Indian Antiquary Vol 46

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 29

JANUARY, 1917)
THE HISTORY OF THE NAIK KINGDOM OF MADURA
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their conversions also were less numerous. Yet they had greater advantages and, as servants of God, they were ideal men. Foreigners in birth, language and race, these missionaries identified themselves with the depressed classes of a coloured race, and worked day and night, amidst a hundred difficulties, for their betterment and their elevation. It should be remembered that the ordinary conditions of Indian life, poor as they were, must have been hard for them. Coming from cold and temperate regions, belonging as a rule to aristocratic families, they worked in India under cirournstances which, though common in Indian eyes, were to them extremely adverse and incongenial. Many of them could not bear the withering climate and the burning atmosphere. Most of them had to live in thatched huts not fit for men, in mere cabins of earth, which had no windows, and which were so narrow and denlike that there was no space even for free movement. Ants and serpents, scorpions and words, rats which nimbled their feet, and bats " which carried away the wick of your lamp even when lighted, "----were their companions. Their bed was on the bare ground or a plain mat, a tiger skin or a plank. Their food consisted of a handful of rice cooked in water," seasoned with a decoction of pepper, sometimes with bitter herbs," vegetables, milk and ghee. The Pandarams took meat by stealth, and fish openly, but the Sanyasins had to refrain from both. Their journeys which were very frequent on account of patients and confessions, were dangerous owing to the post of robbers at night, and the difficulty of walking on sands, "that burn like coals" during the day. In the rainy season, when canals and rivers became torrents and when the mud of the road was mixed with thorns and pebbles, walking was a hard business, swimming a matter of necessity, and utensils consequently a great burden. To add to these, there were the dangers of wild beasts owing to the abundance of forests in those days. But physical difficulties were not the only difficulties. There was, to add to them, the difficulty of persecution and popular scorn. "The people," says De Costa in a language of bitted discontent, " are the vilest race one can imagine. The Government is only tyranny, and there is nothing but disorder and confusion." Even when these difficulties were overoome, and men were brought into the pale of Christianity, there was no permanent satisfaction as there was no permanent security of the new proselytes from backsliding The banishment and torture of Christians had a deterrent effect, and the work of months was often at one stroke, undone in a moment. In 1843 for instance, on the occasion of De Costa's visit to Satyamangalam, a hundred high caste Christians in a body went back to their old religion.
Such were the arrangements made for coping with the increased task of proselytism on the retirement of De Nobilis from Madura, and such were the difficulties which the missionaries had to surmount. But the missionaries were not the men to be daunted by obstacles or discouraged by adverse causes. Both the Sanyasins and Pandarams were men of high mental calibre and wondrous bodily energy, and carried on their work with such firmness of purpose that it was crowned with not a little success. At Trichinopoly, Tanjore, Madura, Satyamangalam and every important Christian centre, the heroic labours of a Martin and an Alvarez, a De Costa and a Proenza, performed wonders. A few events in each of these important centres of Christianity, may be recorded before we pass on to the circumstances of Tirumal Naik's death,