Dohnavur

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

— Psalm 16:6, ASV

Under the Mountains

Dohnavur lies on the plain at the foot of the Western Ghats, in the far south-west of the old Tinnevelly district, a few miles from the boundary of what was then the princely state of Travancore. Amy Carmichael described its setting in the first pages of Things as They Are: “The Western Ghauts sweep down to the sea in curves. Dohnavur is in one of the last of these curves. There are no proper roads running under the mountains, only rough country ruts crossing the plain.” The mountains rise steeply behind the village, blue in the morning and purple at dusk, and in the monsoon their streams come down in white threads. On the plain below are rice fields, palmyra palms and the great irrigation tanks that the people call lakes.

Amy loved the place from the first. She found in it something of the hills and waters of the English Lake District, where she had lived with Robert Wilson. Near one village, she wrote, “the Red Lake lies at the mountain foot; we call it Derwentwater, but there are palms and bamboos, and there is no Friar’s Crag.” It was a homesick joke, and a tender one. She would live within sight of those mountains for fifty years.

A Village with a History

Dohnavur was not an ordinary Tamil village. It had been founded in the 1820s as a Christian settlement by Charles Rhenius, the German missionary whose work had done so much to plant the church in Tinnevelly. Converts who had been driven out of their own villages by persecution were given land and a place to live where they could practise their faith in safety. The money for the land came, according to the village’s own tradition, from a Prussian nobleman, Count Dohna, and the village was named after him. It had a church, a school and a Christian community that by Amy’s day had been there for three generations.

It was, in other words, a place of refuge from the start. Amy and the Walkers did not create its character; they inherited it. When the household that grew up around Amy began to shelter children who had nowhere else to go, it was continuing, in a new form, the purpose for which the village had been founded.

The Old Testament law appointed cities of refuge, scattered through the land of Israel, to which a person in danger of vengeance could flee and be safe until justice was done. They were not prisons, and they were not fortresses; they were places where the vulnerable could live under protection. The image was a familiar one in Amy Carmichael’s tradition, and it fits Dohnavur well. In its earliest days it had sheltered converts whose own villages would not let them live. In her day it would shelter children whom the custom of their communities had marked out for a life they had not chosen. A refuge is only as good as its gate, and Amy would guard the gate of Dohnavur, for better and sometimes for worse, with all her strength.

The Move

The Walkers and Amy had spent time at Dohnavur in 1900, and it is that period of work in “the south of the South” that much of Things as They Are describes. After Preena’s coming in March 1901 at Pannaivilai, they made a more permanent move. Thomas Walker took on responsibilities there, including, by the usual account, the training of young Indian men for Christian service, and in 1901 the whole household moved there: the Walkers, Amy, the women of the band, the converts, and now Preena.

Nobody intended at the time that Dohnavur would become the centre of a large work. Walker had come to teach, and Amy and the band expected to go on with their village evangelism, using Dohnavur as a base. But the household was changing. Within a short time after Preena came, other children began to arrive: girls who had been in danger of temple dedication, girls whose families could not or would not keep them, and in time babies. Amy found that she could not travel with the band and care for small children at the same time. The children needed a home, and the home needed a mother.

A Nursemaid?

The shift was not universally welcomed. Amy had come to India as an evangelist, and some of her fellow missionaries thought she was wasting her gifts. Caring for small children was work that Indian women could do, they felt, and a missionary who could speak Tamil and preach the gospel ought to be out in the villages. Her biographers record that some people said, in effect, that she had given up the work of a missionary to become a nursemaid.

Amy felt the force of the criticism, and she felt the loss of the itinerant work, which she loved. But she came to believe that God had given her a new task. The children who came to her had been rescued from a system that, as she saw it, destroyed both body and soul. They needed not only shelter but a Christian upbringing, and that could not be done by visiting. It needed a home, day after day and year after year. She came to believe that caring for children for Christ’s sake was as spiritual a work as preaching, and that the washing of a baby could be an act of worship. That conviction runs through all her later writing about Dohnavur, and she lived by it from 1901 onward.

It is worth pausing on that change, because it says something about her. She was a woman of strong will and clear plans, and the plan had been village evangelism. When the children came, she let the plan go. She did not abandon evangelism; the children were taught the gospel, and many of them would become Christian workers themselves. But she accepted that God’s purposes for her were not the ones she had chosen. It is one thing to say “not my will but thine”; it is another to give up the work one loves for a work one never asked for. Amy did it, and she never looked back.

The Shape of a Household

In these early years the household at Dohnavur was small. There were the Walkers and Amy; the women of the band, including Ponnammal; the girl converts, including Arulai; and a growing number of small children. They lived in simple buildings near the church, adapted for the purpose and gradually added to. Life followed a pattern of work, prayer, teaching and play. The women of the band still went out to the villages when they could, but more and more of their time was taken up with the children.

From the beginning Amy was determined that the household should be a family and not an institution. She was suspicious of the orphanages and boarding schools that many missions ran, with their rows of beds and uniforms and regimented routines. She wanted the children to grow up as Indian children in an Indian home, with Indian food, Indian dress and Tamil as their language. She wanted them to be loved individually, and she wanted them to love one another. Above all she wanted them to know Christ, not as a subject taught in school, but as a person known in daily life.

She also wanted to keep them safe. The children who came to Dohnavur had been taken, in many cases, out of the reach of people who regarded them as their property, and who might try to recover them by force, by stealth or by law. That meant watchfulness. It meant that the household could not be entirely open to visitors, and that the children were not free to wander. In these early years the watchfulness was necessary and obvious. In later years, as the work grew and the dangers changed, some observers would question whether the walls of Dohnavur, both literal and figurative, had grown higher than they needed to be. That question will return later in this book.

Visitors and a Book

In 1901 and 1902 the household had visitors from home, two women friends who came to India for some months to see the work for themselves. They travelled with the band, shared in the life of the household, and saw, as Amy put it, “the fight as it is.” One of them was a keen photographer, whom the Tamils called the Picture-catching Missie Ammal, and whose pictures would illustrate the book that came out of their visit. Sitting on the floor of the verandah, Indian fashion, the two visitors urged Amy to gather the letters she had written home and make them into a book, so that others could see what they had seen. Amy was reluctant. She had little time, she said, and the world had many books. But they offered to do the hard work of editing, and she agreed. The book they made was Things as They Are. Its story is the subject of the next chapter.

A Goodly Heritage

The psalm at the head of this chapter is a psalm of contentment. “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” The lines are the measuring lines used to divide land, and the psalmist is saying that the portion God has given him is a good one. But the psalm also makes clear that the real heritage is God himself: “Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup” (Psalm 16:5, ASV).

Amy Carmichael’s portion, from 1901, was a village on a hot plain at the foot of the mountains, a household of converts and children, and a work she had not chosen. She would spend the rest of her life there. She came to love it as her home, and she found in it, as she would have said, a goodly heritage. But she would also have said that the heritage was not Dohnavur. It was the Lord who had led her there.