THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY The Theosophical Society was founded on 7 September 1875 in New York following a talk on ancient Egyptian spiritualism, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), a Russian occult medium, and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), a U.S. Civil War veteran and abolitionist, who became the society's first president. Their goals were to study the spiritual truth underlying all religions, to reject materialism, and to do public service. The last aim enabled the society to establish schools, influence the Indian national movement, and act as the seedbed for India's first feminist association in Madras (Chennai) in 1917. Blavatsky claimed that a Rajput spirit "master" or "mahatma" had inspired her during her trip to Tibet and India in 1851. She met Olcott after writing a defense of his investigations into occult phenomena in an essay, "Rosicrucianism." In 1874 they claimed they had witnessed an apparition named Kitty King at a seance in Philadelphia. Their fascination with the occult led Blavatsky to start an Esoteric Section of the society in 1888 and to claim that her books were mystical revelations by "masters." Her first book, Isis Unveiled (1877) increased the society's membership worldwide.

In India

In 1879 Blavatsky and Olcott, who had corresponded with Dayananda Saraswati, the Vedic Hindu revivalist and founder of the ?ry? Sam?j, established their headquarters in his city, Bombay (Mumbai), calling it the Theosophical Society of the ?rya Sam?j. However, theological disagreements separated them in 1882, the Theosophists moving south to Ady?r, Madras. Blavatsky and Olcott's lectures across North India and Sri Lanka were reported extensively in the Allahabad Pioneer by A. P. Sinnett. The British kept them under surveillance as possible Russian spies.

In 1881 Blavatsky began publishing the journal the Theosophist, which C. W. Leadbetter edited when she moved to London due to ill health. There, in 1889, Annie Besant (1847–1933), who was to become her greatest disciple, visited her after reading The Secret Doctrine (1887) on the doctrine of karma (reincarnation). Blavatsky also soon published The Key to Philosophy (1889) and The Voice of Silence (1890). Besant joined the Theosophical Society in 1891, mesmerized by Hinduism and by Blavatsky's fervent appeal to "come among us!" (Besant, Autobiography, p. 311).

Olcott recorded the society's history in his Old Diary Leaves (1892). His interest in Buddhism led him to Sri Lanka and Japan in the 1880s. In The Poor Pariah (1902), Olcott urged the educational uplift of the Dalits, or the panchamas, "downtrodden, wretched human beings" who were shunned by the high castes as untouchables, and seduced by Christian zeal. In 1894 Olcott started a free school for "untouchables" in Ur?r, near Ady?r. He established the Panchama Education Society, starting five primary vocational schools in Madras and several others in Sri Lanka between 1898 and his death in 1907. The Olcott Schools remain in operation with the aid of government grants.

Annie Besant's Early Years

Annie Wood was born in 1847 in London to a middle-class Irish-English family that became impoverished by her father's death. She was educated by a wealthy Calvinist widow and was married at nineteen to Frank Besant, an Anglican vicar. Annie railed against her husband's rigid Christian Victorian values, eventually leaving the marriage. In 1879 she wrote the tract "Marriage as It Was, and as It Should Be," while fighting a legal battle for custody of her children. Thwarted from attaining a degree in science by misogynistic university rules, she became a vocal advocate of women's education. Her spiritual quest led her first to Unitarianism, then to atheism and Fabian Socialism, before she finally became a Theosophist and Hindu.

Besant became a labor activist due to the trade unionist William Roberts. Her affair with the atheist Charles Bradlaugh led to her joining his National Secular Society. In 1877 she and Bradlaugh were tried for "obscenity" for having published Dr. Charles Knowlton's tract on contraception. Their victory prompted Besant to write Law of Population, although later, as a Theosophist, she repudiated this work. As a Fabian Socialist, she supported democratic representation on municipal boards; fought successfully in 1888 for women who were on strike in match factories; wrote and published The Unemployed, Why I Am a Socialist, and How Poverty May Be Destroyed. Radical socialists criticized her "Modern Socialism," and her socialist convictions declined. She became estranged both from Bradlaugh and Bernard Shaw when she espoused Theosophy. In 1908 she declared that democratic socialism would not succeed in India.

Annie Besant in India

In 1893 she and her Theosophist "guru" Gyanandra Nath Chakravarti attended the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago, where Swami Vivekananda made his inspiring speech on Hinduism, predicting that it was destined to "conquer the world" with its philosophic wisdom. On 16 November 1893, at the age of forty-six, Besant reached India. Her appearance in a sari, and her passionate lectures, praising Hinduism and Indian nationalism, sparked interest in journals like Amrita Bazaar Patrika, winning avid followers. She resided first in Benares (Varanasi), learning Sanskrit from Bhagwan Das, with whom she founded the Central Hindu College.

In 1896 at Maharani Girls' School, Mysore, Besant addressed the students as Hindu girls who would "grow up to be Hindu wives and mothers." Noting that there was "nothing nobler than loving, unselfish, spiritual Indian women," Besant beseeched them not to emulate materialistic Western women, but to aspire to the wisdom of female Upanishadic sages like Gargi and Maitreyi, and to the selflessness of the R?ma's heroic wife, S?t?. Her 1904 pamphlet, The Education of Indian Girls, became the educational blueprint for Indian girls for decades. Olcott's death in 1907 brought Besant to Ady?r as the society's new president and head of the Theosophical Educational Trust's network of National Schools.

Besant joined the Indian National Congress in 1914, when she started the journal Commonweal. She and Lokamanya ("Friend of the People") Tilak each started Home Rule Leagues in 1916, also helping M. A. Jinnah to forge the Congress-League Lucknow Pact that year. Arrested in June 1917 under the Defence of India Act, Besant was released after intercession by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. As the first European-born president of the Indian National Congress in 1917, Besant spoke about women activists in her inaugural address. In May 1917 at Ady?r, she became president of the Women's Indian Association. On 18 December 1918, she led a delegation to Secretary of State Edwin Montagu, pleading for female suffrage in India.

In 1919 Besant was replaced as president of the National Home Rule League by Mahatma Gandhi, whom she had tried, without success, to convert to Theosophy when he first came to London. Her last years were clouded by scandals around Leadbetter's alleged homosexuality; and around her proclamation of Jiddu Krishnamurti, a brilliant student, as "the messiah" or "world teacher" through the Order of the Star with twelve apostles. Krishnamurti himself denied that he was a "savior"and dismantled the order, breaking free of Besant's ambitions for him. Annie Besant died in Ady?r in 1933, but the Theosophical Society continues to flourish there.

Sita Anantha Raman

See alsoWomen's Education ; Women's Indian Association

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Besant, Annie. "Address to Maharani Girls' School," Mysore, 24 December 1896. In Arya Bala Bodhini. Ady?r: Theosophical Society, January 1897.

——. "An Appeal: Higher Education for Indian Girls." Ady?r: Theosophical Society, January 1915.

——. An Autobiography. 1893. Reprint, Ady?r: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1984.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Chandra, Jyoti. Annie Besant: From Theosophy to Nationalism. Delhi: K. K. Publications, 2001.

Forbes, Geraldine. Women in Modern India. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Jayawardena, Kumari. The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Kumar, Radha. The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1900. Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997.

Nethercott, Arthur H. The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961.

——. The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

Raman, Sita Anantha. Getting Girls to School: Social Reform in the Tamil Districts, 1870–1930. Kolkata: Stree, 1996.

Ramusack, Barbara. "Catalysts or Helpers? British Feminists, Indian Women's Rights, and Indian Independence." In The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan, edited by Gail Minault. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1981.

Taylor, Anne. Annie Besant: A Biography. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Wolpert, Stanley. Tilak and Gokhale. Berkeley: University of California, 1962.