Introduction
From the 1850s, Calcutta-born Hannah Mullens (1826–1861) travelled all over India trying to bring literacy, self-respect and spiritual consolation into the dreary leisure of zenanas, the cloistered women’s quarters of well-to-do Indian families. The following account is taken from a letter she wrote from Nagercoil on India’s southernmost tip, then in the Kingdom of Travancore.
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)
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.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 60 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 50 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, because, just, may, not, ought, whether, who.
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