V.S. AZARIAH – FATHER OF INDIAN CHRISTIANS (1874 – 1945)

V.S. AZARIAH – FATHER OF INDIAN CHRISTIANS (1874 – 1945)
INTRODUCTION
Late nineteenth century India was the crown jewel within the global empire of Queen Victoria.[1] Christianity was introduced by German Lutheran missionaries in the eighteenth century further strengthened in the nineteenth century by the Anglican auspices of the Church Missionary Society (hereafter CMS) and the Society for the Propagation of the gospel in Foreign parts (hereafter SPG). [2] They worked side by side in Tinnevelly, the south-eastern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Those most receptive to the Christian message in Tinnevelly were the semi-untouchable Shanars (now called Nadars, or ‘lords’), an energetic one-fifth of the district’s population whose hereditary occupation was bringing down the sap of the lofty palmyras. Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah was one of the converts of those Mass movements by the CMS missionaries.
As a Christian leader in a non-Christian culture, V.S. Azariah negotiated complex cultural, social, political, and economic pressures with exceptional skill and diplomacy. He is one of those little-known leaders whose life sheds new light on the challenges and opportunities faced by religious minorities throughout the world today.
BIRTH AND RISE UP
Azariah had a very humble beginning. He was born in a Tamil Christian family at Vellalanvilai village in Tinnevelly on August 17th 1874, after his parents had waited and prayed for thirteen years. He was named Samuel and dedicated to the service of the Lord. Like most of the Palmyra-climbing Nadars, Azariah’s ancestors were Saiva: a poor family of ‘toddy-drawers’ belonging to ‘a very orthodox Hindu sect devoted to the exclusive worship of the god Siva, the destroyer’.[3] Shortly after the admission in CMS school in Megnapuram in 1839, Azariah’s father Velayudam came to Christian faith through a Welsh missionary John Thomas and took the name of Thomas Vedanayagam.[4]
Azariah’s father was twice married and his second wife, Ellen, was a deep devotion and of good character. Ellen brought Azariah up in the fear of God and in strict discipline. Commenting on his childhood days Azariah said, “All my love for the Bible and my knowledge of it came to me from my mother”. [5] Azariah’s childhood at Vellalanvilai village was marked by hardships and a tough but simple life, which later helped him in his missionary work in the villages of Andhra Pradesh. From childhood, Azariah had a great love for missionaries. When he heard the story of the martyrdom of Bishop Hannigton of Uganda, without any hesitation he took off his new gold bangles and offered them as a gift to Uganda.[6]
In his village school, he learnt to read from Palmyra leaf books and wrote the alphabets with his fingers on sand. Even though there was no recorded incident of a definite conversion experience in the life of Azariah, his early background was one of the simple and deep evangelical piety. His father died when he was still a boy, so that his mother became the paramount influence in his life.[7]
After his high-school studies in Megnanapuram[8], Azariah went to Church Missionary College[9] for his First in Arts study, Tinnevelly in 1892. Azariah founded the ‘Christian Brotherhood Association’ to fight against the caste spirit among the students and to inspire spiritual renewal.[10] Azariah was not impressed by the Indian Christians who heightened the mythology of Nadar greatness. Therefore, he began his student activist career by taking aim at the sins of his own people rather than at the sins of his British rulers.[11] From February 1893 – 1896, Azariah was the student in Madras Christian College. Here the Scottish principal, William Miller gave him the name Azariah as the name Samuel was common.[12]
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE
Anbu Mariammal was one of the first Indian Christian women in Tinnevelly to take a college course, and one of still fewer who achieved the old First of Arts degree. However, her dominant desire was to serve the Lord. In 1898, Anbu and Azariah disregarded and reinterpreted various Indian marriage traditions – corresponding with each other during their engagement, not following customary dowry procedures, and marrying on a Wednesday.[13] Azariah’s wedding budget was a mere 40 rupees has become an important part of the oral tradition in Tinnevelly today. They were truly one in mind and spirit, work and prayer, faith and hope and aspiration. Azariah loved to be at home but his work often took him out had to be about on tours. It was part of the price that Anbu had to pay and she was glad to pay it. Thus, both of them gave first place for the Kingdom of God. They had six children and became an active participant in women’s education in the Dornakal Diocese.
YOUNG MEN CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION

Azariah’s contact with YMCA started in 1893 when he was college student in Madras. Bible study class, street preaching in Tamil and hospital visitations attracted Azariah to involve with YMCA.[14] After his college study, he was offered the post of secretary of YMCA for South India in 1895, which he accepted and continued for the next thirteen years. As YMCA secretary, Azariah dedicated himself to his work with humility, gratitude, and sincerity of purpose. During this time, he met Sherwood Eddy, the travelling secretary for the YMCA in India. Eddy, a friend of India, had many things in common with Azariah such as evangelistic zeal, strong love for India and a common ministry to young people. Therefore, their friendship grew and lasted for their whole lifetime. At the age of twenty-one, he was placed in charge of the YMCA headquarters in Madurai, from which he began a decade’s work of developing the YMCA’s smaller, more indigenous associations in the towns and villages of Madurai and Tinnevelly Districts.[15]
PIONEER OF THE INDIGENOUS CHURCH
In the year 1902, Azariah along with Eddy, went to Jaffna in Sri Lanka to conduct meetings. Here he saw the missionary burden of the Tamil Church. He felt ashamed to think of his own church in Tinnevelly, with all its richness, not having made any efforts for mission. Azariah shared his vision and burden with other like- minded Christians. He prayed with them, and in February 1903, they founded the Indian Missionary Society of Tinnevelly. Its principles were to be: “Indian money and Indian management and an area of work where no other missionary society was working.” Soon they found men and money and they looked for an unreached place to send missionaries. Later they found Dornakal to be such a place and decided to start the work.[16] Azariah saw his faith as a form of patriotism, conceiving of India’s evangelization as an activity of surpassing value for his homeland. Contrary to Hindu nationalist charges that Christian missionary work in India was unpatriotic, Azariah argued that conversion to Christianity promised national as well as individual salvation.[17]
Sometime between 1906 and 1909, a student whispered loudly during the missionary service in Madras, why doesn’t he go as a missionary? Azariah took that as a God’s will and offered himself to the missionary service and IMS appointed him AS ‘Superintending Missionary’ for the Dornakal field at a salary of Rs. 60 per month. This appointment involved considerable sacrifice for Azariah, who was poised to take on new international responsibilities for the YMCA. As a YMCA colleague recalled a few years later: It was (Azariah’s) love for the Church that made him… refuse the higher salary offered by the YMCA, and decline their offer to send him to the YMCA convention at Oxford and to the Constantinople Student Conference, and.. go to Dornakal to work among the poor people there.[18]
Azariah was ordained deacon on June 29, 1909, commissioned to begin his IMS work in Dornakal in July, and ordained priest on December 05, 1909. He lived first in a tent, unprotected from dangerous wildlife, and began the strenuous work of evangelising non-Christian Telugu villagers and supervising new Christian congregations. Travelling by foot, bullock cart, and bicycle, with his food and Bible tracts hanging in a bag suspended from the handlebars, Azariah visited families in their simple houses, talked to small groups of men sitting in the shade of trees, preached to crowds gathered in the evenings to hear him, and, on Sundays, performed priestly duties for nascent congregations.[19]
Azariah was consecrated as the first Indian Anglican bishop on Sunday, 29 December 1912, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta. On that momentous day, in the presence of eleven British Anglican bishops, the Governor of Bengal, and a large crowd of western and Indian supporters, the Anglican Church announced to the world that it was opening the floodgates to Indian leadership in the church.[20]
Being the first Indian bishop of an Anglican diocese, and as modern India's most successful leader of depressed class and mass movements to Christianity, Azariah was equally at home with the untouchables of rural India and the unreachables of the British Empire.
PIONEER OF THE ASIAN ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT
The YMCA provided the institutional base from which Azariah emerged as one of Asia's foremost ecumenical mission leaders. As the secretary of YMCA, Azariah had the opportunity to work among the young people in schools and colleges. His colleagues, both Indian and Western, were also young people and they too had the common vision and burden for the conversion of India in their generation. They felt the need for an interdenominational society that could appeal to all sections of the Christian community for the evangelization of their country.
On Christmas Day 1905, in Carey’s historic library at Serampore, the National Missionary Society of India was launched by a group of Indian leaders, with Azariah as its first general secretary.
In 1936, Dr. Ambedkar issued a statement that the Hindu Harijans should embrace a religion, which would give them equal status with the existing devotees of that religion. Azariah approached him with the hope that Ambedkar might regard Christianity as an acceptable religion. Azariah was shaken when Ambedkar asked him which denomination he would suggest for his Harijan followers. He realized that these denominations were stumbling blocks to the extension of Christ’s kingdom in India. It was Azariah, who took the initiative for Church Union in India.[21] The union of church of South India was achieved only after his death in 1947.
As a visionary, while India's attention focused increasingly on the rising nationalism, Azariah's attention turned to even broader – the international character of Christianity and its varied cultural expressions in Asia. Azariah had a natural sympathy for Asian awakening. In 1907, Azariah attended the World Student Christian Federation Conference (hereafter WSCF) in Tokyo and the YMCA conference in Shangchai. In the Tokyo conference, Azariah discussed the strategies for evangelizing Japan, China, and India in the face of rising nationalism. In a WSCF conference, Azariah challenged the delegates saying, “No country will be fully evangelized except by his own sons...”. [22]
Azariah attended the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910, presented a paper on co-operation between foreign and native workers. He expressed that we look our Lord for the ideal personal relationship who calls us friends. Can it be truly said that the foreign missionary has become a friend to his follow-workers?[23]
AZARIAH AND MAHATMA GANDHI
From the beginning, the religious and philosophical disagreements were laid at the heart of Azariah and Gandhi. Azariah favoured conversion rather than reform of Hinduism. After 1929, Azariah expressed his feelings against the Hindu nationalists. “I say my love to my country may be exercised through my ex-political work. If I labour to remove illiteracy, dirt, social enslavement and superstition of the neglected and the unprivileged or underprivileged – am I to be reckoned a foreigner with foreign sympathies with no love for my country? Should I be denounced as unpatriotic, simply because I am not dressed in a particular way or do not eat in a particular style or am not a member of a political party?[24] Gandhi thought of Azariah of his one of the enemy in his lifetime, they united only in the battle against the British government’s communally based political reforms of the 1930’s.
Even though, Azariah went to the glory in 1945 in Dornakal, his life speaks today.
LESSONS FOR TODAY
Social or family background cannot be an excuse for someone to come up in Christian leadership. Azariah was not from a royal family, after all from a Palmyra toddy-drawer family.
His disciplined and prayerful life challenged me, which he learnt from his mother Ellen. Later he started the ‘morning watches’ prayer cells in all YMCA wherever he worked. He challenges me in getting up at four-thirty morning to do the intercessory prayer with all the busy schedules.
Azariah taught himself. He did not go through theological training, but with the help of Eddy was studying the treasury of the scriptures. It is the principle that I will teach myself after completing the theological degree even.
When Indian mission depended upon the foreign agencies for financial support, Azariah looked differently. He believed that God could fulfil the needs through Indian Christian. Even today, the IMS is an example for me to dream of my own God’s mission.
One of the reasons for Azariah’s successful handling to the people movement was that he gave importance to the teaching and training of local leaders and instructing them to teach the new believers, which should be re-emphasized in the mission fields to see the greater growth. My pastor is seventy years old, still he did not train anyone. It is a challenge for me to see the life of my own church future as I study Azariah methods.
Azariah proved himself that caste, Indian superstitions, and mythology can not affect him as he serve the Great God who is beyond of all these. Because of the caste practices, the dalits are outside the church today. It is an ongoing challenge for Indian churches to come out these corporate sins. I pray that God will use me as a powerful writer to fight against of all these social evils.
Gandhi could not see the true enemy of the soul of India was not western civilization, but it was Azariah, the man of God, who thinks for the development of the nation by changing the social evils through gospel. I understand that the future of the nation is not on the politicians hand, rather it is in the hand of God’s children.
CONCLUSION
Azariah was born in 1874, the writer was also born exactly after 100 years (1974). I belong to the same community of Azariah, and stayed in the boarding school and studied in the same college in Tirunelveli, fought against caste and started prayer cells. Like Azariah, my mother influenced me and dedicated my life for fulfil time ministry. I am the second child in my family like Azariah. I have conducted all night prayers in the same Vellalanvilai Church. I found many incidents of life and years matches with the life of Azariah. God has opened my eyes to walk continuously in the footsteps of Azariah as he became my father now onwards to fight against the social evils, which are among the Indian Christians.
[1] Susan Billington Harper, In the shadow of the Mahatma: Bishop V.S. Azariah and the Travails of
Christianity in British India (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmand Publishing company, 2000), 9.
[2] CMS expressed the ‘low-church’ evangelical side of Anglican spirituality and SPG expressed the
‘high-church’ Anglo-Catholic side.
[3] Harper, 15.
[4] Ibid., 19.
[5] Carol Graham, Azariah of Dornakal (London: S.C.M. Press Ltd, 1946), 21.
[6] Ibid., 21.
[7] Ibid., 13.
[8] Nearby village of Vellalanvilai.
[9] Today’s St. John’s college, Palayamkottai.
[10] Harper, 27.
[11] Ibid., 28.
[12] Ibid., 26.
[13] Ibid., 57.
[14] Ibid., 49.
[15] Ibid., 56.
[16] Graham, 25.
[17] Harper, 71.
[18] Ibid., 94.
[19] Ibid., 96.
[20] Ibid., 97.
[21] S. Devasahayam Ponraj, Pioneers of the Gospel (Madhupur: Mission Educational Books, 1996),
97.
[22] Harper, 43.
[23] Roger E. Hedlund, Roots of the Great debate in Mission (Madras: ELS, 1981), 43.
[24] Harper, 297.