Across India at the Dawn of the 20th Century with Lucy E. Guinness

Lucy Evangeline Guinness [1865-1906] wrote this book during the course of a three month tour to India with her father Henry Grattan Guinness [1835-1910]. Lucy went on to marry Karl Kumm [1874-1930] and the couple went on to found the Sudan United Mission (SUM) – now Pioneers UK. This article provides a helpful summary of her life – as well as a very useful bibliography.

My thanks to Redcliffe College for providing me with a copy of this superbly illustrated book to scan. This title is in the public domain.

Lucy Evangeline Guinness [1865-1906], Across India at the Dawn of the 20th Century. London: The Religious Tract Society, 1898. Hbk. pp.260. [Click here to download a complete copy of the book in PDF]

Contents

• Preface
• Introductory – In the Eternal City

1. Bombay, the Eye of India
2. By the Western Sea
3. Sun Worshippers
4. Devotees of East and West
5. Pages from Poona
6. In a Zenana Bungalow
7. The Shrines of Poona
8. Ramabai
9. A Lodge in the Wilderness
10. In a Mofussil Mosque
11. By the Eastern Sea
12. Association Work – ‘From Shore to Shore’
13. Neo-Hinduism
14. Doomed, but Still Dominant
15. Wedding and Widowhood
16. Calcutta and Bengal
17. Darjeeling
18. Between Four Heathendoms
19. The Focus of Heathenism in India
20. Within Four Walls
21. In the North-West
22. Inside a Famine Poorhouse
23. The Rivers of the Unwatered Land
24. ‘Rivers of Living Water.
25. ‘If–‘
26. Conclusion
27. The Behar Mission

• Notes
• Index

Preface

Across India the Sun is rising. How deep the shadows lie, how few are the points of illumination still; yet how surely the Light of the world has dawned; and in what ways we may help to bring the coming Everlasting Day, these pages seek to show.

They are very simple pages; glimpses caught in a brief winter visit of three months, commonplace glimpses such as everyone sees who has the privilege of visiting our vast Eastern Empire. As a traveller’s tale their view is. limited – Bombay, Poona, Anantapur, Madras, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Benares, Mirzapur, voila tout. But where we did not go in fact, we have since gone in heart, and with the help of Dr. George Smith’s Conversion of India, of Mr.Wilder’s Appeal from India, and of every other Indian missionary book I could obtain, I have tried to bring together facts for the whole Empire, and to justify from the missionary standpoint the title Across India at the Dawn of the 20th Century. [Continue reading]