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	Satyamoorthy always remembered that terrible day in Adavi Kolanu but he had been too small to understand what was going on. Years later Marthamma explained: "That day, if the great Lord Jesus Christ were not on our side, they would have surely slain us all." His mother would tell him, "Nayana, beware of the hell you can let loose if you try to dress decently. they would never allow us to, never." She shook her head sadly and told him that that had not been the first time, nor had it been the last, that she was humiliated. Humiliated for wearing nice clothes, for being clean, for being literate, for being a teacher, for desiring to be treated with dignity. But there had been a day when the malas and madigas of Adavi Kolanu had stood up to the kshatriyas. Part of the credit for that goes to the missionaries who first gave them clothes and taught them how to wear them. They were the ones who gave the untouchables the radical idea that they too were legitimate children of God. Many of the untouchable teachers who had been educated by the missionaries became the torchbearers, in villages like Adavi Kolanu, in struggles against caste oppression. They were the ones who did not want to go on begging the caste Hindus for water and led the struggles for independent water sources in the 1920s and 30s. But the same missionaries who, knowingly or unknowingly, stirred the untouchables' desire for social dignity were revolted by their militancy and opposed their taking up arms in self-defense.
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