Ponnammal: Her Story

The life of Ponnammal, one of the earliest Indian women to work with Carmichael, who went with her through the villages and towns looking for ways to save children from temple service. The book opens with Ponnammal as a young widow, desperate with loneliness, and follows her conversion and her years in the work at Dohnavur; later chapters treat her character, her music and her pain. It was first published by Morgan & Scott in 1918 with a foreword by Handley Moule, Bishop of Durham, and reissued by SPCK in 1924, 1939 and 1950; Carmichael's note to the third edition asks readers to remember the date of writing, since the Fellowship by then had its own hospital. It runs to seventeen short chapters and was translated into Danish and German. It is the first of her portraits of individual Indian Christians, followed by Mimosa and Kohila.