Bangalore

“And be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

— Romans 12:2, ASV

The Garden City

Bangalore in 1895 was a pleasant place for a European to live. It stood on the Deccan plateau about three thousand feet above the sea, and its climate was mild compared with the burning plains around it. The British had built a large military cantonment there, with wide roads, gardens, churches, clubs and bungalows, and the town was popular with officers, officials and their families. It was also a centre of missionary work, with schools, churches and mission houses belonging to several societies.

It was to this place that Amy Carmichael came at the end of 1895, to learn Tamil and to see whether her health would bear life in India. She was soon ill. Within a short time of arriving she was struck down by fever, and for weeks she was too weak to study or work. It was not an encouraging start, and it confirmed the fears of those who had doubted whether she should have come at all.

A Disappointment

When she recovered, she found herself disturbed by something more troubling than illness. She had come to India expecting to find missionaries who were wholly given to their work, living simply among the people and burning with zeal for the gospel. What she found in Bangalore, as she saw it, was something else. Many of the missionaries lived much as other Europeans did. They had large houses and servants, they kept up English social customs, they spent time on tennis and calls and the round of station life, and they kept themselves socially apart from the Indian people among whom they worked. Some of them, she felt, had lost the fire that had brought them out.

She was young, and she was not always fair. It is easy for a newcomer to judge those who have spent years in a hard climate and have learned, sometimes through painful experience, what they need to survive. Rest and recreation were not luxuries for missionaries in India; many of them died young or broke down because they did not take enough. The social life of a station was also, for many, the only support they had. Amy would later learn to be more understanding of the weaknesses of fellow workers, though she never lost her dislike of what she saw as worldliness in missionary life.

But her unease was not simply youthful censoriousness. It grew from a real conviction, which she would hold all her life, that the gospel could not be credibly preached by people who lived as if the world were their home. She wrote later, in Things as They Are, about the gulf between the missionary and the people. “We are still up above to them; not on a level, not one of themselves,” she wrote. She admired those who had tried to close the gap, and she knew that it could never be closed completely. “No matter how far you may go,” she wrote, “there is always a distance you cannot cover—yards or inches it may be, but always that fatal hiatus.” The question of how near she could get would occupy her for years.

A Question About Converts

There was another thing that troubled her in Bangalore. She met Indian Christians, many of whom had been Christians for generations, and she found that their faith did not always look like the faith she had known in Belfast and at Keswick. Some seemed to her to be Christians in name only. The missionaries around her, she felt, too readily counted church members as converts, and too rarely asked whether lives had really been changed.

This too was a judgement she would later have to soften and refine. Indian Christianity, like Christianity everywhere, included the earnest and the nominal, and the missionary societies knew it as well as she did. Eugene Stock, the historian of the Church Missionary Society, said as much in the preface he wrote for her first book about India in 1903: “Hereditary Christianity in India is much like hereditary Christianity at home.” But Amy’s concern was not wrong. She wanted to see real conversion, and she distrusted anything that looked like religious statistics without spiritual reality. That concern would shape the way she worked in the villages, and later the way she received children and workers at Dohnavur.

Tamil

Meanwhile she was learning Tamil. It is one of the great classical languages of the world, with a literature that goes back two thousand years, and it is notoriously difficult for English speakers. It has sounds that do not exist in English, a grammar built on very different principles, and a written form with its own script. It also has a gulf between the literary language and the spoken language of ordinary people, so that a learner must master two registers at once.

Amy found it hard. She was not a natural linguist, and her illnesses interrupted her studies. But she was determined, and she had a great motive: she wanted to speak to people directly, without the interpreter she had depended on in Japan. Over the following years she became fluent, and she came to love the language. She wrote Tamil hymns and poems, gave Tamil names to the children of Dohnavur, and in her English books she often translated Tamil words and proverbs for her readers. One of them stands at the end of the note she wrote for a later edition of Things as They Are: “to the Mighty One,” as the Tamil proverb says, “even the blade of grass is a weapon.”

With the language came names. In the villages she would be called the Missie Ammal, a mixture of English and Tamil meaning something like “the missionary lady,” and the glossary she later printed for English readers explained that Amma, “Mother,” was used by all women speaking to one another and by girls speaking to women. It was an ordinary word of courtesy. Within a few years it would become, for hundreds of children, the only name they had for her.

Thomas Walker

The person who did most to help her, and who changed the direction of her life, was Thomas Walker. He was a missionary of the Church Missionary Society who had been working in the Tinnevelly district, in the far south of India, since the 1880s. He was a fine Tamil scholar, a teacher of Indian clergy and evangelists, and a much-loved speaker at conventions for the deepening of spiritual life. By the usual account Amy met him and his wife while they were away in the hills, and Walker agreed to help her with her Tamil.

It was the beginning of a partnership that would last sixteen years, until Walker’s death in 1912. Amy admired him enormously. He was a disciplined, scholarly and humble man, and he combined a deep personal devotion with a hard-headed realism about the work. He had little patience with sentimental reports or inflated numbers. He was also, by temperament, a man who was not easily impressed, and the young Irishwoman with her intensity and her poor health was not an obvious recruit. But he saw in her a real gift and a real call, and he took her seriously.

In 1896 Amy left Bangalore and went to the Tinnevelly district to live and work with the Walkers. It was an unusual arrangement. She remained a missionary of the Zenana Society, but she was to work under the direction of a missionary of another society, in a place her own society had not chosen. It was the kind of arrangement that only made sense because of the people involved, and it would last, in one form or another, for the rest of Walker’s life. When Amy wrote his biography in 1916, she called it simply Walker of Tinnevelly.

Not Fashioned According to This World

The verse at the head of this chapter is Paul’s appeal to the Christians at Rome: “be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The word Paul uses for being fashioned suggests being pressed into a mould. He is warning against letting the surrounding culture shape the Christian life, and calling instead for a transformation that comes from within.

Amy Carmichael’s months in Bangalore were in a sense a confrontation with that verse. She saw, or thought she saw, a missionary community that had been pressed into the mould of British colonial life, and she was determined not to be pressed into it herself. In the years that followed she would reject much of that life: the European dress, the social round, the separation from Indian people. She would wear a sari, eat Indian food, live in Indian houses, and adopt many Indian customs.

But there is a subtler point in Paul’s words, and Amy would come to feel it in time. It is possible to resist one mould and be pressed into another. A missionary who rejects the colonial club can still carry colonial attitudes in her heart; a reformer who rejects worldliness can still be shaped by pride. The transformation Paul speaks of is not achieved by changing one’s clothes, important as that may be. It is the work of God renewing the mind. Amy Carmichael’s life would show both sides of this: a remarkable freedom from many of the habits of her time, and a sharing in some of its assumptions that she never fully saw. She left Bangalore having learned what she did not want to become. She was about to learn, in the villages of Tinnevelly, what she was meant to be.