Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in IndiaVan Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
History
Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in India
Van Doren, Alice B. (Alice Boucher)
India -- Social conditions; Women -- India
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.
[Illustration: MRS. PAUL APPASAMY]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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