Memoir of Krupabai Batthianadhan

UNLIKE Toru Dutt of Bengal, who has been called her prototype, the authoress of Kamala lived to see her literary efforts recognised. Now that she has passed away, the Indian Press has expressed the pride which her countrymen feel in her and their sorrow for her early death.

Her writings seem even better known to English than to Indian readers, some of them having been reviewed in flattering terms in the leading English Journals. Her Majesty the Queen Empress had recently accepted a copy of “Saguna” and was graciously pleased to request that any other work by the authoress should be sent to her.

It might almost seem that Krupabai Satthianadhan is already too well known to need that her story should be told except as she herself has told it in “Saguna.” But the final chapters of her life remain to be written, and to judge of her as an authoress and as a woman, we must view her surroundings and the position of her countrywomen when her life began.

Thirty years ago female education had made but little progress in India. Missionaries were still bribing little girls to come to school with offers of food or clothing as they had been obliged to bribe boys a generation before. The great mass of the women of India were completely uneducated, and their position was becoming more and more unenviable as the education of men progressed and the difference between the intellectual status of the men and of the women in a household became greater.

There is a good deal to show that in Vedic times women had lived a free and healthy life, sharing often in the pursuits and interests of their husbands. They seem even to have had some literary skill and to have composed hymns and songs. But the age in which they lived is remote and its history too much mixed up with myth and legend to be trustworthy. Such are the heroines in the Great Indian Epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

In historic times one or two bright instances like that of the Queen of Beechapore alone occur to relieve the dim twilight in which women—Hindu and Mohammadan alike—lived for many hundreds of years.

But when the work of enlightenment of women consequent on the spread of English education amongst men began, it progressed steadily. For some time it had been recognised that an extraordinary state of things had been brought about by educating one half of the Indian people and leaving the other half in comparative ignorance. But obstacles such as prejudice on the one hand and timidity on the other, stood in the way.

“To these difficulties may be added the belief, perhaps more widely felt than expressed, that the general education of women means a social revolution the extent of which cannot be foreseen. Native gentlemen, advanced and enlightened enough in ordinary matters, are hampered by the dread that when the women of the country begin to be educated, and to learn independence, harassing times are in store for them. They may thoroughly allow that when the process has been completed, the nation will rise in intelligence, in character, and in all the graces of life. But they are none the less apprehensive that while the process of educatian is going on, while the lessons of emancipation are being learnt and stability has not yet been reached, while, in short, society is slowly struggling to adjust itself to the new conditions, the period of transition will be marked by the loosening of social ties, the upheaval of customary ways, and by prolonged, and severe domestic embarrassment. There is, it is true, an advanced section of the community that is entirely out of sympathy with these views.”

So wrote Sir Alfred Croft, the Director of Public Instruction in Bengal, as late as 1886—when already by the liberal policy of the Government a great deal had been achieved in the advancement of female education.

By degrees, the desire for this education has grown and the demand for it is now gradually coming healthily from within, needing, in the great centres of civilisation at least, much less fostering from without.

It is difficult to realize the beginnings of any great movement, to trace the steps by which it has advanced, and to divest it of features which are the outcome of later times. This difficulty increases when it is a question of comparing such movements in countries and races as different as are those of the east and of the west. Still it is interesting to note how much this work of enlightenment has in common with a movement of a similar kind which began in England about the middle of the last century. An impetus was then given to the education of women in England by such writers as Hannah More, Mary Lamb and Miss Edgeworth, and in India, a century later, by some devoted Missionaries scattered throughout the country, especially by those connected with the Free Church of Scotland. Though in India, women undoubtedly started from a much lower and from an essentially different platform, in both cases this impetus not only stirred the springs of intellectual activity and individual culture, but it has also made women’s hearts beat faster. The severest critics of the “New Woman” must admit that deeper culture has in the long run led to wider sympathies, and that wider sympathies have opened out new and broader fields for philanthropic and useful work,—work which is making the lives of thousands of women happier as well as better. A long list of noble English women rises in one’s mind—names too well known to be repeated here. To one England owes the scientific care of her sick and wounded soldiers: others have toiled for the poor, the ignorant, and the oppressed. In song and in story, women have poured forth the same refrain in wise and true sympathy with all that is highest and best. These were the pioneers; others are following them,—in the main, upwards and onwards, though a few may fail and some may have brought ridicule on themselves, and some have not been “loveable though they deserved to be honored and thankfully remembered.”

India too has had her pioneers; alas! her martyrs also in the cause of women’s education and enlightenment. The feverish thirst for learning and for expression which has seized upon some of her most gifted daughters has more than once led to failing health and even to early death. Superstitious and ignorant people are ever ready to “point a moral and adorn a tale” with the story of their mistaken ardour, and to quote them as proving that, in India at least, women are incapable of bearing any prolonged mental strain.

The history of these women is intensely pathetic, and Lady Dufferin has well said in her Introduction to “Sketches of some Distinguished Indian women,” by Mrs. E. F. Chapman, “One might perhaps have feared that women who had had to break the hard and fast rules of caste and custom would have lost their more loveable characteristic in the struggle; but one rises from the perusal of their biographies with as much affection for the woman as admiration for the student.”

This is indeed most true. Indian women with sweet reasonableness seem to have avoided the especial failings of pioneers. Still the women whom Mrs. Chapman has selected for her sketches are one and all instances of how much there is in common in the waves of thought which have stirred the women of the East and the women of the West. Rather is it not one and the same wave—a wave of hopeful unrest, of eager longing for truth and of unselfish enthusiasm. Every one of the names which stand out conspicuously among the women of India are the names of those whose dearest wish has been or still is to serve their fellow country-women. They are all, whether Christians or of other cults, permeated with humanistic and altruistic ideas. One of the earliest to be affected by this feeling was Toru Dutt, the gifted poetess. She, like many other Hindu ladies, owed much to her mother. “In every case,” as Mrs. Chapman observes, “the work of education and enlightenment has been begun in the previous generation.” She owed much too to her sojourn in France and in England. But such genius as hers must have found voice in any language and in any land. Some of her sweetest utterances are recollections of stories learnt at her mother’s knee, myths which had lost their religious significance as she had learnt to rest in a purer faith, but which retained for her always their poetic beauty. Writing to a French friend, she says, “Quand j’entends ma mère chanter le soir lès vieux chants de notre pays je pleure presque tonjours.” Perhaps, however, the following little serenade is more wonderful than any she has written, when it is remembered that the authoress was not twenty and that she wrote in a foreign language.

Still barred thy doors! The far east glows,

The morning wind blows fresh and free.

Should not the hour that wakes the rose

Awaken also thee!

All look for thee, Love, Light and Song,

Light in the sky deep red above,

Song, in the Lark of pinions strong,

And in my heart, true Love.

Apart we miss our nature’s goal,

Why strive to cheat our destinies?

Was not my love made for thy soul?

Thy beauty for mine eyes.

No longer sleep,

Oh listen now.

I wait and weep

But where art thou?

On her return from England Toru Dutt began to study Sanscrit. “The remaining years of her life” says her biographer, “were spent in the old garden-house in Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative production. When we consider what she achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail and hectic body succumbed under so excessive a strain.”

Krupabai Satthianadhan too died young. She was only thirty-two when she passed away on the 3rd of August last. But short as her life has been she has left behind writings which will cause her name to live as the first of Indian women novelists. Those who loved her still see her, through a mist of tears, stepping fearlessly onward in untrodden paths,—the slight form enveloped in the graceful costume of her country, its veil drawn Madonna-wise over the well-shaped head framing her fair refined face.

In her were strangely blended all that is sweetest in womanhood and an overmastering will and courage, —a courage which helped her to bear long periods of weakness and of suffering with cheerful patience, —her clear intellect and vivid imagination seeming to triumph over her pain and to lift her above it into a world of her own.

Krupabai was the thirteenth child of Haripunt and Radhabai, who were the first Brahmin converts to Christianity in the Bombay Presidency. She was born at Ahmednugger on the 14th February 1862. The great struggle of their lives, their conversion, was over before any of their children were born and Haripunt had made his choice and had embarked on a life of earnest self-denial as a Christian Missionary.

It is difficult to over-rate the sacrifice which a Brahmin makes when he renounces the religion of his forefathers. It implies the giving up of friends, position, wealth and of almost everything which men hold dear. Some of the most striking writings in “Saguna” describe Haripunt’s conflict with himself. “One evening in the gloaming,” his daughter tells us, “and amidst the fading glory of the Western Sun, all that he had read came before him with a new and forcible light. He saw the God-man now stooping by the side of the despised blind beggar with a word of comfort for him, now healing the sick, now consoling the grieved, now raising the fallen, with those magic words, “Thy Sins be forgiven thee, go in peace,’ now with Divine light penetrating into the inmost recesses of the hearts of those whom the world looked upon as past redemption, and laying bare to hypocrites the hidden spark of goodness and real love there. By the side of these rose other pictures—Christ’s communion with God on the mountain-top; His striking presence in Bethany surrounded by those whom he loved; His grief by the side of the dead; the God-voice piercing the shadows of the grave and the unknown regions beyond, and demanding the dead back to life; the scene on the Mount of Olives when with His prophetic eye He saw the distant future, foretold the fall of the temple and depicted those fearful scenes that would follow; and last of all the scene on Calvary rose vividly before the mind of Harichandra. He hid his face and groaned: “Such love! I will follow Thee, my Saviour. Here before my country, my home, my people, I give myself up to Thee a whole-hearted sacrifice. Accept me My God. All I have I leave to follow Thee.”

Then when the worst was over, Radhabai had still to be persuaded to leave her people and to join him. One must pity the poor child-wife when she learns the truth and finds herself entrapped, as she thinks, into a Christian Mission house.

“This was the Padre Sahib’s house and she had entered it, she a Brahmin. What pollution! What degradation! A time of anguish followed. In her first impulse she tried to push open the door and shook the bars of the window; but when she found herself powerless, she sat down on the floor quivering with anger and with the sense of some great wrong done to her. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The gentle Radha was for the time changed into an avenging angel who shot her glances and words with withering scorn at her husband. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * He could only say: ‘Rest content Radha I am doing all this for your good.’ His heart went out to her though her words beat on him with untold agony. But when with tragic earnestness she threw her jewels at his feet and asked him if it was money he needed and falling at his feet piteously entreated him to run away from the place and take her to Tai Bai (her much dreaded mother-in-law) he could bear it no longer, and went out of the room with a heavy distressed heart.”

For some time Radha remained obdurate repelling all advances from the ladies of the Mission, keeping her fasts and festivals and giving her husband his food outside their house. But at last his forbearance and the kindness of those about her prevailed and her daughter tells us: —”She succumbed to the strong influences of Christianity. It was the silent acquiescence of a gentle nature; and when she came to know more of the religion, she fully appreciated the noble motives that guided her husband’s actions of love and charity, his strong confidence in his God, his whole-hearted consecration to his Lord and Master, and at last in the religion which her husband had embraced, she herself found a rich harvest of joy and happiness.”

The simple story of their lives from this time and the description of their home with their children about them should be read by all who are inclined to question what Christianity has done for India. Radhabai filled her place well as a wife and mother. Though she never learnt to read herself she seems to have put no barrier in the way of her children’s education and to have influenced them and held her own in their esteem by the natural sweetness and strength of her character, her own position in the household being a freer and more influential one than it could ever have been in a Brahmin home.

“Saguna” is essentially an autobiography, though necessarily an idealized one, and therefore we cannot do better than to follow in it the early years of Krupabai’s life tracing the influences which helped to form her character. She thus describes the home of her childhood.

“A large family grew up arouud Harichandra and Radha. The Christian life in that house was of a simple apostolic type, The children knew no luxuries nor hankered after any. The little ones tumbled about in coarse garments which Radha prepared herself. They often displayed somewhat ridiculous combinations of English and Native dress, for comfort was studied rather than effect. The girls knew nothing of ornaments or jewels, and the boys put their hands to manual labour as readily as they took to study. There was an absence of false shame and pride, which imparted a certain innocence and freshness to their manner and behaviour. Simplicity, truthfulness, piety and the habit of self-reliance were inculcated. On the other hand, anything like duplicity, obstinacy, or levity was severely punished.”

Haripunt’s eldest daughter, who is living still, resembled him in many ways. We are told that she was his friend and companion. Her education, received in a European Christian family, where she was treated almost like a daughter, fitted her to take his place in guiding and teaching her brothers and sisters, when her father died in 1858. Her influence and that of an elder brother, who died while still a young man, did much in forming Krupabai’s character. The little girl seems to have shown unusual intellectual powers at an early age. Her thirst for knowledge made her press for permission to learn with her brothers, or at least, to be allowed to remain in the room when they studied, whilst they, boy-like, objected to the presence of a girl especially as she frequently corrected their sums or gave right answers when theirs were wrong. But they never succeeded in banishing her to the kitchen fire, “the right place for a girl,” and, by degrees, became proud of their little sister’s attainments. Like Mrs. Carlyle whose successful declining of the noun penna from under the table gained her the privilege of learning Latin, Krupabai’s pertinacity triumphed in the end. The elder brother always stood her friend. He saw the depth in the child’s character and she looked up to him and reverenced his earnest devoted spirit. The two enjoyed together the wild scenery of the Upper Deccan where the family removed for her brother Bhasker’s health. Young as she was, Krupabai seems to have bent and swayed to every changing mood of nature around her. She thus describes their last morning on the hill tops before returning to the city home:

“I remember well the last day when Bashkar and I got up while the stars were still shining and stole to the mountain heights to have a last look at the dear place. There was nothing to be seen at first as far as the eye could reach except small and great hills and peaks all round; but soon the scene changed. As we ascended the hill in front of our house we seemed to be leaving the world, and piercing the region of the unknown, so thick was the mist around us, and when we reached the highest point we were startled by the dim majesty and grandeur that burst upon us. We seemed to be looking down upon mortals below in another world. The shadowy cloudland, dark and gloomy, like a large bird with spreading wings, hovered overhead and the great world, sleeping in mist, lay below in its purity and whiteness like a huge sea stretched at our feet. It was the silence of eternity linked to the world for a moment. A soft starry dreamland light enwrapt and overspread all. Above, the neighbouring peaks, distant and dark, mysteriously loomed like fingers pointing to heaven. The strangely transformed world, the heavenly beauty and purity of the scene bound us fast and when I looked up my brother seemed strangely excited. He turned to me and said; “It was in this place with such a scene before me some years ago that I determined that my life should be pure and holy. Oh how our lives are wasted. Promise to me that yours will be devoted to God’s glory. We were alone, alone with God on the mountain top and we fell on our knees and prayed.”

But the son soon followed the father, and this time Krupabai’s heart was sorely tried. For many months she did not recover from the shock of his death, and her health suffered materially.

Partly in the hope of arousing her, she was sent first to study with some Lady Missionaries and then to school at the Zenana Mission in Bombay. There it was found that instead of being, as she feared, more backward than the other scholars of her own age, she was too far in advance of them to be placed in any of the classes. She was therefore allowed to pursue her own course of study. She thus fell under the influence of an American lady doctor,-a person of much originality and force of character and this circumstance led eventually to her choice of a profession.

Krupabai’s remarkable talents and her desire to study medicine induced her English friends to think of sending her to England to complete her education there. She herself was most anxious to go, but it was feared that her constitution was not sufficiently strong to bear the strain of severe study in a climate which, to her, would have been most trying. The Medical College in Madras had just then opened its doors to women,—the first school of medicine in India to adopt this liberal policy,—and her friends decided to send her there. She accordingly left Bombay unaccompanied by any friend or guardian and was received in Madras by the father of her future husband, the Rev. W. T. Satthianadhan. She could not have been placed in better hands. Mr. Satthianadhan was a much respected clergyman and earnest Missionary,-one of the earliest undergraduates students of the Presidency and a Fellow of the University of Madras. He had been honored by the Archbishop of Canterbury with the degree of Bachelor of Divinity. His influence and that of his excellent wife and daughters was for many years a power for good among the community of which he was the head. A tender affection sprang up between them and Krupabai, and she passed a happy year in their house, working steadily and attending lectures at the Medical College. She has, in “Saguna,” described her reception there, when the whole body of students rose as she entered and cheered the delicate looking girl, the first Indian lady who had joined their ranks. At the end of a year she had won several prizes and stood first in every subject except Chemistry. Some envious feeling might, not unnaturally, have been aroused by the high praise bestowed on her in the class room by the professors but, to their honor be it spoken, her fellow-students appear to have always behaved kindly and generously towards her. This may have been partly due to her unassuming and gentle demeanour. Writing of her, the other day, a former Head of the Medical College says:”I always thought her one of the sweetest characters I ever knew. She was só gentle, thoughtful and intelligent. As a worker she was a conscientious and untiring student.”

Unfortunately her fragile frame was not strong in proportion to the ardent soul within it, and when the excitement of the examination was over, her nerve forsook her, and her health broke down completely. Nor was she ever strong enough again to resume her medical studies. It was one of the dreams of her life to complete them in England but this wish was never fulfilled. Her genius found another and a different field as will be seen.

In 1881 Krupabai met the son of her friend and host in Madras. Mr. Samuel Satthianadhan had just then returned from England, after passing nearly four years at Cambridge where he had distinguishd himself and had graduated with honors. It must have been a surprise to him to find, as Krupabai’s shyness and physical weakness wore off, and her bright intellect could assert itself, the depth of thought and of enthusiasm that lay beneath that quiet exterior. To her it was new life to hear the subjects of the day discussed by one fresh from the homes of thought and learning, who still could be true to his own country and his own people, and who was ready to share her schemes for their benefit.

It was only natural that they should mutually attract one another. It may have cost Krupabai an effort to give up the freer life of intellectual pursuits which she had sketched out for herself, and which had been her ambition even in her school-days. “How hard,” she says, “it seemed to my mind that marriage should be the goal of a woman’s ambition and that she should spend her days in the light trifles of a home life, live to dress, to look pretty, and never know the joy of independence and intellectual work.” But, in the end, she found that love and intellectual life are not incompatible and her best work was eventually done in the home to which her husband took her. Krupabai had once before dedicated her life to God, when alone with her brother on the mountains. This brother, her best guide and friend, had been taken from her. Again, in the full bloom of her girlhood and of maturer thought and feeling, she realised what it was to find in another heart the echo of her own best aspirations, and to start afresh with a companion whose goal was the same and whose “feet were also planted on the Rock of Ages.” “There was no fear now,” she says, “no losing one’s way. Let darkness come, let the whole world be blotted out from view, darkness and night would have no terror for us. Christ was ours. God was ours. Heaven was ours, and our lives were to be one full and joyous song.”

So far I have allowed Krupabai to tell much of her own story. Those who wish for more details will find them in “Saguna.”

It was whilst she was a student in the Medical College that I first knew her, and that acquaintance ripened into friendship, when, after her marriage, she lived for nearly two years near us at Ootacamund, where her husband was the Headmaster of the Breeks’ Memorial School. Krupabai’s health had improved and her bright spirit revelled in the glorious scenery, the exhilarating air and the lovely flowers of the Nilgiris. They reminded her of that mountainous region of the Deccan where she had spent a portion of her childhood.

Here she began at once to seek out ways of being useful. She spent many hours in the week in Zenanas, and in the Hobart School for native girls, where she superintended and improved the teaching. She also started a little school for the hitherto neglected Mohammadan girls in Ootacamund. This school has since developed into a fairly large and very useful one under the auspices of the C. M. S. Mission.

Her first attempt at writing was an article contributed about this time to the South India Observer. It was called “A Visit to the Todas,” and appeared under the nom de plume of an Indian lady. This was followed by several others chiefly descriptive of the scenery of the Hills. These articles attracted attention by their truthful and vivid delineation of nature and life.

In 1884 Mr. Satthianadhan was appointed to a new charge in Rajahmundry and she accompanied him there. The climate does not seem to have agreed with her. After a few months she broke a blood-vessel very unexpectedly and this was followed by a long and dangerous illness which left her a complete invalid during the rest of her stay,—a period of about a year. She contributed articles to the “National Indian Journal” at this time and to other papers and magazines. The following year was spent in Kumbaconam,—the educational centre of the wealthy Tanjore District. There Krupabai’s health began to improve. Her pen was constantly at work and she seems to have begun to take a delight in studying the people about her. No one was too poor or too humble to interest her. She loved to gather “all sorts and conditions” of people around her sofa and to listen to the story of their joys and sorrows. Then probably she first became conscious of her talent as a storyteller, though she was always very distrustful of her own powers. She certainly tried her hand at versification and attained to some facility in thus expressing her thoughts, which were always full of poetry and of devotion. But the exigencies of English Metre were a difficulty to her which she did not overcome until much later.

In 1886 Mr. Satthianadhan was appointed Assistant to the Director of Public Instruction, and afterwards to the Chair of Logic and Philosophy in the Presidency College, which necessitated their living in Madras. About this time Krupabai was persuaded by a friend, as well as by her husband, to write something beyond the limits of a magazine article. She wisely began by describing what she knew best,—the scenes of her childhood —out of this “Saguna” grew.

Its freshness and originality give it an unusual charm, and there is a vividness and power in some of the scenes which makes them very real. The reader is carried along by the strong individuality of the writer and those chapters which have perhaps called down most criticism are in some respects those which leave the clearest pictures on the mind. Krupabai’s education had been unlike that of most girls of her own race or of ours. Christianity had been taught to her with an apostolic simplicity utterly free from the Shibboleths and conventionalities of the nineteenth century. As regards secular subjects she had leant on no system and probably was ignorant of some things which most children are taught, whilst in other respects she was considerably in advance of girls of her own age. So that when asked by her teachers to “parse” a word she had no idea what was required of her, though her knowledge of grammar made her quite equal to the task when the term, new to her, was explained. Mind and body had developed unevenly and when she joined the Mission School in Bombay there was undoubtedly, as is often the case with clever and delicate girls at that age, something of the ugly duckling about her. Precocious in mind and thought and terribly in earnest, she was a prey to self-consciousness and to an almost hysterical over-sensitiveness. The discipline there was exactly what she required and after a few misunderstandings and some amusing little “scenes” she and her teachers understood one another.

Wonderful as her grasp of English is it fails her occasionally when she wishes to satirise and make her strokes far heavier than she intends. In like manner the humourous passages sometimes miss their point. This is particularly the case in her account of the Christian village. She wished only to describe its quaintness and some of the drawbacks incident to the collecting of poor and very ignorant converts in communities where they were not under careful supervision. Unfortunately she has been misunderstood, and by those especially whose cause she most wished to serve. It is only fair to her memory that this should be explained. She herself was a standing example of the benefit of a Christian training. Could there be a more charming picture than the one which she has drawn of her own home,—the father sincere, earnest, enthusiastic and self-sacrificing; the mother sweet and gentle, with all the instincts of the Brahman race, freed from its selfish exclusiveness, and developing in the freer, clearer air of a Christian household,—a household, where no despotic mother-in-law is a terror to the wife and mother, and where the women, young and old, may profit by the society and conversation of the father and his friends, unrestrained by cramping and narrowing native customs. Perhaps, however, the subject of this memoir was at her best when describing scenery. She loved nature with the love of an artist and of a poet. Her own nature is stirred to its depths by the grandeur of some of its moods and this when she was a mere child. The power to paint in words which moved her so much was probably increased by her love of English poetry and the extent of her reading. Here is her description of her first experiences of natural scenery:

“My whole being took a great bound, as it were, as the wide expanse of land and sky unfolded itself to my view. I felt the freedom of nature; nothing seemed too great to attempt here; all was on a grand scale. The distant hills had caught the skies. Why! I felt that I could mount and catch them too. I went bounding everywhere and was filled with new life and spirits. After some days I became somewhat sobered, and my elder brother Bhasker promised to take me to a very wild and rocky place. It was on a dewy morning that we went out on this eagerly looked-for walk. The half risen sun was still veiled by the mists and clouds. There was a rich tint of colour on the wreaths of mist overhanging the rocks and hills. The mild light of the dawn had not yet penetrated into the densely wooded haunts and the rocky caves of this hilly country. It was still dark and dim, and only the outlines of the trees and rocks could be discerned, which gave a weird shadowy appearance to the whole scene. The newly awakened birds were all life and merriment. A loud twitter filled the whole place, as the birds kept answering each other from tree to tree. The morning wind, the thin light freshening wind, came along the hills and through the trees in soft and gentle puffs, and we walked together, hand in hand, up and down the mountain path. I was hushed and speechless; the sight, so new, thrilled me with wonder. The mountain path with its loose stones moss-grown and dark, the trees loaded with foliage, the twisted gnarled trunks springing from the midst of granite rocks and stones, the huge serpentine creepers swinging overhead, and over it all the faint glimmering light of dawn, —all this formed a picture too full of living beauty, light and shade, to be ever forgotten. We ascended a little rocky eminence, and were looking at the wonders round us, the mists and the shadows, and the play of the light over all, when suddenly the scene changed, and the sun emerged from behind a huge rock. In a moment the whole place was bathed in light. Did the birds make a louder noise or was the echo stronger, for I thought I heard, with the advent of light, quite an outburst of song and merriment? My brother, in his usual earnest way, remarked that it is just like this, shadowy, dark, mystic, weird, with superstition and bigotry lurking in every corner, before the light of Christianity comes into a land. When the sun rises, he said, all the glory of the trees and rocks comes into view, each thing assumes its proper proportions and is drawn out in greater beauty and perfection. So it is when the sunbeams of Christianity dispel the darkness of superstition in a land.”

So taught by her brother, Saguna’s sympathy with the outer world of beauty suffered from no chilling or depressing influence. It grew and developed until the glancing river met her with a smile, the stars looked down with kindly light on her lonely journey, birds told her their tales of love and praise and the glory of the western sky lifted her whole being into a higher atmosphere. “There on those heights I should like to be, there, above the clouds, in the midst of the light or nowhere at all.”

Along with much beautiful description of scenery, the book contains some keen analysis of character. Like many of our own novelists Krupubai was rather silent in society. She loved to listen and to observe, making studies for the characters she has reproduced. No one was too insignificant to interest her. Shortly after her first book was completed and when the last chapter had appeared in the Journal of the Madras Christian College, Krupabai’s baby was born, —her own Saguna—the treasure which was only lent to its parents for a few short months and nearly cost its mother her life. One feels in reading of the death of Kamala’s child that the pen which described her sorrow had been dipped in a mother’s tears. Her husband wrote of her at this time “she was never herself after this great loss.” Yet she never repined but moved about quietly, —seeking to make herself useful and thus to still the aching at her heart. Her husband took her to Bombay thinking that the sight of her old home and her own people would cheer her. But unfortunately the fatigue of the journey prostrated her completely, and she returned again a complete invalid.

She passed several weeks at a hospital in Madras and derived some temporary benefit from the treatment there. She was told however that the illness from which she suffered was one which must sooner or later prove fatal. This intelligence she received with her usual quiet strength and sweetness.

In the year which followed she was deeply pained by the loss of several near relatives, especially by the death of her husband’s mother, and then by that of his father, to both of whom she had been tenderly attached, from the time when they had met her as a timid, shy girl and had made her feel at home in Madras. In spite of ill-health and sorrow, or perhaps to keep her to bear both, she wrote continuously from this time. The history of her father-in-law’s conversion, which appeared first, contains some of her best writings. It was followed by some sketches of his wife’s life and of the good work in her schools in Madras. Then Krupabai’s second story, “Kamala,” was begun. The longing for expression must have been strong, for she had thought out some of the chapters whilst in the hospital in Madras, notably the one in which Rukma’s husband died of cholera. It was written with feverish eagerness for she feared she might not live to complete it. When too ill to hold a pen she would dictate, and some of the last chapters were dictated to her husband when her temperature was actually at 104º. “Let me show that even a simple Indian girl can do something useful,” she pleaded, and this desire was granted to her. She lived to see “Kamala” appear in the same Journal whose Editors had recognized the merit of Saguna.

This earnestness of purpose and the way in which she turned her talents to account in a totally different field, when she found that of medicine barred to her by ill-health, betokened surely something very like genius, —a readiness to do the work nearest to hand and her infinite capacity for taking pains.

In many respects, “Kamala” is an advance upon Krupabai’s first novel, though we miss the brightness of “Saguna.” There is a plot and the writing is that of a more experienced teller of stories. Still it is now and then a little difficult to follow the thread of the narrative. Its prolonged strain of sadness too reflects the painful effort made by the authoress to complete her task. Her talent is perhaps best shown by the manner in which she has divested herself of the effect of her own Christian surroundings and the ethical reflections which, in “Saguna,” seemed to flow naturally from her pen. “Kamala” is, as it professes to be, essentially a tale of Indian life. We rise from its perusal to shake off the dream-like feeling of having been living another life and breathing another atmosphere. We are admitted into the secrets of an Indian household,—the difficulties and the sorrows of a Hindu wife and mother. Happy children we meet every day but from the time when an Indian girl enters her mother-in-law’s house her life seems rarely to be a very happy one. She is not imprisoned in a Zenana and denied the blessings of air and exercise, but her life is seemingly too often one of hard work, of misconstruction and of covert rebellion against injustice and domestic repression. She sees very little of her husband and only in very exceptional cases takes any part in his pursuits or is able to converse with him alone. Thus. he is powerless to help her, and she gains very little from any culture which he may possess and remains in the same narrow ignorance, which no one attempts to enlighten. Kamala is represented as having learnt from the noble old Sanyasi, her father, to think and to feel, and as one with talents of an unusual order, which made her all the more conscious of the narrow circle in which she moved. A more ordinary woman would have hungered less for love and sympathy, would have contented herself with trying to hoard up jewels, and thus lay up a little store against the dark hour, when a cruel fate might make her that saddest of sad beings, —an Indian widow.

Krupabai says: —

“Blame not the poor Indian woman for her love of jewellery, she strives and toils hard to put by a few rupees out of the money allotted to her by her husband for home expenses, and invests the money in jewels. She knows well that they are the only things that will not be taken away from her at her husband’s death, or when any trouble or calamity overtakes the family. The jewels are hers whatever may happen to the other property. She sees her future independence in them, or at least has the consolation that she will have something to fall back upon in times of distress. It is a hard wrench when she is obliged to part with one of them. Life is not so dear as these jewels are; for what is the use of living?—she argues within herself,—to be trampled on by others, and to slave for others. Such feelings are purely Hindu and are the outcome of wrongs committed for generations on the poor unprotected Hindu woman.”

Almost unknown to herself Kamala had higher ideals and aspirations. The passionate sorrow and sense of humiliation which drove her, when convinced of her husband’s cruelty and faithlessness, to fly, with her baby into the dark night are touching in the extreme.

So too are the dawnings of hope and faith which the stars and the silence of the night seem to teach her. Events are crowded into the last chapters of Kamala. It is natural that it should be so. Still the death of Kamala’s child is most pathetically told and her lullaby is the most finished of Krupabai’s attempt in verse. She has shown throughout, but especially in the purified Hinduism of the old Sanyasi, whose character is powerfully drawn, and in Kamala’s renunciation of the happiness offered to her, that she could enter into and value that spontaneous lifting of the soul by which men and women of every religion and every nationality “are bound about the feet of God.” The descriptions of scenery are as beautiful as in “Saguna” and there is some keen analysis of character. But to fairly guage the mind of the authoress the two should be compared,—the story of Christian life and the story of Hindu life.

In her autobiography she has shown, sometimes it would almost seem unconsciously, what a higher culture and a purer faith can achieve in her country. She brings into strong contrast the ignorance and superstition of Kamala’s home and the equally simple but happy and enlightened atmosphere of her own home and surroundings. Her sense of humour and her truthfulness led her to paint the picture as it appeared to her. But the touches of satire, here and there, are not the straws which show the way the wind blows but the light spray tossed back by the breeze when the tide is setting full in a contrary direction. Did we need it, the story of Kamala would confirm this. It must also prove that Krupabai’s love for her countrywomen remained as strong as if she had not been divided from them by a different faith and a higher culture. The character of Kamala is purely Hindu and it is drawn with a loving hand. Young, beautiful and intelligent, she needed only to have seen the light to have recognised and absorbed it. There is surely no character in fiction more pure. Once, only once, “in the midst of her misery,” we are told, “a wish intruded itself in the deepest and most sacred chamber of her heart,—a wish which made her blush at her boldness and cover her bosom with her hands as if to hide it from herself. Would, she said to herself, that Ganesh had been more like Ramchander. Such a wish, though natūral it may seem, was shocking in the extreme to a Hindu girl, who must never allow herself to compare her husband to anybody else.” Like Enid, in her patience, Kamala stoops until she can stoop no lower that she may lift a weak and unworthy husband, and, in the end, she puts aside the happiness offered to her that she may be true to his memory and to her ideal of a faithful wife.

“Her religion, crude as it was, had its victory.”

This is the key-note of the book. This is what Krupabai seems to say to her people: —”There is a higher light which you have not yet discovered. If it has been revealed to me, I have not forgotten that your lives may still be the highest and the noblest, that we are all feeling after the same God ‘though He be not far from every one of us.’”

The greater portion of “Kamala” was written at Conoor in the Nilgiris, whither Krupabai had been taken, in 1893, in the hope that the cool air of the Hills might in some measure restore her strength. She was taken again to Conoor in April last. The change did at first seem to revive her but only temporarily, and though tenderly nursed by her husband and his sister, her health continued to decline, and at one time her life was despaired of. Her cheerfulness seems never to have forsaken her, and her strong faith burnt more brightly as death approached. She lived to return to Madras, but the sudden death of the sister who had tended her was a shock greater than in her feeble state she could bear, and the life which had long hung on a thread ended peacefully on the 8th August 1894. She lies beside her child, in a quiet unlovely cemetery, at Pursewaukam in Madras.

Who can say what Krupabai might have achieved had her life been prolonged, and had her fragile frame been strong in proportion to the soul within it? Her most poetic prose gave promise of the future poetess. Her books though written in a language foreign to her are worthy to take rank among English Fiction for their exquisite description of scenery, their life-like delineation of character, and for the pure and earnest spirit which breathes in every line.

She has interpreted her countrywomen to us as no writer has done before. Seeming to reach a hand to each and to plead to us to study the people about us and to enter more fully into their interests, —into their joys and sorrows, their hopes and fears. Whilst to her country women she must ever be a bright herald beckoning to them to leave their prejudices behind, to learn to understand us better, and to walk on fearlessly in the path of knowledge and of enlightenment in which she has led the way.

Krupabai never sought notoriety, she lived a quiet studious life, though she had many friends both Native and European. Still the home which she shared with her husband was a small centre of intellectual culture and of modern thought. She loved, when health permitted, to meet her friends, and especially shone when, as was frequently the case in Madras, some English lady sought her help in entertaining other Indian ladies. She could on these occasions be as bright and playful as a child.

The freedom of her position as a Christian and the wife of a Christian, her descent from a good Brahman stock, and her great intelligence, sweetness of manner, and breadth of views all helped to give her influence and to add weight to the views she advocated. She will ever be a standing reproach to those who deny the effect of Western teaching and who would meet out grudgingly to Indian women the benefits of Western education.

Her wide and varied reading of English authors resulted in no servile imitation. On the contrary she seems to have absorbed and assimilated the thoughts of the poets she loved, until they became a part of herself and helped to make her what she was.

As an authoress she is singularly truthful, original and courageous. No novelist or story-teller in Southern India, or, as far as I know, in India has achieved so much, either as regards a mastery over our language or in an absolute freedom from imitation or bookmaking.

From her deep love of nature and her manner of describing it one would have expected to find that Wordsworth was her favorite poet, but although she doubtless was well acquainted with his poems and may have unconsciously reproduced some of his thoughts she seems to have preferred Tennyson, Longfellow, Mrs. Browning and Lewis Morris. The lyrics in The Princess she especially loved and Tennyson’s last sweet poem: —

“Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me,”

seems to have been often on her lips before she died.

She took great delight in the writings of George Eliot, and indeed in those of most of our best writers of fiction. Some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories and poems she read with pleasure during her last illness.

It had been her intention in her next book to deal with peasant life in India, making her Ayah the heroine of the story. Her sympathy with the poor and perfect simplicity made her well-fitted to be their exponent. She would have thrown herself into their life with the same earnestness that characterized her other writings.

Krupabai Satthianadhan has left no children to follow in her footsteps, but her memory is a precious possession to all true daughters of India. It must fill them with hopes that they may yet produce a beautiful and beneficent literature. It must fill them with gratitude,—a gratitude in which we English women share, for she has taught us to know and to love each other better.

RESIDENCY

TRIVANDRUM,

10th December 1894.