A room inside the zenana or women’s quarters in the City Palace, Udaipur, Rajasthan. The zenana was a perilous environment, where (wrote Mullens) women were ignorant, inquisitive, solitary, imaginative, despised, and had abundant leisure. Zenana missions began in 1854 when Scottish minister John Fordyce (the man who introduced the rickshaw to India) joined forces with Hannah Mullens. Resistance was stiff. “Our husbands won’t hear of it,” sighed one woman, “they say that it is bad enough that we are learning to read, they won’t have their own house turned into a school for Christianity.” Prasanna Kumar Tagore (1801-1886) was among the first Hindu gentlemen to throw open his zenana, but disinherited his son Gnanendramohan (1826-1890) for being baptised in 1851. Gnanendramohan subsequently became the first Indian called to the English bar.
Part 1 of 2
IN the various districts in which our sixteen Bible-women* are at work, there are many who are really — though secretly* — followers of Christ. They do not leave their homes and join the Christian community, their names are not in the church list, nor are they reckoned among the number of Christian adherents; but we believe that they belong none the less to Christ’s Church, and have their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.* Although for the most part the women are quite indifferent about spiritual things, their one thought being how far they can surpass others in their display of jewels, there are some who before ever they hear of Christianity are crushed with the burden of sin and are earnest seekers after God.
There is a woman living in Kottar* who has grown old and grey during many a thousand miles’ search after salvation. She had been a pilgrim to the Ganges, Benares, Papavinasham, Kurtalam, and many other sacred places;* but no peace rewarded the long journeys of fatigue.
* Bible-women were Indians, often recruited locally from the lower social classes, who were described by Richard Lovett (1851-1904) as “Christian women with some knowledge of the Bible and of Christian truth, and an adequate amount of intelligence, zeal, and tact”. They could move where even such as Hannah Mullens, who was born in the country and spoke fluent Bengali, could not. Attitudes to the education of women back home in England were not always much better: see Imagine.
* Mullens records several occasions when patriarchs of well-to-do Indian families put their foot down over the invasion of the household zenana. But resistance softened over time. “The boys who had come under Duff’s influence at Calcutta,” wrote Eugene Stock, “though not Christians, had learned to feel the need of companionship in their wives; and a few of the more advanced began to see that women ought to be educated.” The same realisation had come not long before to Daniel Defoe: see The Weakness of Women. “In 1857,” Stock went on, “Dr Duff took a further step by opening a high-class ladies’ school like Mr Bethune’s, but with Christianity avowedly taught; and it is remarkable that many non-Christian Hindus, who had distrusted the ‘neutrality’ of the Bethune School, patronized Duff’s, because of the high moral teaching they knew would be given.”
* A reference to the Revelation of St John, which speaks in several places of a Book of Life in the possession of Jesus Christ, who is the Lamb of God. The book lists the names of all human beings, except those ‘blotted out’ so that nothing “that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie” may enter and mar Paradise. See Revelation 21:27.
* Nagercoil grew up around Kottar, which became a suburb of Nagercoil.
* The River Ganges is India’s most famous sacred river, flowing through some 1,550 miles eastwards from the Himalayas in Northern India across to the Bay of Bengal near Calcutta. Benares (Varanasi) is a city in Uttar Pradesh, northeast of India, on the Ganges, associated with Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha. Papavinas(h)am is the name of a sacred waterfall in Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, said to wash away sins. Courtallam or Coutrallam Falls (also Kutralam or Kuttalam) is a medical spa of some nine distinct waterfalls in Tamil Nadu, southern India, some 52 miles north of Nagercoil.
Précis
Hannah Mullens, a Calcutta-born Christian missionary, told of her campaign to bring education to women confined to the zenanas or women’s quarters of wealthy Hindu families. Most were content with unabashed materialism but some had a spiritual longing, and one in particular had travelled the length and breadth of India hoping to satisfy hers. (54 / 60 words)
Part Two
The Home Church in Nagercoil was founded in 1819, with funding from the British Resident in Travancore, General John Munro, His Highness the Maharani of Travancore, the Maharaja of Cochin and the Rajah of Tanjore. It is now administered by the Church of South India. The Christian missions sent out by European churches from the sixteenth century onwards did much good work not only in preaching the gospel but also in morality, medicine, literacy and trade. Nonetheless, they could have unwitting but catastrophic effects when politics and religion became tangled together and secular Powers jumped on the bandwagon. See Hideyoshi Changes His Mind.
At last she settled down here [in Nagercoil] so that she might go monthly to Cape Comorin to bathe in its sacred waters.* But neither did this bring the desired forgiveness. It was a long and sad tale of disappointed hope that she told to Santhyai and Ambudial, the two zenana teachers visiting in that district. But they were able to tell her of a more excellent way* — the Way of Life, which is Jesus Christ.* She said she had sought salvation through her own gods until she despaired of their ever giving it; she would now willingly make a trial of this new way. The Bible-women taught her a short prayer, “Jesus, my God, my Life, I am a poor sinner, save me!”* She has a different tale to tell now, for she is filled with joy and peace. She delights to speak of the great blessing that has come to her, and says that when she communes with God she seems to be lifted up and surrounded by light, so that she is able to understand many truths hitherto hidden from her.
* Cape Cormorin (Comorin), a corruption via Portuguese of the Indian name Kanyakumari, is sometimes dubbed India’s ‘Land’s End’ as it lies right on the southernmost tip of the subcontinent, in the waters of the Laccadive or Lakshadweep Sea, where the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean all converge. Nagercoil is just a few miles away. Hindu legend says that the goddess Kanya Devi (Shakti) was jilted by Shiva on her wedding day, and ever afterwards remained a virgin and patroness of the unwedded.
* See 1 Corinthians 12:31.
* See John 14:6.
* An expanded form of the Prayer of the Publican (tax-gatherer) in Luke 18:13: “God be merciful to me, a sinner!”. It is closely related to the Prayer of the Heart or Jesus Prayer widely used in the Eastern churches since the fifth century or earlier, which may take several forms but in its most common runs “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me [a sinner]”. See The Prayer of the Heart.
Précis
After visiting many of India’s holy places, said Mullens, this particular woman had settled near Cape Comorin’s sacred waters. Still she had found no spiritual solace, until two Indian women in Mullens’s team had taught her a prayer of the Name of Jesus, and at last all that the woman had been seeking came to her, and remained with her. (60 / 60 words)
