Servants of the Gods

“Deliver them that are carried away unto death, And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back. If thou sayest, Behold, we knew not this; Doth not he that weigheth the hearts consider it? And he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it?”

— Proverbs 24:11-12, ASV

A Hard Chapter

This chapter is about the system from which many of the children of Dohnavur were sheltered. It is the hardest part of Amy Carmichael’s story to tell well, because it is easy to tell it badly in two opposite ways. It can be told as a lurid tale of heathen wickedness, in which a brave missionary rescues innocent girls from evil priests. Or it can be told as a story of missionary prejudice, in which a foreign woman misunderstood and slandered an ancient tradition of sacred art. Neither version is true. This chapter tries to tell it plainly, without graphic detail, and with fairness to everyone involved.

The Temple Women

For many centuries, in many parts of India and especially in the south, some temples had women attached to them who were dedicated to the service of the deity. In Tamil they were known by several names; in English they came to be called devadasis, from a Sanskrit word meaning “servant of god,” and Amy Carmichael translated their Tamil title as “Servants of the gods.” A girl was dedicated in a ceremony that was spoken of as a marriage to the god, after which she could never marry a man and so, as the people said, could never be widowed. That was why their presence was considered auspicious at weddings and festivals.

The tradition had a long and in some ways distinguished history. Inscriptions from the great temples of the Chola period record the endowment of hundreds of temple women, and in some periods they held property, were educated when most women were not, and were the custodians of the classical traditions of dance and music. The dance that is now known around the world as Bharatanatyam descends in large part from their art. Communities of hereditary temple dancers and musicians, with their own family structures and inheritance through the female line, were part of the social fabric of South India for many generations.

But by the nineteenth century the tradition had changed in many places, and its connection with sexual relationships outside marriage had become central. A woman dedicated to a temple could not marry, and in practice many such women entered relationships with patrons, sometimes long-term and recognised, sometimes not. Girls were dedicated in childhood. Some came from hereditary families; others were given by parents who had made a vow, or who could not support them, or were bought from poor families, or were adopted by older temple women to carry on their household. Whatever the arrangement, the girl had no say in it. By the time she was old enough to understand, her life had been decided for her.

What Amy Saw

Amy Carmichael did not set out to study this system. She stumbled on it, as she put it, through the children. She had seen little girls playing in the courtyards near the temples, “gracious little maidens, winsome in their ways,” and had heard that some of them had been bought as infants. In Things as They Are she described meeting a bright child in a village who asked to come home with her, and then, a few days later, seeing two men leading the same child away to be “married to the god.” She wrote that the men’s faces haunted her all night.

She had met the child once before, in her own village, and the memory of that meeting is one of the most striking passages in the book. Amy had been talking with the girl’s grandmother, a learned old woman who could recite page after page of the Tamil classics and who preferred to sing Hindu verses to her visitor and explain them, rather than listen to Christian ones. “Consider the age of our great Religion, consider its literature—millions of stanzas!” the old woman said. While they talked, the little girl came and stood by the verandah and joined in the verses her grandmother was chanting, going on through stanza after stanza while Amy listened in astonishment. Then she ran off laughing to play. Amy’s comment was brief: “And this was the child. All that brightness, all that intelligence, ‘married to a god.’” It is worth noticing what the passage shows without meaning to: a family of real culture and learning, a grandmother proud of a great literary tradition, and a child of quick intelligence. Amy did not think the people around her were savages. She thought that something terrible was being done within a world that was in many ways refined, and that was what made it so hard to bear.

After Preena came, she began to inquire systematically. She wanted to know how many girls were involved, how they were obtained, where they came from, and what happened to them. It was difficult and sometimes dangerous work. The subject was not discussed with outsiders, and certainly not with a foreign woman associated with the Christians. Information had to be gathered patiently, through Indian Christian helpers, through people who were willing to talk, and through official records such as the census of 1901, which Amy later drew on in Lotus Buds.

On some of these inquiries, it is said, she went in disguise. She already wore Indian dress, and popular accounts say that she darkened her skin, with coffee or some other stain, so that she could pass unnoticed in places where a European face would have closed every door. The details have been embellished, and should not be pressed. But it is clear that she went to great lengths to learn the truth, and that she took real risks in doing so.

What she learned convinced her that very large numbers of girls were involved across the Madras Presidency, and that many of them were destined, from early childhood, for a life of sexual exploitation in the name of religion. She did not publish the details. She said, again and again, that what she knew could not be printed. But she believed she knew enough to act.

Not a Western Discovery

It is important to say clearly that Amy Carmichael was not the first or the only person to oppose the dedication of girls to temples, and that the campaign which eventually ended it was led above all by Indians.

From the 1890s an “anti-nautch” movement, named after the Anglo-Indian word for a dance performance, had been campaigning against the hiring of temple dancers at social functions, and it drew support from Indian social reformers as well as from missionaries. In the early twentieth century Indian reformers in the Madras Presidency took up the cause in earnest. The most important of them was Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, the first woman to serve in the Madras Legislative Council, who in the late 1920s brought forward a resolution and then a bill to end the dedication of girls to temples. She had family ties to the communities concerned, and she argued her case in medical, moral and religious terms. Another powerful voice was Moovalur Ramamirtham, who came from a devadasi family herself and campaigned for decades, in the self-respect movement, for the freedom of women in her community to marry and live as they chose.

The campaign took many years. It was finally successful in October 1947, two months after Indian independence, when the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act was passed. Other states passed similar laws later, some of them much later, and the practice persisted illegally in some regions for decades. Amy Carmichael lived to see the Madras Act passed. She had spent nearly half a century working towards the same end, but the law was the achievement of Indian legislators and campaigners, and it should be remembered as theirs.

The Other Side

There is one more thing to say, and fairness requires it. Not everyone in the communities concerned welcomed the reform. Associations of hereditary temple artists protested against the bill, arguing that their community was being slandered for the sins of some, that their art and their livelihood were being destroyed, and that they had a right to their own way of life. Historians of South India have shown that the abolition, whatever its benefits, also brought real losses to these communities. Their dance was taken up and refashioned by others, often from higher castes, while the women who had carried it for generations were stigmatised and impoverished. Some scholars, notably Davesh Soneji, have argued that missionary writing, including Amy Carmichael’s, helped to fix a picture of these women as nothing but victims or prostitutes, and that this picture did lasting harm to their descendants.

A Christian reader may disagree with some of that argument. The children Amy sheltered were not consenting adults choosing a way of life; they were small girls whose futures had been decided for them, and there is ample evidence that many such girls were abused. But the critique is a needed reminder that the women of these communities were human beings with their own voices and their own dignity, and that the language used about them, by missionaries and by Indian reformers alike, was often cruel. The real people behind the “system” deserve to be remembered as people, and not only as a problem.

Deliver Them

The verse at the head of this chapter is one that Amy Carmichael might have taken as her charter. “Deliver them that are carried away unto death,” it says, “And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back.” The next verse removes the excuse of ignorance: “If thou sayest, Behold, we knew not this; Doth not he that weigheth the hearts consider it?” Once we know, we are responsible.

That was how Amy saw it. Once she knew what she believed she knew, she could not unknow it, and she could not do nothing. She did not have the power to change the law, and she did not try to lead a public campaign. What she could do was to take in children, one at a time, and give them a home. It was a small response to a large evil. But she believed that God weighed hearts, and that he would ask what she had done with what she knew. She spent the rest of her life answering that question.