Books

Radio Record, Volume II, Issue 11, 28 September 1928, Page 13

Books

DAUGHTERS OF INDIA. **L9. the poor Indian" has been the theme for many writers in recent years. Comparatively lately Mr. B. M. Forster, in his brilliant "Passage to India," achieved extraordinarily lucid delineation of the creeds and castes of this elusive people; while we are still aware of the storm of protest that greeted the revelations of American Miss Mayo, who, with courage of conviction, raised the curtain of ignorance and indifference in her uncompromising portrayal of the cruelty and horror of the gorgeous and gruesome land. In "Daughters of India" Miss Wilson has undertaken a "large order," in the vernacular of the man in the street; for it would appear a superhuman task truthfully to describe but one small facet of the conglomerate life of teeming millions of that Dark Land, with its menace and magnificence, its pomp and pageant, festering corruption and tortuous travellings of the soul. Full of interest is this story of an American woman missionary, aided in her good work by a few white colleagues and a handful of saintly, selfless native recruits; who endeavour to make contact with and help in some small measure the poor, the halt and the blind, by bringing a modicum of physical and spiritual hope and healing into the lives of the corrupt, the down-trodden and despised. A groping, bewildering crusade at its best; for they are kittie cattle to handle, queer fish, these Indians of all kinds and eonditions; the whole effort c¢alculated to bring despair to all save the stoutest-hearted spreader of the Gospel of Christ. "How could He come to a land like this?" in bitter discouragement cries a noble old native woman worker in the spiritual vineyard. "Could Te come as a Hindu, so that the Moslems would despise Him? Or as a native Christian, so that they both would spit on Him? Or a Jew, so that the three would crucify Him? Or an Englishman, so that everybody could revile Him altogether ?" Of intriguing simplicity of narration, we get an impression from Miss Wilson’s book of an unexaggerated statement of fact, and attention is enchained by what is apparently a plain tale of day-by-day existence in a foreign country, the insistent quest of the Grail, and a striving to plant in barren ground some flowering seed of truth and beauty. Elusive beyond Western understanding is the sliding, slipping mind of the dark and hopeless Indian outcast, possessing no glimmer of equity or straight dealing; suspicious, dirty, the scum of the earth, yet here and there with some saving quality of generous grace,

"Ror ways that are dark and tricks that are vain," as Bret Harte onee said of an equally wily nation, one looks to the Dark Land of India; but, whatever the personal point of view, we pay homage to the Christ-like spirit of those who walk in poverty for sweet Charity’s sake, although it may be we close the book with an unregenerate sigh of satisfaction that our individual lot is cast in a more pleasant nlace-

R.U.

R.