols, with which the College is wakened at four o’clock “on Christmas day in the morning.”

The History Club sounds like an organization of research workers; on the contrary, its interests are bound up with the march of current events in India and the world. At the time when India was stirred by the visit of the Duke of Connaught and the launching of the Reform Government, this Club took to itself the rights of suffrage, elected its members to the first Madras Legislative Council, and after the elections were duly confirmed sat in solemn assembly to settle the affairs of the Province. They have also carried out equally dramatic representations of the English House of Lords and even the League of Nations.

“Lighted to Lighten.”

The Young Women’s Christian Association of the College among its many activities includes Bible classes in the vernacular which bring together students from the same language areas and after a week of purely English study and English chapel service serve as a link with home life and home conditions. Not only with home on the one side; on the other the Association ties them up with wider interests, with conferences that bring together students from all India, with activities that range all the way from teaching servants’ children to read and translating Christian books into their own vernaculars to sending gifts of money to a suffering student in Vienna.

Social service is carried on along lines not very different from those pursued in Lucknow. Sunday schools, visits to outcaste villages, and lectures on health and cleanliness have their place. A new feature is the dispensing of simple medical help, which not only relieves the recipients, but teaches the students what they can do later when in their own homes. Another distinctive venture is the “Little School” in the college grounds, where volunteer workers take turns morning and evening in teaching the neighborhood children, and thus get their first taste of the joys and difficulties of the teacher’s profession.

An interested girl thus expresses her ideas on the subject of social service. Her emphasis upon the positive side of life speaks well for her future accomplishment:

“Though the condition of the people is deplorable we need not despair of making matters better for them. Instead of giving the mere negative instructions that they should not drink, or be extravagant with their money, or get into the clutches of money lenders, we can do something positive. Some interesting diversions could be invented that would prevent men from frequenting drinking houses. With regard to their extravagance on certain occasions, we might suggest to them ways in which they could lessen items of expenditure. To prevent their being at the mercy of money lenders, co-operative societies may be started in order to lend money at a lower rate of interest; or to supply them with capital or with tools in order to start their work.

“To remove the other evil of ignorance with regard to health, we may go into the villages and give them practical lessons on cleanliness. We could tell them of the value of fresh air and give them other needful instructions.

“In doing social work of this kind, there are many principles we ought to have in mind. Instead of telling a poor man with no means of living that he should not steal it would be better to see that he is somehow placed beyond the reach of want. Another is that instead of merely imparting morality in negative form, it would be better to point out to them some positive way in which they could improve. More important than any of these principles is that instead of thinking of ‘bestowing good’ on the people, it would be more effective, if we co-operate with them and enlist their initiative, thus enabling them by degrees to be fit to manage their own affairs.”

Applied Sociology.

Certain parts of the curriculum also tie up closely with community life. Economics and essay writing lead into fields of research. Essays and contributions to the College magazine, “The Sunflower,” bear such titles as the “Social Needs of Kottayam District,” which goes into the causes of poverty and distress in the writer’s own locality, or “The Religion of the People of Kandy,” written by a convert from Buddhism who knows from her own childhood experience the beauties and defects of that great religious system.

An intercollegiate essay prize was won by a Christian college girl who wrote on her own home town, “The Superstitions and Customs of the Village of Namakal.” She writes:

“A set of villages would also be seen where the people are very much like the insects under a buried stone, which run underground, unable to see the light or to adapt themselves to the light. The moment the stone is turned up, so much accustomed are they to live in the darkness of superstition and unbelief that they think they would be better off to go on so, and refuse to accept the light rays of science, education, and civilization, which are willingly given them.”

The list of current omens and superstitions which she has unearthed may prove of interest to Western readers who have little idea of the burden of _taboo_ under which the average Hindu passes his days. The essayist says:

“An attempt to enumerate these superstitious beliefs would be useless, but the following would illustrate the villagers’ deep regard for them, It is a good omen to hear a bell ring, an ass bray, or a Brahmini kite cry, when starting out to see a married woman whose husband is alive. They believe it to be an excellent omen to see a corpse, a bunch of flowers, water, milk, a toddy pot, or a washerman with dirty clothes, while setting out to give any present to her or her husband. No Hindu man or woman would set out to visit a newly married couple if he or she hears sneezing while starting, or proceed on the journey if he or she hears the wailing of a beggar, or happens to see a Brahmin widow, a snake, a full oil pot, or a cat.”

[Illustration: IN THE CLOISTER’S STUDIOUS SHADE]

[Illustration: MISS JACKSON AND SOME SOCIAL SERVICE WORKERS]

The College Woman and India.

Many of the students are full of ideas as to the various places which women may fill in the economy of the India of the future. Among the professions open to women, teaching is of course the favorite. Its opportunities are shown in the following:

“The University women who, more than any one else, have enjoyed the fruits of education and the privileges of college life are naturally very keen on imparting them to the million of their less graduate sisters. Almost every student in a college is now filled with a greater love and longing to help the uneducated women. Thus, most of them go out as teachers. Some of them work in their own schools, or take up work either in a mission school or a government school. Some of the graduates are now in a position to establish schools of their own. The pay for teachers is usually lower than that earned by women in other positions, but the fact that so many women become teachers shows that they care more for service than for salary, for surely this is the greatest service that they as women can give to India.”

Another student has some ideas as to new methods to be used:

“The present method of teaching in India is not quite suitable to the modern stage of children. Now, children are very inquisitive and try to learn by themselves. They cannot understand anything which is taught as mere doctrines. The teacher has to draw her answers from the children and thus build up her teaching on the base of their previous knowledge. So the educated women have to train themselves in schools where they are made fit to meet the present standard of children.”

Miss Cornelia Sorabji has shown by her career what a woman lawyer can do for other women. A college girl writes as follows of the opportunities for service that other students might find in the law:

“I have seen many women in the villages, though not educated, showing the capacities of a good lawyer. I think that women have a special talent in performing this business, and hence would do much better than men. Tenderness and mercy are qualities greatly required in a judge or magistrate. Women are famous for these and so their judgments which will be the products of justice tempered by mercy will be commendable. A man cannot understand so fully a woman, the workings of her mind, her thoughts and her views, as a woman can; so in order to plead the cause of women there should be women lawyers who could understand and put their cases in a very clear light.”

Another feels the need of women in politics:

“According to the present system in India, the government is carried on by men alone. Thus women are exclusively shut off from the administration of the country. The good and bad results of the government affect men and women alike. Therefore, it is only fair that women also should have an active part in the government of the country. Women should be given seats in the Legislative Council where they would have an opportunity to listen to the problems of the country and try to solve them.

“From ordinary life we see that women are more economical than men. Therefore, it would be better for the country if women could take a part in economic matters. When the rate of tax is fixed men are likely to decide it merely from a consideration of their income without thinking about small expenses. Women are acquainted with every expense in detail. If women could take part in economic affairs, the expenditure of a country would be directed in a better and more careful way.

“In national and international questions also women can take a part. Women are more conservative, sympathetic, and kind than men. Great changes and misery which are not foreseen at all are brought by wars between different countries. Women, too, can consider about the affairs of wars as well as men. Their sympathetic and conservative views will help the people not to plunge into needless wars and political complications.

“Women know as well as, and perhaps more than men, the evils which result from the illiteracy of people and their unsanitary conditions. Men spend much of their time outside home, while women in their quiet homes can see their surroundings and watch the needs of people around them. So women can give good ideas in matters concerning education and sanitation. In this way, women can influence the public opinion of a place and the government of a country depends much on the nature of public opinion.”

But with all these “new woman theories” the claims of home are not forgotten:

“Among the many possibilities opening out to women, we cannot fail to mention _home life_, though it is nothing new.

“According to the testimony of all history, the worth and blessing of men and nations depend in large measure on the character and ordering of family life. ‘The family is the structural cell of the social organism. In it lives the power of propagation and renewal of life. It is the foundation of morality, the chief educational institution, and the source of nearly all real contentment among men.’ All other questions sink into insignificance when the stability of the family is at stake. In short, the family circle is a world in miniature, with its own habits, its own interests, and its own ties, largely independent of the great world that lies outside. When the family is of such great importance, how much greater should be the responsibilities of women in the ordering of that life? Is it not there in the home that we develop most of our habits, our lines of thought and action?

“Even while keeping home, woman can do other kinds of work. She can help her husband in his varied activities by showing interest and sympathy in all that he does; she can influence him in every possible way. Then also she may do social and religious work, and even teaching, though she has to manage a home. But _the_ work that needs her keenest attention is in the home itself, in training up the children. Happiness and cheerfulness in the home circle depend more or less on the radiant face of the mother, as she performs her simple tasks, upon her tenderness, on her unwearied willingness to surpass all boundaries in love. She is the ‘centre’ of the family. The physical and moral training of her children falls to her lot.

“Now, the developing of character is no light task, nor is it the least work that has to be done. The family exists to train individuals for membership in a large group. In the little family circle attention can be concentrated on a few who in turn can go out and influence others. The family, therefore, is the nursery of all human virtues and powers.

“In conclusion, expressing the same idea in stronger words, it is to be noted that whether India shall maintain her self-government, when she receives it, depends on how far the women are ready to fulfill the obligations laid upon them. This is a great question and has to be decided by the educated women of India.”

[Illustration: In the Laboratory, Madras]

[Illustration: Tennis Champions with Cup AT WORK AND PLAY]

One Reformer and What She Achieved.

Of the wealth of human interest that lies hidden in the life-stories of the one hundred and ten students who make up the College, who has the insight to speak? Coming from homes Hindu or Christian, conservative or liberal, from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the modern Indian city, or the far side of the jungle villages, one might find in their home histories, in their thoughts and ambitions and desires, a composite picture of the South Indian young womanhood of to-day. Countries as well as individuals pass through periods of adolescence, of stress and strain and the pains of growth, when the old is merging in the new. The student generation of India is passing through that phase to-day, and no one who fails to grasp that fact can hope to understand the psychology of the present day student.

In Pushpam’s story it is possible to see something of that clash of old and new, of that standing “between two worlds” that makes India’s life to-day adventurous–too adventurous at times for the comfort of the young discoverer.

Pushpam’s home was in the jungle–by which is meant not the luxuriant forests of your imagination, but the primitive country unbroken by the long ribbon of the railway, where traffic proceeds at the rate of the lumbering, bamboo-roofed bullock cart, and the unseemliness of Western haste is yet unknown. Twice a week the postbag comes in on the shoulders of the loping _tappal_ runner. Otherwise news travels only through the wireless telegraphy of bazaar gossip. The village struggles out toward the irrigation tank and the white road, banyan-shaded, whose dusty length ties its life loosely to that of the town thirty miles off to the eastward. On the other side are palmyra-covered uplands, and then the Hills.

The Good News sometimes runs faster than railway and telegraph. Here it is so, for the village has been solidly Christian for fifty years. Its people are not outcastes, but substantial landowners, conservative in their indigenous ways, yet sending out their sons and daughters to school and college and professional life.

Of that village Pushpam’s father is the teacher-catechist, a gentle, white-haired man, who long ago set up his rule of benevolent autocracy, “for the good of the governed.”

“To this child God has given sense; he shall go to the high school in the town.” The catechist speaks with the conviction of a Scotch Dominie who has discovered a child “of parts,” and resistance on the part of the parent is vain. The Dominie’s own twelve are all children “of parts” and all have left the thatched schoolhouse for the education of the city.

Pushpam is the youngest. Term after term finds her leaving the village, jogging the thirty miles of dust-white road to the town, spending the night in the crowded discomfort of the third class compartment K marked for “Indian females.” Vacation after vacation finds her reversing the order of journeying, plunging from the twentieth century life of college into the village’s mediaeval calm. There is no lack of occupation–letters to write for the unlearned of the older generation to their children far afield, clerks and writers and pastors in distant parts; there are children to coach for coming examinations; there are sore eyes to treat, and fevers to reduce.

One Christmas Pushpam returns as usual, yet not as usual, for her capable presence has lost its customary calm. She is “anxious and troubled about many things,” or is it about one?

Social unrest has dominated college thinking this last term, focussing its avenging eyes upon that Dowry System which works debt and eventual ruin in many a South Indian home. Pushpam has seen the family struggles that have accompanied the marriages of her older sisters; the “cares of the world” that have pressed until all the joy of days that should have been festal was lost in the counting out of rupees. In neighbor homes she has seen rejoicing at the birth of a son, as the bringer of prosperity, and grief, hardly concealed, at the adversity of a daughter’s advent. Unchristian? Yes; but not for the lack of the milk of human kindness; rather from the incubus of an evil social system, inherited from Hindu ancestors.

Pushpam’s father is growing old; lands and jewels have shrunk. Married sons and daughters are already gathering and saving for the future of their own young daughters. Three thousand rupees are demanded of Pushpam in the marriage market. The thought of it is marring the peace of her father’s face and breaking his sleep of nights. But Pushpam has news to impart, “Father, I have something to say. It will hurt you, but I must speak. It is the first time that I, your daughter, have even disobeyed your wishes, but this time it must be.

“All this college term we girls have been thinking and talking of our marriage system and its evils. Husbands are bought in the market, and in these war years they, like everything else, are high. A man thinks not of the girl who will make his home, but of the rupees she will bring to his father’s coffers. Marriage means not love, but money. My classmates and I have talked and written and thought. Now three of us have made one another a solemn promise. Our parents shall give no dowries for us. We have no fear of remaining unmarried; we can earn our way as we go and find our happiness in work. Or if there are men who care for us, and not for the rupees we bring, let them ask for us; we will consider such marriages, but no other. Do not protest, Father, for our minds are made up.”

[Illustration: THE NEW DORMITORY AT MADRAS COLLEGE]

The old man, for years autocrat of the village, bows to the will of his youngest child, fearing the jeers of relatives, yet unable to withstand.

No, Pushpam did not remain single. In men’s colleges the same ferment is going on, and when a suitor came he said, “I want you for yourself, not for the gold that you might bring.” He married Pushpam, and their joy of Christian service is not shadowed by the financial distress brought upon the father’s house.

Mary Smith asked to be shown the justification of college education for Indian girls. Is it good? The College of the Sunflower has its home in dignified and seemly buildings set in a tropical garden. Does its beauty draw students away from the world of active life, or send them with fresh strength to share its struggles. Pushpam has given one answer. Another one may find in the college report of 1921 with its register of graduates. Name after name rolls out its story of busy lives–married women, who are housemakers and also servants of the public weal; government inspectresses of schools, who tour around “the district,” bringing new ideas and encouragement to isolated schools; teachers and teachers, and yet more teachers, in government and mission schools, and schools under private management. Only six years of existence, and yet the Sunflower has opened so wide, the Lamp has lighted so many candles in dim corners. Will the Mary Smiths of America do their part that the next six years may be bigger and better than the last?

The spirit of Madras Students is shown in the following extracts from personal letters written to former teachers:

FROM A GRADUATE OF MADRAS CHRISTIAN COLLEGE

“Last week we had the special privilege of hearing Mr. and Mrs. Annett, of India Sunday School Union. The last day Mr. Annett showed how we can lead our children to Christ and make them accept Christ as their Master. That is the aim of religious education. My heart thrilled within me when I heard Mr. Annett in his last lecture confirm what I had thought out as principles in teaching and training the young, and I found my eyes wet. But the very faith which Jesus had in people and which triumphs over all impossibilities I am trying to have. I have patiently turned to the girls and am trying to help them in their lives. The Christ power in me is revealing to me many things since I surrendered to Him my will. He is showing me what mighty works one can do through intercessory prayer which I try to do with many failings.

“Politics have lately been very interesting to me. Rather I have been forced to enter in. You will have read or heard of the new movement in India that sprang up early in September. Gandhi is the leader. I have some clippings to send you. It is not about that I wish to write, but about the remarkable way India is repressing the movement. The Panjab, the province for which sympathy is called for and the one which affords the cause for non-co-operation, has thrown up Gandhi’s scheme and her sons are standing for council elections. No Indian can help being thrilled over the nominations and elections for legislative councils and councils of state, which are to assemble in January according to the Reform Act. Our girls are taking a keen interest in the affairs of the country and earnestly praying for her.

“This is the week of prayer of the Y.W. and Y.M.C.A. I am sure you are remembering us,–the young women of India and our girls who are to lay out the future in India; also our young men and boys.

“The Student Federation has its conference in P—- during Christmas, and four of our college students are going. If only the men would be open hearted and less prejudiced and brave enough to stand alone and reform society. I think the time is coming.

“Isn’t it strange that you should also feel the thirst for Bible study just as I am doing here. I never felt the lack of Scriptural knowledge as now while I teach our girls.”

EXTRACTS FROM A TEACHER’S JOURNAL IN MADRAS COLLEGE

November 12, 1921.

We had nine graduates to garland last night and should have had more if Convocation had followed closely on their success in April. But now one is at Somerville College, Oxford (we have five old students in England now and one in America), one at her husband’s home in Bengal, one serving in Pundita Ramabai’s Widows’ Home at Mukti near Poona, and three kept away by some duty in their families. Among our nine were two who had been among our very earliest students; in fact, one bears the very first name entered on our student roll in April, 1915, when we were looking round in trembling hope to see whether any students at all would entrust themselves to our inexperienced hands. These two, of course, left some years ago, but have since taken the teachers’ degree, the Licentiate in Teaching, for which they have prepared themselves by private study while serving in schools.

This L.T. is a University degree open to graduates in Arts only, and a B.A., L.T., is regarded as a teacher fully equipped for the highest posts in schools. The preparation for it has been carried on hitherto chiefly at a Government Teachers’ College, where the few women students, though very courteously treated, have naturally been at a great disadvantage among more than a hundred men. Such of our graduates as have spent the required year there have been considerably disappointed, feeling that their work has been too easy and too theoretical. In any case it is impossible that much practical work could be found for so large a number of students, and the belief is growing that the ideal training college is a small one. That it must be a Christian one is from our point of view still more important. The women B.A., L.T.’s will hold positions of greater influence than any other class in South India. They will be Government Inspectresses, Heads of Middle Schools and High Schools, lecturers in Training Colleges, in fact, the sources of the inspiration which will permeate every region of women’s education. Before long the missions will be unable to keep pace with the rapid increase of available pupils for girls’ schools. Their success in originating and fostering the idea of educating girls has now produced a situation with which we cannot personally cope, but which we can indirectly control by concentrating effort at the most vital spot, that is the training of the highest rank of women teachers. These will set the tone and, to a great extent, determine the quality of the women teachers who have lower qualifications, and these will have in their hands the training of ever-increasing numbers of girl pupils and will hand on the ideals which they have themselves received. It was an honor which we felt very deeply when the Missionary Educational Council of South India entrusted to the council of our College the task of inaugurating an L.T. College for Women, and we have been very busy about it.

December 15, 1921.

More than a month has passed since I began the Journal and I am now sitting in the junior B.A. class-room watching over nineteen students (the twentieth happens to be absent) who are writing their terminal examination papers. I was a false weather-prophet; rain did not come, and still keeps away. Instead there is a high cool wind, and every one of these students is firmly holding down her paper with the left hand while her fountain pen (they all have fountain pens) skims all too rapidly over the page. The great principle of answering an examination paper is never to waste a moment on thought. If you do not know what to say next, repeat what you said before until a new idea strikes you. As it is not necessary to dip the pen in ink it should never leave the page. This method enables them to produce small pamphlets which they hand in with a happy sense of achievement, but the examiner’s heart sinks as she gathers up the volumes of hasty manuscript.

Sometimes, however, the answers err on the side of conciseness. “We believe them because we cannot prove them,” was the truthful reply of a student in Physics to the question, “Why do we believe Newton’s Laws of Motion?” Or sometimes an essential transition is omitted; “At the period of the Roman conquest the Greeks were politically hopeless, economically bankrupt, and morally corrupt. They became teachers.” But sometimes it is the caprice of the English language which betrays them. “The events of the 15th century which most affected philosophic thought were the founding of America and the founding of the Universe.” Occasionally they administer an unconscious rebuke. I was just starting out to give an address at a week-night evening service from the chancel steps of a neighboring church, and having a minute or two to spare I took up one of my 120 Scripture papers and read, “St. Paul’s chief difficulty with the Corinthians was that women insisted on speaking in church. It is wicked for women to talk in church.”

The nineteen students before me are very representative of our student body, which now numbers one hundred and thirty. Eleven are writing on Constitutional History, two on Philosophy, four on Zoology and two (a young Hindu married girl and a Syrian Christian) on Malayalam literature. Ten of them speak Tamil, eight Malayalam, and one Telugu. They vary in rank from high official circles to very low origins, but most belong to what we should call the professional classes. All are barefooted and wear the Indian dress, which in the case of the Syrians is always white.

Through the open door I look into the library where the fifty-three new students of this year are writing an English paper. There are eight Hindus and one European among them, also two students from Ceylon, two from Hyderabad, and one, differing widely from the rest in dress and facial type, from Burma. The lecturer in charge is Miss Chamberlain, the daughter of our invaluable secretary in America. She arrived only three weeks ago to take the place of Miss Sarber who has started on her furlough and already the dignity of the philosopher and psychologist is mingling with the gaiety which makes her table a favorite place for students.

The debate on the conscience clause[*] which took place in the new Legislative Assembly in November shows that the party now in power, the non-Brahmin middle-class, realizes the value to the country of Christian education. Man after man rose to express his gratitude to the Christian College and to point out that missionaries alone had brought education to low-caste and out-caste people. The proposal was rejected by 61 votes to 13, a most unexpected and happy event.

One proposal, perfectly well meant, was made at the Government Committee on Education which aroused great indignation among our students. It was that various concessions should be made to the supposed weakness of women students and that the pass mark in examinations should be lowered for them. As the Principals of both the Women’s Colleges opposed the suggestion, it was withdrawn, but this little incident shows two things, the sympathetic feeling of men toward the studies of women, and the distance that women have travelled since the time when they would themselves have requested such concessions.

In the recent agitation in favor of Nationalism finding that the only constructive advice given was to devote themselves to Indian music, to the spinning wheel, which is Mr. Gandhi’s great remedy for social and political ills and to social service, I did all that I could to promote these ends. I asked the Senior Student to collect the names of all who wished to learn to play an Indian instrument, I presented the College with a pound of raw cotton and spinning wheel of the type recommended by Mr. Gandhi, and the social service begun some months before was continued This last consists of our expedition led by Miss Jackson, which twice a week visits an unpleasant little village not far from our gates. The students wash the children, which is not at all a delightful task, attend to sore eyes and matted hair and teach them games and songs, and chat with the village women about household hygiene and how to keep out of debt. One of our Sunday Schools is in this village, too, so by this time the students are welcome visitors, and whether they do much good or not, they learn a great deal of sobering truth. Of course, only a few can go at a time, but others find some scope in the other Sunday Schools and in the little Day School which Miss Brockway instituted for the children of our servants. This last means real self-denial, as the work must be done every day. Still, it remains one of our greatest problems to find channels for the spirit of service which we try to inspire, and without which the current of their patriotism may become stagnant.

But I am being disappointed about the music and the spinning wheel. Not one student was willing to undergo the toilsome practice of learning an instrument, and though the spinning wheel was received with enthusiasm the pound of cotton has hardly diminished at all. Nor will they take the trouble to read the newspapers regularly. So that they might not feel that too British a view of events was presented to them they are supplied with some papers of a very critical tone, but I need not have feared the risk, the papers remain unread. They much prefer the medium of speech, and are keenly interested in almost any topic on which we invite an attractive speaker to give an address, but they do not follow it up by reading. They are decidedly fonder of books than they were, and use the library more, but their taste is for the better kind of domestic fiction more than for anything else. There is one important exception, they all love Shakespeare and there is no one whom they so delight to act. Whenever they invite us to an entertainment, which they do on many and various occasions, we are fairly sure of seeing a few scenes of Shakespeare acted much better than I have ever seen English girls of their age act.

The students have been collecting a fund for our new Science building, a great and beautiful enterprise, which, also, is still in its proper stage. The drawing of plans so large and detailed has occupied many months. We are looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is welcome, too, and particularly help from the students. They have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than Rs. 500. Their most important undertaking was a performance of “Everyman” most solemnly and beautifully carried out before an audience of our women friends, and there was also a dramatic version written by one of the students of the parable of the prodigal son and performed before the college only. This last was remarkable in its adaptation of the story to Indian conditions and for the characteristic introduction of a mother and a sister.

[Illustration: THE OLD INDIA
No Chance–No Hope]

“If she have sent her servants in our pain, If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword, If she have given back our sick again And to the breast the weakling lips restored, Is it a little thing that she has wrought? Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought.”

_Kipling’s “Song of the Women”_

The Medical School at Vellore is still without a permanent home and is lodged in scattered buildings–without a permanent staff except for two or three heroic figures who are performing each the work of several–without a certainty of a regular income in any way equivalent to its needs–but it has an enthusiastic band of students and it has Dr. Ida Scudder, and so the balance is on the right side.

[Footnote *: Opposing the study of the Bible in our schools.]

CHAPTER FIVE

SENT FORTH TO HEAL

“THE Long Trail A-Winding.”

Who that has read “Kim” will ever forget Kipling’s picture of the Grand Trunk Road, with its endless panorama of beggars, Brahmans, Lamas, and talkative old women on pilgrimage? Such roads cover India’s plains with a network of interlacing lines, for one of Britain’s achievements on India’s behalf has been her system of metalled roads, defying alike the dust of the dry season and the floods of the monsoon.

One such road I have in mind, a road leading from the old fortress town of Vellore through twenty-three miles of fertile plain, to Gudiyattam, at the foot of the Eastern Ghats. It is just a South Indian “up country” road, skirting miles of irrigated rice fields, gold-green in their beginnings, gold-brown in the days of ripening and reaping. It winds past patches of sugar cane and cocoanut palm; then half arid uplands, where goats and lean cattle search for grass blades that their predecessors have overlooked; then the _bizarre_ shapes of the ghats, wide spaces open to the play of sun and wind and rain, of passing shadow and sunset glory. They are among the breathing spaces of earth, which no man hath tamed or can tame.

An Indian “Flivver.”

An ordinary road it is, and passing over it the ordinary procession–heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bullocks; crowded jutkas whose tough, little ponies disappear in a rattle of wheels and a cloud of dust; weddings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or mournful as the case may be. One feature alone distinguishes this road from others of its kind; once a week its dusty length is traversed by a visitant from the West, a “Tin Lizzie,” whose unoccupied spaces are piled high with medicine chests and instrument cases. Once a week the Doctor passes by, and the countryside turns out to meet her.

When the Doctor Passes by.

Where do they come from, the pathetic groups that continually bring the little Ford to a halt? For long stretches the road passes through apparently uninhabited country, yet here they are, the lame, the halt, and the blind, as though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the tamarind trees, stands one village; at the edge of the rice fields huddles another. The roofs of thatch or earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of child-birth pain, its fever-burnings, its germ-borne epidemics where sanitation is unknown, its final pangs of dissolution. But once a week the Doctor passes by.

What do she and her attendants treat? Sore eyes and scabies and all the dirt-carried minor ailments that infect the village; malaria from the mosquitoes that swarm among the rice fields; aching teeth to be pulled; dreaded epidemics of cholera or typhoid, small pox or plague. Now and then the back seat is cleared of its _impedimenta_ and turned into the fraction of an ambulance to convey a groaning patient to a clean bed in the hospital ward. Once at least a makeshift operating table has been set up under the shade of a roadside banyan tree, and the Scriptural injunction, “If thy foot offend thee, cut it off,” carried out then and there to the saving of a life.

At dark the plucky little Ford plods gallantly back to the home base, its occupants with faded garlands, whose make-up varies with the seasons–yellow chrysanthemums with purple everlasting tassels at Christmas time; in the dry, hot days of spring pink and white oleanders from the water channels among the hills; during the rains the heavy fragrance of jasmine. All the flowers do their brave best for the day when the Doctor passes by.

Where no Doctor Passes by.

But what of the roads on which the Doctor never passes? From Vellore’s fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all the intermediate points of the compass. Every city of India forms such a nucleus for the country around. Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo clusters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads. Some mathematically minded writer once computed that, if Christ in the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the villages of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the advancing years of the twentieth century many would yet be waiting, unenlightened and unvisited. Few have been visited by any modern follower of the Great Physician. Who can compute their sum total of human misery, of preventable disease, of undernourishment, of pain that might all too easily he alleviated?

[Illustration: Kamala (Lotus Flower), Winner of The Gold Medal in Anatomy in Vellore Medical School]

[Illustration: A Little Lost One–What Will Such Girls Do for India? CONTRASTS]

A Problem In Multiplication.

Was it, one wonders, the memory of the Gudiyattam road, and those like it in nameless thousands, that burned deep into Dr. Ida Scudder’s heart and brain the desire to found a Medical School, where the American Doctor might multiply herself and reproduce her life of skillful and devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian women physicians? It is the only way that the message of the Good Physician, His healing for soul and body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, disease, and ignorance. One hundred and sixty women doctors at present try to minister to India’s one hundred and sixty millions of women, shut out by immemorial custom from men’s hospitals and from physicians who are men. “What are these among so many?” What can they ever be except as they may multiply themselves in the persons of Indian messengers of healing?

Small Beginnings.

And so, in July, 1918, the Vellore Medical School was opened, under the fostering care of four contributing Mission Boards, and with the approval and aid of the Government of Madras. “Go ahead if you can find six students who have completed the High School Course,” said the interested Surgeon General. Instead of six, sixty-nine applied; seventeen were accepted; and fourteen not only survived the inevitable weeding out process, but brought to the school at the end of the first year the unheard of distinction of one hundred per cent, of passes in the Government examination. That famous first class is now in its Senior Year, and by the time this book comes from the press will be scattering itself among thirteen centres of help and health.

And so, in rented buildings, the Medical School started life. If ever an institution passed its first year in a hand-to-mouth existence, this one has. Short of funds save as mercifully provided by private means; short of doctors for the staff; short of buildings in which to house its increasing student body, for it has grown from fourteen to sixty-seven; short, in fine, of everything needed except faith and enthusiasm and hard work on the part of its founders, it has yet gone on; the girls have been housed, classes have been taught, examinations passed, and the first class is ready to go out into the world of work.

Just here perhaps one brief explanation should be made. These girls will not be _doctors_ in the narrowly technical sense, for the Government of India reserves the doctor’s degree for such students as have first taken a college diploma and then on top of it a still more demanding medical course of five years. These students will receive the degree of Licensed Medical Practitioner (L.M.P.) which authorizes them to practise medicine and surgery and even to be in charge of a hospital. The full college may come, we hope, not many years hence, when funds become available. Meantime, this school will year by year be turning out its quota of medical workers whose usefulness cannot be over-estimated.

[Illustration: FIRST BUILDING AT NEW MEDICAL SCHOOL, VELLORE, WHICH IS HOUSING OUR STUDENTS]

A Visit to Vellore.

Let us pay a visit to the School and see it as it is in its present state of makeshift. Since its beginning it has dwelt, like Paul the prisoner, “in its own hired house,” but Paul’s epistles tell of no such uncertainty in his tenure of his rented dwelling, as that which has afflicted this institution. The housing shortage which has distressed New York has reached even to Vellore. Two rented bungalows were lost, and, as an emergency measure, the future Nurses’ Home was erected in great haste on the town site and at once utilized as a dormitory with some rooms set aside for lectures as well.

Corpses–and Children.

Let us first pay a visit to “Pentland,” the one remaining “hired house,” in which the Freshmen have their home with Dr. Mary Samuel, the Indian member of the staff, as their house mother. Just behind it is the thatched shed, carefully walled in, which serves as the dissecting room. To the uninitiated it is a place of gruesome smells and sights, for cadavers, whole or in fragments, litter the tables. The casual visitor sympathizes with the Hindu student who confides to you that during her first days of work in the dissecting room she could only sleep when firmly flanked by a friend on each side of her “to keep off the spirits that walk by night.” After a few weeks of experience, however, the fascinating search for nerve and muscle, tendon, vein, and artery becomes the dominating state of consciousness, and the scientific spirit excludes all resentment at the disagreeable.

Pentland Compound possesses another feature in pleasing contrast to the dissecting shed. As you come away from a session there and close the door of the enclosing wall, from the opposite end of the compound comes the sound of children’s voices in play. There in a comfortable Indian cottage lives the jolly family of the Children’s Home. They are a merry, well-nourished collection of waifs and strays, of all ancestries, Hindu, Muhammadan, and Christian, mostly gathered in through the wards of the Mission Hospitals. Only an experienced social worker could estimate what such a home means in the prevention of future disease, beggary, and crime. It is good for the medical students to live in close neighborliness with this bit of actual service. One student in writing of her future plans mentions that, as an “avocation” in the chinks of her hospital work, she plans to raise private funds and found a little orphanage all her own!

Early Rising.

Not far from Pentland are the new buildings of Voorhees College belonging to the Arcot Mission of the Dutch Reformed Church. For the resent, the Medical School has the loan of its lecture rooms and laboratories in the early morning hours before the boys’ classes begin. That means seven o’clock classes, and previous to that for most of the students a mile walk from the town dormitory. Here is the Chemistry Laboratory. Freshmen toil over the puzzling behavior of atoms and electrons, while in lecture rooms the ear of the uninstructed visitor is puzzled by the technical vocabularies of the classes in anatomy and surgery, and one wonders how the Indian student ever achieves this vast amount of information through the difficult medium of a foreign tongue.

[Illustration: DR. SCUDDER AND THE MEDICAL STUDENTS AT VELLORE.]

In Hospital Wards.

Next in our path of visitation comes Schell Hospital, where the theories learned in dissecting room, laboratory, and lecture are connected up with actual relief of sick women and children. Here the students are divided into small groups and many kinds of clinical demonstrations are going on at once. In the compounding room you will see a lesson in pill-making. That smiling young person working away on the floor in front of the table is a West Coast Brahman, sent on a stipend from the Hindu state of Travancore. It is her first experience away from home and the zest and adventure of the new life have already fired her spirit.

In this verandah another group are at work with bandaging. We watch them while brown arms and legs, heads and bodies disappear under complicated layers of white gauze.

In the large ward Seniors, equipped with head mirrors and stethoscopes, with chart and pen, are taking down patients’ histories and suggesting diagnoses. Soon it will be their work to do this unaided, and every bit of supervised practice is laying up stores of experience for the future.

On the next verandah Doctor Findlay is giving a lecture and demonstration on the care and feeding of babies. Demonstration is not difficult, for the hospital always provides an abundance of ailing infants whose regulated diet and consequently improving health serve as laboratory tests.

The Ford in a New Capacity.

Now we follow the shady verandah around three sides of the attractive courtyard with its trees and flowering creepers. At the far end the class in obstetrics is going on. And behold, the irrepressible Ford has entered into a new province. This truly American product will probably be found to-day in every continent and nearly every country in the world, but one ventures to prophesy that Vellore is the only spot on the habitable globe where its cast-off tires have been metamorphosed into models of human organs! Every student not working over an actual mother or baby is busy performing on these home-made rubber models the operations she may some day be called to do upon a living patient.

In the midst of these Dr. Griscom is interrupted by next ward that didn’t cry for a week? You know that this morning you slapped it and it cried for the first time, and its mother was very happy. Now she wants to hear it cry again, and says–“may she please beat it herself?” The Doctor leaves her Ford tires, and runs to the ward to explain to the overzealous mother the difference between _massage_ administered by a physician and the ordinary manner of “beating” a baby.

[Illustration: Interior of the Temple Where God is a Stone Image]

[Illustration: Interior of the Hospital Where God is Love]

Our next place of pilgrimage is the “town site” where the new Nurses’ Home affords temporary dormitory accommodation. Beside it is the Doctor’s bungalow, and in the open space next is to be built the big dispensary. This is well called the “town site,” for it is in the thick of Vellore’s population. Children, dogs, and donkeys swarm across its precincts, and there is no fear of these students being separated from the actualities of Indian life. The two-story buildings, however, give abundant opportunity for the occupants to “lift up their eyes unto the hills”; and the open air sleeping-rooms promise breezes in the hottest nights.

“Mrs. Earth Thou-Art.”

Here, too, the Seniors have their lectures in obstetrics, and with the beginning of that course a new difficulty arose. Equipment here, as in practically every Mission institution, is pitifully limited by lack of funds. For the proper teaching of obstetrics there is need of a pelvic manikin, lifesize. There were no funds to spare for so expensive a piece of apparatus, and, if there had been, there would have been a delay of months in getting it out from England or America. But meantime obstetrics must be taught, and a manikin must be had. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Necessity got to work, and “Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art” is the result. Dr. Griscom sent for the potter, who left his wheel in the bazaar and came to this market for new wares. After long and detailed instructions, he returned to his wheel, and set it to the making of a shape never seen in the potter’s vision of Jeremiah or Robert Browning. The first attempt was a failure; the second and third were equally useless; at last something was produced that approximated the human size and form. The tires of the Ford were again requisitioned and, by the miraculous aid of the blacksmith, nailed to the pottery figure without wrecking the latter. “Mrs. Earth-Thou-Art” at last reposed complete, one example of the triumph of the missionary teacher over the handicaps of the situation. We hope that her brittle clay will survive until such time as some friend from across the sea is moved to provide for her a “store-made” successor.

“That which shall be.”

One more spot must be visited before our pilgrimage ends. No guest of the Medical School is ever allowed to depart without a visit to “the site,” that pride of Dr. Ida Scudder and her staff.

Three miles out from the dust and noise of the bazaars lies this tract of fertile land, the near hills rising even within its boundaries, the heights of Kylasa forming a mountain wall against the sunset. Here in the midst of natural beauty, open to every wind of heaven, the dormitories, lecture room, chapel, and new hospital will rise. It will mean a healthful home, with the freedom of country life and endless opportunity for games and walks. The motor ambulances will form the daily connecting link with the practical work of dispensary and emergency hospital.

“Who’s Who.”

We have spoken much of buildings and courses of study, but little of the girls themselves. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What are their future plans?

They are girls of many shades of belief, from many classes of society. The great majority are, of course, Protestant Christians, representing the work of almost every Mission Board to be found in South India. There are a few Roman Catholics, and about an equal number of members of the indigenous Syrian Christian community. Nine are Hindus, including one Brahman. They come from the remotest corners of the Madras Presidency, and some from even beyond its borders.

Why did they come? There are some who frankly admit that their entrance into Medical School was due solely to the influence of parents and relatives, and that their present vital interest in what they are doing dates back not to any childhood desire for the doctor’s profession, but only to the stimulating experiences of the school itself. Others tell of a life-long wish for what the school has made possible; still others of “sudden conversion” to medicine, brought about by a realization of need, or in one case to the chance advice of a school friend. Two speak of the appalling need of their own home villages, where no medical help for women has ever been known. Some of the students have expressed their reasons in their own words:–

“Once I had a severe attack of influenza and was taken to the General Hospital, Madras. I have heard people say that nurses and doctors are not good to the patients. But, contrary to my idea, the English and Eurasian nurses there were very good and kind to me, more than I expected. I used to see the students of the Medical College of Madras paying visits to all the patients, some of whom were waiting for mornings when they should meet their medical friends. I saw all the work that they did. The nurses were very busy helping patients and, whatever trouble the patients gave, they never got cross with them. They used to sing to some of them at night, give toys to little ones and thus coax every one to make them take medicine. I admired the kindness and goodness that all the medical workers with whom I came in contact possessed. As medical work began to interest me, I used to read magazines about medical work. Again, when I once went to Karimnagar, I saw ever so many children and women, uncared for and not being loved by high caste people. I wanted to help Indians very much. All these things made me join the Medical School.

“My father’s desire was that one of his daughters should study medicine and work in the hospital where he worked for twenty years, and so in order to fulfill his desire I made up my mind to learn medicine.

“Now my father is dead and the hospital in which he had worked is closed, for there is no one to take his place. So all are very glad to see that I am learning medicine. There are many men doctors in Ceylon, but very few lady doctors and I think that God has given me a good opportunity to work for Him.

“For a long time I did not know much about the sufferings of my country women without proper aid of medical women. One day I happened to attend a meeting held by some Indian ladies and one European. They spoke about the great need of women doctors in India and all about the sufferings of my sisters. One fact struck me more than anything else. It was about an untrained mid-wife who treated a woman very cruelly, but ignorantly. From that time I made up my mind to study medicine with the aim of becoming a loving doctor. My wish is now that all the women doctors should be real Christian doctors with real love and sympathizing hearts for the patients.

“When I told my parents that I wanted to study medicine, they and my relatives objected and scolded me, for they were afraid that I would not marry if I would study medicine. In India they think meanly of a person, especially a girl, who is not married at the proper age. I want now to show my people that it is not mean to remain unmarried. This is my second aim which came from the first.”

[Illustration: A MEDICAL STUDENT IN VELLORE]

The following is written by a Hindu student:–

“Before entering into the subject, I should like to write a few words about myself. I am the first member of our community to attain English education. Almost all my relatives (I talk only about the female members of our community) have learnt only to write and read our mother language Telugu.

“When I entered the high school course I had a poor ambition to study medicine. I do not know whether it was due to the influence of my brother-in-law who is a doctor, or whether it was due to our environments. Near our house was a small hospital. It was doing excellent work for the last five years. Now unfortunately the hospital has been closed for want of stock and good doctors. From that hospital I learnt many things. I was very intimate with the doctors. I admired the work they were doing.

“My father had a faithful friend. He was a Brahman. He realized from his own experience the want of lady doctors. He had a daughter, his only child, and she died for want of proper medical aid. Whenever my father’s friend used to see me he used to ask my father to send me to the Medical College, for he was quite interested in me, like my own father. After all, as soon as I passed the School Final Examination, it was decided that I should take up medicine, but at that time my mother raised many an objection, saying the caste rules forbid it. I left the idea with no hope of renewing it and joined the Arts College. I studied one year in the College. Then luckily for me my father and his friend tried for a scholarship.

“Luckily again, it was granted by the Travancore Government.

“I am not going to close before I tell a few words of my short experience in the College. As soon as I came here I thought I wouldn’t be able to learn all the things I saw here. I looked upon everything with strange eyes and everything seemed strange to me, too. But, as the days passed, I liked all that was going on in the College. The study–I now long to hear more of it and study it. Now everything is going on well with me and I hope to realize my ambition with the grace of the Almighty, for the ‘thoughts of wise men are Heaven-gleams.'”

[Illustration: BETTER BABIES Throughout India. Feeding and Weighing]

You ask, what of the future? What will these young doctors bring to India’s need? How much will they _do_? Might one dare to prophesy that in years to come they will at least in their own localities make stories like the following impossible?

A woman still young, though mother of seven living children, is carried into the maternity ward of the Woman’s Hospital. At the hands of the ignorant mid-wife she has suffered maltreatment whose details cannot be put into print, followed by a journey in a springless cart over miles of rutted country road. She is laid upon the operating table with the blessed aid of anaesthetics at hand; there is still time to save the baby. But what of the mother? Only one more case of “too late.” Pulseless, yet perfectly conscious, she hears the permission given to the relatives to take her home, and knows all too well what those words mean. The Hospital has saved her baby; her it cannot save. Clinging to the doctor’s hand she cries:

“Oh, Amma, I am frightened. Why do you send me away? I must live. My little children,–this is the eighth. I don’t care for myself, but I must live for them. Who will care for them if I am gone? Oh, let me live!”

And the doctor could only answer, “Too late.”

On that road where the doctor passes by, one day she saw a beautiful boy of one year, “the only son of his mother.” The eyelids were shut and swollen. “His history?” the doctor asks. Ordinary country sore eyes that someway refused to get well; a journey through dust and heat to a distant shrine of healing; numberless circlings of the temple according to orthodox Hindu rites; then a return home to order from the village jeweller two solid silver eyeballs as offerings to the deity of the shrine. Weeks are consumed by these doings, for in sickness as in health the East moves slowly. Meantime the eyes are growing more swollen, more painful. At last someone speaks of the weekly visit of the doctor on the Gudiyattam Road.

The doctor picked up the baby, pushed back the swollen eyelids, and washed away the masses of pus, only to find both eyeballs utterly destroyed. One more to be added to the army of India’s blind! One more case of “too late”! One more atom in the mass of India’s unnecessary, preventable suffering,–that suffering which moved to compassion the heart of the Christ. How many more weary generations must pass before we, His followers, make such incidents impossible? How many before Indian women with pitying eyes and tender hands shall have carried the gift of healing, the better gift of the health that outstrips disease, through the roads and villages of India?

[Illustration: Freshman Class at Vellore]

[Illustration: Latest Arrivals at Vellore]

The existence of the Medical School has been made possible by the gifts of American women. Its continued existence and future growth depend upon the same source. Gifts in this case mean not only money, but life. Where are those American students who are to provide the future doctors and nurses not only to “carry on” this school as it exists, but to build it up into a great future? It is to the girls now in high school and college that the challenge of the future comes. Among the conflicting cries of the street and market place, comes the clear call of Him whom we acknowledge as Master of life, re-iterating the simple words at the Lake of Galilee, “What is that to thee? Follow thou me.”

Rupert Brooke has sung of the summons of the World War that cleansed the heart from many pettinesses. His words apply equally well to this service of human need which has been called “war’s moral equivalent.”

“Now, God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.”

AN EXAMPLE OF CHRISTIAN TREATMENT

Volumes might be written on the atrocities and absurdities of wizards, quack doctors, and the hideous usages of native midwifery. The ministry of Christian physicians comes as a revelation to the tortured victims.

The scene is a ward in a Christian Hospital for women in South India. The patients in adjacent beds, convalescents, converse together.

“What’s the matter with you?” says Bed No. 1 contentedly. “My husband became angry with me, because the meal wasn’t ready when he came home and he cut my face. The Doctor Miss Sahib has mended me, she has done what my own mother would not do.” Said another in reply to the question, “The cow horned my arm, but until I got pneumonia I couldn’t stop milking or making bread for the father of my children, even if it was broken. The hospital is my Mabap (mother-father).”

“What care would you get at home?” chimed in another who had been burning up with fever. “Oh! I would be out in the deserted part of the woman’s quarters. It would be a wonderful thing if any one would pass me a cup of water,” she replied. From another bed, a young wife of sixteen spoke of having been ill with abscesses. “One broiling day,” she said, “I had fainted with thirst. The midwives had neglected me all through the night, and, thinking I was dying, they threw me from the cord-bed to the floor, and dragged me down the steep stone staircase to the lowest cellar where I was lying, next to the evil-smelling dust-bin, ready for removal by the carriers of the dead, when the Doctor Miss Sahib found me and brought me here. She is my mother and I am her child.”

An old woman in Bed No. 4 exhorts the patients around her to trust the mission workers. “I was against them once,” she tells them, “but now I know what love means. Caste? What is caste? I believe in the goodness they show. That is their caste.”

Words profoundly wise!

On the slope of the desolate river among the tall grasses I asked her, “Maiden, where do you go shading your lamp with your mantle? My house is all dark and lonesome,–lend me your light!” She raised her dark eyes for a moment and looked at my face through the dusk. “I have come to the river,” she said, “to float my lamp on the stream when the daylight wanes in the west.” I stood alone among tall grasses and watched the timid flame of her lamp uselessly drifting in the tide.

In the silence of the gathering night I asked her, “Maiden, your lights are all lit–then where do you go with your lamp? My house is all dark and lonesome,–lend me your light.” She raised her dark eyes on my face and stood for a moment doubtful. “I have come,” she said at last, “to dedicate my lamp to the sky.” I stood and watched her light uselessly burning in the void.

In the moonless gloom of midnight I asked her, “Maiden, what is your quest holding the lamp near your heart? My house is all dark and lonesome,–lend me your light.” She stopped for a minute and thought and gazed at my face in the dark. “I have brought my light,” she said, “to join the carnival of lamps.” I stood and watched her little lamp uselessly lost among lights.

_Rabindranath Tagore._

CHAPTER SIX

WOMEN WHO DO THINGS

India has boasted certain eminent women whom America knows well. Ramabai with her work for widows is a household word in American homes and colleges; President Harrison’s sentences of appreciation emphasized the distinction that already belonged to Lilavati Singh; Chandra Lela’s search for God has passed into literature. The Sorabji sisters are known in the worlds of law, education, and medicine.

But these names are not the only ones that India has to offer. In the streets of her great cities where two civilizations clash; in sleepy, old-world towns where men and women, born under the shade of temple towers and decaying palaces, are awakening to think new thoughts; in isolated villages where life still harks back to pre-historic days–against all these backgrounds you may find the Christian educated woman of New India measuring her untried strength against the powers of age-old tradition.

In this chapter I would tell you of a few such women whom I have met. They are not the only ones; they may not be even pre-eminent. Many who knew India well would match them with lists from other localities and in other lines of service.

These five are all college women. One had but two years in a Mission College whose course of study went no further; one carries an American degree; three are graduates of a Government College for men. All go back to the pioneer days before Madras Women’s Christian College and Vellore Medical School saw the light, and when Isabella Thoburn’s college department was small; all five bear proudly the name of Christian; through five different professions they are giving to the world of India their own expression of what Christianity has meant to them.

[Illustration: MRS. PAUL APPASAMY]

Home Making and Church Work.

Throughout India there exists a group of women workers, widely scattered, largely unknown to one another, in the public eye unhonored and unsung, yet performing tasks of great significance. Wherever an Indian Church raises its tower to the sky, there working beside the pastor you will find the pastor’s wife.

Sometimes she lives in the heart of the Hindu town; sometimes in a village, in the primitive surroundings of a mass-movement community. Eminent among such is Mrs. Azariah, wife of the first Indian bishop, and with him at the head of the Tinnevelly Missionary Society at Dornakal. There, in the heart of the Deccan, among primitive Telugu outcastes, is this remarkable group of Indian missionaries, supported by Indian funds, winning these lowly people through the gospel of future salvation and of present betterment.

It was on a Sunday morning that I slipped into the communion service at Dornakal. The little church, built from Indian gifts with no aid from the West, is simplicity itself. The roof thatched with millet stalks, the low-hanging palmyra rafters hung with purple everlastings, the earth-floor covered with bamboo matting, all proclaimed that here was a church built and adorned by the hands of its worshippers. The Bishop in his vestments dispensed the sacrament from the simple altar. Even the Episcopal service had been so adapted to Indian conditions that instead of the sound of the expected chants one heard the Te Deum and the Venite set to the strains of Telugu lyrics. The audience, largely of teachers, theological students, and schoolboys and girls, sat on the clean floor space. One saw and listened with appreciation and reverence, finding here a beginning and prophecy of what the Christianized fraction of India will do for its motherland.

It was against this background that I came to know Mrs. Azariah. In the bungalow, as the Bishop’s wife, she presides with dignity over a household where rules of plain living and high thinking prevail. She dispenses hospitality to the many European guests who come to see the activities of this experimental mission station, and packs the Bishop off well provided with food and traveling comforts for his long and numerous journeys. The one little son left at home is his mother’s constant companion and shows that his training has not been neglected for the multitude of outside duties. One longs to see the house when the five older children turn homeward from school and college, and fill the bungalow with the fun of their shared experiences. Mercy, the eldest daughter, is one of the first Indian women students to venture on the new commercial course offered by the Young Women’s Christian Association with the purpose of fitting herself to be her father’s secretary. In a few months she will be bringing the traditions of the Women’s Christian College of Madras, where she spent two previous years, to share with the Dornakal community.

But, though wife and mother and home maker, Mrs. Azariah’s interests extend far beyond the confines of her family. She is president of the Madras Mothers’ Union, and editor of the little magazine that travels to the homes of Tamil and Telugu Christian women, their only substitute for the “Ladies’ Home Journal” and “Modern Priscilla.” She is also the teacher of the women’s class, made up of the wives of the theological students. A Tamil woman in a Telugu country, she, too, must have known a little of the linguistic woes of the foreign missionary. Those days, however, are long past, and she now teaches her daily classes in fluent and easy Telugu. There are also weekly trips to nearby hamlets, where the women-students are guided by her into the ways of adapting the Christian’s good news to the comprehension of the plain village woman, whose interests are bounded by her house, her children, her goats, and her patch of millet.

Such a village we visited that same Sunday, when toward evening the Bishop, Mrs. Azariah, and I set out to walk around the Dornakal domain. We saw the gardens and farm from which the boys supply the whole school family with grain and fresh vegetables; we looked up to the grazing grounds and saw the herd of draught bullocks coming into the home sheds from their Sunday rest in pasture. I was told about the other activities which I should see on the working day to follow–spinning and weaving and sewing, cooking and carpentry and writing and reading–a simple Christian communism in which the boys farm and weave for the girls, and the girls cook and sew for the boys, and all live together a life that is leading up to homes of the future.

It was after all that that we saw the village. On the edge of the Mission property we came to the small group of huts, wattled from tree branches and clay, inhabited by Indian gypsy folk, just settling from nomadism into agricultural life. So primitive are they still, that lamp light is _taboo_ among them, and the introduction of a kerosene lantern would force them to tear down those attempts at house architecture and move on to a fresh site, safe from the perils of civilization. It is among such primitive folk that Mrs. Azariah and her students carry their message. Herself a college woman, what experiment in sociology could be more thrilling than her contact with such a remnant of the primitive folk of the early world?

Mother, home-maker, editor, teacher, evangelist, with quiet unconsciousness and utter simplicity she is building her corner of Christian India.

Public Service.

“To-morrow is the day of the Annual Fair and I am so busy with arrangements that I had no time even to answer the note you sent me yesterday.” No, this was not said in New York or Boston, but in Madras; and the speaker was not an American woman, but Mrs. Paul Appasamy, the All-India Women’s Secretary of the National Missionary Society.

[Illustration: MRS. PAUL APPASAMY]

It was at luncheon time that I found Mrs. Appasamy at home, and persuaded her by shortening her meal a bit to find time to sit down with me a few minutes and tell me of some of the opportunities that Madras offers to an Indian Christian woman with a desire for service.

For such service Mrs. Appasamy has unusual qualifications. The fifth woman to enter the Presidency College of Madras, she was one of those early pioneers of woman’s education, of whom we have spoken with admiring appreciation. Two years of association with Pandita Ramabai in her great work at Poona added practical experience and a familiarity with organization. Some years after her marriage to Mr. Appasamy, a barrister-at-law in Madras, came the opportunity for a year of foreign travel, divided between England and America. Such experiences could not fail to give a widened outlook, and, when Mrs. Appasamy returned to make her home in Madras, she soon found that not even with four children to look after, could her interests be confined to the walls of her own home.

American girls might be interested to know how wide a range of activities Indian life affords–how far the Western genius for organization and committee-life has invaded the East. Here is a partial list of Mrs. Appasamy’s affiliations:

Member of Council and Executive for the Women’s Christian College.

Vice President of the Madras Y.W.C.A.

Member of the Hostel Committee of the Y.W.C.A.

Member of the Vernacular Council of the Y.W.C.A.

Women’s Secretary for All India of the National Missionary Society.

Supervisor of a Social Service Committee for Madras.

President of the Christian Service Union.

Of all her activities, Mrs. Appasamy’s connection with the National Missionary Society is perhaps the most interesting. The “N.M.S.,” as it is familiarly called, is a cause very near to the hearts of most Indian Christians. The work in Dornakal represents the effort of Tinnevelly Tamil Christians for the evangelization of one section of the Telugu country. The N.M.S. is a co-ordinated enterprise, taking in the contributions of all parts of Christian India and applying them to seven fields in seven different sections of India’s great expanse. The first is denominational and intensive; the second interdenominational and extensive. India has room for both and for many more of each. Both are built upon the principle of Indian initiative and employ Indian workers paid by Indian money.

In the early days of the N.M.S., its missionaries were all men, assisted perhaps by their wives, who with household cares could give only limited service. Later came the idea that here was a field for Indian women. At the last convention, the question of women’s contribution and women’s work was definitely raised, and Mrs. Appasamy took upon herself the burden of travel and appeal. Already she has organized contributing branches among the women of India’s principal cities and is now anticipating a trip to distant Burmah for the same purpose. Rupees 8,000–about $2,300.00–lie in the treasury as the first year’s response, much of it given in contributions of a few cents each from women in deep poverty, to whom such gifts are literally the “widow’s mite.”

The spending of the money is already planned. In the far north in a Punjabi village a house is now a building and its occupant is chosen. Miss Sirkar, a graduate now teaching in Kinnaird College, Lahore, has determined to leave her life within college walls, to move into the little house in the isolated village, and there on one third of her present salary to devote her trained abilities to the solution of rural problems. It is a new venture for an unmarried woman. It requires not only the gift of a dedicated life, but also the courage of an adventurous spirit. Elementary school teaching, social service, elementary medical help–these are some of the “jobs” that face this new missionary to her own people.

But, to return to Mrs. Appasamy, she not only organizes other people for work, but in the depressed communities of Madras herself carries on the tasks of social uplift. As supervisor of a Social Service organization, she has the charge of the work carried on in fifteen outcaste villages. With the aid of several co-workers frequent visits are made. Night schools are held for adults who must work during the hours of daylight, but who gather at night around the light of a smoky kerosene lantern to struggle with the intricacies of the Tamil alphabet. Ignorant women, naturally fearful of ulterior motives, are befriended, until trust takes the place of suspicion. The sick are induced to go to hospitals; learners are prepared for baptism; during epidemics the dead are buried. During the great strike in the cotton mills, financial aid was given. Hull House, Chicago, or a Madras Pariah Cheri–the stage setting shifts, but the fundamental problems of ignorance and poverty and disease are the same the world around. The same also is the spirit for service, whether it shines through the life of Jane Addams or of Mrs. Appasamy.

With the “Blue Triangle.”

The autumn of 1906 saw the advent of the first Indian student at Mt. Holyoke College. Those were the days when Oriental students were still rare and the entrance of Dora Maya Das among seven hundred American college girls was a sensation to them as well as an event to her.

It is a far cry from the wide-spreading plains of the Punjab with their burning heats of summer to the cosy greenness of the Connecticut valley–a far cry in more senses than geographical distance. Dora had grown up in a truly Indian home, as one of thirteen children, her father a new convert to Christianity, her mother a second generation Christian. The Maya Das family were in close contact with a little circle of American missionaries. An American child was Dora’s playmate and “intimate friend.” In the absence of any nearby school, an American woman was her teacher, who opened for her the door of English reading, that door that has led so many Oriental students into a large country. Later came the desire for college education. To an application to enter among the men students of Forman Christian College at Lahore came the principal’s reply that she might do so if she could persuade two other girls to join her. The two were sought for and found, and these three pioneers of women’s education in the Punjab entered classes which no woman had invaded before.

[Illustration: BABY ON SCALES]

Then came the suggestion of an American college, and Dora started off on a voyage of discovery that must have been epoch-making in her life. It is, as I have said, a far cry from Lahore to South Hadley. It means not only physical acclimatization, but far more delicate adjustments of the mind and spirit. Many a missionary, going back and forth at intervals of five or seven years, could tell you of the periods of strain and stress that those migrations bring. How much more for a girl still in her teens! New conventions, new liberties, new reserves–it was young David going forth in Saul’s untried armor. Of spiritual loneliness too, she could tell much, for to the Eastern girl, always untrammelled in her expression of religious emotion, our Western restraint is an incomprehensible thing. “I was lonely,” says Miss Maya Das, “and then after a time I reacted to my environment and put on a reserve that was even greater than theirs.”

So six years passed–one at Northfield, four at Mt. Holyoke, and one at the Y.W.C.A. Training School in New York. Girls of that generation at Mt. Holyoke will not forget their Indian fellow student who “starred” in Shakespearian roles and brought a new Oriental atmosphere to the pages of the college magazine. Six years, and then the return to India, and another period of adjustment scarcely less difficult than the first. That was in 1910, and the years since have seen Miss Maya Das in various capacities. First as lecturer, and then as acting principal of Kinnaird College at Lahore, she passed on to girls of her own Province something of Mt. Holyoke’s gifts to her. Now in Calcutta, she is Associate National Secretary of the Y.W.C.A.

It was in Calcutta that I met Miss Maya Das, and that she left me with two outstanding impressions. The first is that of force and initiative unusual in an Indian woman. How much of this is due to her American education, how much to her far-northern home and ancestry, is difficult to say. Whatever the cause, one feels in her resource and executive ability. In that city of purdah women, she moves about with the freedom and dignity of a European and is received with respect and affection.

The second characteristic which strikes one is the fact that Miss Maya Das has remained Indian. One can name various Indian men and some women who have become so denationalized by foreign education that “home” is to them the land beyond the water, and understanding of their own people has lessened to the vanishing point. That Miss Maya Das is still essentially Indian is shown by such outward token as that of dropping her first name, which is English, and choosing to be known by her Indian name of Mohini, and also by adherence to distinctively Indian dress, even to the embroidered Panjabi slippers. What matters more is the inward habit of mind of which these are mere external expressions.

In a recent interview with Mr. Gandhi, Miss Maya Das told him that as a Christian she could not subscribe to the Non-Co-operation Movement, because of the racial hate and bitterness that it engenders; yet just because she was a Christian she could stand for all constructive movements for India in economic and social betterment. One of Mr. Gandhi’s slogans is “a spinning wheel in every home,” that India may revive its ancient arts and crafts and no longer be clothed by the machine looms of a distant country. Miss Maya Das told him that she had even anticipated him in this movement, for she and other Christian women of advanced education are following a regular course in spinning and weaving, with the purpose of passing on this skill through the Rural Department of the Y.W.C.A.

Another pet scheme of Miss Maya Das is the newly formed Social Service League of Calcutta. Into its membership has lately come the niece of a Chairman of the All-India Congress, deciding that the constructive forces of social reform are better to follow than the destructive programme of Non-Co-operation. Miss Maya Das longs to turn her abounding energy into efforts toward purdah parties and lectures for the shut-in women of the higher classes, believing that in this way the Association can both bring new interests into narrow lives, and can also gain the help and financial support of these bored women of wealth toward work among the poor.

One of Miss Maya Das’s interests is a month’s summer school for rural workers, a prolonged Indian Silver Bay, held at a temperature of 112 in the shade, during the month of May when all schools and colleges are closed for the hot weather vacation. Last year women came to it from distant places, women who had never been from home before, who had never seen a “movie,” who had never entered a rowboat or an automobile. Miss Maya Das’s stereopticon lectures carried these women in imagination to war scenes where women helped, to Hampton Institute, to Japan, and suggested practical ways of assisting in tuberculosis campaigns and child welfare. After four weeks of social enjoyment and Christian teaching they returned again to their scattered branches with the curtain total of their results from 88 in Newark to 355 in Madras.

[Illustration: PUTTING SPICES IN BABY’S MILK Notice Feeding Vessels, Shell and Tin Cup]

What is Dr. Vera Singhe doing about it? With her two medical assistants, her corps of nurses, and the increasing number of health visitors whom she herself has trained, she has been able to reduce the death rate among the babies in her care during 1920 from the city rate of 280 for that year to 231.

But enough of statistics. More enlightening than printed reports is a visit to the Triplicane Health Centre, where in the midst of a congested district work is actually going on. We shall find no up-to-date building with modern equipment, but a middle-class Hindu house, adapted as well as may be to its new purpose. Among its obvious drawbacks, there is the one advantage, that patients feel themselves at home and realize that what the doctor does in those familiar surroundings they can carry over to their own home life.

Our visit happens to be on a Thursday afternoon, which is Mothers’ Day. Thirty or more have gathered for an hour of sewing. It is interesting to see mothers of families taking their first lessons in hemming and overcasting, and creating for the first time with their own hands the garments for which they have always been dependent on the bazaar tailor. For these women have never been to school–their faces bear that shut-in look of the illiterate, a look impossible to define, but just as impossible to mistake when once it has been recognized. With the mothers are a group of girls of ten or twelve, who are learning sewing at an earlier age, when fingers are more pliant and less like to thumbs. Then there are the babies, too–most of them health-centre babies, who come for milk, for medicine, for weighing, over a familiar and oft-traveled road. Fond mothers exhibit them with pride to the doctor, and there is much comparison of offspring, much chatter, and much general sociability.

Back of the dispensary is the milk room, where in an adapted and Indianized apparatus, due to the doctor’s ingenuity, the milk supply is pasteurized each day, and given out only to babies whose mothers are positively unable to nurse them, and are too poor to buy.

Of some of the difficulties encountered Dr. Vera Singhe will tell in her own words:

“The work of the midwife is carried out in the filthiest parts of the city among the lowest of the city’s population, both day and night, in sun and rain … A patient whose ‘address’ was registered at the Triplicane Centre was searched for by a nurse on duty in the locality of the ‘address’ given, and could not be found. Much disappointed, the nurse was returning to the centre, when to her bewilderment she found that her patient had been delivered in a broken cart.”

Of some of the actual cases where mothers have been attended by untrained barber women, the details are too revolting to publish. Imagine the worst you can, and then be sure that your imagination has altogether missed the mark.

Of the reaction upon ignorance and superstition Dr. Vera Singhe says, “In Triplicane dispensary as many as sixty cords around waists and arms and variously shaped and sized pieces of leather which had been tied in much trust and confidence to an innocent sufferer with the hope of obtaining recovery have been in a single day removed by the mothers themselves on seeing that our treatment was more effective than the talisman.”

Weighing, feeding, bathing, prevention of disease, simple remedies–knowledge of all these goes out from the health centres to the unsanitary homes of crowded city streets. So far one woman’s influence penetrates.

In a Hospital.

It was on a train journey up-country from Madras, some twelve years ago, that I first met Dr. Paru. She and I shared the long seat of the small second-class compartment, and in that close neighborliness I soon fell to wondering. From her dress I knew her to be a Hindu, yet her jewels were few and inconspicuous. She was most evidently of good family, yet she was traveling unattended.

Presently we fell into some casual talk, the inconsequent remarks common to chance acquaintance the world over. More intimate conversation followed, and before the end of the short journey together, I knew who Miss Paru was. The oldest daughter of a liberal Hindu lawyer on the Malabar Coast, she was performing the astounding feat of taking a medical course at the Men’s Government College in Madras, while systematically breaking her caste by living at the Y.W.C.A. I almost gasped with astonishment. “But what do your relatives say?” I asked. “Oh,” she replied, “my father is the head of his family and an influential man in our town. He does as he pleases and no one dares to object.”

That was twelve years ago. Yesterday for the second time I met my traveling companion of long ago. She is now Dr. Paru, assistant to Dr. Kugler in the big Guntur Women’s Hospital, with its hundred beds, managing alone its daily dispensary list of one hundred and fifty patients, and performing unaided such difficult major operations as a Caesarean section for a Brahman woman, of whom Dr. Kugler says, “The patient had made many visits to Hindu shrines, but the desire of her life, her child, was the result of an operation in a Mission Hospital. In our Hospital her living child was placed in her arms as a result of an operation performed by a Christian doctor.”

How did Dr. Paru, the Hindu medical student, develop into Dr. Paru, the Christian physician? I asked her and she told me, and her answers were a series of pictures as vivid as her own personality.

First, there was Paru in her West Coast Home, among the cocoanut palms and pepper vines of Malabar where the mountains come down to meet the sea and the sea greets the mountains in abundant rains. Over that Western sea once came the strange craft of Vasco di Gama, herald of a new race of invaders from the unknown West. Over the same sea to-day come men of many tongues and races, and Arab and African Negroes jostle by still in the bazaars of West Coast towns. Such was the setting of Paru’s home. During her childhood days certain visitors came to its door, Bible women with parts of the New Testament for sale, little paper-bound Gospels with covers of bright blue and red. The contents meant nothing to Paru then, but the colors were attractive, and for their sake she and her sister, childlike, bought, and after buying, because they were schoolgirls and the art of reading was new to them, read.

The best girls’ school in that Malabar town was a Roman Catholic