Who Was Amy Carmichael? Missionary to India's Temple Children
Amy Carmichael was an Irish missionary who lived from 1867 to 1951. She went to South India in 1895 and never came home. At Dohnavur, near India's southern tip, she made a home for hundreds of children, many of them rescued from being given to Hindu temples, and the work became the Dohnavur Fellowship. The children called her Amma, "mother." She also wrote some thirty-five books, and Christians still read them for their honesty about missionary life and their call to a love that holds nothing back.
Here's a fuller look at her life, what she wrote, and which of her books to start with.
Childhood in Ireland
Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born on December 16, 1867, in the village of Millisle, County Down, in the north of Ireland. She was the oldest of seven children. Her father, David, ran a flour mill, and both parents were devout Presbyterians. When she was a teenager the family moved to Belfast, and not long after, her father died.
In Belfast she began a Sunday class for the "shawlies," the mill girls who wore shawls because they couldn't afford hats. The class grew until it needed its own hall. Later she worked for a time among mill girls in Manchester.
A call to missions
At the Keswick Convention in England in 1887 she heard Hudson Taylor speak about China, and she became sure God was calling her to serve overseas. Robert Wilson, one of the founders of the Keswick Convention, took her into his family and treated her like a daughter. For years she signed her name Amy Wilson-Carmichael.
The China Inland Mission turned her down because of her health. She suffered from neuralgia, a nerve pain that could put her in bed for weeks. In 1893 she sailed for Japan instead, as the first missionary supported by the Keswick Convention, but illness sent her home after about fifteen months. In 1895 the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society accepted her for India. She arrived in November of that year.
The work in South India
In the Tinnevelly district she joined the missionary Thomas Walker and his wife. While she learned Tamil, she traveled from village to village with a small band of Indian Christian women, telling women in their homes and courtyards about Christ. She wore Indian dress and went wherever the band was welcome.
The work was slow and costly. Converts, especially girls, could lose everything for confessing Christ, and some families would rather see a child dead than baptized. When she wrote her first full book about it, Things as They Are (1903), she refused to dress it up:
Practical missionary life is an unexciting thing. It is not sparkling all over with incident. It is very prosaic at times.
Things as They Are, Humdrum
The temple children
Around 1901 a young girl named Preena ran away from a Hindu temple where she had been dedicated to the gods, and she found her way to Amy. Preena's story opened Amy's eyes to a hidden trade: little girls given to temples and raised for a life of temple prostitution. That same year the band settled at Dohnavur, and the rescue of these children became her life's work.
She wrote about it with tenderness and with anger. In Lotus Buds she pictured the children as flowers in a temple pool, gathered by a hand that had no right to them:
The children of the temples of South India are His — His and not another's.
Lotus Buds, Lotus Buds
The work grew. By 1913 there were well over a hundred children, and in 1918 a home for boys was added. In her books she gave the glory to God and much of the credit to her Indian fellow workers, who did most of the searching for children in danger. In 1927 the work was formally organized as the Dohnavur Fellowship. She never asked anyone for money. She prayed, and she told what God had done.
Love that costs
The thread through all her writing is love that doesn't count the cost. She asked her readers hard questions about what they were willing to give up for people who had never heard of Christ:
Christ counted souls worth Calvary. What do we count them worth?
Things as They Are, What do we count them worth?
She also learned that much of that love would be spent on ordinary things: feeding babies, nursing the sick, scrubbing pots. She called it "the sacredness of the commonplace":
The enlightening of a dark soul or the lighting of a kitchen fire, it matters not which it is, if only we are obedient to the heavenly vision, and work with a pure intention to the glory of our God.
Lotus Buds, The Glory of the Usual
Her later years
In 1931 she had a bad fall. The injury, and arthritis after it, kept her mostly in her room for the last twenty years of her life. She didn't stop working. She led the Fellowship from her bed, prayed, wrote letters, and wrote many of her best-loved books, including Gold Cord, Rose from Brier and If.
She died at Dohnavur on January 18, 1951, at eighty-three. She had asked that no stone be put over her grave. The children placed a birdbath there instead, marked with one word: Amma.
Why she's still read
Elisabeth Elliot, who wrote her life story in A Chance to Die, was one of many Christians whose lives she shaped. Amy writes about suffering, obedience and prayer without any sentiment, and she never lets you forget that the Lord is near. Her stories of real people, like the Hindu girl Mimosa who held to God for twenty years with almost no teaching, are still some of the most moving missionary books ever written.
Where to start
TheWay Library has seven of her earlier books, all free to read. Start with Mimosa, a short true story you can read in an evening. Then read Things as They Are, her honest picture of village missions, and Lotus Buds, about the children of Dohnavur. If Things as They Are feels heavy, read Overweights of Joy, which she wrote to show the joy that ran underneath.
Our guide to Amy Carmichael's books describes all seven, and our collection of Amy Carmichael quotes gathers her best lines, each checked against her books. For more lives like hers, see our list of the best missionary biographies. You'll find all her books on the Amy Carmichael author page.