Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah

Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah was born in 1874 in the village of Vellalanvilai, in the Tirunelveli country of Tamil South India, and he was not the first Christian in his house. His father, Thomas, had been converted in 1839 at a mission school and had gone on to serve as a pastor there. His mother, Ellen, had waited thirteen years between her daughter's birth and his, and when he came she dedicated him as Hannah dedicated Samuel, and gave him the prophet's name. So the boy grew up inside a faith already two generations deep, and what he would do with his life was not a break with his people but a continuation of it.

At Madras Christian College he read mathematics, fell ill before the final examination, and never took the degree. He came away with something else instead. The principal, Dr. William Miller, gave him the name Azariah, and it is the name by which the whole world came to know him.

He went to work for the YMCA, the first Indian secretary in the South, and travelled. In 1896 he met the American student-movement leader John R. Mott, who noted his enthusiasm and remembered it. In 1903 he helped found the Indian Missionary Society of Tirunelveli, and on Christmas Day of 1905, with his college friend K. T. Paul and fifteen others, the National Missionary Society of India: societies run by Indians and paid for by Indians, at a time when almost nobody thought Indians could do either.

Then came Edinburgh. In June 1910 the whole Western missionary establishment gathered for the World Missionary Conference, and on a Monday evening in the Assembly Hall a young Indian clergyman rose to speak on the problem of co-operation between foreign and native workers. Consider what he was standing in front of: the men who ran the mission societies, who paid the salaries, who decided which Indians were fit for which offices. He began by saying, courteously and plainly, that India would need Western missionaries for years to come. And then he told them what all their giving had not yet given. "You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS!" The capital letters are in the printed record. Everyone in that hall knew the passage from Saint Paul he was standing on, and knew what Paul says such gifts amount to without love. In the same hall that week sat an American bishop, Charles Henry Brent, who went away convinced the conference had ducked the harder question of Christian unity altogether, and among the young stewards was a future Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1909 he had been ordained; he began learning Telugu, a language not his own, and went to the Dornakal district of Hyderabad State. On 29 December 1912, in St Paul's Cathedral, Calcutta, with the Metropolitan of India presiding and ten other bishops assisting, he was consecrated the first Bishop of Dornakal: a diocesan bishop, not an assistant, and the first Indian ever consecrated a bishop of the Anglican Communion. Isabel Whitehead, the wife of his mentor Bishop Henry Whitehead, urged him to wear a turban for the occasion; to her it was the very emblem of a dignified Orient. To Azariah it looked like either the cloth a labourer wraps against the sun or the headgear of princes and Brahmans, and he wore a plain cassock instead.

What followed was thirty-three years of unglamorous building in a country whose language he had learned as a grown man. In 1924 the diocese had eight British priests and fifty-three Indian clergy; by 1935 it had two hundred and fifty ordained Indian clergy, more than two thousand village teachers, clinics, cooperatives and printing presses. The Anglican population of the diocese rose from 56,681 in 1912 to 225,080 in 1941, most of them from the communities then called the depressed classes, for whom baptism was also an exit from a stigma the world had fixed on them. Azariah watched them closely and without condescension. When converts of their own accord gave up beef to lower the prejudice of caste neighbours against the faith, he wrote that he was very much amused, and that the campaign's coming entirely from them was among the most encouraging facts he knew. He reminded his diocese that the religion of Christ refuses to be confined to any one race, class, or caste, and that if it ever becomes petrified and static, it is dead.

It cost him. Gandhi opposed the mass conversions, holding them exploitative and, at a moment when British constitutional reform was tying political representation to religious community, a threat to keeping the untouchables inside a Hinduism he meant to reform from within. This was not a foreign missionary against an Indian patriot. It was two Indians disagreeing about what the liberation of the oppressed actually required, reform from inside or a real way out, and Azariah, who had spent his whole life fighting for Indian hands on Indian church work, took the harder side of a popular argument. He saw further than the quarrel. He warned of a time coming when nationalism would be identified with loyalty to the ancient religion of the land, and would look with suspicion on any religion not supposed to belong to the soil.

He built his cathedral at Dornakal with Indian money only, no missionary funds, its frontage like a temple's and its towers like minarets, and it was consecrated on the Epiphany, in his own lifetime. And all through those years he kept working at the thing he had asked for at Edinburgh. At Lausanne in 1927 he told the world conference on Faith and Order, with Brent presiding in that room, that the divisions of Christendom might be a source of weakness in Christian countries, but that in non-Christian lands they were a sin and a scandal. He had organised the Tranquebar Conference in 1919, where thirty-three church leaders, thirty-one of them Indian, called for one visible Church in South India; he chaired the negotiations that followed for the rest of his life.

He died at Dornakal on the first day of 1945, aged seventy, and was buried in the compound of the cathedral he had built. Two and a half years later the Church of South India was inaugurated, Anglicans and Congregationalists and Presbyterians and Methodists in one body, the first union of its kind since the Reformation. He did not live to see it. But the thing he had asked a hall full of strangers for in 1910, and had never stopped asking for, was granted after all.