Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India Part 4

"Whenever I felt troubled or worried, I did not often read the Bible or prayer book, but I wanted to go alone to some quiet place from where I could see the broad, bright blue sky with all its mysteries and green trees and gray mountains with fields and forests around them.

"I think Nature is the best comforter and preacher of G.o.d. When we are too tired to learn our lessons or to do our duty, we can go alone for a safe distance where G.o.d waits for us to strengthen us. It is hard for me to sit and think about G.o.d in the cla.s.s room, where everybody is speaking, and the cla.s.s books and sums on the board attract my attention, or make me feel useless because I was not able to do them as nicely as others in my cla.s.s. But, if we go away from all these, our friend Nature jumps up and greets us with new greetings. The cool wind and the pretty birds and wonderful little flowers and giant-like rocks help us to feel the presence of G.o.d. We cannot appreciate all these when we are walking with the crowd and talking and playing, but, if we are left alone when we go out to see G.o.d, then even the stones and tiny flowers which we often see look like a mystery to us. In thinking about them we can feel the wisdom of G.o.d."

Crude as the English may be, the spiritual perception is not so different from that of the English lad who cried,

"My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky."

Religion Made Practical.

Religious feeling and expression may be natural to the Indian mind, but how about its transfer to the affairs of the common day? It is a hard enough proposition for any of us, be we from the East or the West; to make the difficulty even greater, the Indian girl is heir to a religious system in which religion and morals may be kept in water-tight compartments. Where the temples shelter "protected" prost.i.tution and the wandering "holy man" may break all the Ten Commandments with impunity, it is hard to learn that the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d means right living. Harder than irregular verbs or English idioms is the fundamental lesson that the Bible cla.s.s on Sunday has a vital connection with honest work in arithmetic on Monday, the settling of a quarrel on Tuesday, and the thorough sweeping of the schoolroom on Wednesday. Right here it is that we see "the grace of G.o.d" at work in the hearts of big girls and middle-sized girls and little children from the villages. When cla.s.ses can be left to take examinations unsupervised, a big step forward is marked. When before Communion Sunday the "queens" of their own initiative settle up the school quarrels and "make peace," one has the glad feeling that a little bit of the Kingdom of G.o.d has come in one small corner of the earth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BASKETBALL AT ISABELLA THOBURN COLLEGE, LUCKNOW]

"Among you as He that serveth."

Religious emotion may find one of its normal outlets in personal right-living. That is good as far as it goes, but yet not enough. It must seek expression also in making life better for other people. The Indian schoolgirl lives in the midst of a vast social laboratory, surrounded by problems that are overwhelmingly intricate. What is her education worth? Nothing, if it leads to a cloistered seclusion; everything, if it brings her into vital healing touch with even one of its needs.

The spirit of Christian social service opens many doors. There are Sunday afternoons to be spent with the shy pupils of the High Caste Girls' Schools at the opposite end of town. In the outcaste village beside the rice fields we may find the other end of the social scale--twenty or thirty little barbarians whose opening exercises must start off with a compulsory bath at the well.

Vacation weeks at home are bristling with opportunity--the woman next door whose forgotten art of reading may be revived; the bride in the next street who longs to learn crochet work; the little troop of neighbor children who crowd the house to learn the haunting strains of a Christian lyric. A cholera epidemic breaks out, and, instead of blind fear of a demon-G.o.ddess to be placated, there is practical knowledge as to methods of guarding food and drinking water. The baby of the house is ill and, instead of exorcisms and branding with hot irons, there is a visit to the nearest hospital and enough knowledge of hygienic laws to follow out the doctor's directions.

Rebecca teaches a cla.s.s of small boys in the outcaste Sunday school that gives preliminary baths. On this particular Sunday, however, she starts out armed not with the picture roll and lyric book, but with a motley collection of soap and clean rags, cotton swabs and iodine and ointment.

"Amma," says Rebecca, "in the little thatched house, the fourth beyond the school, I saw a boy whose head is covered with sores. May Zipporah teach my cla.s.s to-day, while I go and treat the sores, as I have learned to do in school?" So Rebecca, following in the steps of Him who sent out His disciples not only to preach but also to heal, attacks one of the little strongholds of dirt and disease and carries it by storm. No young surgeon after his first successful major operation was ever prouder than Rebecca when the next Sunday evening she rushes into the bungalow, eyes s.h.i.+ning, to report her cure complete.

Is there somewhere an American girl who longs to "do things"? A little plumbing--or its equivalent in a land where no plumbing is; a little bossing of the carpenter, the mason, the builder; a great deal of "high finance" in raising one dollar to the purchasing power of two; a deal of administration with need for endless tact; the teaching of subjects known and unknown,--largely the latter; a vast amount of mothering and a proportionate return in the love of children; days bristling with problems, and nights when one sinks into bed too tired to think or feel--there you have it, with much more. More because it means opportunity for creative work--creative as one helps to mould the new education of new India; creative as one reverently helps to fas.h.i.+on some of the lives that are to be new India itself. More too, as the rebound comes back to one's self in a life too full for loneliness, too obsessing for self-interest. Does it pay? Try it for yourself and see.

One bright noon in North India, sixty years ago, a young missionary on an evangelistic tour among the villages paused to rest by the wayside.

As he paced up and down beneath the tamarind trees, pondering the problem of India's womanhood, shut in the zenanas beyond the reach of the Gospel which he was bringing to the little villages, there fell at his feet a feather from a vulture's wing. Picking it up, he whimsically cut it into a quill. Thinking that his sister in far-away America might like a letter from so strange a pen, he went into his tent and wrote to her. He told her of the millions of girls shut up in those "citadels of heathenism," the zenanas of India,--a problem which only Christian women might hope to solve. Half playfully, half in earnest, he added, "Why don't you come out and help?" As swift as wind and wave permitted was Isabella Thoburn's answer, "I am coming as soon as the way opens!"

Already a group of women, stirred to the depths by the words of Mrs.

Edwin W. Parker and Mrs. William Butler, returned missionaries from India, were forming a Society to help the women and girls of Christless lands. At the first public meeting of this Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, though but twenty women were present with but three hundred dollars in the treasury, when they learned that Isabella Thoburn,--gifted, consecrated, wise,--was ready to go to India, they exclaimed, "Shall we lose Miss Thoburn because we have not the needed money in our hands to send her? No, rather let us walk the streets of Boston in our calico dresses, and save the expense of more costly apparel!" Thus was answered the letter written with the feather from the vulture's wing by the wayside in India. In 1870, Isabella Thoburn gathered six little waifs into her first school in India, a one-roomed building in the noisy, dusty bazaar of Lucknow. From this brave venture have grown the Middle School, the High School, and finally in 1886 the first woman's Christian College in all Asia, housed in the Ruby Garden, Lal Bagh. Here for thirty-one years Isabella Thoburn lived and loved and labored for the girls of India.

CHAPTER THREE

I. THE GARDEN OF HID TREASURE

Prelude: Why go to College?

"Why should an Indian girl want a college education?" queried Mary Smith, as she listened to her roommate's account of the "Lighting of the Christmas Candles." "I can see why she would need to learn to read and write, and even a high school course I wouldn't mind; but college seems to me perfectly silly, and an awful waste of good money. Why, from our own home high school there are only six of us at college."

Mary Smith, fresh from "Main Street," may be less provincial than she sounds. Her question puts up a real problem. When only one girl in one hundred has a chance at the Three R's, is it right to "waste money" on giving certain others the chance to delve into psychology and higher mathematics? When there is not bread enough to go around, why should some of the family have cake and pudding?

Something less than a hundred years ago, similar questions were vexing the American public. Those were the days when Mary Lyon fought her winning battle against the champions of the slogan "The home is woman's sphere," the days in which the pioneers of women's education foregathered from the rocky farmslopes of New England, and Mt. Holyoke came into being. Mary Smith, who is duly born, baptized, vaccinated, and registered for Va.s.sar, the last requiring no more volition on her part than the first, realizes little of the ancient struggle that has made her privilege a matter of course.

They are much the same old arguments that must be gone over again to justify college education for our sisters of the East. Rather say argument, in the singular, for there is just one that holds, and that is the possibilities for service that such education opens up.

High schools there must be in India, but who will teach them? American and English women have never yet gone out to India in such numbers as to staff the schools they have founded, nor would there be funds to support them if they did. Travel through India to-day and you will find girls'

schools staffed either with under-qualified women teachers, or else with men whose academic qualifications are satisfactory, but who, being men, cannot fill the place where a woman is obviously needed. What could be more contradictory than to find a Christian girls' school, supported largely by American money, but staffed by Hindu men, just because no Christian women with necessary qualifications are available?

Hospitals there must be, but where are the doctors to conduct them? Here again, foreign doctors can fill the need of the merest fraction of India's suffering womankind. But the American doctor can multiply herself in just one way. Give her a Medical College, well equipped and staffed, and a body of Indian girls with a sufficient background of general education, and instead of one doctor and one hospital you will find countless centres of healing springing up in city and small town and along the roadside where the doctor pa.s.ses by.

Leaders.h.i.+p there must be among the women of the New India. Where will it be found but among those women whose powers of initiative have been developed by the four years of life in a Christian college? Church workers, pastors' wives, social workers, child welfare promoters, where can you find them in India? Here and there, scattered in unlikely places, where educated women, married and home-making, yet let their surplus energy flow out into neighborhood betterment.

Mothers of families there must be, and far be it from me to say that non-college women fail in that high office. There comes before me one mother of fourteen children who has never seen the inside of a college cla.s.sroom, yet whom it would be hard to excel in her qualities of motherliness. But, other things being equal, it is to the Christian, educated mothers that we turn to find the life of the ideal home, with real comrades.h.i.+p between wife and husband, with intelligent understanding of the children, and the coveting for them of the best that education can give.

One other question Mary Smith may rightly ask. What about the men's colleges already existing? Will co-education not work in India?

To a certain limited extent it has. Rukkubai, with her too brief years of freedom, proved its possibility. Others there have been, pioneer souls, who pushed their way into lecture halls crowded with men, took notes in the dark and undesirable remnants of s.p.a.ce allotted to them, and by dint of perseverance and hard work pa.s.sed the examinations of the University and carried off the coveted degree.

They were courageous women, deserving admiration. They won knowledge, sometimes at heavy cost of health and nerve power. They helped to make women's education possible. But what of the fairer side of college life could they ever know? They were accepted always on sufferance; they never "belonged." One such pioneer was a friend of mine. In many walks and talks she told me of life in a men's college under the patronage of the Maharajah of a native state. Loyal to her college, and proud of the treasures of opportunity it had opened to her, she yet sighed for what she had missed. "When I see the life of the girls in the Women's Christian College at Madras," she said, "I feel that I have never been to college."

Three times the girls and women of America have reached out hands across the sea and either founded or helped to found Christian schools of higher education for the women of India, with the belief that they have a right to the knowledge of the spiritual truth which has brought to Christian women of America development in righteousness, freedom of faith, a personal knowledge of G.o.d through Jesus Christ, and the blessed hope of immortality.

Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow, 1886.

The Women's Christian College, Madras, 1915.

The Vellore Medical School, 1918.

These three names and dates are red-lettered in the history of international friends.h.i.+p, for through them the college women of America and India are joined into one fellows.h.i.+p of knowledge and service.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BIOLOGY CLa.s.s AT LUCKNOW COLLEGE Head of Cla.s.s Leaning on Table, and Nine Students Dissecting Nine Rabbits]

LUCKNOW

Lal Bagh.

A dusty journey of a night and almost a day brings you from Calcutta across the limitless Ganges plains to Lucknow, capital of the ancient kingdom of Oudh. Every tourist visits it, making a pious pilgrimage first to the Residency, where in the midst of green lawns and banyan trees the scarred ruins tell of the unforgettable Mutiny days of '57; and then to the nearby cemetery, where the dead sleep among the jasmines. Then, if his hours are wisely chosen, the traveler drives back to the town at sunset when palace towers and cupolas, mosque minarets and domes are silhouetted against the blazing west in an unrivalled skyline.

The tourist returns to the bazaars and in the midst of them, amid the dust and clatter of _ekkas_ and _tongas_, probably pa.s.ses by a sight more interesting than Residency ruins and abandoned palaces--inasmuch as it deals with the living present rather than the dead past. It was in Lal Bagh, the Ruby Garden of hid treasure, that the Nawab Iq bal-ud-dowler, Lord Chamberlain to the first king of Oudh, hid, according to report, great caskets of silver rupees, with a huge ruby possessed of magic virtues, and left behind him a sheet of detailed directions for finding the treasure, with, alas, a postscript to explain that all the careful directions were quite wrong, being intended to mislead the would-be discoverer. It was again in Lal Bagh that Isabella Thoburn founded her school for Indian girls, and in 1886 opened the cla.s.ses of the first women's college for India to possess residence accommodation and a staff of women teachers. The buried rupees and the magic ruby have never been unearthed; instead these years of Lal Bagh history have witnessed the discovery of richer treasure in the minds and hearts of young women, set free from age-long repressions and sent out to share their riches with a world in need.

You enter Lal Bagh's gates and find yourself before a stretch of dull red buildings whose wide-arched verandahs are built to keep out the fierce suns of May In November the sun has lost its terrors, and you rejoice in its warmth as it s.h.i.+nes upon the gardens with their riot of color--yellow and white chrysanthemums, roses, and ma.s.ses of flaming poinsettias, surely a fair setting for the girls who walk amid its changing loveliness.

Cosmopolitan Atmosphere.

As you leave the setting and for a few days merge yourself into the life that is going on within, there are a few outstanding impressions that fasten upon you and persistently mingle with Lal Bagh memories. Of these, perhaps, the foremost is the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Here you have on the one hand a group of American college women representing no one locality, no narrow section of American life, but drawn from east and west, north and south. On the other side, you see a body of nearly sixty Indian students whose homes range all the way from Ceylon to the Northwest frontier, from Singapore to Bombay.