A Promised Life
Robert Maxwell: Missionary to the Punjab 1900-1942
by
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After their months in study while Robert and Maud lived with the Andersons and their first summer in Dharmsala, Robert began to work at Boys High School in Rawalpindi while he continued to study Urdu and Hindi. In addition to studying and working at the school, he visited the churches within bicycle riding distance of Rawalpindi and began to become familiar with the people and culture around him. In a letter to his father in April, Robert wrote: The people here as everywhere else are the most peculiar thing. Yesterday I was riding the bicycle and the tire punctured so I had to come on foot and I took a short cut between the bridges crossing the stream on stepping stones. As I was starting to cross I saw a woman of perhaps seventy with nothing on that I noticed taking a bath. Such things are not at all surprising to us anymore and we allow men to work around the yard and to come in for worship with so little on that you would send them to jail for indecent exposure. They go about with sort of pantaloons which seem to be made on a band and come to the knees in front but cover very little of the back of the leg. Some go on the street with only a shirt and loin cloth on and some with nothing except the loin cloth and a very small one at that. Fakirs usually go with many rags about them but occasionally one is seen without anything but sacred ashes on him and they are fat lustful looking fellows, too. Women usually dress so as to cover themselves very well though they look strange at all times in pants, but when they bathe in the rivers they think that if they do expose themselves it is pleasing to the gods. The plow used here would cause your eyes to stand out with wonder. It is a straight piece with sometimes a piece of iron on the point and this is fastened to a long, crooked stick which is attached to the yoke. The furrow is about three inches deep and the same in width. They plow very small divisions and the poor oxen and buffaloes keep turning around. They go over it often and after they have worked with the plow to their satisfaction they take a plank or clod crusher and go over it a few times with that. One day I was watching a man plow as I supposed and Rev. Scott asked me if I had seen him drilling in grain. I told him that I had seen him plowing but he said he was sowing and I watched him more carefully and saw that the handle of his plow was hollow and he was taking grain from a sack which hung from his neck and dropping the grain through the hollow handle into the earth. The drill and plow were so much alike that I could not distinguish between them for a little distance. To dig they do not use spade or shovel but a sort of hoe which resembles a shovel with the handle stuck through one edge of it like the old hoe used by the slaves except that the side edges of this are slightly curved. For the work of shoveling or rather of moving broken stone I have seen them use an instrument with broad flat tines something like a potato fork but instead of one man using it three were trying to work it, one held the handle and two pulled strings to move the load. It looked like boys tying to plow with a stick. Recently we have had a box made and the carpenters did the planing with jack planes but instead of one man working it, one pushed and one pulled. The box is quite good now that it is done but two men were at it for a week though I should say that they were waiting on the blacksmith for part of the time and now his work is not finished or we would have sent the box off today. They work so cheaply that Europeans cannot at all compete with them so we are likely to have many different workmen during our stay here. A Christian man did the dealing with them and watched that they did the work instead of stealing or leaving or we would have had more trouble and worry.
He wrote to Elizabeth in the summer of 1902 that he hoped to have enough skill in Urdu to be able to preach when the time for itinerating came around. In the meantime, he was learning about trust in a whole new way. Each time he preached, he had to depend on someone else to translate his sermon for him so that the congregation could understand it. He could only hope that the translator was being true to the sermon as he had crafted it.
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About the Book
Robert Maxwell was promised for ministry seven years before he was born, and his life work would take him to British India in the half century leading up to its independence. Maxwell spent his life keeping his father’s promise to enter the ministry, and he would be a formative part of the missionary movement that shaped the Presbyterian Church in today’s Pakistan.
In A Promised Life, author Elizabeth Paige Maxwell McRight tells the story of her grandfather Robert Maxwell and his role in the missionary movement, all through the lens of her family’s part in it and with many wonderful letters and correspondence left behind. Tracing his life from a farm in Upstate New York to a world strange and new to him and his bride—a world where he spent forty-two years in mission service—this chronicle both tells of the joy and the sacrifice in his family life as well as documents Maxwell’s mission work in the first half of the twentieth century, which would lead to the growth of the Presbyterian Church in Pakistan today.
The Maxwells felt a sense of duty to raise sons and daughters who would make their own contributions to their communities, and their story is part of the larger tale of the spread of the gospel far beyond their own households. They are not particularly remarkable on the world stage, yet their story points beyond themselves to represent the countless others who devoted their lives to being Christ’s witnesses.
About the Author
Elizabeth Paige Maxwell McRight is a retired Presbyterian minister, and she spent half of her ministry serving on the staffs of four presbyteries. Like her grandfather Robert, the subject of A Promised Life, she discovered along the way that the support work of church administration is important ministry. She currently lives in Orlando, Florida.