Holiday in Australia - through India 1956

For my leave in 1956 I headed for Australia, leaving Anthony Molesworth in charge with Jack Dobson looking after the farm.  The Usuthu semi-brotherhood was good but something was lacking.  Perhaps we could learn from the ashrams (mini-communities) of India, and from the West Queensland Bush Brotherhood, where I hoped to spend a fortnight. 

I was keen to see something of Asia, where our family history began.  I sailed for Australia on a White Star cargo ship via the east coast of Africa, to Bombay (now Mumbai ).  Two miles off Zanzibar the wind already carried the scent of cloves. 

At Mombasa, Arab dhows were in the harbour.  I watched one being repaired.  The Arab boat-builder was using a drill operated by a bow, rather like that for a violin.  The bit span backwards and forwards as the skilled craftsman moved his hand left to right, with the cord wrapped round the drill bit.  I saw later  exactly the same technique being used in Penang harbour.  Arabs had been trading on both sides of the Indian Ocean from the time of Christ.  The bow-drill, like Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia and East Africa, was one of their legacies, as was the Swahili language, made up from Arabic words and Bantu grammar.  At Karachi an enormous squatting camp provided a kind of temporary home for perhaps a hundred thousand Muslims, some of the millions who had left India for the new state of Pakistan established in 1947.

At Tiruppattur station – mid-way between Bangalore and Madras – I was glad to find an ashram bullock-cart waiting for me.  The ashram church was in the style of a South India Hindu temple.  It had a white tower covered with carvings, not of Hindu deities but of trees and wildlife.  I found nine members of the ashram, but some were out in villages.  They lived in a community of eighty or more, the rest being students, mostly Hindu, who had come to spend their vacation working with members of the ashram.  The two founders, one Scots and the other Tamil, were both eye-surgeons and had met during World War I.  From time to time the ashram divided into small groups who would each stay in one of twenty or so villages, looking for new patients with eye problems  and helping with other community needs, such as clean water.

At sunrise each morning all of us – Hindu volunteers, ashram members and myself as a guest from Africa – spent an hour in silent meditation, cross-legged on an inner verandah that surrounded a patch of grass and a palm-tree.  I think I felt nearer to Jesus and his Twelve than at any time of my life.

Gandhi once visited Tiruppattur.  When he left, he said to the Hindu members of the group, “This is the kind of Christianity you should be afraid of!”  The rest – symbolised by the very English parish churches I saw, even in villages, would have no future. 

I left by bullock-cart after three days, caught another train and in Madras met a South Indian Bishop.  I disgraced myself by calling him “My Lord” and trying to kiss his ring.  I thought this was what one did to bishops.  I received a gentle rebuke, “This is the Church of South India.  We don’t have Lords.”

By train again down the Coromandel Coast (what a lovely name!) and then the long Adam’s Bridge that spans the 20 miles of the Gulf of Mannar between India and Sri Lanka.  Sri Lanka had just won its independence and my hostess took me to the top of a mountain overlooking the beautiful city of Kandy.  The results of the election of Sri Lanka’s first President were about to be announced.  There, 500 feet below us, the whole of Kandy was in party mood – fireworks, music and dancing.  Then the news broke - Sri Lanka’s first Prime Minister would be Solomon Bandaranaike, leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party.  He was succeeded by his wife.  Then by ship to Fremantle.