Part 12 (1/2)
Women's Secretary for All India of the National Missionary Society.
Supervisor of a Social Service Committee for Madras.
President of the Christian Service Union.
Of all her activities, Mrs. Appasamy's connection with the National Missionary Society is perhaps the most interesting. The ”N.M.S.,” as it is familiarly called, is a cause very near to the hearts of most Indian Christians. The work in Dornakal represents the effort of Tinnevelly Tamil Christians for the evangelization of one section of the Telugu country. The N.M.S. is a co-ordinated enterprise, taking in the contributions of all parts of Christian India and applying them to seven fields in seven different sections of India's great expanse. The first is denominational and intensive; the second interdenominational and extensive. India has room for both and for many more of each. Both are built upon the principle of Indian initiative and employ Indian workers paid by Indian money.
In the early days of the N.M.S., its missionaries were all men, a.s.sisted perhaps by their wives, who with household cares could give only limited service. Later came the idea that here was a field for Indian women. At the last convention, the question of women's contribution and women's work was definitely raised, and Mrs. Appasamy took upon herself the burden of travel and appeal. Already she has organized contributing branches among the women of India's princ.i.p.al cities and is now antic.i.p.ating a trip to distant Burmah for the same purpose. Rupees 8,000--about $2,300.00--lie in the treasury as the first year's response, much of it given in contributions of a few cents each from women in deep poverty, to whom such gifts are literally the ”widow's mite.”
The spending of the money is already planned. In the far north in a Punjabi village a house is now a building and its occupant is chosen.
Miss Sirkar, a graduate now teaching in Kinnaird College, Lah.o.r.e, has determined to leave her life within college walls, to move into the little house in the isolated village, and there on one third of her present salary to devote her trained abilities to the solution of rural problems. It is a new venture for an unmarried woman. It requires not only the gift of a dedicated life, but also the courage of an adventurous spirit. Elementary school teaching, social service, elementary medical help--these are some of the ”jobs” that face this new missionary to her own people.
But, to return to Mrs. Appasamy, she not only organizes other people for work, but in the depressed communities of Madras herself carries on the tasks of social uplift. As supervisor of a Social Service organization, she has the charge of the work carried on in fifteen outcaste villages.
With the aid of several co-workers frequent visits are made. Night schools are held for adults who must work during the hours of daylight, but who gather at night around the light of a smoky kerosene lantern to struggle with the intricacies of the Tamil alphabet. Ignorant women, naturally fearful of ulterior motives, are befriended, until trust takes the place of suspicion. The sick are induced to go to hospitals; learners are prepared for baptism; during epidemics the dead are buried.
During the great strike in the cotton mills, financial aid was given.
Hull House, Chicago, or a Madras Pariah Cheri--the stage setting s.h.i.+fts, but the fundamental problems of ignorance and poverty and disease are the same the world around. The same also is the spirit for service, whether it s.h.i.+nes through the life of Jane Addams or of Mrs. Appasamy.
With the ”Blue Triangle.”
The autumn of 1906 saw the advent of the first Indian student at Mt.
Holyoke College. Those were the days when Oriental students were still rare and the entrance of Dora Maya Das among seven hundred American college girls was a sensation to them as well as an event to her.
It is a far cry from the wide-spreading plains of the Punjab with their burning heats of summer to the cosy greenness of the Connecticut valley--a far cry in more senses than geographical distance. Dora had grown up in a truly Indian home, as one of thirteen children, her father a new convert to Christianity, her mother a second generation Christian.
The Maya Das family were in close contact with a little circle of American missionaries. An American child was Dora's playmate and ”intimate friend.” In the absence of any nearby school, an American woman was her teacher, who opened for her the door of English reading, that door that has led so many Oriental students into a large country.
Later came the desire for college education. To an application to enter among the men students of Forman Christian College at Lah.o.r.e came the princ.i.p.al's reply that she might do so if she could persuade two other girls to join her. The two were sought for and found, and these three pioneers of women's education in the Punjab entered cla.s.ses which no woman had invaded before.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BABY ON SCALES]
Then came the suggestion of an American college, and Dora started off on a voyage of discovery that must have been epoch-making in her life. It is, as I have said, a far cry from Lah.o.r.e to South Hadley. It means not only physical acclimatization, but far more delicate adjustments of the mind and spirit. Many a missionary, going back and forth at intervals of five or seven years, could tell you of the periods of strain and stress that those migrations bring. How much more for a girl still in her teens! New conventions, new liberties, new reserves--it was young David going forth in Saul's untried armor. Of spiritual loneliness too, she could tell much, for to the Eastern girl, always untrammelled in her expression of religious emotion, our Western restraint is an incomprehensible thing. ”I was lonely,” says Miss Maya Das, ”and then after a time I reacted to my environment and put on a reserve that was even greater than theirs.”
So six years pa.s.sed--one at Northfield, four at Mt. Holyoke, and one at the Y.W.C.A. Training School in New York. Girls of that generation at Mt. Holyoke will not forget their Indian fellow student who ”starred” in Shakespearian roles and brought a new Oriental atmosphere to the pages of the college magazine. Six years, and then the return to India, and another period of adjustment scarcely less difficult than the first.
That was in 1910, and the years since have seen Miss Maya Das in various capacities. First as lecturer, and then as acting princ.i.p.al of Kinnaird College at Lah.o.r.e, she pa.s.sed on to girls of her own Province something of Mt. Holyoke's gifts to her. Now in Calcutta, she is a.s.sociate National Secretary of the Y.W.C.A.
It was in Calcutta that I met Miss Maya Das, and that she left me with two outstanding impressions. The first is that of force and initiative unusual in an Indian woman. How much of this is due to her American education, how much to her far-northern home and ancestry, is difficult to say. Whatever the cause, one feels in her resource and executive ability. In that city of purdah women, she moves about with the freedom and dignity of a European and is received with respect and affection.
The second characteristic which strikes one is the fact that Miss Maya Das has remained Indian. One can name various Indian men and some women who have become so denationalized by foreign education that ”home” is to them the land beyond the water, and understanding of their own people has lessened to the vanis.h.i.+ng point. That Miss Maya Das is still essentially Indian is shown by such outward token as that of dropping her first name, which is English, and choosing to be known by her Indian name of Mohini, and also by adherence to distinctively Indian dress, even to the embroidered Panjabi slippers. What matters more is the inward habit of mind of which these are mere external expressions.
In a recent interview with Mr. Gandhi, Miss Maya Das told him that as a Christian she could not subscribe to the Non-Co-operation Movement, because of the racial hate and bitterness that it engenders; yet just because she was a Christian she could stand for all constructive movements for India in economic and social betterment. One of Mr.
Gandhi's slogans is ”a spinning wheel in every home,” that India may revive its ancient arts and crafts and no longer be clothed by the machine looms of a distant country. Miss Maya Das told him that she had even antic.i.p.ated him in this movement, for she and other Christian women of advanced education are following a regular course in spinning and weaving, with the purpose of pa.s.sing on this skill through the Rural Department of the Y.W.C.A.
Another pet scheme of Miss Maya Das is the newly formed Social Service League of Calcutta. Into its members.h.i.+p has lately come the niece of a Chairman of the All-India Congress, deciding that the constructive forces of social reform are better to follow than the destructive programme of Non-Co-operation. Miss Maya Das longs to turn her abounding energy into efforts toward purdah parties and lectures for the shut-in women of the higher cla.s.ses, believing that in this way the a.s.sociation can both bring new interests into narrow lives, and can also gain the help and financial support of these bored women of wealth toward work among the poor.
One of Miss Maya Das's interests is a month's summer school for rural workers, a prolonged Indian Silver Bay, held at a temperature of 112 in the shade, during the month of May when all schools and colleges are closed for the hot weather vacation. Last year women came to it from distant places, women who had never been from home before, who had never seen a ”movie,” who had never entered a rowboat or an automobile. Miss Maya Das's stereopticon lectures carried these women in imagination to war scenes where women helped, to Hampton Inst.i.tute, to j.a.pan, and suggested practical ways of a.s.sisting in tuberculosis campaigns and child welfare. After four weeks of social enjoyment and Christian teaching they returned again to their scattered branches with the curtain total of their results from 88 in Newark to 355 in Madras.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PUTTING SPICES IN BABY'S MILK Notice Feeding Vessels, Sh.e.l.l and Tin Cup]
What is Dr. Vera Singhe doing about it? With her two medical a.s.sistants, her corps of nurses, and the increasing number of health visitors whom she herself has trained, she has been able to reduce the death rate among the babies in her care during 1920 from the city rate of 280 for that year to 231.
But enough of statistics. More enlightening than printed reports is a visit to the Triplicane Health Centre, where in the midst of a congested district work is actually going on. We shall find no up-to-date building with modern equipment, but a middle-cla.s.s Hindu house, adapted as well as may be to its new purpose. Among its obvious drawbacks, there is the one advantage, that patients feel themselves at home and realize that what the doctor does in those familiar surroundings they can carry over to their own home life.