The Starry Cluster

“And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”

— Daniel 12:3, ASV

The Far South

The Tinnevelly district, now Tirunelveli, lies at the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, where the land narrows towards Cape Comorin. To the west rise the Western Ghats, a wall of mountains that catches the monsoon rains and sends them down in rivers across the plain. To the east the land falls away in a great red plain dotted with palmyra palms, rice fields watered by tanks, small towns and hundreds of villages, to the sea. It is hot for most of the year, and dry for much of it. In Amy Carmichael’s day most people lived by farming, by climbing the palmyra palms for their sap, or by trades handed down through their castes.

It was also one of the few places in India where Christianity had taken deep root. Protestant missionaries had worked there since the eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth century the German missionary Charles Rhenius, working for the Church Missionary Society, had seen large numbers of people, especially among the palmyra-climbing Shanar community, now known as Nadars, become Christians. Whole villages had come over together, and Christian villages with their own churches and schools had grown up across the district. By the 1890s the Christian community in Tinnevelly numbered tens of thousands, served by Anglican missions of two societies, by Indian pastors, and by catechists and schoolmasters in many villages.

But it was still a small minority. Eugene Stock, introducing Amy’s first book about the district, reckoned that there were about twenty Hindus to every Christian. Most of the Christians came from a handful of communities, and the caste Hindus of the district, especially the higher castes, had remained largely untouched. The Christian presence was strong enough to be familiar, and familiar enough to be resented. To a high-caste Hindu family, conversion to Christianity meant joining the people of lower castes who had already done so, and losing caste, family and inheritance in the process.

With the Walkers

Amy came to Tinnevelly in 1896 and lived at first with the Walkers at Palamcottah, the chief mission centre of the district. Later they moved to Pannaivilai, a village in the east of the district, where Walker had charge of a wide area of country and of the training of Indian Christian workers. Amy studied Tamil under Walker’s guidance, and as her Tamil improved she began to go out into the villages.

Walker was a demanding teacher. He expected her to learn the language properly, not just enough to get by, and he insisted on accuracy. He was also a model of the kind of missionary she wanted to be: someone who lived for the work, who knew the people and their language deeply, who prayed, and who did not exaggerate. Mrs. Walker, whom Amy’s books call simply “the Ammal,” became a close friend and, in many ways, a second mother.

The Band

The work Amy took up was itinerant evangelism among women. With a small group of Indian Christian women she travelled from village to village, staying for days or weeks in one area and then moving on, visiting homes, talking with women, singing, and telling the story of Jesus. In her books she called them the Band, and its members the Band Sisters. They became known in Tamil by a name that has been translated as “the Starry Cluster,” and the image stuck.

The women of the band were the heart of the work. They knew the language and the customs, they could go into homes where a foreigner would not be welcome, and they could speak of their own experience of Christ in a way that a foreigner could not. Amy described in Things as They Are how much depended on this. “To hear one of their own people saying, with evident sincerity, ‘One thing I know, that whereas I was blind now I see,’” she wrote, “makes them look at each other and nod their heads sympathetically.” She called it the “simple witness,” and she believed that nothing told more.

The leading member of the band was Ponnammal, a young widow from a Christian family. In Tamil society a widow was expected to live a hidden and restricted life, and even in Christian families some of those expectations lingered. Ponnammal broke with them to join the band, and she became one of its most effective workers and Amy’s closest Indian friend. Amy would later write her life, and she would mourn her deeply when she died. Other women joined over the years, some of them, like Ponnammal, widows; others young converts who had come out of Hindu families at great cost. Amy lived with them, travelled with them, ate with them and prayed with them, and the band became a kind of family, the first of several she would build.

On the Road

Things as They Are is full of the texture of these journeys. The band travelled by bandy, a springless bullock cart with a mat roof, over roads that were often nothing but ruts. “Crash and tumble went the bandy,” Amy wrote, describing an afternoon when the floods were out and the cart rolled into a pool, so that “the water swished in at the lower end and floated our books out quietly.” They fished the books out and went on, “somewhat damp, but happy.”

In the villages they were a sensation. Amy wore Indian dress, but she could not do without a sun hat, which marked her out at once. On one occasion a little girl caught sight of the hat through the end of the cart and ran to tell the village: “A great white man is here! Oh what an appalling spectacle!” Amy enjoyed the story, and enjoyed even more the contrast with a magazine article at home which claimed that Indian women thought the lady missionary fairer and more divine than anything they had ever imagined. “Was it not an appalling spectacle?” the villagers said instead. In another chapter she mentioned the hat again, calling it “the only foreign thing about me which was visible—oh that I could dispense with it!”

The women they met asked endless questions. Was she married or a widow? Why did she wear no jewels? Where were her relations? Why had she left them? What did the government pay her? Why did she not oil her hair? Amy recorded these questions with humour and patience, and she knew that they had to be answered before anything else could be said. “If we ignore their desires,” she wrote of the women’s natural curiosity, “we defeat our own.”

Humdrum

But the heart of Things as They Are is not the comedy of the road. It is the hardness of the work. Day after day the band visited homes, told the story of Jesus, and saw nothing happen. People listened politely, or stared, or laughed, or wandered away. A girl at a potter’s wheel asked whether, if she joined the Christian way, she would get a new sari and good curry every day. An old woman, on the point of interest, drew back when she understood that following Christ would mean the end of her place in her family. The men of one village forbade their children to learn to read lest they be drawn to the missionaries.

Amy called one chapter “Humdrum,” and she meant it. “There have been times of late,” she wrote, “when I have had to hold on to one text with all my might: ‘It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful.’ Praise God, it does not say ‘successful.’” She refused to dress up the work for readers at home. “Most days in real life,” she wrote, “end exactly as they began, so far as visible results are concerned.”

That honesty was costly. Supporters at home wanted encouraging news, and missionary magazines were full of it. To write that most days ended as they began was to risk discouraging the people whose prayers and gifts sustained the work. But Amy believed that the truth would produce better prayer than a pleasant fiction. She also believed, and this is easy to miss, that faithfulness without visible success was itself a kind of joy. “There is joy in the doing of it,” she wrote of the humdrum work, “there is joy in just obeying.”

Caste

The great obstacle, as Amy came to see it, was caste. The Hindu social order divided people into thousands of hereditary communities, each with its own occupation, customs and rules about food, marriage and contact with others. To belong to a caste was to belong to a people: to have a place, a trade, a family, and a network of obligations and protections. To break caste, by eating with people of other castes or by joining a religion that ignored caste, was to lose all of that.

Amy did not think that every Hindu who heard the gospel was indifferent to it. She met people who seemed to be moved, and who asked questions that showed real interest. But again and again she saw that interest die when the cost became clear. “However tenderly you tell it,” she wrote, “the keen Hindu mind soon perceives the drift of it all—Redemption must mean loss of Caste.” A potter told her that he could not imagine a potter changing his caste; his caste was his trade, his life, and everything he knew. “Caste and religion!” she wrote. “They are so mixed up that we do not know how to unmix them.”

Modern readers will want to be careful here. Amy wrote about caste as a missionary, convinced that it was a barrier to the gospel and a source of cruelty. She was not wrong that it caused great suffering, especially to those at the bottom of the hierarchy, and many Indian reformers of her day, Hindu as well as Christian, said the same. But she also tended, like most missionaries of her time, to see caste only from the outside, as a system of bondage, and to miss the sense of identity, belonging and mutual care that it also gave. The Indian Christian churches, moreover, were not free of caste themselves; in Tinnevelly, as elsewhere, caste divisions persisted among Christians, a fact that Amy acknowledged and grieved over. She would later insist that at Dohnavur there should be no caste distinctions at all, and she held to that with great firmness.

Stars

The verse at the head of this chapter, from the book of Daniel, promises that “they that turn many to righteousness” shall shine “as the stars for ever and ever.” It is a promise that would have been on the minds of the women of the Starry Cluster. But it is worth noticing what the verse does not say. It does not say that the stars are seen. Stars shine whether or not anyone looks at them, and some of the brightest are far away and faint to the eye.

The women of the band did not turn many to righteousness, if we count by numbers. In the years they travelled together they saw a handful of converts, most of whom paid a terrible price for their faith, and some of whom fell away. Much of their work was sowing in ground that showed no sign of harvest. But Amy Carmichael believed that the promise was true, and that faithfulness would shine in the end, whatever the numbers said. The women of the band, most of whose names are not remembered, were among the first stars in her sky. Ponnammal, above all, would shine in Amy’s memory for the rest of her life.