The autumn of 1906 saw the advent of the first Indian student at Mt.
Holyoke College. Those were the days when Oriental students were still
rare and the entrance of Dora Maya Das among seven hundred American
college girls was a sensation to them as well as an event to her.
It is a far cry from the wide-spreading plains of the Punjab with their
burning heats of summer to the cosy greenness of the Connecticut
valley--a far cry in more senses than geographical distance. Dora had
grown up in a truly Indian home, as one of thirteen children, her father
a new convert to Christianity, her mother a second generation Christian.
The Maya Das family were in close contact with a little circle of
American missionaries. An American child was Dora's playmate and
"intimate friend." In the absence of any nearby school, an American
woman was her teacher, who opened for her the door of English reading,
that door that has led so many Oriental students into a large country.
Later came the desire for college education. To an application to enter
among the men students of Forman Christian College at Lahore came the
principal's reply that she might do so if she could persuade two other
girls to join her. The two were sought for and found, and these three
pioneers of women's education in the Punjab entered classes which no
woman had invaded before.
[Illustration: BABY ON SCALES]
Then came the suggestion of an American college, and Dora started off on
a voyage of discovery that must have been epoch-making in her life. It
is, as I have said, a far cry from Lahore to South Hadley. It means not
only physical acclimatization, but far more delicate adjustments of the
mind and spirit. Many a missionary, going back and forth at intervals of
five or seven years, could tell you of the periods of strain and stress
that those migrations bring. How much more for a girl still in her
teens! New conventions, new liberties, new reserves--it was young David
going forth in Saul's untried armor. Of spiritual loneliness too, she
could tell much, for to the Eastern girl, always untrammelled in her
expression of religious emotion, our Western restraint is an
incomprehensible thing. "I was lonely," says Miss Maya Das, "and then
after a time I reacted to my environment and put on a reserve that was
even greater than theirs."
So six years passed--one at Northfield, four at Mt. Holyoke, and one at
the Y.W.C.A. Training School in New York. Girls of that generation at
Mt. Holyoke will not forget their Indian fellow student who "starred" in
Shakespearian roles and brought a new Oriental atmosphere to the pages
of the college magazine. Six years, and then the return to India, and
another period of adjustment scarcely less difficult than the first.
That was in 1910, and the years since have seen Miss Maya Das in various
capacities. First as lecturer, and then as acting principal of Kinnaird
College at Lahore, she passed on to girls of her own Province something
of Mt. Holyoke's gifts to her. Now in Calcutta, she is Associate
National Secretary of the Y.W.C.A.
It was in Calcutta that I met Miss Maya Das, and that she left me with
two outstanding impressions. The first is that of force and initiative
unusual in an Indian woman. How much of this is due to her American
education, how much to her far-northern home and ancestry, is difficult
to say. Whatever the cause, one feels in her resource and executive
ability. In that city of purdah women, she moves about with the freedom
and dignity of a European and is received with respect and affection.
The second characteristic which strikes one is the fact that Miss Maya
Das has remained Indian. One can name various Indian men and some women
who have become so denationalized by foreign education that "home" is to
them the land beyond the water, and understanding of their own people
has lessened to the vanishing point. That Miss Maya Das is still
essentially Indian is shown by such outward token as that of dropping
her first name, which is English, and choosing to be known by her Indian
name of Mohini, and also by adherence to distinctively Indian dress,
even to the embroidered Panjabi slippers. What matters more is the
inward habit of mind of which these are mere external expressions.
In a recent interview with Mr. Gandhi, Miss Maya Das told him that as a
Christian she could not subscribe to the Non-Co-operation Movement,
because of the racial hate and bitterness that it engenders; yet just
because she was a Christian she could stand for all constructive
movements for India in economic and social betterment. One of Mr.
Gandhi's slogans is "a spinning wheel in every home," that India may
revive its ancient arts and crafts and no longer be clothed by the
machine looms of a distant country. Miss Maya Das told him that she had
even anticipated him in this movement, for she and other Christian women
of advanced education are following a regular course in spinning and
weaving, with the purpose of passing on this skill through the Rural
Department of the Y.W.C.A.
Another pet scheme of Miss Maya Das is the newly formed Social Service
League of Calcutta. Into its membership has lately come the niece of a
Chairman of the All-India Congress, deciding that the constructive
forces of social reform are better to follow than the destructive
programme of Non-Co-operation. Miss Maya Das longs to turn her abounding
energy into efforts toward purdah parties and lectures for the shut-in
women of the higher classes, believing that in this way the Association
can both bring new interests into narrow lives, and can also gain the
help and financial support of these bored women of wealth toward work
among the poor.
One of Miss Maya Das's interests is a month's summer school for rural
workers, a prolonged Indian Silver Bay, held at a temperature of 112 in
the shade, during the month of May when all schools and colleges are
closed for the hot weather vacation. Last year women came to it from
distant places, women who had never been from home before, who had never
seen a "movie," who had never entered a rowboat or an automobile. Miss
Maya Das's stereopticon lectures carried these women in imagination to
war scenes where women helped, to Hampton Institute, to Japan, and
suggested practical ways of assisting in tuberculosis campaigns and
child welfare. After four weeks of social enjoyment and Christian
teaching they returned again to their scattered branches with the
curtain total of their results from 88 in Newark to 355 in Madras.
[Illustration: PUTTING SPICES IN BABY'S MILK
Notice Feeding Vessels, Shell and Tin Cup]
What is Dr. Vera Singhe doing about it? With her two medical assistants,
her corps of nurses, and the increasing number of health visitors whom
she herself has trained, she has been able to reduce the death rate
among the babies in her care during 1920 from the city rate of 280 for
that year to 231.
But enough of statistics. More enlightening than printed reports is a
visit to the Triplicane Health Centre, where in the midst of a congested
district work is actually going on. We shall find no up-to-date building
with modern equipment, but a middle-class Hindu house, adapted as well
as may be to its new purpose. Among its obvious drawbacks, there is the
one advantage, that patients feel themselves at home and realize that
what the doctor does in those familiar surroundings they can carry over
to their own home life.
Our visit happens to be on a Thursday afternoon, which is Mothers' Day.
Thirty or more have gathered for an hour of sewing. It is interesting
to see mothers of families taking their first lessons in hemming and
overcasting, and creating for the first time with their own hands the
garments for which they have always been dependent on the bazaar
tailor. For these women have never been to school--their faces bear that
shut-in look of the illiterate, a look impossible to define, but just as
impossible to mistake when once it has been recognized. With the mothers
are a group of girls of ten or twelve, who are learning sewing at an
earlier age, when fingers are more pliant and less like to thumbs. Then
there are the babies, too--most of them health-centre babies, who come
for milk, for medicine, for weighing, over a familiar and oft-traveled
road. Fond mothers exhibit them with pride to the doctor, and there is
much comparison of offspring, much chatter, and much general
sociability.
Back of the dispensary is the milk room, where in an adapted and
Indianized apparatus, due to the doctor's ingenuity, the milk supply is
pasteurized each day, and given out only to babies whose mothers are
positively unable to nurse them, and are too poor to buy.
Of some of the difficulties encountered Dr. Vera Singhe will tell in her
own words:
"The work of the midwife is carried out in the filthiest parts of the
city among the lowest of the city's population, both day and night, in
sun and rain ... A patient whose 'address' was registered at the
Triplicane Centre was searched for by a nurse on duty in the locality of
the 'address' given, and could not be found. Much disappointed, the
nurse was returning to the centre, when to her bewilderment she found
that her patient had been delivered in a broken cart."
Of some of the actual cases where mothers have been attended by
untrained barber women, the details are too revolting to publish.
Imagine the worst you can, and then be sure that your imagination has
altogether missed the mark.
Of the reaction upon ignorance and superstition Dr. Vera Singhe says,
"In Triplicane dispensary as many as sixty cords around waists and arms
and variously shaped and sized pieces of leather which had been tied in
much trust and confidence to an innocent sufferer with the hope of
obtaining recovery have been in a single day removed by the mothers
themselves on seeing that our treatment was more effective than the
talisman."
Weighing, feeding, bathing, prevention of disease, simple
remedies--knowledge of all these goes out from the health centres to the
unsanitary homes of crowded city streets. So far one woman's influence
penetrates.
In a Hospital.
It was on a train journey up-country from Madras, some twelve years ago,
that I first met Dr. Paru. She and I shared the long seat of the small
second-class compartment, and in that close neighborliness I soon fell
to wondering. From her dress I knew her to be a Hindu, yet her jewels
were few and inconspicuous. She was most evidently of good family, yet
she was traveling unattended.
Presently we fell into some casual talk, the inconsequent remarks
common to chance acquaintance the world over. More intimate conversation
followed, and before the end of the short journey together, I knew who
Miss Paru was. The oldest daughter of a liberal Hindu lawyer on the
Malabar Coast, she was performing the astounding feat of taking a
medical course at the Men's Government College in Madras, while
systematically breaking her caste by living at the Y.W.C.A. I almost
gasped with astonishment. "But what do your relatives say?" I asked.
"Oh," she replied, "my father is the head of his family and an
influential man in our town. He does as he pleases and no one dares to
object."
That was twelve years ago. Yesterday for the second time I met my
traveling companion of long ago. She is now Dr. Paru, assistant to Dr.
Kugler in the big Guntur Women's Hospital, with its hundred beds,
managing alone its daily dispensary list of one hundred and fifty
patients, and performing unaided such difficult major operations as a
Caesarean section for a Brahman woman, of whom Dr. Kugler says, "The
patient had made many visits to Hindu shrines, but the desire of her
life, her child, was the result of an operation in a Mission Hospital.
In our Hospital her living child was placed in her arms as a result of
an operation performed by a Christian doctor."
How did Dr. Paru, the Hindu medical student, develop into Dr. Paru, the
Christian physician? I asked her and she told me, and her answers were a
series of pictures as vivid as her own personality.
First, there was Paru in her West Coast Home, among the cocoanut palms
and pepper vines of Malabar where the mountains come down to meet the
sea and the sea greets the mountains in abundant rains. Over that
Western sea once came the strange craft of Vasco di Gama, herald of a
new race of invaders from the unknown West. Over the same sea to-day
come men of many tongues and races, and Arab and African Negroes jostle
by still in the bazaars of West Coast towns. Such was the setting of
Paru's home. During her childhood days certain visitors came to its
door, Bible women with parts of the New Testament for sale, little
paper-bound Gospels with covers of bright blue and red. The contents
meant nothing to Paru then, but the colors were attractive, and for
their sake she and her sister, childlike, bought, and after buying,
because they were schoolgirls and the art of reading was new to them,
read.
The best girls' school in that Malabar town was a Roman Catholic
convent. It was there that Paru's education was given to her, and it was
there that prayer, even in its cruder forms, entered into her
experience. Religious teaching was not compulsory for non-Christian
pupils, but, when the sisters and their Christian following gathered
each morning for prayers, the doors were not shut and among other
onlookers came Paru, morning after morning, drawn partly by curiosity,
partly by a sense of being left out. Never in all her years in that
school did the Hindu child join in the Christian service, but at home,
when father and mother were not about, she gathered her sister and
younger brothers into a corner and taught them in childish words to tell
their wants and hopes and fears to the Father in Heaven.
The lawyer-father was the abiding influence in the daughter's growth of
mind and soul. A liberal Hindu he would have been called. In reality,
he was one of that unreckoned number, the Nicodemuses of India, who come
to Jesus by night, who render Him unspoken homage, but never open
confession. A man of broad religious interests, he read the Hindu Gita,
the Koran, and the Gospels; and among them all the words of Jesus held
pre-eminence in his love and in his life. When in later years he found
his daughter puzzling over Bible commentaries to clear up some question
of faith, he asked impatiently, "Why do you bother with those books?
Read the words of Jesus in the Gospels and act accordingly. That is
enough." Father and daughter were wonderful comrades. In all the years
of separation when, as student and doctor, Paru was held on the opposite
side of India, long weekly letters went back and forth, and events and
thoughts were shared. When the hour of decision came, and the girl
ventured into untried paths where the father could not follow, there
were separation and misunderstanding for a time, but that time was
short. The home visits were soon resumed and the Christian daughter was
once more free to share home and meals with her Hindu family. And when
one day the father said, "If a person feels a certain thing to be his
duty, he should do it, whatever the cost," Paru rejoiced, for she knew
that her forgiveness was sealed.
Dr. Paru's entrance into the world of medicine was due to her father's
wish rather than her own. He was of that rare type of social reformer
who acts more than he speaks. Believing that eventually his daughter
would marry, he felt that as a doctor from her own home she could carry
relief and healing into her small neighborhood. Paru, to please her
father, went into the long grind of medical college, conquered her
aversion for the dissecting table, and "made good." What does he think,
one wonders, as, looking upon her to-day with the clearer vision of the
life beyond, he sees the beloved daughter, thoughts of home and husband
and children put aside, but with her name a household word among the
women of a thousand homes. Ask her what she thinks of medicine as a
woman's profession and her answer will leave no doubt whether she
believes it worth while.
Actual decision for Christ was a thing of slow growth, its roots far
back in memories of bright-covered Gospels and convent prayers, fruit of
open confession maturing only during her years of service at Guntur.
Life in the Madras Y.W.C.A. had much to do with it. There were Indian
Christian girls, fellow students. "No," said Dr. Paru, "they didn't talk
much about it; they had Christian ideals and tried to live them." There
was a secretary, too, who entered into her life as a friend. "Paru," she
said at last, "you are neither one thing nor the other. If you aren't
going to be a Christian, go back and be a Hindu. At least, be
something." At Guntur there were the experiences of Christian service
and fellowship. Finally, there were words spoken at a Christian meeting,
"words that seemed meant for me"; and then the great step was taken, and
Dr. Paru entered into the liberty that has made her free to appear
outwardly what she long had been at heart.
Such are a few of those Indian women whom one delights to honor. They
broke through walls of custom and tradition and forced their way into
the open places of life. Few they are and widely scattered, yet their
influence is past telling.
To-day Lucknow, Madras, and Vellore are sending out each year their
quota of educated women, ready to find their place in the world's work.
It gives one pause, and the desire to look into the future--and dream.
Ten years hence, twenty, fifty, one hundred! What can the dreamer and
the prophet foretell? When those whom we now count by fives and tens are
multiplied by the hundred, what will it mean for the future of India and
the world? What of the gladness of America through whose hand,
outstretched to share, there has come the release of these latent powers
of India's womanhood?
But what of the powers not released? What of the "mute, inglorious"
company of those who have had no chance to become articulate? There
among the road-menders, going back and forth all day with a basket of
crushed stone upon her head, toils a girl in whose hand God has hidden
the cunning of the surgeon. No one suspects her powers, she least of
all, and that undeveloped skill will die with her, undiscovered and
unapplied. "To what purpose is this waste?"
Into your railway carriage comes the young wife of a rajah. Hidden by a
canopy of crimson silk, she makes her aristocratic entrance concealed
from the common gaze. Her life is spent within curtains. Yet she is the
descendant of a Mughal ancestor who carried off and wedded a Rajput
maiden. In her blood is the daring of Padmini, the executive power of
Nur Jahan. With mind trained and exercised, she would be the
administrative head of a woman's college. Again,--"To what purpose is
this waste?"
Who dares to compute the sum total of lives wasted among the millions
of India's women because undiscovered? Will American girls grudge their
gifts to help in the discovery? Will American girls grudge the
investment of their lives?
Only like souls I see the folk thereunder,
Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings,
Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder,
Sadly contented with a show of things.
Then with a rush the intolerable craving
Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call;
Oh, to save these! To perish for their saving,
Die for their life, be offered for them all.