Prasanna Rao found a job as a secondary-grade teacher in C.B.M. (Canadian Baptist Mission) High School and Maryamma as a higher-grade teacher in the girls' school associated with it, Hope Hall. No one, except the Canadians who ran the mission, called Hope Hall "Hope Hall." Everyone else, all the teachers and students, knew it as "Hopalu." They would say: Hopalu this, Hopalu that.
Missionaries were the ones who brought modern education to India. Before that the brahmins educated their children, if at all, in gurukulams where they would study the Vedas but nothing useful. When the missionaries opened modern schools the brahmins and other upper-castes resisted it at first but, not wanting their children to be left behind, ended up sending them to the mission schools. But they did not want their children to sit with the outcaste children who had readily joined the schools from from the beginning.
There was a mission school in the town of Vijayanagaram that, because it was in a big town where there were few untouchables and because it was formed with the help of the local rajah, happened to have only caste students. When some missionaries, impressed by the cleverness of two untouchable girls from a nearby village, brought them into town to go to the school, the parents of the caste children threatened to withdraw their children immediately. The missionaries tried to appease them by promising to make the untouchable girls sit separately. They couldn't use seats but had to sit on the floor. The parents still objected: "What if the teacher slaps the outcastes and with the same hand touches our children?"
Missionaries were not working specially for the upiftment of untouchables. If in their schools and hospitals they happened to serve untouchables in greater numbers, that was because it was the untouchables who were most willing to convert. In fact, the early missionaries said that a caste Hindu convert, because he had to give up his caste privileges, is much more of a credit to Christianity than an untouchable who becomes a Christian only in the hope of escaping his poverty and oppression. Whenever the missionaries had a chance to serve caste Hindus they were eager to make accomodations for them at the expense of untouchables. When caste Hindus did not want their children to go to school with untouchable children, the missionaries started separate schools for caste students that they actually called "caste schools."
Hope Hall had been started as a caste girls' school, but shortly before Maryamma became a teacher there it was opened to untouchables too. At that time the Congress party was trying to convince untouchables that they would be treated with dignity in independent india--not by organizing untouchables or giving them a voice in the independence movement, but by preaching to the upper-castes that they should serve the untouchables. In allowing untouchable students into caste schools, the missionaries were not acting on any special Christian principles but merely going with the spirirt of the times.