Amma

“But we were gentle in the midst of you, as when a nurse cherisheth her own children: even so, being affectionately desirous of you, we were well pleased to impart unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were become very dear to us.”

— 1 Thessalonians 2:7-8, ASV

A Name

The children of Dohnavur called Amy Carmichael Amma. In Tamil the word means “mother,” and it is also, as she explained in the glossary to her first book, an ordinary word that women use in speaking to one another and that girls use to older women. For a child at Dohnavur it meant both things at once. It was a word of courtesy, and it was a word of belonging. Amy did not want to be called “Miss Carmichael,” or “madam,” or by any of the titles that missionaries in India usually bore. She wanted to be a mother to the children, and she wanted them to know it.

She was not, of course, their mother in the ordinary sense, and she knew it. Many of the children had mothers living, and some kept in touch with them. Some had been brought by their mothers. And as the family grew, Amy could not be a mother to each child in the way that a woman with a few children can be. But the name expressed what she hoped Dohnavur would be: not an orphanage, but a home.

Becoming Indian

From her early years in Tinnevelly, Amy wore Indian dress, and at Dohnavur she asked those who joined her to do the same. The women wore saris; the household ate Indian food, cooked in the Indian way; Tamil was the language of daily life. The children were given Tamil names, and they grew up in Tamil culture, learning Tamil songs and stories and the courtesies of Tamil life. Amy wrote many Tamil hymns and songs for them, and set Scripture to Tamil tunes.

This was not common among missionaries at the time. Many mission schools and orphanages in India gave their children English names, dressed them in European clothes, taught them English, and raised them to be, in effect, little Englishmen and Englishwomen. The aim was often sincere, and the results were mixed. Such children could find themselves strangers in their own country, cut off from their families and communities, and dependent on the mission for the rest of their lives. Amy wanted to avoid that. She wanted the children of Dohnavur to be Indian Christians, not Westernised Indians.

There was one Indian custom, however, that she would not adopt, and that was caste. The children who came to Dohnavur came from many communities, high and low, and Amy insisted that within the family those distinctions counted for nothing. The children ate together, played together, slept in the same nurseries, and were taught that they were sisters. For children from high-caste families this could be a hard lesson, as it had been for Pearl-eyes on her first night, when she drew herself up and refused food that would break her caste. For the families and communities outside, it was one of the most offensive things about Dohnavur, because it meant that a child who went there could never go back into her caste. Amy knew this, and she did not flinch from it. She believed that in Christ there was neither high caste nor low, and that a Christian family which kept caste was not fully Christian.

It would be wrong to exaggerate the extent of her adaptation. She remained in many ways a woman of her own culture. She thought and prayed and wrote in English. Her books were addressed to British readers, and her theology was that of Keswick. Dohnavur was run according to her ideas of order and discipline, and those ideas were shaped by a Victorian upbringing. Some later observers felt that, for all its Indian dress and Tamil songs, Dohnavur was at heart a very British institution. There is truth in that, as there is in most such judgements. But for her time she went further than most, and she did it on principle.

The Accals

The real work of caring for the children was done, in large part, by Indian Christian women. They were known as the accals, from the Tamil word for “elder sister,” and that name too was chosen with care. They were not servants or employees in the usual sense, but members of the family, responsible for the children in their care. Some of them were converts who had come out of Hindu homes, like Arulai; some were widows, like Ponnammal; some came from Christian families in the district; and in time many were girls who had grown up at Dohnavur themselves.

Ponnammal, the young widow who had led the band, became one of the chief pillars of the household. Amy relied on her for wisdom, for knowledge of Tamil ways, and for a kind of steady holiness that she deeply admired. Arulai, the girl convert from the Pannaivilai years, grew into another. These women, and many others whose names are recorded only in the Fellowship’s own books, did most of the daily work of feeding, washing, teaching and comforting that made Dohnavur what it was.

Women from Britain and elsewhere also came to join the work, some for a few years and some for the rest of their lives. They were expected to learn Tamil, wear Indian dress, live simply, and accept the authority of the household. Not all of them stayed. Life at Dohnavur was demanding, and Amy’s standards were high. But those who stayed formed a close-knit community, bound together by the work, by prayer, and by their loyalty to Amma.

Discipline and Love

Amy Carmichael was a loving mother, and she was also a strict one. She believed, as most people of her generation did, that children needed firm discipline, and that disobedience, lying and sulking should be dealt with promptly. She expected obedience, and she could be severe. Some of the children who grew up at Dohnavur remembered her with deep love and with a certain awe. Some of the adult workers found her exacting, and a few found her overbearing.

There is no need to pretend otherwise. A woman who had built a large and complex household out of nothing, against opposition, with very little help, was not likely to be meek. She had strong opinions about almost everything, from the way children should be fed to the way prayer meetings should be run, and she expected them to be followed. She could be sharp with those who disagreed, and she did not always distinguish between disagreement with her and disloyalty to the work. Those were real faults, and they caused real pain to some who loved her.

But her discipline was meant in love, and those who knew her best testified that it was received that way by most of the children. She had a gift for making each child feel important. She laughed easily, enjoyed jokes, invented games, wrote songs and stories, and loved the natural world, which she taught the children to love too: birds, butterflies, flowers, streams, the mountains. She wanted Dohnavur to be a happy place, and by most accounts it was.

Not the Gospel Only

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. He reminds them that when he and his companions were among them, they were “gentle in the midst of you, as when a nurse cherisheth her own children.” The word translated “nurse” means a nursing mother, and the image is of a mother caring for her own baby. Paul goes on: “we were well pleased to impart unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were become very dear to us.”

That last sentence is a good description of what Amy Carmichael tried to do at Dohnavur. She did not want only to teach the children about God. She wanted to give them herself, and she wanted the women who worked with her to do the same. Her idea of Christian service was not a professional transaction, in which a missionary delivered a message and went home on furlough. It was a life given, day after day, to particular people who had become dear.

That was one of the reasons she never went home. There were other reasons too: her health, the long voyage, the cost, and later her injury. But the deepest reason was that her children were at Dohnavur, and she would not leave them. In the early years, the danger that a child might be taken back if she were away was real. Later it was simply that she could not imagine being anywhere else. Her home was where her family was.

A Mother’s Cost

Being Amma cost Amy Carmichael a great deal. It cost her the evangelistic work she had loved. It cost her the possibility of ever going home, and of seeing her own mother again. It cost her rest, and often sleep, and sometimes health. It cost her grief, because children died, and some who lived turned away from what she had taught them. And it cost her a certain kind of freedom, because a mother is never free of her children.

She did not complain of it. She believed that she had been given the children by God, and that caring for them was her calling. But it is worth remembering, when we think of her as the saint of Dohnavur, that sainthood looked very ordinary from the inside. It looked like getting up at night to a sick baby, settling quarrels between small girls, checking the accounts, writing letters, and praying for children one by one by name. The verse from Thessalonians speaks of imparting not only the gospel but our own souls. Amy Carmichael imparted hers, piece by piece, over fifty years.