Part 9 (1/2)
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.