Introduction: The Legend and Her Own Books

“For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.”

— 2 Corinthians 13:8, ASV

A Verse She Chose Herself

When Amy Carmichael sat down in 1902 to introduce her first book about India, she put a sentence of Paul’s at the head of it: “We can do nothing against the Truth, but for the Truth.” She quoted it from the Authorised Version, and it is the same sentence that stands, in the words of the American Standard Version, at the head of this chapter. Under it she wrote a short paragraph about her book. “This, the book, has tried to tell the Truth,” she said. “That is all it has to say about itself.”

It is a good standard for a biography, and it is the standard this book tries to keep. That is harder than it sounds, because Amy Carmichael has become a legend, and legends are not easily corrected.

The Legend

The popular story of her life is told in sermons, children’s books, devotional websites and missionary calendars, and much of it is true. She did grow up by the sea in County Down. She did gather mill girls into a hall in Belfast. She did go to Japan, and then to India, and she never came home. She did take in a little girl named Preena who had run away from a temple, and she did spend the rest of her life sheltering children. She did fall, in 1931, and spend her last twenty years largely confined to her room. She did write many books that are still in print.

But the legend has also grown in the telling. Some versions say that she rescued a thousand temple prostitutes, as if the children she sheltered were all taken out of temples. Most were not. Many were babies or small children brought to Dohnavur because they were thought to be in danger of being given to temples, and many others came for other reasons, as orphans, as unwanted daughters, or as the children of women who could not keep them. Some versions say that her work ended the dedication of girls to temples in India, or that the practice was outlawed in 1948 because of her. The law that ended it in the Madras Presidency was passed in October 1947, after a long campaign led by Indian reformers, above all the physician and legislator Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddy, and by members of the communities concerned. Missionaries had a part in the debate, but it was not their law.

Other stories are true in substance but uncertain in detail. The best-known story from her childhood, of a little girl praying for blue eyes and discovering in the morning that they were still brown, comes from her own memory, told late in life, and the ages given for it vary. The story of her staining her skin with coffee to pass unnoticed into places where a European could not go is told in many popular books; it is consistent with what she says about wearing Indian dress, but the details have been embroidered. The saying most often quoted from her, that “missionary life is simply a chance to die,” is widely attributed to her and gave Elisabeth Elliot the title of her book, but it is rarely given with a date or a source.

None of this makes her smaller. It is simply the kind of growth that happens to the stories of people who are loved. This book tries to separate what is known from what is told.

Her Own Books

The first source for her life is what she wrote herself. She wrote a great deal: books, booklets, poems, hymns, and a stream of letters to friends, to supporters, and to the members of her own Fellowship. The early books were mostly written from the field, in the form of letters or sketches, and they are vivid and immediate. From Sunrise Land (1895) collected her letters from Japan. Things as They Are (1903) told of village work in the Tinnevelly district, and its sequel Overweights of Joy (1906) set beside it the joys she felt the first book had not had room for. Lotus Buds (1909) described the first babies and small girls at Dohnavur and the system from which many of them had been kept. Walker of Tinnevelly (1916) was her memoir of the missionary with whom she worked for sixteen years. Later came biographies of Indian Christians, books of verse and devotion, and Gold Cord (1932), her own history of the Fellowship.

These books are invaluable, but they need to be read for what they are. They were written for supporters, and she shaped them. She changed names, often giving the people in them English translations of their Tamil names, such as Pearl-eyes, Star and Jewel of Victory, to protect them and to make them memorable. She sometimes compressed time. She wrote in the language of the Keswick holiness movement, in which every event was part of a spiritual battle, and in which the religion of her neighbours was often described as the work of the devil. And she was, by her own admission, a writer who left a great deal out. In Things as They Are she said repeatedly that she could not tell the whole truth, because it could not be printed.

The Biographers

The first full life, Frank Houghton’s Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur (1953), was written by a senior figure in the China Inland Mission, who was given access to her letters and papers. It is the source of many of the dates and details that later books repeat. It is also the work of an admirer, written within two years of her death for readers who loved her. Elisabeth Elliot’s A Chance to Die (1987) drew on Houghton, on the Dohnavur archives, and on interviews with people who had known Amy, and it is more willing to see her faults. Iain Murray’s Amy Carmichael: Beauty for Ashes (2015) is a more recent life from within the same tradition. All three remain in copyright, and this book has used them for facts and not for their words.

Beside the biographies there is a smaller body of scholarly work. Historians of mission have looked at her place in the Keswick movement and at the long quarrel between her and the young Stephen Neill, later a bishop and a noted historian of Christian missions, who worked at Dohnavur for little more than a year in 1924 and 1925. Historians of South India have studied the reform movement against temple dedication, in which missionary writing, including hers, played a part. Some of them, notably Davesh Soneji, have argued that the reformers’ language did lasting harm to the hereditary communities of temple dancers and musicians, whose art and dignity were swept away along with the abuses. This book does not adopt every judgement of these scholars, but it has listened to them.

What This Book Is, and Is Not

This book is a narrative life. It follows Amy Carmichael from Millisle to Dohnavur, and it tries to give the people around her their due: her mother, who outlived her husband by nearly thirty years and let her eldest daughter go, first to another household and then to the far side of the world; Robert Wilson, the Quaker who treated her as a daughter; Thomas Walker, who taught her Tamil and fought beside her for sixteen years; Ponnammal, the young widow who led the women’s band; Arulai, the girl convert who became one of the pillars of Dohnavur; and the children themselves, so far as the sources let us see them.

It is not an account of her devotional teaching. Her poems and meditations deserve their own reading, and the best way to meet them is in her own books. The present book quotes her own words chiefly from Things as They Are, which readers can find complete in the Ochorus library, and it quotes sparingly.

Above all, this book does not try to make her a saint without shadows. She could be fierce, and she could be imperious. She sometimes wrote about Hinduism with a contempt that was common among missionaries of her day, and that Hindu readers had every reason to resent. She guarded the children of Dohnavur with a protectiveness that some observers saw as love and others as control. She was also brave, self-forgetting, funny, tender, and utterly given to the God she served. Paul said that he could do nothing against the truth, but only for it. A true portrait will serve her memory, and her Lord, better than a flattering one.