Dohnavur Collections

The Dohnavur Fellowship (TDF) is a non-denominational Christian charity not affiliated with any institutional Christian administrative and/or theological bodies. It was founded in 1901 by Amy Carmichael (1867-1951), an Irish woman missionary who lived and worked in India for most of her life. The charity runs a clinic, hospital, kindergarten, residential and day school, vocational training center, home for senior citizens, and a home for children and young women at their institutional campus in Dohnavur, Tirunelveli district, Tamil Nadu, near the foothills of the Western Ghats. The Fellowship and surrounding settlement were both named Dohnavur in honor of Count Dohna, a Prussian count who made a substantial donation to help establish Carmichael’s charitable and educational endeavour.

Carmichael was explicit that missionaries wanting to join the fellowship and become part of the TDF family should not exclusively be preachers or theologicians. Each of them had to be skilled in at least one branch of knowledge or trade, whether doctors, engineers, naturalists and additionally they should be skilled educators capable of transferring their knowledge to children of diverse age groups successfully. Various members of the TDF family continue to regularly observe and record nature (flora and fauna) and weather at this retreat in the logbooks, their personal journals, diaries, along with sketches and songs. The textual and visual material however were created not just by today’s members but also by those in the colonial period including Amy Carmichael, Godfrey Webb-Peploe and others, who were among the first naturalists to record the region’s flora and fauna.