Hugh Tinker, The Ordeal of Love: C.F. Andrews and India, Delhi, Oxford India Paperbacks, [1979] 1998
At the centre of it all stands Charles Freer Andrews, uncertain of himself, impetuous, at some times irrational, at all times vulnerable….—p. xi
…He who failed and fell so often is remembered as a mighty sage. The humanity is sometimes missing from the Andrews of modern Indian myth, or, if it is there, it is super-human: a love that never fails, a compassion that moves mountains.—p. xii
…When a Quaker admirer urged Radio Birmingham—the local radio station of the city where he {Andrews} lived in boyhood and again in later life, a city with thousands of Indian and Pakistani citizens—to include a programme to mark his centenary, she received a blunt answer: We have never heard of him.
This eclipse has come relatively suddenly. In 1960, the BBC Third Programme produced a sensitive commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Andrews’ death. During the 1940s, several biographical studies had been published in England. In part, the decline follows the waning British interest in India; it no longer seems so very important that independence was achieved in 1947 without a massive alienation from Britain. In part this may be just another sign of the dwindling importance of religion in British life. All of Andrews’ biographers have been committed Christians, writing to a Christian audience. Christianity has been a minority belief in Britain for several decades.—p. xii
…Long before African nationalism was recognized as a coherent movement—in the days when Africans were still generally considered as ‘primitive’, ‘natives’—he {Andrews} realized that colonialism had to give way to nationalism….—p. xii
…He {Andrews} knew that unless the West practised co-operation it would inevitably be involved in conflict….—p. xiii
…The whole phase may be summed up in the aphorism of S.K. Rudra which Andrews liked to quote:
To India would come at last in Christ that centre of unity which it so surely needs. India’s children would gain in Christ the full fruition of their new-found national consciousness. A great Indian Church would become possible, and therefore a great Indian nation.—p. 1
The condition of the Christian Church in India at the beginning of the twentieth century reproduced that state which has persisted for a thousand years or more: the Church was divided and separated by differences which, to those who maintained them with such conviction, often seemed more important than the ties which united them with other Christians. In India, there were subtle differences and distinction which seemed to create a replica of the Hindu caste system within the body which had come to rescue India from the divisiveness of caste. However, the main feature of the Church at this time—and for the next thirty years—was that it remained a foreign importation. Attempts by Indians like Rudra to transform it into an Indian Church were frustrated, not so much by opposition, as by British reluctance to acknowledge that their Church was a foreign body within the sub-continent. –p. 19
The Anglican Church in India was a branch of the Established Church of England: and also, in effect, a branch of the Government of India. The system of Church government—whereby India (with Burma and Ceylon) was divided up into dioceses presided over by bishops, with the Bishop of Calcutta at the head as Metropolitan of India—was part of the secular law of British India. If changes were required (perhaps the creation of a new post of Archdeacon), these had to be submitted to the Government of India for approval and the necessary new regulations. There was an Ecclesiastical Department of the Government to manage Anglican affairs and to disburse the considerable amount of government revenue which was allocated to supporting the Christian church in India.
The bishops, and the cathedral clergy, were clerical government officials….—p. 21
…There were two rival Anglican societies: the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), which represented the High Church, Catholic wing of Anglicanism; and the Church Missionary Society (CMS), representing the Low Church, Evangelical wing….—p. 21
…The theory which T. B. Macaulay had enunciated in his Education Minute of 1835—that of ‘filtration’, the introduction of Western ideas and practices to a small Indian elite, expecting that they would be the agents of Westernization, filtering down gradually to the masses—was still very influential….—p. 22
If the government chaplains were the Brahmans of the Anglican church in India and the European missionaries were its Vaisyas—its middle caste—it is but little exaggeration to suggest that the Indian clergy were the Sudras, the serving-men….
This was the Anglican caste hierarchy…..—p. 23
…A branch of the Sikh princely family of Kapurthala became Christians. In 1900, they were led by Sir Harnam Singh, the father of Rajkumar Maharaj Singh, Shamsher Singh, and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur….—p. 23
…The Catholics were, of course, upheld by their conviction that they constituted the one true Church, amidst the heathen Hindus and the heretic Protestants….—p. 24
…G.A. Lefroy (1854-1919), Bishop of Lahore….When a bigoted Islamic religious leader known as the Blind Maulvi, followed Lefroy around Delhi, abusing Christianity, Lefroy wrestled with him, spiritually, and converted him to faith in Jesus Christ….—p. 24
…Beyond the walled city, through Kashmiri Gate, lay the Nicholson gardens, and carriage-roads stretched towards the River Jamuna. The rich Delhi merchants liked to drive abroad in the early evening, but should one of their carriages come up behind a walking Englishman, the driver should slow his horse down to a walk—unless the Englishman was gracious enough to wave him on. No Indian should be allowed to imagine that he had the right to cast dust upon an Englishman.—p. 25
When Andrews first arrived at Delhi he was at once impressed by the manner in which the spirit of John Nicholson and John Lawrence still ruled. He wrote, just three years later: ‘I shall not soon forget the strangeness of my first few days in Delhi—the policeman saluting, the people salaaming, the Indian soldier standing at attention, every one making way…It was due to the simple fact that I was a sahib.’8….—p. 26
8. North India, p. 160. [I couldn’t trace any other reference for this—db]
…Andrews found two Sikh converts who were married to ‘heathen’ wives; he felt obliged to exclude the two men from partaking of the sacrament, even though their wives were anxious to receive instruction in Christianity. They needed the guidance of ‘English shepherding’, he concluded.10—pp. 27
10 Andrews wrote a report on his Rawalpindi visit which he sent to Lefroy, who in turn forwarded it to Montgomery. Andrews’ attitude to the Sikh converts married to non-Christians appears harsh, but he was only doing what his superiors instructed: see Bishop Coplestone (Metropolitan) to the Rev. C.G. Stokes, 26 March 1907, instructing the latter to refuse the sacrament to parishioners married to non-Christians. By the end of Andrews’ life (1940) the Metropolitan (Foss Westcott) was allowing the clergy ‘discretion’ to permit Christians in this situation to receive the sacrament, See Box ‘Holy Communion’, Papers of the Metropolitan.—p. 31
Charlie Andrews had arrived in India [1905, second time] accepting the belief which his father had passed on to him: that India was ‘a sacred trust, committed into the hands of Englishmen, and that by the (p.29) fulfilment of that trust, Great Britain would stand or fall’. He had begun to compare this ideal of a trust with the reality, impressed upon him when he reached Delhi: ‘Though you have come out as a missionary, you are an Englishman first,’14….—p. 30
14 For ‘a sacred trust’, see The Claim for Independence: within or without the British Empire, p. 1’ for ‘Englishman first’, see India and Britain: a moral challenge, p. 72.—p. 31 [No other reference is given for these sources—db]
{Susil} Rudra was a steadfast patriot, and in the following years his nationalism became more distinct and articulate. But he was also a reserved, rather conventional person, who accepted British rule as ordained by Divine Providence….—p. 32
…a journal was launched by two Presbyterians at Poona, Nicol Macnicol and A. Robertson. This was the Indian Interpreter, whose policy was announced as: ‘Sympathy with all that is worthy in the religions of India and the aspirations of the Indian people, as pointing to their fulfilment in the Christian faith.’….—p. 35
Andrews also contributed a similar survey to The East and the West, ‘The Situation in the East’, Oct. 1907, reporting ‘a remarkable development of nationalism’ since his last communication of October 1905. He posed the question which was soon to overwhelm him: ‘How far can the Christian missionary dissociate himself from the foreign ties of an English government in order to be one with the people of the country?’—Notes. 19, p. 52
…Har Dayal was associating with them, making it plain that he renounced the whole Christian, liberal philosophy of the Cambridge Brotherhood. He had a house in Lahore on which he posted a sing, ‘No Admission to Europeans or Christians’. When Rudra attempted to visit his former brilliant pupil, he was turned out, and Har Dayal had the room and its contents washed and disinfected, for he regarded Rudra as one ‘who had joined forces with the enemy’.{Emily C. Brown, Har Dayal: Hindu revolutionary and rationalist (Tuscon, Arizona, 1975), p. 53}—p. 42
…In 1908 appeared the first of the books of his maturity, North India, in the series ‘Handbooks of English Church Expansion’, which he dedicated to Susil Rudra. Within a few years, Andrews repudiated this work, and never mentioned it in his later writings. It bears the ‘missionary’ mark, condemning Indian ‘idolatry’ and ‘evil superstitions’; but it also presents a forward-looking portrait f the achievements and failures of the Anglicans in India. Andrews portrays the ideas of Indian Christians imaginatively; thus of Nehemiah Goreh: ‘He believed that India could not be won for Christ by westernizing the East, but rather by boldly claiming for Christ the Eastern ideals of poverty and self-renunciation—ideals which find so high a place in the words of Christ himself,’ He inveighed against those missionaries who had ‘pauperised’ their people by turning them into dependents; worse, some had become ‘foreigners in their own country’, denationalized spectators of the national movement. Andrews proposed some rather obvious reforms, such as abolishing the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Indian Church, and selecting Indians as bishops. ‘The principle of racial equality in Christ had to be fought out once more’, he concluded.—p. 44
..Andrews wrote in the Modern Review about theories of creation, and suggested that the emergence of God and the world was integral (i.e. that God was not the first cause). The article is in the form of a conversa-(p.44)tion with a Hindu, and in this formulation, Andrews’ imaginary Hindu observes: ‘I see you are rapidly becoming Hinduised.’ Andrews makes himself reply: ‘We come out as “teachers and civilisers”…we have found out…that we have got to be students first.’{Modern Review, April 1909, ‘The Creation Theory of the Universe’.} Where was all this taking C.F. Andrews?—pp. 44-45
…Andrews was convinced that Europeans must draw nearer to Indian ways of thought and action if they were to present Christianity in a meaningful form….—p. 47
…To the SPG supporters he explained: ‘To state my conclusions positively, the one true justification for our taking the responsibility of educating the children of Hindus and Muslims lies in the fact that Christianity is the fulfilment of the present religions of the land, not their destruction. Our education, therefore, starts with all that is good in Hinduism and Islam.{Annual Report of the CMD, 32nd Report (1910} This might have appeared to be asking the supporters of the Mission to Delhi—mostly Cambridge country parsons—to swallow a lot; but in fact they were more worried by the introduction of a Baptist than by the association with Hindus and Muslims.—p. 48
…His essay, India in Transition, issued through the SPG, took the Sympathy idea about as far as it could go within an orthodox framework.31 He announced: ‘If Christianity is to succeed….It must come as a helper and a fulfiller, a peacemaker and a friend [to Hindus and Buddhists]. It must be able to gather up all that is great and noble in a higher synthesis. There must no longer be the desire to capture converts from Hinduism, by any and every means, and to take advantage of her hour of weakness and desolation; but rather the desire to come to her help in the needful time of trouble.’….—p. 48
31 India in Transition appeared as an ‘Occasional Paper’ of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi in 1910, published in England, and distributed from Church House, Westminster. …—p. 53
…Should he resign from the SPG, ‘and launch out my little boat on unknown seas’? He explained: ‘I have been feeling the call of sanyasi, to cut myself free from these worldly ties of an assured income and a place in a fixed society and a work which is in great measure prescribed, and give myself wholly into the hands of God, to go where he leads.’ {CFA to Munshi Ram (Swami Shraddhanand), 3 May 1913}….—p. 69
…His visits to Calcutta brought him into contact with the Brahmos, reminding him of Keshab Chandra Sen and the mess he had made of things:
First playing at being a Hindu, then playing at being a Christian—how utterly futile. There is no road to unity there….A unity arrived at in this way would be barren indeed….[Keshab was] an actor taking different parts, and leading his followers after him, who were hyponotised by his emotionalism. Yet he lived a pure, self-sacrificing life…I suppose I am hard on him because he had the very things I am trying to get rid of in myself, and have learnt to despise. {CFA to Munshi Ram (Swami Shraddhanand)}—p. 74
…He told Munshi Ram (28 October1913):
The wrappings of mere ecclesiasticism and conventional Christianity are falling off, one by one, and I am coming nearer to Christ himself than ever. And this has come about by me drawing nearer to (p.76) Hindu India in its ideals, wherever I see them truly exhibited…..I long to be set free from all the conventionalities of my present lot—to be able to follow with absolute freedom where Truth leads.—pp. 76-77
…With many insertions and erasures, Charlie Andrews slowly recorded his conclusions for his friend—and for India.{ CFA to Rabindranath Tagore Feb. 1914}
I am beginning to understand from history, as well as from my own inner experience…that Christianity is not an independent Semitic growth but an outgrowth of Hindu religious thought and life besides… [that] Christ and Buddha are not separate but closely united as one factor in the religious history of the world; that the stream of Hindu-Buddhist life and early Christian life are one stream, not two; that the Upanishads and the Buddhist development lie at the back of the Gospels as their partial source and inspiration….
The Jews crucified Jesus. The men of the East, in the legend of the (p.88) birth, worshipped him…That legend, I feel, has a vital truth behind it…I find it less and less easy to reverence Palestine alone as the Motherland of the Christian faith…India lived that very Gospel-picture centuries before Christ came….What can it all mean, then, but that Christianity itself has its roots, in the past, in Indian soil, not in Palestine only: and that India in this as in so many other ways is the great Mother in the world’s history.—pp. 88-89
Much of the letter was given over to the idea of the Indian Jesus: ‘All the distinctiveness of Christ, separating him utterly from the Old Testament and St Paul, comes from this Indian Mother source.’ This conviction of his would lead to a ‘lonely pilgrimage’, Andrews concluded.—p. 90
…More fundamental still, in his perception of God and the Divine Will, he was not satisfied with the Trinitarian concept of God. He did not doubt that Christ was divine, the Son of God, but he had come to believe that God’s divinity also filled Gautama, the Buddha—and indeed he believed that God was in all humanity—all men were divine, all men also lived out the agony of Christ in their own lives….—p. 96
… ‘Fasting is doing evil in order to do good. But doing hard work… will be a real test of their sincerity.’ Although Tagore and Gandhi had not yet come together, here was a sign that the Poet would not always find Gandhian ideas acceptable.26—p. 99
26The quotation is in Rabindranath Tagore to CFA, 5 Dec. 1912]
Andrews replied with contrition: ‘You were right not to spare me.’ ‘I must come back to HIM, with all my heart, leaving all else,’ he avowed: he rebuked himself for ‘restlessness’ and ‘a longing that was really selfish’ (23 January, 1915). Tagore patiently explained ‘I knew my letter would give you pain, but I was not a free agent when I wrote it [he was directed by his daemon, his driving force] and I am relieved to know that you forgive me and accept from my hands the message which is not my own!’ (26 January, 1915).—p. 103
Andrews’ torment, largely self-generated….—p. 103
…Yet, within limits, Tagore actually enjoy the pomp and pageantry of public occasions and despite his protestations, was not averse to the celebration of his fame. Andrews created a Tagore of his own imagining when he pictured him as shrivelled up by the public glare.—p. 104
…The Poet {Tagore} replied in his most lyrical vein (11 June 1915):
…Some say that (p.106) we idealise him we love, but the fact is that we realise through love the ideal in him—and the ideal is the real, if we know it.37—pp. 106-07
37 The letter is in Letters to a Friend (pp. 47-8), unaccountably dated 11 Nov. 1914. [I cannot trace the publisher information—db]
He {Andrews} emphasized Gandhi’s obsession with duty: even when the ashramites said their evening prayers they ‘bawled them out…at the top of their voices’. Gandhi had ‘reduced life to a schedule, with every half-hour marked out for a certain work to be done’. Yet: ‘In spite of all, there is a poet deep down somewhere in Mr Gandhi’s own nature, struggling to get free, and showing through his eyes. It is a beauty and a wonder to see it come out at times and it wins my love.’—p. 112
Anandadheva khalvimani bhutani jayante
Anandena jatani jivanti
Anandam samprayantyabhisamvishanti*—{Tagore}—ibid. p. 112
- Freely translated {by the author} : From Love, all things are born,
- By love they are sustained,
- Towards Love they proceed,
- And into Love they enter.—Notes. p. 112
It is a common experience that one with a strong personality tends to weaken the characters of those who are closely associated with him, whenever they remain too long at his side and become dependent on him….This danger I have experienced personally….I was too eager to be continually present with the Poet, Rabindranath Tagore, whom I deeply loved, and it became an oppression to him because he saw with his fine instinct that it was weakening my individual character. Therefore, in the gentlest manner possible, he warned me from this.{ ‘anxiety’, CFA to William Rothenstein, 3 Aug. 1916}—p. 129
…Governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, whose loyalism, nurtured in the Irish Ascendancy, conceived that no stratagem was improper if it contributed to victory….—p. 151
The shadow of Amritsar continued to darken the land. The Christian community was particularly shaken; while European Christian missionaries had been attacked, European—nominally Christian—British officers had savagely punished the Indians. Which way were the Christians to turn? Two letters surviving from this time illustrate the reactions of Indian Christians who were also ardent patriots. S. K. Dattta and K. T. Paul—both well-known to Andrews—had volunteered to serve the British troops in France. Their faith in Britain had survived the ordeal: it did not now survive Amristar. Datta wrote on 6 May: (p.156)
The tragic events of the last few weeks have so alienated mutual sympathy between the European… and the Indian…that for a decade at least, it would appear, Christian effort in India will be fruitless….The disorders in the Punjab are probably more serious than we have realised yet. The authorities are the only people who know the facts. The general public is ignorant…I have had a terrible disillusionment. During those four years in France I built up a new idea of what human brotherhood meant. The spirit of comradeship, so marked in France, was upon me. I brought that vision back to India…but now, in the face of hard facts, my faith fails me,
Paul wrote in the same strain (27 June 1919), concerning ‘The Prussian tone of the administration of Sir Michael O’Dwyer’. Revealing that those whipped in Lahore included students at Forman Christian College, he called this ‘the last straw’:
I can understand my countrymen being shot down by a military commander who loses his head when facing a mob….But the cold-blooded barbarity which carried out this humiliation is beyond me….My faith is shattered. The war has evidently prussianised some of those who engaged in it to put down the Prussians.{International Missionary Council Archives: Box 414, ‘India—Politics’.}—pp. 156-57
…J. H. Oldham, the Secretary of the Conference of Missionary Societies in Great Britain, himself born in India….Worried about the whole missionary position in India, Oldham asked leading Indian Christians for their views.
S.K. Rudra replied (8 August, 1919), ‘Today the missionary is not looked up to as he was in 1914. He is simply tolerated. Not unoften is he considered a political spy.’ Missionary leaders never spoke out, wrote Rudra, to question any of the injustices which troubled India, such as the situation in South Africa, indenture in Fiji, or the disturbances in Punjab. In a postscript he added, ‘Mr Andrews’ work has been wonderful—but the Christian church looks upon him as a renegade. That is commentary enough on what I have written.’—p. 157 [in happened in the context of Jalianwala bag massacre by General O’Dwyer—db]
…But among the European Christian leaders in India there were few who honoured, or even tolerated the apostate Andrews. Among them was Foss Westcott, who succeeded Lefroy as Metropolitan in April 1919. When he invited Andrews to a garden party in Calcutta and introduced him to an important Anglican layman, the latter turned away, asserting, ‘I wouldn’t soil my hands by touching that man’s’….{National Christian Council Review (India), May 1940, E. C. Dewick, ‘C.F. Andrews’.}—p. 158
…Bosworth Smith had inflicted coarse humiliations upon entire villages and had singled out the village leaders for beatings. In one instance, a Sikh village headman, who was also an ex-non-commissioned officer, was accused of being involved in the disruption of railway services. When he denied all knowledge of the sabotage he was publicly flogged. Andrews heard of his story, and went to see him; but the Sikh refused to talk to him.
Charlie Andrews shared with Tagore a belief that England must demonstrate prayaschitta towards India for the wrongs inflicted at Amritsar and after. Prayascitta was interpreted by Andrews as ‘repentance’, but its strict Sanskrit meaning is ‘a gesture’.16 Now he made a gesture to the wronged Sikh ex-soldier: he stooped down and touched his feet, and asked him to forgive the British for their evil-doing. This act, so unexpected in a province where arrogance was paraded, produced its effect: the headman embraced Charlie Andrews in the warm embrace off Indian friendship.—p. 159
16 Tagore’s play, Prayaschitta, written in 1908, was translated as Atonement.
Tagore’s visit to England turned into a dreary disappointment, after waiting so long. He found that the atmosphere of Amritsar extended even to London: on 20 July the House of Lords voted to exonerate and congratulate General Dyer. In despair he wrote to Charlie (4 August 1920), ‘The English people has not the power to give us anything truly great, and whatever it offers us will be haram [unlawful] for us to accept. We must ignore our connection with this people altogether and do our duty to our country.’….—p. 166
16 Tagore’s play, Prayaschitta, written in 1908, was translated as Atonement. Its principal character offers non-violent resistance to a tyrannical ruler. On 1 May 1919, CFA expressed his hope to R. Tagore that England would show ‘some repentance’ f or the wrongs committed: he was still hoping in October.—p. 174
In Andrews’ view, Gandhi’s proposal to demand swaraj ‘either within or without the Empire’ was a delusion. Gandhi must see this before the annual Congress met at Nagpur in December: ‘Jawahar Lal, when I spoke to him, was quite clear’. They must have no hypocrisy; Indians were foreigners to the British, for even their services in the war had not made them ‘blood brothers’: ‘In such an Empire there is only one place for an Asiatic, and that is an inferior place….Where numbers are quite insignificant, as in England, there is kindly treatment; but even in England, recently, the current of race feeling has changed against all other races. Racialism has run side by side with imperialism, and for the Englishman, from first to last, empire means “We are the Ruling Race” (with two capital Rs).’—p. 169
…He {Andrews} was disgusted because ‘Bengal has been the one province not to be captured by Mr Gandhi’s personality’, and the pictured to Tagore their Calcutta friends, like Promotho Lal Sen, [laying bridge and taking their strong glasses of whisky and brandy’. {5 October 1920 to Tagore}—p. 171
…The whole concept of uttering poetic sentiments in order to raise money was wrong: ‘I should not let my dignity be soiled by the sordid touch of her dollars—mere lack of means should not be allowed to mock the majesty of the soul’ (17 December). So they moved on, resenting the ‘ugly barbarity’ of the United States, as Rathindranath called it (2 December 1920)—p. 172
…Despite all this, Tagore seemed to believe that Andrews was encouraging Gandhi’s campaign and bringing his ideas into Santiniketan. Worried about his new Visva-Bharati, he imagined that Andrews’ political extremism would drive away Western scholars and Western money: and he was almost overwrought about the shortage of funds.—p. 186
…At Santiniketan during the festival of Paush (24 December) Tagore inaugurated his new international university, Visva-Bharati. Its declared aim was ‘to study the mind of man in its realisation of different aspects of truth’…..—p. 189
…in Malabar, the Khilafat cry had been taken up by an Indo-Arab Muslim community, the Moplahs (Mappillas) who had launched a campaign of forcible conversion of their Hindu neighbours, killing those who would not submit….—p. 190
… ‘Honour is very cheap when another person has to maintain it’, commented Andrews.{CFA to R. Tagore, 23 February 1922 (from Howrah0}—p. 191
… ‘The busy, restless element in me…has been all too strong and has ruined my as a whole… {Andrews to Tagore}—p. 198
… From the Multan he wrote to Benarsidas, ‘I had a very bad nervous breakdown, due to illness and overwork during the hot weather and …it is necessary to get the best medical advice with regard to this increasing nervous exhaustion’ (15 November 1923). All this was true enough; but Charlie Andrews was also fleeing from Tagore and from India in greater dejection than at any time since the flight to Fiji in 1917.—p. 205
I have this puritan in me, this missionary mood, which looks at the morbid side of life and misses its beauty. But when I am with you it vanishes….You represent the spirit of beauty in the world which the puritan within me would kill.—(Andrews to Tagore, 13 March, 1924).—p. 211
… Bajpai {Girja Shanker} returned a mollifying reply (29 December 1927): ‘In this wicked world we sometimes have to temporise and to nurse our hopes in secret in order not to risk a tactical setback.’…. {to Andrews}….—p. 228
During Andrews’ absence, an attack had been launched (p.236) against him by Indians living in the United States who resented his opposition to a move to recognize Indians as ‘Aryans’ and therefore white. Such recognition, they supposed, would improve opportunities for immigration….—pp. 236-37
…Andrews warned that Britain must accept India as free and equal or else expect the end of all friendly relations. It was a challenging statement.
Andrews still aroused hostile reactions among many of those he tried to influence. Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Davidson, wrote to commiserate with Irwin on having to deal with Gandhi (28 June 1930): ‘A perverse and dangerous mixture of the mystic, the fanatic, and the anarchist’. He went on: ‘It so happens that not so long ago I had a talk with C. F. Andrews. He talked wildly about Gandhi’s spiritual force—about this force as destined to be the redemption f India…It must be extraordinarily difficult to keep any patience with [Gandhi and] his followers.’ However, Lang softened a little towards Andrews, for on 21 September he wrote again to Irwin describing a second meeting: ‘He is right enough in pleading that the only hope lies in understanding and co-(p.245)operation…But he seemed to me as much in the clouds and as little possessed of political sense as his master.’—pp. 244-45
..With money drying up, Andrews was unable to indulge in his practice of sending telegrams….—p. 245
…Tagore no longer dreamed of (p.248) solving his financial needs through American aid: ‘To waste time and energy in seeking for sympathy and aid from others is demoralising. The boon will come without our asking, when we ourselves are truly ready for it. If we fail, let us ascribe our defeat to our own imperfections and never complain’ (6 July 1931).—pp. 428-29
One such attempt at mobilizing goodwill was a talk by Gandhi at the Church Missionary House, designed to explain his attitude to proselytizing and to conversion (8 October, 1931). Gandhi declared: ‘If I want a pattern of the ideal missionary I should instance C.F. Andrews…It was love at first sight when I saw him first at Durban…He has become firmer in his own faith and in the growth of love for others…He is today a potent instrument in influencing the lives of Hindus for the better.’—p. 251
Now came the long-awaited publication of What I Owe to Christ. The reviewers were generous, and soon the book was being widely read….
There was a simple directness in Andrews’ account of his childhood, his conversion, and his years at Cambridge and at Delhi. His story effectively ended with his meeting with Gandhi and Tagore, and he did not explore the anguish of the following years. In a time when so many had left the Christian faith, under the stress of World War or in the frenetic 1920s, there was reassurance in this unaffected, almost Victorian, statement of belief. Soon, new editions were needed: a cheap edition appeared at one shilling, while translations in many European languages followed. C. F. Andrews was no longer known only to those interested in India; he became a familiar name to Christians of an Evangelical or Nonconformist persuasion everywhere; familiar to the elderly and middle-aged, but also a subject of discussion among the young.(p. 255)
From being rather an embarrassment to official Christianity, Charlie Andrews was now a major asset. He was welcomed back into the Church of England, and he was also approached by other religious bodies. Andrews had been attracted to what was then known as the Oxford Group (later, Moral Re-Armament). His friends, Foss Westcott and Alek Fraser, were also enthusiastic ‘Groupers’. Andrews now became a sought-after participant in Oxford Group house-parties…..—pp. 255-56
…Tagore read his old friend’s spiritual autobiography. { What I Owe to Christ}. He praised it generously (2 August, 1931):
The mode of self-expression in a Christian life is in love which works. In that of a Hindu it is in love which contemplates, enjoys the spiritual emotion as an end in itself…My idea of the divine has concentrated in Man the Eternal, and I find that in your own religious experience. You have the same idea centred in a concrete historic personality. Evidently it strongly helps you in the realisation of perfection in your life…to feel in your constant love a divine comradeship in Christ….You have been of help to your fellow beings not merely for some individual benefits that you may have rendered them but for a direct inspiration that gives us certainty of the ultimate greatness of Man.—p. 257
…Benarsidas suggested that Andrews ought ‘to write in simple English the story of the life of Christ for Hindi-speaking masses….There are many people in India, from high intellectuals down to the masses, who take their conception of Christ from you…I do (p.263) feel that you must tell me how Christ lived and how He is still living in the lives of millions of people’ (12 February 1933)…..—pp. 263-64
…Living among the Gonds, {Verrier} Elwin refused to attempt to convert them to Christianity. Andrews thought he was wrong, and wrote from S. S. Mloja, ‘You and I have to learn by experience, and we shall both lose a great deal if we lose our sense of proportion….Life in this primitive form often (p.270) becomes a ghastly terror impossible to describe. It would be difficult to over-estimate the freedom from these primitive terrors wherewith Christ has set us free…I am writing this because I myself fhave gone to the utmost limits of toleration, bordering on weakness, and I can see the same danger in your case.’ Elwin should not over-idealize the Gonds, ‘as I tended to over-idealise Hinduism at one time’ (12 November 1933).—pp. 270-71
…But {Andrews} he also foresaw from afar how Britain’s political, economic and military weakness would make the Empire an embarrassment instead of an asset: ’The burden of India around Great Britain’s neck is beginning to weigh heavily. There are very many in England who would only too gladly lay down the burden, but they cannot find the way to do so’.{The Challenge of the North-West Frontier: a contribution to world peace}.—p. 286
His presence in south India led to a meeting with the Bishop of Madras and a suggestion by Andrews that he should take services in the local churches. In some perplexity, the bishop asked Foss Westcott: was Andrews a ‘licenced preacher’? The bishop had supposed that he had ‘given up the exercise of his ministerial duties’, though Andrews assured him he preached, and administered Holy Communion. Westcott was asked as Metropolitan to give a ruling (21 April 1938). For Westcott replied carefully: when he himself had administered communion at an Oxford Group house party, in an Oxford women’s college, Andrews had assisted him. He was fully prepared to give him a licence to preach, but Andrews was a ‘bird of passage’ and (p.294) had not yet applied for a licence (26 April 1938). When the Bishop of Madras tackled Andrews directly on the matter, he answered that he was ‘not sure whether he has it [the licence] or has lot it’. The bishop told Westcott he seemed ‘definitely surprised’ at the question (5 May, 1938). It was strange that Charlie Andrews should want his priestly function to be officially endorsed. Yet he seemed to have what Agatha termed a ‘pathetic joy’ in being recognized as the lost sheep which had returned.’7—pp. 294-95
7 Agatha Harrison to Carl Heath, 7 April 1940: ‘To me it was often pathetic to see what joy it gave him when he saw this attitude [within the Anglican Church] changing, and he was taken into confidence by them. This has been noticeable in the last few years’.—p. 306
For Charlie, the internal agony and conflict concerning God in Man was over. The dilemma of the Asian Jesus had been solved: He had become universal. Andrews told the evening circle at Tirupattur {in Kristu Kula ashram, in Tamilnadu} that they must show courtesy to other religions, but that ‘does not mean that we should in any way weaken our own Christian faith or look upon Christ our Master merely as one of the prophets…What was dimly seen before by seers and rishis of old time is fully revealed in Christ.’—p. 300
In order to ensure that nobody could again raise the old (p. 304) suspicion that he was really a Hindu in his spiritual outlook, Andrews made one practical change in his arrangements. When Henry Polak had drawn up his Will—of which he was to be executor—Andrews had recorded that he wished his body to be cremated after death. Now he added a codicil to the Will stating that he wanted to be buried, if possible near St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta. No one should be able to suggest that he had wished for a Hindu funeral.—pp. 304-05
…Then Gandhi decided that it was disgraceful not to have raised the funds for his friend {Andrews}, and within eight days he got together Rs 5,00,00 (nearly L 40,000), from the Bombay business community. The money was handed over to Santiniketan, and four-fifths was swallowed up in the ordinary running expenses of Visva-Bharati. The remainder was assigned to build a dispensary, and later to found a centre of international understanding. Today, the dispensary is surrounded by a daily crowd of rural patients; the centre is shuttered and locked. Its Christian director resigned when in the 1960 the Visva-Bharati accepted an officers’ training unit for the armed forces into the abode of Peace.—p. 312
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