A ‘trusted friend’

Walter Scott and Anira Phipon Lepcha reflect on the life of a woman missionary and her legacy in the Eastern Indian Himalayas.

THIS year, in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim state in the Eastern Indian Himalayas, as Paljor Namgyal Girls High School celebrates its centenary, its community remembers fondly its founder, Mary Hepburne Scott (1877-1963), who served as a missionary with the Church of Scotland in the region for 48 years.

The Eastern Himalayan mission began in Bengal in 1870, when William Macfarlane left a failing mission in Gaya, Bihar, noting that the hill people – and particularly those of the Lepcha tribe – were more receptive to the gospel. He started among the teaplanters in Darjeeling, before moving the mission headquarters to Kalimpong in 1873. When he died in 1887, the Young Men’s Guild of Scotland sent a young John Anderson Graham, with his new wife Katherine, to take his place.

Mary, who dreamt of being a missionary in India from childhood, was finally given permission by her parents, Lord and Lady Polwarth, to go to India with the Grahams in 1905. They left Tilbury Docks, London on the SS Mombasa on January 5, bound for Calcutta.

The Kalimpong mission put more stock into helping people than into mass market evangelising. Consequently, Mary enjoyed a huge variety of experience in and around the growing town over the next 18 years. She taught in the new girls’ school and ran its hostel, supervised handicrafts in the industrial school for local women, and nursed in the hospital. She played the harmonium in church, and opened a Christian bookshop in the bazaar. Yet she was best known in the district for her tours around local settlements by pony and on foot, covering huge distances over steep terrain to get to know local people in their homes. During epidemics, she established makeshift medical camps to care for the sick and dying, at great risk to her own health.

James Nicholl Ogilvie, convenor of the Church of Scotland’s Foreign Mission Committee (FMC) in Edinburgh, observed in 1922: ‘the heroic work of district visitation that is carried on, year in year out, by the Hon. Mary H. Scott, DCS. No-one comes closer to the life of the villagers than she. The women and the girls of the hills rejoice to see her coming. She is their proved and trusted friend.’

The mission’s interest in neighbouring Sikkim, to the north, had begun in the 1880s. The small state was ruled autocratically by the ‘Chogyal’, and recognised as strategically important for its borders with Bhutan, Tibet and Nepal, for evangelical and commercial reasons. The missionaries, however, were forbidden in all three countries, and were firmly denied residence in Sikkim. Instead, the Scottish Universities Mission – recruited from the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen - opened a training institute in Kalimpong, forwarding local men into Sikkim as catechists, teachers and medical compounders.

Sikkim proved endlessly challenging. In 1890, residence in the state was eventually granted, but only at a distance from Gangtok – and therefore from the Government, which at that time had also started tax-raising to provide education and medical services, effectively marginalising the mission’s work. Attempts to get the Chogyal’s permission to build a church in Gangtok in 1910 and 1922 failed to bear fruit.

By late 1922, the mission was in sharp decline. The post had lain empty for three years and the number of Christians was declining. It was expected that yet another man would fill the post, for which the touring requirement was physically demanding. Nonetheless, Mary volunteered to fill the post until a suitable man could be found. Her offer was gladly accepted.

Thanks to her reputation in the region, the Chogyal soon granted Mary residence in Gangtok. She moved there in April 1923, and in December held a large Christmas party for local people at all levels of society. The Chogyal and senior officials attended, bringing a gramophone, rugs and cups. There was a Christmas tree, party games, and Christmas carols, and people of other faiths attended. From here Mary’s relationship with the Chogyal and his administration blossomed. In April 1925 she was invited to join the Royal family on a tour of India, and she was often asked to act as a hostess for Palace functions.

From her arrival, Mary had envisioned building a church in Gangtok as a permanent mission station for Sikkim, but deliberately avoided raising this with the Chogyal. Instead, she focussed her effort on mission stations across the state, continuing her touring work by pony or on foot, covering huge distances of mountainous terrain, to oversee the creation of new mission stations, schools, dispensaries and churches.

Yet for Mary, the jewel in the crown would be to address the lack of education for girls. This was emotive, having herself received little formal education, yet seen its value for girls in Kalimpong. With the Chogyal’s approval, she started a school in her home, beginning with two girls, and growing it rapidly. While it was aimed initially at daughters of upper-class families, recognising that this would buy her favour with the rulers, in due course it was widened to all, and was formalised as Paljor Namgyal Girls High School in 1944, today a flagship school for 1,200 girls.

From her personal letters, it is clear that Mary had little time for over-zealous evangelising. In the end, it was Mary who gained their confidence. Through her school, the worship services in her home, and her friendships with people at all levels across the state, she built up the Christian community, and in parallel the attitudes of the rulers softened. In 1933 Sikkim incorporated the Christian Marriages Act of India, and the Government approved the offer of land on the outskirts of Gangtok for a Christian cemetery.

“Mary, who dreamt of being a missionary in India from childhood, was finally given permission by her parents, Lord and Lady Polwarth, to go to India...”

At this point, Mary instigated a petition for a church among local Christians. It was submitted in August 1933 to the Chogyal, who gave his final approval in April 1934, including for the design. It is notable that St Andrews Church in Darjeeling (1873) and Macfarlane Church in Kalimpong (1891) are high neo-Gothic in design, and the 1910 designs for the Gangtok church show a quintessential Scots kirk, with Gothic windows and buttressing, making no concession to local style. By contrast, the design submitted to the Chogyal in 1934 was definitively Tibetan – by local people for local people.

Mary’s “retirement” to Kalimpong in 1940, due to ill-health and failing eyesight, proved short-lived. That same year, seeing blind boys begging near her cottage, she established a home and school for blind children, and would lead it until finally retiring to Scotland in 1953.

Walter Scott is a great, great, great nephew of Mary Scott, and a former volunteer-teacher at the Mary Scott Home & School for the Blind in Kalimpong.

Anira Phipon Lepcha is assistant professor of history at Sikkim University, and a fourth generation Lepcha-Christian.