Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Sikkim, Gangtok. Picture: EPCS

A Trusted Friend

Monday December 9 2024

Walter Scott and Anira Phipon Lepcha reflect on the life of a missionary and her legacy in the Eastern Indian Himalayas

This year, in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim state in the Eastern Indian Himalayas, as Paljor Namgyal Girls High School celebrates its centenary, its community remembers fondly its founder, Mary Hepburne Scott (1877-1963), who served as a missionary with the Church of Scotland in the region for 48 years.

The Eastern Himalayan mission had begun in Bengal in 1870 by William Macfarlane, who started among tea-planters in Darjeeling, before moving the mission headquarters to Kalimpong in 1873; and continued after his death in 1887 by a young John Anderson Graham, and his new wife Katherine.

Mary, who had dreamt of being a missionary in India from childhood, was given permission by her parents, Lord and Lady Polwarth, to go to India with the Grahams in 1905.

Mary enjoyed a huge variety of experience in and around Kalimpong over the next 18 years. She taught in the new girls’ school and ran its hostel, supervised handicrafts in the industrial school for local women, and nursed in the hospital. She played the harmonium in church, and opened a Christian bookshop in the bazaar.

Yet she was best known in the district for her tours around local settlements by pony and on foot, covering huge distances over steep terrain to get to know local people in their homes. During epidemics, she established makeshift medical camps to care for the sick and dying, at great risk to her own health.

James Nicholl Ogilvie, convenor of the Church of Scotland’s Foreign Mission Committee in Edinburgh, observed in 1922: ‘the heroic work of district visitation that is carried on, year in year out, by the Hon. Mary H. Scott, DCS. No-one comes closer to the life of the villagers than she. The women and the girls of the hills rejoice to see her coming. She is their proved and trusted friend’.

The mission’s interest in neighbouring Sikkim, to the north, had begun in the 1880s, but by late 1922, the mission there was in sharp decline. The post had lain empty for three years and the number of Christians was falling. It was expected that a man would fill the post, but Mary volunteered to stand in until a suitable person could be found.

Thanks to her reputation in the region, the Chogyal (the state’s autocratic ruler) granted Mary residence in the capital, Gangtok. She moved there in April 1923, and in December held a large Christmas party for local people at all levels of society. The Chogyal and senior officials attended, bringing a gramophone, rugs and cups. From here Mary’s relationship with the Chogyal and his administration blossomed. In April 1925 she was invited to join the Royal family on a tour of India, and she was often asked to act as a hostess for Palace functions.

From her arrival, Mary had envisioned building a church in Gangtok, but deliberately avoided raising this with the Chogyal. Instead, she focussed her effort on mission stations across the state, continuing her touring work by pony or on foot, covering huge distances of mountainous terrain, to oversee the creation of new mission stations, schools, dispensaries and churches.

Yet for Mary, the jewel in the crown would be to address the lack of education for girls. With the Chogyal’s approval, she started a school in her home, beginning with two girls, and growing it rapidly. While it was aimed initially at daughters of upper-class families, recognising that this would buy her favour with the rulers, in due course it was widened to all, and was formalised as Paljor Namgyal Girls High School in 1944, today a flagship school for 1,200 girls.

It is clear that Mary had little time for over-zealous evangelising. On reading in the April 1926 issue of Life and Work that the Foreign Mission Committee were advertising for an ordained doctor for Sikkim, she wrote to Dr Graham: ‘I do hope if they get a new missionary for here, he will be a man who is loving and wide-minded, and a gentleman. They will never stand the sort of missionary who proclaims that people of other religions are all going to damnation, and that all their things are bad... They will stand anything from a man who will live Christ more than he talks it, and the right person could gain their confidence.’ 

In the end, it was Mary who gained their confidence, through her school, the worship services in her home, and her friendships with people at all levels across the state. In 1933 Sikkim incorporated the Christian Marriages Act of India. The Government approved the offer of land on the outskirts of Gangtok for a Christian cemetery, and the following year the Chogyal gave final approval for a church.

It is notable that earlier designs for a Gangtok church show a quintessential Scots kirk, with Gothic windows and buttressing, making no concession to local style. By contrast, the design submitted to the Chogyal in 1934 was definitively Tibetan – by local people for local people. 

Mary’s “retirement” to Kalimpong in 1940, due to ill-health and failing eyesight, proved short-lived. That same year, seeing blind boys begging near her cottage, she established a home and school for blind children, and would lead it until finally retiring to Scotland in 1953.

Walter Scott is a great, great, great nephew of Mary Scott, and a former volunteer-teacher at the Mary Scott Home & School for the Blind in Kalimpong.
Anira Phipon Lepcha is assistant professor of history at Sikkim University, and a fourth generation Lepcha-Christian.

This article first appeared in Life and Work, the magazine of the Church of Scotland. Subscribe here