Throughout India there exists a group of women workers, widely scattered, largely unknown to one another, in the public eye unhonored and unsung, yet performing tasks of great significance. Wherever an Indian Church raises its tower to the sky, there working beside the pastor you will find the pastor's wife.
Sometimes she lives in the heart of the Hindu town; sometimes in a village, in the primitive surroundings of a mass-movement community. Eminent among such is Mrs. Azariah, wife of the first Indian bishop, and with him at the head of the Tinnevelly Missionary Society at Dornakal. There, in the heart of the Deccan, among primitive Telugu outcastes, is this remarkable group of Indian missionaries, supported by Indian funds, winning these lowly people through the gospel of future salvation and of present betterment.
It was on a Sunday morning that I slipped into the communion service at Dornakal. The little church, built from Indian gifts with no aid from the West, is simplicity itself. The roof thatched with millet stalks, the low-hanging palmyra rafters hung with purple everlastings, the earth-floor covered with bamboo matting, all proclaimed that here was a church built and adorned by the hands of its worshippers. The Bishop in his vestments dispensed the sacrament from the simple altar. Even the Episcopal service had been so adapted to Indian conditions that instead of the sound of the expected chants one heard the Te Deum and the Venite set to the strains of Telugu lyrics. The audience, largely of teachers, theological students, and schoolboys and girls, sat on the clean floor space. One saw and listened with appreciation and reverence, finding here a beginning and prophecy of what the Christianized fraction of India will do for its motherland.
It was against this background that I came to know Mrs. Azariah. In the bungalow, as the Bishop's wife, she presides with dignity over a household where rules of plain living and high thinking prevail. She dispenses hospitality to the many European guests who come to see the activities of this experimental mission station, and packs the Bishop off well provided with food and traveling comforts for his long and numerous journeys. The one little son left at home is his mother's constant companion and shows that his training has not been neglected for the multitude of outside duties. One longs to see the house when the five older children turn homeward from school and college, and fill the bungalow with the fun of their shared experiences. Mercy, the eldest daughter, is one of the first Indian women students to venture on the new commercial course offered by the Young Women's Christian Association with the purpose of fitting herself to be her father's secretary. In a few months she will be bringing the traditions of the Women's Christian College of Madras, where she spent two previous years, to share with the Dornakal community.
But, though wife and mother and home maker, Mrs. Azariah's interests extend far beyond the confines of her family. She is president of the Madras Mothers' Union, and editor of the little magazine that travels to the homes of Tamil and Telugu Christian women, their only substitute for the "Ladies' Home Journal" and "Modern Priscilla." She is also the teacher of the women's class, made up of the wives of the theological students. A Tamil woman in a Telugu country, she, too, must have known a little of the linguistic woes of the foreign missionary. Those days, however, are long past, and she now teaches her daily classes in fluent and easy Telugu. There are also weekly trips to nearby hamlets, where the women-students are guided by her into the ways of adapting the Christian's good news to the comprehension of the plain village woman, whose interests are bounded by her house, her children, her goats, and her patch of millet.
Such a village we visited that same Sunday, when toward evening the Bishop, Mrs. Azariah, and I set out to walk around the Dornakal domain. We saw the gardens and farm from which the boys supply the whole school family with grain and fresh vegetables; we looked up to the grazing grounds and saw the herd of draught bullocks coming into the home sheds from their Sunday rest in pasture. I was told about the other activities which I should see on the working day to follow—spinning and weaving and sewing, cooking and carpentry and writing and reading—a simple Christian communism in which the boys farm and weave for the girls, and the girls cook and sew for the boys, and all live together a life that is leading up to homes of the future.
It was after all that that we saw the village. On the edge of the Mission property we came to the small group of huts, wattled from tree branches and clay, inhabited by Indian gypsy folk, just settling from nomadism into agricultural life. So primitive are they still, that lamp light is taboo among them, and the introduction of a kerosene lantern would force them to tear down those attempts at house architecture and move on to a fresh site, safe from the perils of civilization. It is among such primitive folk that Mrs. Azariah and her students carry their message. Herself a college woman, what experiment in sociology could be more thrilling than her contact with such a remnant of the primitive folk of the early world?
Mother, home-maker, editor, teacher, evangelist, with quiet unconsciousness and utter simplicity she is building her corner of Christian India.
Public Service.
"To-morrow is the day of the Annual Fair and I am so busy with arrangements that I had no time even to answer the note you sent me yesterday." No, this was not said in New York or Boston, but in Madras; and the speaker was not an American woman, but Mrs. Paul Appasamy, the All-India Women's Secretary of the National Missionary Society.