Portraits of Courage – Amy Carmichael

It is a Christian biography of Amy Carmichael (1867–1951), the Irish missionary who founded the Dohnavur Fellowship in South India. It follows her from her childhood in Millisle, County Down, through the Welcome Hall for Belfast mill girls, Manchester, Robert Wilson’s home at Broughton Grange, fifteen months in Japan, and village evangelism in the Tinnevelly district, to the coming of a runaway child named Preena in 1901, the growth of the family at Dohnavur, her crippling fall in 1931, and her death in 1951.

She was a missionary from the north of Ireland who reached India in 1895 with the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society and stayed for fifty-five years without a furlough. After years of travelling the villages with a band of Indian women, she began in 1901 to shelter girls in danger of being dedicated to temples, and later boys as well. The children called her Amma, “mother.” She also wrote many books, including Things as They Are, Gold Cord and If.

No, and the book is careful about this. The practice was outlawed in the Madras Presidency by the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act of October 1947, after a long campaign led above all by Indian reformers such as Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy and Moovalur Ramamirtham. Amy Carmichael’s contribution was to shelter children, one by one, for nearly fifty years, and her witness was one of many streams that fed the reform.

Honestly, but without graphic detail. It explains the long history of the temple women of South India, including their place in classical dance and music, and how the tradition had come by her day to involve the dedication of small girls to a life of exploitation. It also reports the criticism of historians such as Davesh Soneji that reform writing, missionary and Indian alike, did lasting harm to the hereditary communities concerned.

Yes. Published in 1903, it told readers at home that most days on the mission field ended as they began, and that conversion in caste India often cost everything. Some in England doubted it; later editions printed confirmatory notes from missionaries and from Pandita Ramabai. The biography also asks how the book would have read to a Hindu, noting that its language about Hinduism was often harsh and sometimes unfair.

Yes. It shows a woman who could be imperious and slow to share authority, who wrote about Hinduism in terms common among missionaries of her day, and whose protectiveness at Dohnavur some observers saw as control. It tells of her painful parting with the young Stephen Neill in 1925. It also shows her courage, humour, tenderness and lifelong self-giving, and argues that the shadows are real but do not cancel the light.

It quotes chiefly from her own early books, above all Things as They Are (1903), which is in the public domain. The standard biographies by Frank Houghton (1953) and Elisabeth Elliot (1987) are still in copyright and are used only for facts, never quoted. Where a well-known story rests only on later retelling, such as the coffee-stained skin or the place of her fall, the book says so.

At the beginning. The preface and introduction explain the sources and how the legend differs from the record; the chapters then follow her life in order, from Millisle and Belfast to Japan, Tinnevelly, Dohnavur and her last twenty years in one room. Appendix A gathers lessons from her life, Appendix B is a study guide for groups, Appendix C a chronology, and Appendix D a note on sources and corrections.