Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India: A Study of Conditions among Women in India

								


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Lighted to Lighten
The Hope of India
A Study of Conditions
among Women in India
By ALICE B. VAN DOREN

1922

FOREWORD
The Central Committee sends out this book on Indian girlhood to meet
the young women of America with their high privilege of education, that
often unrealized and unacknowledged gift of Christ.
Miss Van Doren has given emphasis in the book to the privileged young
woman of India; she shows the possibilities, and yet you will see in it
something of the black shadow cast by that religion which holds no place
for the redemption of woman. If you could see it in its hideousness
which the author can only hint at, you would say as two American college
girls said after a tour through India, "We cannot endure it. Don't take
us to another temple. We never dreamed that anything under the guise of
religion could be so vile." And somehow there has seemed to them since a
note of insincerity in poetic phrasings of Hindu writers who pass over
entirely gross forms of idolatrous faith to indulge in noble sentiments
which suggest plagiarism. A distinguished author said recently, "I can
never read Tagore again after seeing the women of India." From sacred
temple slums of South India to shambles of Kalighat it is revolting,
sickening, shameful. It is pleasanter to dwell on the beauties of
Hinduism and ignore the unprintable actualities, but if we are to help
we must feel how terrible and immediate the need is. No one can really
meet that need but the educated Indian Christian women whom God is
preparing in this day for service. They are the ones who are Lighted to
Lighten. They are the Hope of the future. Fifty years ago, after the
Civil war, the light began in the organization of Woman's Missionary
Societies. Through all the years women have gone, never very many,
sometimes not very strong, limited in various ways, but with one stern
determination, at any cost "to save some."
Now at the close of your war, young women of America, a new era is
beginning in which you are called to take your part. You will not be the
pioneers. The trail is blazed. It has been proven that Indian girls can
be educated, their minds are keen and eager, they are Christian, many of
them, in a sense which girls of America cannot comprehend. Their task is
infinitely greater than yours. If they fail, the redemption of Indian
womanhood will not be realized, and so we see them taking as the college
emblem, not the beautiful, decorated brass lamp of the palace, but the
common, little clay lamp of the poorest home and going out with the
flickering flame to lighten the deep darkness of their land. College
girls in America sometimes wear their degree as a decoration. To these
girls it is equipment, armor, weapons, for the tearing down of
strongholds. These girls must be leaders. They cannot escape the