A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

English became the vehicle of revolutionary aspirations which reached a climax in the savage Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. The fuse that fired it was small but significant. Cartridges for the new Enfield rifle had to be opened with the teeth. Religious scruples of the influential Brahman element in the army were deeply offended, since the cartridges, it was claimed, had been lubricated with cow’s fat, sacred to vegetarian Hindus, and (for good measure) pig’s fat, unclean to Muslims. They refused. Nevertheless the perspective of history would indicate that the matter was infinitely larger. It was East against West, white against black, an ancient people seeking to maintain an ancient culture against a highly confusing admixture of materialism, European culture, and something which called itself Christianity.

Britain succeeded in crushing this uprising, but the existence of the Honourable East India Company was terminated on August 12, 1858 by Queen Victoria, who then (providentially, it was believed) became Empress to 300 million Indians, her authority represented by a sort of king called a viceroy. Under him were two thousand members of the Indian civil service and ten thousand officers of the Indian army whose authority was sustained by sixty thousand British regular soldiers and two hundred thousand native troops.

Theirs was the India of gentleman officers wearing plumed shakos and riding at the head of their turbaned sepoys; of district magistrates lost in the torrid wastes of the Deccan; of sumptuous imperial balls in the Himalayan summer capital of Simla; of cricket matches on the manicured lawns of Calcutta’s Bengal Club; of polo games on the sunburnt plains of Rajputana; of tiger hunts in Assam; of young men sitting down to dinner in black ties in a tent in the middle of the jungle, solemnly proposing their toast in port to the King-Emperor while jackals howled in the darkness around them; of officers in scarlet tunics scaling the rock defiles of the Khyber Pass or pursuing rebellious Pathan tribesmen in the sleet or the unbearable heat of the Northwest Frontier; of a caste unassailably certain of its superiority, sipping whisky and soda on the veranda of its Europeans Only clubs. Those men were generally the sons of families of impeccable breeding, but less certain wealth; the offspring of good Anglican country churchmen; talented second sons of the landed aristocracy destined to be deprived of a heritage by primogeniture; the sons of schoolmasters, classics professors and minor aristocrats who had managed to squander the family fortune. They mastered on the playing fields and in the classrooms of Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester, Charterhouse, Haileybury, the disciplines that would fit them to rule an empire: excellence at games, a delight in “manly pursuits,” the ability to absorb the whack of a headmaster’s cane or declaim the Odes of Horace and the verses of Homer. “India,” noted James S. Mill, “was a vast system of outdoor relief for Britain’s upper classes.”1

Travelers to India by ship noticed a strange transformation in fellow-passengers. Ordinary middle-class or lower middle-class Englishmen began to assume an air of superiority and self-assertiveness. Ladies affected the airs of grande dames. The vocabulary changed—instead of breakfast they now had “tiffin,” the call for a steward became, “Boy!” (derived from Hindi bhoi, Telugu boi, a term which had come to be applied to a carrier or domestic servant). The bartender served up not whisky and soda but “chota pegs.” When the ship reached Port Said out came the “topees,” the preposterous sun helmets believed to be indispensable for Europeans. When the ship approached the port it was met by British officers aboard a launch which flew the Red Ensign, a flag with the Union Jack in the corner. The arriving passengers became, with no credentials other than the passage they had bought to India, the lords of creation, acquiring at once the status of Sahib or Memsahib. By virtue of being English and white they were given preference on the railroads and in the shops. It did not take long to take such treatment for granted, so that if occasionally it was not accorded, they became first testy and then angrily insistent. Power corrupts. It corrupted soldiers, officials, planters, and their wives and children. It corrupted missionaries.

It was to this—in its later phase Rudyard Kipling’s romantic and picturesque India—Britain’s “rightful” empire for nearly three hundred years, that Amy Carmichael came. Perhaps it was not the climate only which made her feel it was “too easy.” We have no reason to think that she harbored any doubts about the ethical basis of the “raj” (rule), but we can be certain that her soldier-soul shrank from the thought of its British comforts and its aristocratic British society.

The Church of England Zenana Mission Hospital, taking its name from the Hindi word denoting the part of a house where women were kept in seclusion, was in Bangalore, a city of South India with an altitude of three thousand feet. Amy arrived there, not in the buoyant good health her time in England was meant to have bestowed, but with dengue fever, a malady characterized with pain in limbs and head so extreme that its nickname is break-bone fever.

She was too ill to write or think, and found herself feeling “low and gravelly, not in the least a soldier.” With excellent care from the English mission doctor and nurses, she recovered. The hospital was barracks-like, built high and dry in a sandy compound. “I am to be its ‘prophet’”—meaning the hospital evangelist I can’t help being as happy as happy can be.” She loved the work, loved the climate, loved her fellow-workers., the doctor—“a splendid girl”—and Clare “who is, well, just Clare!” These three lived together in the staff quarters. Twenty minutes away were five single women missionaries, two of whom codirected the work. The scenery was flat, “nothing to touch Japan,” the climate fine except in the long middle of the day, one almost forgets it is tropical. One can work hard in the morning, work fairly in the middle of