The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India
by Alice B. Van Doren

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Title: Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India

Author: Alice B. Van Doren

Release Date: April 16, 2004 [EBook #12062]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: Regina Thumboo
College, Lucknow
The First M.A. from Isabella Thoburu]

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