Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India Part 1

Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India.

by Alice B. Van Doren.

FOREWORD

The Central Committee sends out this book on Indian girlhood to meet the young women of America with their high privilege of education, that often unrealized and unacknowledged gift of Christ.

Miss Van Doren has given emphasis in the book to the privileged young woman of India; she shows the possibilities, and yet you will see in it something of the black shadow cast by that religion which holds no place for the redemption of woman. If you could see it in its hideousness which the author can only hint at, you would say as two American college girls said after a tour through India, "We cannot endure it. Don't take us to another temple. We never dreamed that anything under the guise of religion could be so vile." And somehow there has seemed to them since a note of insincerity in poetic phrasings of Hindu writers who pa.s.s over entirely gross forms of idolatrous faith to indulge in n.o.ble sentiments which suggest plagiarism. A distinguished author said recently, "I can never read Tagore again after seeing the women of India." From sacred temple slums of South India to shambles of Kalighat it is revolting, sickening, shameful. It is pleasanter to dwell on the beauties of Hinduism and ignore the unprintable actualities, but if we are to help we must feel how terrible and immediate the need is. No one can really meet that need but the educated Indian Christian women whom G.o.d is preparing in this day for service. They are the ones who are Lighted to Lighten. They are the Hope of the future. Fifty years ago, after the Civil war, the light began in the organization of Woman's Missionary Societies. Through all the years women have gone, never very many, sometimes not very strong, limited in various ways, but with one stern determination, at any cost "to save some."

Now at the close of your war, young women of America, a new era is beginning in which you are called to take your part. You will not be the pioneers. The trail is blazed. It has been proven that Indian girls can be educated, their minds are keen and eager, they are Christian, many of them, in a sense which girls of America cannot comprehend. Their task is infinitely greater than yours. If they fail, the redemption of Indian womanhood will not be realized, and so we see them taking as the college emblem, not the beautiful, decorated bra.s.s lamp of the palace, but the common, little clay lamp of the poorest home and going out with the flickering flame to lighten the deep darkness of their land. College girls in America sometimes wear their degree as a decoration. To these girls it is equipment, armor, weapons, for the tearing down of strongholds. These girls must be leaders. They cannot escape the challenge.

Until now the undertaking has seemed hopeless. What could a few foreign women do among those millions? But the great, silent revolution has begun Eastern women are seeking self-determination as nations seek it.

They are a.s.serting rights to soul and mind and body. They refuse to be chattels, and going out to release these millions come these little groups of Christian college girls who are to furnish leadership. Have we no part? Yes, as allies we are needed as never before. Unless from the faculties of our colleges, as well as from our student volunteers adequate aid is sent at once these little groups may fail. This is your "moral equivalent of war." To go and help them in this Day which is their Day of Decision requires vision, devotion, a glorious giving of life which will count just in proportion as the need is immediate, the battle in doubt, failure possible. Mission Boards must go haltingly for lack of women and of funds until groups of women from colleges in America hear the call of Christ and follow Him, for G.o.d Himself will not do this work alone. He has chosen that it shall be done through you.

From our colleges and medical schools recruits and funds must be sent until those who are in the new colleges over there are trained and ready to win India for their Master. To bring them over here for training is not altogether good. There are dangers in this our age of jazz. It is not good to send out very young girls to a far country during the formative years lest a strange language and customs and a new civilization should unfit them to go back to their "Main Street" and adjust themselves. The Indian Colleges are best for the undergraduate Indian girl and are the only ones for the great majority. We must make these the best possible, truly Christian in their teaching and standards, in impressions on the lives of students as well as in their mission to the people of India.

This book is for study in our church societies of older girls and of women, and very especially for girls in the colleges, who should consider this as one of the greatest fields for service in the world to-day. We preach internationalism. Let our churches and colleges practice it.

Mrs. HENRY W. PEABODY Miss ALICE M. KYLE Mrs. FRANK MASON NORTH Miss GERTRUDE SCHULTZ Miss O.H. LAWRENCE MRS. A.V. POHLMAN Miss EMILY TILLOTSON

NOTE: The Central Committee recommends Dr. Fleming's book, "Building with India", for advanced study cla.s.ses and groups who wish really to _study_. For Women's societies wishing programs for meetings we think Miss Van Doren's book better as it is less difficult and more concrete.

PREFACE

These chapters are written with no claim to their being an accurate representation of life in all India. That India is a continent rather than a country is a statement so often repeated that it has become trite. To understand the details of girl-life in all parts of this continent would require a variety of experience which the present writer cannot claim. This book is written frankly from the standpoint of one who has spent fifteen years in the South, and known the North only from brief tours and the acquaintance which reading can give.

For help in advice and criticism thanks are due to friends too numerous to name; especial mention, however, should be made of the kindness of three Indian critics who have read the ma.n.u.script: Miss Maya Das of the Y.W.C.A., Calcutta, Mr. Chandy of Bangalore, and Mr. Athiseshiah of Voorhees College, Vellore.

TO-MORROW

"If there were no Christian College in India, the foreshadowings of a great To-morrow would demand its creation. It is needed:

(1) for training native leadership in this age when all India is demanding Indian leadership along all lines, and is impatient of foreign control.

(2) for developing Christian workers for the mult.i.tudes in India who are turning to Christianity and need care and shepherding in schools and in all phases of daily life.

(3) for the education of those who will be the homemakers of their country, that the stamp of Christianity may be upon the minds and lives of mothers and wives in this New India.

(4) for moralizing the social life in India which otherwise would have the bias of an increasingly disproportionate educated male population.

(5) for demonstrating the uplifting influence of Christ upon that s.e.x which has been so disastrously ignored and repressed in India, and for proving that the best is none too good for Indian womanhood. 'Better women' are the strongest factor in the development of a Better India.

(6) for definitely distributing the ideals of Christian womanhood to all parts of Southern Asia from which the College draws its students.

Personal witness to the value of Christian education for women is a real Kingdom message.

(7) for training women to take their part in the new national life of awakened India. This training must be by contact with lives already devoted to Christ, more than by precept, for 'character is caught, not taught.'

(8) for meeting the needs of the more educated cla.s.ses of India, as the evangelistic and other parts of mission work minister specifically to the needs of the ma.s.ses."

(9) In furnishing pre-medical training for the hundreds of women who must be educated to follow in the footsteps of the Great Physician.

INTRODUCTION

To say that the world is one is to-day's commonplace. What causes its new solidarity? What but the countless hands that reach across its sh.o.r.es and its Seven Seas, hands that devastate and hands that heal!

There are the long fingers of the cable and telegraph that pry through earth's hidden places, gathering choice bits of international gossip and handing them out to all the breakfast tables of the Great Neighborhood.

There are the swift fingers of transcontinental train and ocean liner, pushing the dweller from the West into the Far East, the man from the prairie into the desert. There are the devastating fingers of war that first fashion and then carry infernal machines and spread them broadcast over towns and ships and fertile fields. Thank G.o.d, there are also hands of kindness that dispense healing medicines, that scatter schoolbooks among untaught children and the Word of G.o.d in all parts of earth's neighborhood. And, lastly, there are hands that seem never to leave the house roof and the village street, yet gain the power of the long reach and set thousands of candles alight across the world.

"Why don't you let them alone? Their religion is good enough for them,"

was the cla.s.sic comment of the armchair critic of a generation ago. Time has answered it. Nothing in to-day's world ever lets anything else alone. We read the morning paper in terms of continents. To the League of Nations China and Chile are concerns as intimate as Upper Silesia. To the Third Internationale the obscure pa.s.ses of Afghanistan are a near frontier. Suffrage and prohibition are echoed in the streets of Poona and in the councils of Delhi. Labor strikes in West Virginia and Wales produce reactions in the cotton mills of Madras. And the American girl in high school, in college, in business, in society, in a profession, is producing her double under tropic suns, in far-off streets where speech and dress and manners are strange, but the heart of life is one.

That time is past; we cannot let them alone; we can only choose what shall be the shape and fashioning done by hands that reach across the sea.

CHAPTER ONE

YESTERDAY AND TO-DAY

"Once upon a Time."

"Once upon a time,"[1] men and women dwelt in caves and cliffs and fashioned curious implements from the stones of the earth and painted crude pictures upon the walls of their rock dwellings. Archaeologists find such traces in England and along the river valleys of France, among the sands of Egyptian deserts and in India, where armor heads, ancient pottery, and cromlechs mark the pa.s.sing of a long forgotten race. Thus India claims her place in the universal childhood of the world.

The Brown-skinned Tribes.

"Once upon a time,"[2] when the Stone Men had pa.s.sed, a strange, new civilization is thought to have girdled the earth, pa.s.sing probably in a "brown belt" from Mediterranean lands across India to the Pacific world and the Americas. Its sign was the curious symbol of the Swastika; its pa.s.swords certain primitive customs common to all these lands. Its probable Indian representatives are known to-day as Dravidians--the brown-skinned people still dominating South Indian life, whose exact place in the family of races puzzles every anthropologist. It was then that civilization was first walking up and down the great river valleys of the Old World. While the first pyramids[3] were a-building beside the long green ribbon of the Nile and the star-gazers[4] of Mesopotamia were reading future events from her towers of sun-dried bricks, Dravidian tribes were cultivating the rich mud of the Ganges valley, a slow-changing race. Did the lonely traveler, I wonder, troll the same air then as now to ward away evil spirits from the star-lit road? Did the Dravidian maiden do her sleek hair in the same knot at the nape of her brown neck, and poise the earthen pot with the same grace on her daily pilgrimage to the river?

The Aryan Brother.

"Once upon a time" Abraham pitched his tent beneath the oaks of Mamre, and Moses shepherded his father-in-law's flocks at "the back side of the desert." It was then that down through the grim pa.s.ses of the Himalayas, where now the British regiments convoy caravans and guard the outposts of Empire, a people of fair skin and strange speech migrated southward to the Land of the Five Rivers and the fat plains of the Ganges. Aryan even as we, the Brahman entered India, singing hymns to the sun and the dawn, bringing with him the stately Sanskrit speech, new lore of priest and shrine, new pride of race that was to cleave society into those horizontal strata that persist to-day in the caste system. Thus through successions of Stone-Age men, Dravidian tribes, and Aryan invaders, India stretches her roots deep into the past. But while there were transpiring these

"Old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago,"

where were we? The superior Anglo-Saxon who speaks complacently of "the native" forgets that during that same "once upon a time" when civilization was old in India, his ancestors, clad in deer skin and blue paint, were stalking the forests of Europe for food.