REWARDING JOURNEY TO SOUTH INDIA

It was decided that Brother Skinner should make a trip to south India and visit the brothers in South Kanara and Travancore. Hendry Carmichael, the circuit overseer, though just recovering from a serious operation, accompanied the branch overseer on this tour. The two brothers left Bombay by coastal steamer and stopped off at Mangalore for a weekend. There they found a group of fourteen interested persons who quite regularly studied The Watchtower in Kanarese. None knew English very well and there was no interpreter. Therefore, the public talk was advertised as an English meeting, with Brother Skinner as the speaker. With only one day to advertise the talk, it was amazing to note that ninety persons attended.

At the next place, Cochin, an assembly had been arranged in an effort to start developing this part of the field. Under British rule, Cochin had been a state separate from Travancore, with its own maharajah and system of government, although the people of Cochin State spoke Malayalam, as did those of Travancore. Up to that point in time, however, most of the work in the Malayalam field had been done in southern Travancore State. The opening session at this Cochin assembly had 210 in attendance. Thirty to forty interested persons had come from Travancore. There were 110 Witnesses engaged in the assembly witnessing activity and the eyes of the people of Cochin fairly bulged as they saw twenty to thirty sisters walking around the town with placards advertising the public talk​—a thing never seen before in Cochin. It is a city saturated with Roman Catholicism, with a resident bishop. Yet there was a final attendance of 1,022 at the public meeting, making it the largest assembly held in India up to that time. It was gratifying to observe twenty-five persons get baptized and to find a group of five English-speaking men desirous of being formed into a congregation.

On October 14, Brother Skinner was scheduled to give the public talk at the Gokhale Hall in a solidly Hindu locality. But a crowd of anti-Christian rowdies broke up the meeting and the brothers had to leave amid the jeering shouts of “Quit India!” Violence was threatened at the same time. Even the police were unable to restore law and order.

All the brothers met at the Poona Kingdom Hall, where they completed the assembly program. Afterward, Brothers Skinner and Carmichael went to the police station and registered a complaint. Then plans were made to hold another public meeting in the same hall on October 31, but this time with police protection. The brothers organized another advertising campaign and distributed 10,000 handbills in both the Marathi and English languages. When the time came for the meeting to begin, there were two police officers and about twelve constables present. Brother Skinner had scarcely got through his introduction when trouble broke out again. The police intervened but quickly were outnumbered and soon great crowds of shouting people gathered, so that it appeared that the assembled brothers and interested persons were endangered.

However, an arrangement was made with a neighbor whose rear gate opened onto the hall grounds that, in the event of trouble, he would open the gate and allow the brother’s to escape. So, as the police were battling against the tremendous odds at the front, the brothers quietly filed out without observation and all escaped injury. Later, the newspapers gave considerable publicity to the affair, much of which was unfavorable to Jehovah’s people. A letter of protest against the infringement of the Witnesses’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and worship was sent by the branch overseer to the minister of home affairs, Government of Bombay, with copies to Prime Minister Nehru and the inspector-general of police, Bombay State.