The Punjab He Entered

“but God chose the foolish things of the world, that he might put to shame them that are wise; and God chose the weak things of the world, that he might put to shame the things that are strong; and the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did God choose, yea and the things that are not, that he might bring to nought the things that are”

— 1 Corinthians 1:27-28, ASV

The Land of Five Rivers

It is impossible to understand John Hyde’s life without understanding the place where he spent it, and the people among whom he worked. The devotional books about him say little about either. They move quickly from the prayer room to the next prayer room, and the Punjab appears only as a backdrop of villages and heat. But the Punjab was not a backdrop. It was a real society, going through one of the most remarkable religious movements in the modern history of India, and Hyde’s prayers and preaching belonged to that movement.

The Punjab takes its name from five rivers, the tributaries of the Indus, that cross its broad plain from the Himalayas toward the south-west. In Hyde’s day it was a province of British India. Most of it now lies in Pakistan, and part in India. It was a land of farming villages, of wheat and cotton and sugar cane, fed increasingly by great new irrigation canals. Its people were Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, with a very small number of Christians. And like the rest of Indian society, its villages were ordered by caste.

Two Missions, One Field

Hyde belonged to the Punjab Mission of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. American Presbyterians had arrived in Ludhiana in 1834, and the mission had been known for most of its history as the Lodiana Mission. By Hyde’s time it had stations in a string of towns across the eastern Punjab: Ludhiana, Jagraon, Ferozepore, Jullundur, Lahore, Kasur, and others. The seminary catalogue sums up Hyde’s entire career in a single line: “miss. Ferozepore, India, ‘92–’12.” Ferozepore, now Firozpur, on the Sutlej river near today’s border between India and Pakistan, was his home station. From it, and later from Ludhiana, he worked the villages of the surrounding districts.

Another American Presbyterian body, the United Presbyterian Church of North America, had its own mission farther north and west, centred on the town of Sialkot. It is important to keep the two apart, because many books about Hyde blur them. Sialkot, whose convention would make Hyde famous, was never his station. It was the United Presbyterians’ town. Hyde travelled there each year for the convention and was a guest on their ground. The two missions were friendly and cooperated closely, and the Church of Scotland also worked nearby. But they were different churches with different missionaries, and the great movement toward Christ that shaped the region began in the United Presbyterian field.

A Lame Man Named Ditt

That movement began with a man who would never have appeared in any account of India’s leaders.

His name was Ditt. He lived in a village near Mirali, some thirty miles from Sialkot, and he earned a meagre living by buying hides in the neighbourhood and selling them on at a small profit. The United Presbyterian missionary Andrew Gordon described him as “a dark little man, lame of one leg, quiet and modest in his manner, with sincerity and earnestness well expressed in his face.” He belonged to the community then called the Chuhras. These were landless labourers, sweepers, and scavengers, at the very bottom of the Punjab’s caste order and treated as untouchable by those above them. The name itself was used with contempt and is today regarded as a slur. Their descendants make up much of the Christian community of Pakistan and the Indian Punjab.

Ditt heard the gospel from a Christian convert of higher caste, and around 1873 he asked the Rev. Samuel Martin to baptize him. Then he did something the missionaries had rarely seen. He did not ask to stay at the mission compound, as converts often did when their families cast them out. He went home. His relatives were furious. Gordon records his sister-in-law’s curse: “One of your legs is broken already; so may it be with the other.” Ditt answered, “Very well, my brethren; if it pleases you, you may oppose me and load me with reproaches and abuse; but your opposition will never induce me to deny Christ.”

In August 1873, three months after his own public confession, Ditt walked the thirty miles to Sialkot, lame as he was, with his wife, his daughter, and two neighbours, to present them for baptism. The following February he brought four more men. They too went straight home. The gospel began to pass from family to family and village to village along the lines of kinship, in the ordinary conversations of people whom no one else had ever thought worth converting.

A People Movement

What followed is known to historians as a mass movement or people movement. Over the next fifty years hundreds of thousands of people from the Chuhra community across the Punjab turned to Christ. They came not usually one by one, as missionaries had expected converts to come, but in families and groups. Each group decided together.

The numbers are striking. The census of the Punjab counted 3,912 Indian Christians in 1881. By 1901 there were 38,513. By 1911, the year Hyde left India for the last time, there were 163,994. The membership of the United Presbyterian mission alone grew from a few hundred in the late 1870s to over 24,000 by 1911, and its whole Christian community to more than 46,000. Hyde’s own mission shared in the movement. In the year he died its magazine reported two thousand baptisms “among low caste converts” in a single year.

The missionaries did not all welcome this. Some worried that people were coming for the wrong reasons: for the dignity and protection the church seemed to offer, or in hope of help, land, or education. The Punjab’s census superintendent in 1911, Pandit Harikishan Kaul, thought the movement was driven mainly by the converts’ desire for “enhanced dignity and social status.” Some missionaries worried that converts were baptized with too little instruction. A later study noted that Ditt himself “was baptized without instruction.” Others worried that a church made up almost entirely of the poorest and least educated people could never support itself or lead itself. These were serious questions, and serious people argued about them.

But others, and John Hyde was among them, saw in the movement something the apostle Paul would have recognised at once. The verse at the head of this chapter was written to a church in Corinth that had few prominent members: “not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called” (1 Corinthians 1:26, ASV). God, Paul says, deliberately chose “the base things of the world, and the things that are despised,” to shame the proud. The gospel had always gone first to the poor. Jesus announced his ministry with the words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor” (Luke 4:18, ASV). James asked his readers, “Did not God choose them that are poor as to the world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he promised to them that love him?” (James 2:5, ASV).

Hyde’s District

We have, unusually, an official picture of the work Hyde was doing in the middle of this movement. It comes from the printed report of the Punjab Mission for 1907.

Until the spring of that year or the one before (the report says “until April last”), the village work of the Ludhiana station “was solely in the hands of Rev. J. N. Hyde.” The district was then reorganised into four circles, each under a missionary with an Indian evangelist or pastor living in the central town. Hyde was made superintendent of the Moga circle, a district of 275 villages. The resident evangelist was an Indian worker named Jalal Masih. Missionaries travelled by rail where they could and by horse or two-wheeled cart in the remoter places. Luggage went by village ox cart. The aim was to visit every village at least once a year.

The same report summarises Hyde’s own observations on the people he was reaching, and they are among the few independent records we have of his views. Practical interest in religion, the report gives his testimony, was “limited almost entirely to the low castes. Only one convert came from another class. He was a Sikh.” The work among the low castes “advances generally along the lines of relationship,” from family to family, as it had in Ditt’s village. The farmers who employed the low-caste labourers often opposed the work, from fear “that if the low castes become Christians, they will refuse to serve them as they have done.” Yet Hyde also saw something hopeful among the higher castes. According to the report, he testified that “the better classes are drawn toward Christianity, being convinced that the religion which can elevate the lower classes must be the true religion. They see in Christians love not seen in their own.”

The report also records his testimony about what the gospel did in the lives of converts: “an immediate change in their conduct. They are more truthful, more patient, cease to worship idols, some of them become prayerful in their homes and endure persecution for Christ’s sake.”

Finally, the report quotes Hyde directly on how village work should be done. It is short enough to memorise, and it is worth doing so:

Begin the day in prayer and praise with your helpers. Then divide and go to the various parts of the town. Follow up inquirers and Christian converts in their places of work. Preach and baptize on the spot. Every time we visit a convert, we try to leave some lesson or some influence on his life.

There is nothing mystical in these sentences. They are practical instructions from a working evangelist. But the first sentence holds the key to everything else: begin the day in prayer and praise.

Among the Despised

The devotional sources add warmth to this official outline. One of McGaw’s informants, who once attended one of Hyde’s conventions for Christians, remembered how Hyde would meet his village converts as they arrived and embrace them “in Oriental style, laying his hand first on one shoulder and then on the other.” He did the same to Christians “of the lowest caste,” and he persuaded others to do likewise. The same witness thought it Hyde’s “strong point. Love won him victories.”

To understand why this mattered, we need to remember what caste meant in the Punjab of 1900. Members of the higher castes would not eat with Chuhras, touch them, or take water from their hands. Some missionaries unconsciously carried their own racial and social distances into their relations with converts. A European missionary publicly embracing a low-caste village Christian was making a statement that everyone present understood. Jones remembered that at the conventions it was often “Gulla, the sweeper” who carried a plate of curry and rice to Hyde in the prayer room. One of his Indian evangelists remembered sharing a village mud house with him, and Jones heard that Hyde “lived with them, he ate and slept with them.”

Paul told the Galatians, “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one man in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28, ASV). In the Punjab that verse had a sharp edge. The church that grew from Ditt’s village was a church of the despised. And the missionaries who served it well were those who did not merely preach to them but lived among them as brothers. Griswold, writing Hyde’s obituary, singled this out: he would be greatly missed “by humble village preachers with whom he lived as a brother.”

Opposition

The movement also provoked resistance. In the same years, reforming Hindu organisations were growing in the Punjab. The most active was the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875. It worked hard to win low-caste communities back from Christianity and Islam, and sometimes it saw particular missionaries as threats. Jones later heard from an Indian doctor that the Arya Samaj had been troubled by Hyde’s influence and by the number of people baptized under his preaching. It had tried to find a fault in his life that it could publish. That story belongs to a later chapter. It is mentioned here only to show that Hyde’s work was not carried on in a vacuum. It was part of a contest for the souls, and the loyalties, of the poorest people in the Punjab.

For Reflection

The prayers of John Hyde, which this book will now begin to follow closely, were not prayers for an abstraction called “India.” They were prayers for particular villages full of particular people, most of them poor, many of them despised by their neighbours, and all of them precious to God. When he later cried, “Father, give me these souls, or I die,” he was thinking of faces he knew.

That is worth remembering whenever we are tempted to think of prayer as a spiritual exercise detached from the real world. Hyde’s prayer life grew up in the middle of one of the great people movements in Christian history. Its fruit was counted in baptisms in the villages of the Moga district, among people whom the world thought least likely to matter. God still chooses such people. Our prayers should follow his choosing.