Walter Scott and Anira Phipon Lepcha reflect on the life of a woman 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 began in Bengal in 1870, when William Macfarlane left a failing mission in Gaya, Bihar, noting that the hill people – and particularly those of the Lepcha tribe – were more receptive to the gospel. He started among the teaplanters in Darjeeling, before moving the mission headquarters to Kalimpong in 1873. When he died in 1887, the Young Men’s Guild of Scotland sent a young John Anderson Graham, with his new wife Katherine, to take his place.

Mary, who dreamt of being a missionary in India from childhood, was finally given permission by her parents, Lord and Lady Polwarth, to go to India with the Grahams in 1905. They left Tilbury Docks, London on the SS Mombasa on January 5, bound for Calcutta.

The Kalimpong mission put more stock into helping people than into mass market evangelising. Consequently, Mary enjoyed a huge variety of experience in and around the growing town 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.