Amy Beatrice Carmichael was born on 16 December 1867 in Millisle, County Down. She sailed for Japan in 1893, transferred to Ceylon and then India, and in 1901 rescued her first temple girl — Preena, a seven-year-old who had escaped a Hindu temple in Tamil Nadu where she was being trained for ritual prostitution.
Carmichael settled at Dohnavur, near Tirunelveli, and refused all furloughs, remaining in India from 1901 until her death 50 years later. The Dohnavur Fellowship grew from a single rescued child into a compound housing over a thousand girls (and later boys), with its own hospital, schools and adoptive family structure.
She dressed in an Indian sari, took the name Amma ("mother"), and campaigned publicly against the devadasi system — securing the 1947 Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act, which formally outlawed temple dedication of minors in the state.
An accident in 1931 confined her to bed for the last 20 years of her life, during which she wrote 35 devotional books — most famously If (1938), a spare series of prose meditations on Calvary love. She died at Dohnavur on 18 January 1951 and asked to be buried without a headstone; a simple stone birdbath marks the place, inscribed only "Amma".