The effects of this stunning piece of history, so cataclysmic for the country, made little difference inside the red clay walls of the Dohnavur compound. Godfrey Webb-Peploe wrote,
“The great day passed off quietly. The village had a few fireworks and chorused shouting of ‘Victory to India.’ We had a very simple talk by Thyaharaj on the change of government, and then we put up the new flag of India and stood around it and prayed for the country. There was no visible difference on August 16th.”3
One of the sitties felt liberated in a personal way. “We were sisters now,” she said, “Indian and European. It was wonderful. I no longer resented everyone’s knowing everything about me anymore. Before, I had held onto my British culture—I liked to be alone.”
Amy did not think it was wonderful. A woman of her generation, she could not think that independence was a good thing, although she may not have shared Rudyard Kipling’s view of Britain’s divine appointment: “The responsibility for governing India has been placed by the inscrutable design of providence upon the shoulders of the British race.” It is doubtful she felt pained for the same reason Churchill did: “The loss of India would be final and fatal to us. It could not fail to be part of a process that would reduce us to the scale of a minor power.” Amy’s thought was not for Britain’s loss so much as for India’s. She believed India was not ready for self-government and would suffer far more than she could benefit. Amy was tremendously loyal to her own people. She knew the worth of Britain’s control, as did many Indians who looked with misgiving on the end of the raj and had fought hammer and tongs to prevent it. There were men in the civil service for whom she had great respect, men of honor who saw themselves not as conquerors but, like Amma, servants to the Indian people. The price of freedom was a terrible one—partition, war, murder, and pillage.
In the quiet gardens and lanes, in the lively cottages of the compound, things went on more or less as usual. Rice, by the ton, was pounded by hand, parboiled in the great pots, cooked daily, and eaten. Babies were fed and bathed and changed and rocked and sung to and carried out to play. Bottles were prepared, diapers washed, nurseries scrubbed, walks swept, tiles and brass vessels polished, gardens weeded. The children bathed under the pumps, ate their curries, learned their lessons. The bells of the Prayer Tower called the Family to prayer and rang out the evening hymn.
In the Room of Peace lay the mother, nearly eighty years old now, interviewing people for five hours a day, writing her love letters, working on a book—a simplified biography of Thomas Walker, This One Thing—writing always in longhand on the writing stand, giving the pages one by one to Neela her helper, who typed them and passed them on to a sittie for final draft.
It seemed to Amy that the Family had let up a bit on their prayers for healing.
“For years patiently the prayer meeting went on praying for me,” she wrote in her private notebook. “It does not seem to do so now. I was feeling the need of prayer very much, but to ask for it would be selfish. So I had settled that I would not do so, when this word came: ‘I have prayed for thee.’ My dear, dear Lord.”
Daily Amma called in one of her doctors, Nancy Robbins, to give her background in Hinduism, customs, histories of DF people. Nancy was writing a book, Greater Is He, for which Amma made suggestions and, to Nancy’s surprise, humbly asked for suggestions on her own book. Dr. Robbins believed that the strongest psychological element of Amma’s illness was her fear of the domination of pain over mind and spirit. This she managed to conceal from nearly everyone, but it was revealed again and again in Rose From Brier and her poetry, such as:
Before the winds that blow do cease,
Teach me to dwell within Thy calm:
Before the pain has passed in peace,
Give me, my God, to sing a psalm.
Let me not lose the chance to prove
The fulness of enabling love.
O Love of God, do this for me:
Maintain a constant victory.
“She never complained,” Nancy said, “and was reluctant to discuss her symptoms with anyone, even her doctor.”
At least one or two of the Indian women who cared for her saw a different side. Neela once said to Amma, “Your last word will be pain, pain, pain.” Tired of hearing about Sennacherib and Goliath and Apollyon and the rest of her aches, she told Amma she ought to be thanking God instead that most of the ordinary functions were still functioning.
Nancy wondered at the large number of people who always seemed to be about, waiting on Amy. It made a strange impression at first, “but I realize that this attention was largely imposed on her by her anxious family, and that most of these ‘attendants’ were selected by Amma because no one else could cope with them and she felt they needed her help. So it was a complex situation.”
The family thought of everything. Philip England, who built everything, designed a brick platform reaching from her verandah out to a place under the trees where she could sit without having to negotiate steps. Jeevanie brought powder for cooling and comforting, but when she put it on Amma’s face, Amma said, “You must not think you can put powder on when you go to the House of Prayer.” Powder for an invalid was one thing. Powder for vanity quite another.
Jeevanie was annoyed
