Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India Part 9

December 15, 1921.

More than a month has pa.s.sed since I began the Journal and I am now sitting in the junior B.A. cla.s.s-room watching over nineteen students (the twentieth happens to be absent) who are writing their terminal examination papers. I was a false weather-prophet; rain did not come, and still keeps away. Instead there is a high cool wind, and every one of these students is firmly holding down her paper with the left hand while her fountain pen (they all have fountain pens) skims all too rapidly over the page. The great principle of answering an examination paper is never to waste a moment on thought. If you do not know what to say next, repeat what you said before until a new idea strikes you. As it is not necessary to dip the pen in ink it should never leave the page. This method enables them to produce small pamphlets which they hand in with a happy sense of achievement, but the examiner's heart sinks as she gathers up the volumes of hasty ma.n.u.script.

Sometimes, however, the answers err on the side of conciseness. "We believe them because we cannot prove them," was the truthful reply of a student in Physics to the question, "Why do we believe Newton's Laws of Motion?" Or sometimes an essential transition is omitted; "At the period of the Roman conquest the Greeks were politically hopeless, economically bankrupt, and morally corrupt. They became teachers." But sometimes it is the caprice of the English language which betrays them. "The events of the 15th century which most affected philosophic thought were the founding of America and the founding of the Universe." Occasionally they administer an unconscious rebuke. I was just starting out to give an address at a week-night evening service from the chancel steps of a neighboring church, and having a minute or two to spare I took up one of my 120 Scripture papers and read, "St. Paul's chief difficulty with the Corinthians was that women insisted on speaking in church. It is wicked for women to talk in church."

The nineteen students before me are very representative of our student body, which now numbers one hundred and thirty. Eleven are writing on Const.i.tutional History, two on Philosophy, four on Zoology and two (a young Hindu married girl and a Syrian Christian) on Malayalam literature. Ten of them speak Tamil, eight Malayalam, and one Telugu.

They vary in rank from high official circles to very low origins, but most belong to what we should call the professional cla.s.ses. All are barefooted and wear the Indian dress, which in the case of the Syrians is always white.

Through the open door I look into the library where the fifty-three new students of this year are writing an English paper. There are eight Hindus and one European among them, also two students from Ceylon, two from Hyderabad, and one, differing widely from the rest in dress and facial type, from Burma. The lecturer in charge is Miss Chamberlain, the daughter of our invaluable secretary in America. She arrived only three weeks ago to take the place of Miss Sarber who has started on her furlough and already the dignity of the philosopher and psychologist is mingling with the gaiety which makes her table a favorite place for students.

The debate on the conscience clause[*] which took place in the new Legislative a.s.sembly in November shows that the party now in power, the non-Brahmin middle-cla.s.s, realizes the value to the country of Christian education. Man after man rose to express his grat.i.tude to the Christian College and to point out that missionaries alone had brought education to low-caste and out-caste people. The proposal was rejected by 61 votes to 13, a most unexpected and happy event.

One proposal, perfectly well meant, was made at the Government Committee on Education which aroused great indignation among our students. It was that various concessions should be made to the supposed weakness of women students and that the pa.s.s mark in examinations should be lowered for them. As the Princ.i.p.als of both the Women's Colleges opposed the suggestion, it was withdrawn, but this little incident shows two things, the sympathetic feeling of men toward the studies of women, and the distance that women have travelled since the time when they would themselves have requested such concessions.

In the recent agitation in favor of Nationalism finding that the only constructive advice given was to devote themselves to Indian music, to the spinning wheel, which is Mr. Gandhi's great remedy for social and political ills and to social service, I did all that I could to promote these ends. I asked the Senior Student to collect the names of all who wished to learn to play an Indian instrument, I presented the College with a pound of raw cotton and spinning wheel of the type recommended by Mr. Gandhi, and the social service begun some months before was continued This last consists of our expedition led by Miss Jackson, which twice a week visits an unpleasant little village not far from our gates. The students wash the children, which is not at all a delightful task, attend to sore eyes and matted hair and teach them games and songs, and chat with the village women about household hygiene and how to keep out of debt. One of our Sunday Schools is in this village, too, so by this time the students are welcome visitors, and whether they do much good or not, they learn a great deal of sobering truth. Of course, only a few can go at a time, but others find some scope in the other Sunday Schools and in the little Day School which Miss Brockway inst.i.tuted for the children of our servants. This last means real self-denial, as the work must be done every day. Still, it remains one of our greatest problems to find channels for the spirit of service which we try to inspire, and without which the current of their patriotism may become stagnant.

But I am being disappointed about the music and the spinning wheel. Not one student was willing to undergo the toilsome practice of learning an instrument, and though the spinning wheel was received with enthusiasm the pound of cotton has hardly diminished at all. Nor will they take the trouble to read the newspapers regularly. So that they might not feel that too British a view of events was presented to them they are supplied with some papers of a very critical tone, but I need not have feared the risk, the papers remain unread. They much prefer the medium of speech, and are keenly interested in almost any topic on which we invite an attractive speaker to give an address, but they do not follow it up by reading. They are decidedly fonder of books than they were, and use the library more, but their taste is for the better kind of domestic fiction more than for anything else. There is one important exception, they all love Shakespeare and there is no one whom they so delight to act. Whenever they invite us to an entertainment, which they do on many and various occasions, we are fairly sure of seeing a few scenes of Shakespeare acted much better than I have ever seen English girls of their age act.

The students have been collecting a fund for our new Science building, a great and beautiful enterprise, which, also, is still in its proper stage. The drawing of plans so large and detailed has occupied many months. We are looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is welcome, too, and particularly help from the students. They have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than Rs. 500. Their most important undertaking was a performance of "Everyman" most solemnly and beautifully carried out before an audience of our women friends, and there was also a dramatic version written by one of the students of the parable of the prodigal son and performed before the college only. This last was remarkable in its adaptation of the story to Indian conditions and for the characteristic introduction of a mother and a sister.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OLD INDIA No Chance--No Hope]

"If she have sent her servants in our pain, If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword, If she have given back our sick again And to the breast the weakling lips restored, Is it a little thing that she has wrought?

Then Life and Death and Motherhood be nought."

_Kipling's "Song of the Women"_

The Medical School at Vellore is still without a permanent home and is lodged in scattered buildings--without a permanent staff except for two or three heroic figures who are performing each the work of several--without a certainty of a regular income in any way equivalent to its needs--but it has an enthusiastic band of students and it has Dr.

Ida Scudder, and so the balance is on the right side.

[Footnote *: Opposing the study of the Bible in our schools.]

CHAPTER FIVE

SENT FORTH TO HEAL

"THE Long Trail A-Winding."

Who that has read "Kim" will ever forget Kipling's picture of the Grand Trunk Road, with its endless panorama of beggars, Brahmans, Lamas, and talkative old women on pilgrimage? Such roads cover India's plains with a network of interlacing lines, for one of Britain's achievements on India's behalf has been her system of metalled roads, defying alike the dust of the dry season and the floods of the monsoon.

One such road I have in mind, a road leading from the old fortress town of Vellore through twenty-three miles of fertile plain, to Gudiyattam, at the foot of the Eastern Ghats. It is just a South Indian "up country"

road, skirting miles of irrigated rice fields, gold-green in their beginnings, gold-brown in the days of ripening and reaping. It winds past patches of sugar cane and cocoanut palm; then half arid uplands, where goats and lean cattle search for gra.s.s blades that their predecessors have overlooked; then the _bizarre_ shapes of the ghats, wide s.p.a.ces open to the play of sun and wind and rain, of pa.s.sing shadow and sunset glory. They are among the breathing s.p.a.ces of earth, which no man hath tamed or can tame.

An Indian "Flivver."

An ordinary road it is, and pa.s.sing over it the ordinary procession--heavy-wheeled carts drawn by humped, white bullocks; crowded jutkas whose tough, little ponies disappear in a rattle of wheels and a cloud of dust; weddings, funerals, and festivals with processions gay or mournful as the case may be. One feature alone distinguishes this road from others of its kind; once a week its dusty length is traversed by a visitant from the West, a "Tin Lizzie," whose unoccupied s.p.a.ces are piled high with medicine chests and instrument cases. Once a week the Doctor pa.s.ses by, and the countryside turns out to meet her.

When the Doctor Pa.s.ses by.

Where do they come from, the pathetic groups that continually bring the little Ford to a halt? For long stretches the road pa.s.ses through apparently uninhabited country, yet here they are, the lame, the halt, and the blind, as though an unseen city were pouring out the dregs of its slums. Back a mile from the road, among the tamarind trees, stands one village; at the edge of the rice fields huddles another. The roofs of thatch or earth-brown tiles seem an indistinguishable part of the landscape, but they are there, each with its quota of child-birth pain, its fever-burnings, its germ-borne epidemics where sanitation is unknown, its final pangs of dissolution. But once a week the Doctor pa.s.ses by.

What do she and her attendants treat? Sore eyes and scabies and all the dirt-carried minor ailments that infect the village; malaria from the mosquitoes that swarm among the rice fields; aching teeth to be pulled; dreaded epidemics of cholera or typhoid, small pox or plague. Now and then the back seat is cleared of its _impedimenta_ and turned into the fraction of an ambulance to convey a groaning patient to a clean bed in the hospital ward. Once at least a makes.h.i.+ft operating table has been set up under the shade of a roadside banyan tree, and the Scriptural injunction, "If thy foot offend thee, cut it off," carried out then and there to the saving of a life.

At dark the plucky little Ford plods gallantly back to the home base, its occupants with faded garlands, whose make-up varies with the seasons--yellow chrysanthemums with purple everlasting ta.s.sels at Christmas time; in the dry, hot days of spring pink and white oleanders from the water channels among the hills; during the rains the heavy fragrance of jasmine. All the flowers do their brave best for the day when the Doctor pa.s.ses by.

Where no Doctor Pa.s.ses by.

But what of the roads on which the Doctor never pa.s.ses? From Vellore's fortress-crowned hills they stretch north and south, east and west, and toward all the intermediate points of the compa.s.s. Every city of India forms such a nucleus for the country around. Amid the wheat fields of the Punjab, under the tamarinds of the Ganges plain, among the lotus pools and bamboo cl.u.s.ters of the Bengal deltas, and on the black cotton fields of the Deccan are the roads and the villages, the villages and the roads. Some mathematically minded writer once computed that, if Christ in the days of His flesh had started on a tour among the villages of India, visiting one each day, to-day in the advancing years of the twentieth century many would yet be waiting, unenlightened and unvisited. Few have been visited by any modern follower of the Great Physician. Who can compute their sum total of human misery, of preventable disease, of undernourishment, of pain that might all too easily he alleviated?

[Ill.u.s.tration: Kamala (Lotus Flower), Winner of The Gold Medal in Anatomy in Vellore Medical School]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Little Lost One--What Will Such Girls Do for India?

CONTRASTS]

A Problem In Multiplication.

Was it, one wonders, the memory of the Gudiyattam road, and those like it in nameless thousands, that burned deep into Dr. Ida Scudder's heart and brain the desire to found a Medical School, where the American Doctor might multiply herself and reproduce her life of skillful and devoted service in the lives of hundreds of Indian women physicians? It is the only way that the message of the Good Physician, His healing for soul and body, may penetrate those village fastnesses of dirt, disease, and ignorance. One hundred and sixty women doctors at present try to minister to India's one hundred and sixty millions of women, shut out by immemorial custom from men's hospitals and from physicians who are men.

"What are these among so many?" What can they ever be except as they may multiply themselves in the persons of Indian messengers of healing?

Small Beginnings.

And so, in July, 1918, the Vellore Medical School was opened, under the fostering care of four contributing Mission Boards, and with the approval and aid of the Government of Madras. "Go ahead if you can find six students who have completed the High School Course," said the interested Surgeon General. Instead of six, sixty-nine applied; seventeen were accepted; and fourteen not only survived the inevitable weeding out process, but brought to the school at the end of the first year the unheard of distinction of one hundred per cent, of pa.s.ses in the Government examination. That famous first cla.s.s is now in its Senior Year, and by the time this book comes from the press will be scattering itself among thirteen centres of help and health.

And so, in rented buildings, the Medical School started life. If ever an inst.i.tution pa.s.sed its first year in a hand-to-mouth existence, this one has. Short of funds save as mercifully provided by private means; short of doctors for the staff; short of buildings in which to house its increasing student body, for it has grown from fourteen to sixty-seven; short, in fine, of everything needed except faith and enthusiasm and hard work on the part of its founders, it has yet gone on; the girls have been housed, cla.s.ses have been taught, examinations pa.s.sed, and the first cla.s.s is ready to go out into the world of work.

Just here perhaps one brief explanation should be made. These girls will not be _doctors_ in the narrowly technical sense, for the Government of India reserves the doctor's degree for such students as have first taken a college diploma and then on top of it a still more demanding medical course of five years. These students will receive the degree of Licensed Medical Pract.i.tioner (L.M.P.) which authorizes them to practise medicine and surgery and even to be in charge of a hospital. The full college may come, we hope, not many years hence, when funds become available.

Meantime, this school will year by year be turning out its quota of medical workers whose usefulness cannot be over-estimated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIRST BUILDING AT NEW MEDICAL SCHOOL, VELLORE, WHICH IS HOUSING OUR STUDENTS]

A Visit to Vellore.

Let us pay a visit to the School and see it as it is in its present state of makes.h.i.+ft. Since its beginning it has dwelt, like Paul the prisoner, "in its own hired house," but Paul's epistles tell of no such uncertainty in his tenure of his rented dwelling, as that which has afflicted this inst.i.tution. The housing shortage which has distressed New York has reached even to Vellore. Two rented bungalows were lost, and, as an emergency measure, the future Nurses' Home was erected in great haste on the town site and at once utilized as a dormitory with some rooms set aside for lectures as well.

Corpses--and Children.