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Theosophy and Modern India

In seeking to maintain their power and protect their interests, the governments of nation states and empires have tended to view other governments as their primary source of competition. As the record of the Theosophical Society in India illustrates, however, non-state actors such as new religious groups can exert a surprisingly powerful influence on the course of international relations. Although the Theosophical Society claimed at its inception to be neither a religious creed nor a political movement, its concerted efforts to promote the revival of ancient religions and foster Indian cultural autonomy by building a network of Hindu schools, colleges, and fraternal organizations helped spur the growth of the Indian National Congress and had great impact on the nationalist ideals and aspirations of young people among the Indian intelligentsia, including Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.  During the First World War, when Theosophical leaders dared to take more overtly political stands on the question of Indian Home Rule, the Society served as a powerful catalyst that changed irrevocably the terms of the debate about India’s relationship to the British Empire. Furthermore, the Society’s effective amalgamation of religious and political rhetoric helped pave the way for Gandhi’s religious activism and even graced him with the title of Mahatma.[1] In the decades following World War One, the future leaders of India generally distanced themselves from the Society, although they acknowledged how much the Theosophical Society had done to promote cultural and political autonomy of the emerging nation. For Nehru, a more secular basis for building a polity seemed the only wise course for a country as religiously diverse as India.[2] And though the religious activism of Gandhi owed something, by his own account, to his encounters with Theosophy, he completely eschewed the arcane mysticism of the Society for a strategy of self-sacrifice and moral witness that owed at least as much to the philosophy of Tolstoy and Thoreau as it did to the Hindu Vedas.[3]

 Given its humble beginnings and the public ridicule with which so many of its doctrines were received, it is not surprising that authorities within the British Empire underestimated the potential of the Theosophical Society, terminating surveillance of its members in the early 1880s after officially concluding that that it bore no discernible connection to the grand designs of the Russian Empire and that its activities posed no threat to British control of India.[4] Over the next three decades, though, the Society proved to be a very potent catalyst, and sometimes a leading force, in the movement that would bring independence to India. This paper will concentrate on the activities of two its leaders, the American Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and the British radical of Irish descent Annie Besant, to discern how their activities fused politics and religion and altered the course of British rule in India.

Henry Steel Olcott:

Co-Founder and President, 1875 to 1907

The founding of the Theosophical Society resulted from the now famous encounter between an American Civil War colonel and journalist named Henry Steel Olcott and an itinerant Russian spiritualist named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.  Both had come to the Eddy homestead Chittenden, Vermont to investigate reports that the spirits of the dead were speaking to gatherings there, and they formed a very intense personal and professional partnership almost immediately. It was a partnership that prompted Olcott’s wife (who had suffered from his earlier infidelities) to seek a divorce, though there is little evidence to suggest that the relationship between the lanky Colonel and the stout, chain-smoking Russian spiritualist was anything other than platonic.[5]

 When they created the Theosophical Society in New York City in 1875, each of them brought complementary strengths to the project. Blavatsky was charismatic, mysterious, and an experienced global traveler. In addition to being a natural magnet for publicity, she was a prodigious and popular writer. Isis Unveiled, which she published in 1877 and dedicated to the Theosophical Society, blended the lore of spiritualism with Victorian Orientalism to create an amalgam that would prove appealing to individuals around the world who were equally disaffected with orthodox religion and scientific materialism. As a saving grace for readers less interested in her claims about occult phenomena, Blavatsky was also a spirited polemicist who made humorous assaults on the narrow pieties of established religions and the smug certainties of Victorian atheism with roughly equal frequency.[6]

The spiritualist movement that Olcott had long dabbled in and that Blavatsky now linked to the arcane teachings of the Pythagoras, ancient Egypt, and the Vedas was generally liberal and nonsectarian in its worldview. In the United States, spiritualist communes were usually organized on Fourierist principles and spiritualist publications advocated such causes as fair treatment for American Indians, the abolition of capital punishment, and political equality for women.[7] When spiritualists had gathered at a convention in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1859 they declared that they shared no common creed or dogma beyond a common interest in occult teachings and unexplained phenomena.”[8]  In combining the esoteric authority of eastern teachings with the pluralistic Weltanschauung of spiritualism, Blavatsky created a flexible yet convincing religious vocabulary that would travel well with the Theosophical Society and prove attractive to people from a very broad range of ethnic and religious backgrounds.

 Henry Steel Olcott brought his own considerable talents to the Society, among them an officer’s genius for organization and logistics, a professional journalist’s gifts for publishing and publicity, and, perhaps as a trait from his Presbyterian upbringing, a reformer’s zeal for improving the world. Describing how the Colonel had earned his rank in the Civil War through his tireless and effective investigation of war profiteering and fraud, Stephen Prothero makes a compelling case that Olcott was a bridge between the utopian reform spirit of antebellum America and the hardheaded pragmatism of the Progressive era.[9]  As Blavatsky’s writings and compelling personality aroused growing interest in the tenets of the Theosophy, Olcott’s sheer drive and organizational skills created the institutions that would become the Society’s bone and muscle.

 In December of 1878, after performing the world’s first Theosophical funeral rite at a Masonic Temple in Manhattan and enduring some very colorful lampooning in the New York press, Olcott and Blavatsky set out for India where, in spite of having few contacts to speak of, they planned to establish the Society on a permanent basis.[10]  By 1884, barely five years after the Theosophical Society had arrived on the subcontinent, Olcott’s efforts had established more than one hundred branch associations throughout India.[11]  In 1885, the English Theosophist and retired civil servant A.O. Hume helped to establish the Indian National Congress and would remain its General Secretary for the next three decades.[12]

 The records of the I.N.C. also reveal a significant overlap between its membership and that of the Theosophical Society, indicating that Theosophy had a strong appeal for young college-educated Indians who aspired to see the development of greater cultural and political autonomy in their homeland. “Among the influential Congressmen who had been theosophists were Kashinath Telang of Bombay, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi of Poona, Narandrenath Sen of Calcutta, and P. Ananda Charlu of Madras.”[13] 

 Although Olcott was never an explicit advocate of Indian political independence, he was a tireless promoter of the cultural and religious of independence of Asian peoples, especially in India and on the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). His greatest achievement was to take the methods of Christian missionaries, especially the founding of schools and voluntary societies, and use them to promote a goal which was diametrically opposed to the Western missionaries’ efforts: the revival of Asian religions in Asia. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, Olcott’s mission to teach Asians about the value of their own religions may seem startling in its apparent condescension, but in the late nineteenth century many people, especially the Buddhist inhabitants of Ceylon, had reason to welcome his efforts. As one of the first Europeans to publicly take pansil or the oath of refuge that marks one’s conversion to Theravada Buddhism, Olcott was revered by the Sinhalese for legitimating their native religion at a time when white missionaries were mounting a tireless and concerted effort to Christianize the island.[14]  After writing and publishing a “Buddhist Catechism” and founding a network of schools on the island, the Colonel brought the same methods to India: He published Hindu catechisms, founded schools, and pushed a wide variety of social reforms, including equality for women and the reformation of the caste system.[15] He also founded a Hindu Tract Society, a Young Men’s Hindu Association, and a Hindu Sunday-School Union. “He was, as a result, a contributor not only to the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival but also to the Indian Renaissance.”[16] As the American and French Revolutions were informed by a neo-classicism that sought the forge new nationalities the revival of Greek and Roman culture, the Indian Renaissance envisioned the creation of a modern India through the revival and reform of ancient Vedic culture, and the Theosophical Society, thanks primarily to Olcott’s efforts, emerged as an integral part of that movement.

 In his own mind, Henry Steel Olcott no doubt lamented that what he was able to accomplish in Asia fell so far short of his goals. In the 1890s, he had traveled throughout Asia, seeking to unite all Buddhist sects into a World Buddhist movement and mend the ancient division between the Mahayana and Theravada schools of Buddhist thought and practice. The scope of this goal says something about Olcott’s naiveté and his tireless energy: a rough analogy would be the prospect of a recent convert to Christianity aiming to unite all of the various Protestant sects with their Orthodox and Catholic forbears. Nonetheless, what Olcott did achieve in India was to have lasting significance, the religious and cultural renaissance that he worked tirelessly to foment had created nothing less than a new national identity around which educated Indians, and future leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru could gravitate.

 Jawaharlal Nehru’s wry account of his decision to join the Society after reading Madame Blavatsky’s writings and attending a lecture by Annie Besant says something about the Society’s appeal to succeeding generations of patriotic Indians:

For the first time I began to think, consciously and deliberately, of religion and other world. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but its great books, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. . . .

I decided to join the Theosophical Society, although I was only thirteen then. When I went to ask my father’s permission, he laughingly gave it; he did not seem to attach importance to the subject either way. I was a little hurt by his lack of feeling. Great as he was in many ways in my eyes, I felt he was lacking in spirituality. As a matter of fact he was an old theosophist, having joined the Society in its early days when Madame Blavatsky was in India. Curiosity had probably led him to it more than religion, and he soon dropped out of it; but some of his friends, who had joined with him, persevered and rose high in the spiritual hierarchy of the Society.[17]

 As was the case with his father, Nehru’s tenure in the Society was destined to be relatively short. He came to view the spiritual pretensions of many within the society with more than a little skepticism. Nonetheless, in reflecting the on the influence of his Theosophist tutor F.T. Brooks Nehru still affirms in hindsight that, “I feel that I owe debt to him and to theosophy,” and concerning Annie Besant, the second president of the Theosophical Society in India, he remarks, “for Mrs. Besant I always had the warmest admiration.”[18]

 As a young man, Mohandas K. Gandhi had many friends in the Theosophical Society, and in his writings he expresses a similar sense of debt to the movement.  The same Annie Besant who initiated Nehru into the Society affectionately bestowed upon Gandhi the title of Mahatma, or “great soul.”  Gandhi expressed the same measured respect for Besant that he had shown for her earlier secularist mentor Charles Bradlaugh, who had been a reliable parliamentary advocate for India. He also credited his encounters with Theosophist friends for kindling his interest in Hinduism and Indian philosophy and closing the period when, as a young man, he had been “affecting the English gentleman” in thought, dress, and manners.[19] Theosophy inspired him to study Sanskrit and to learn by heart passages from the Bhagavad-Gita each morning as he was brushing his teeth.[20] 

Annie Besant:

President, 1907 to 1933

In the 1889, Madame Blavatsky invited Annie Besant, a notorious woman whom George Bernard Shaw was proud to count among his Fabian friends, to join the Theosophical Society.[21] She recognized in Besant the same gifts for organization and propaganda that she had seen in Olcott, and it was not long after Blavatsky’s death in 1891 that Besant emerged as the heir apparent to the aging Colonel. With some controversy, she was elected President of the Society shortly after the Olcott’s death in 1907.[22] While Olcott’s tenure was characterized by a very American spirit of reform through education, Besant’s reign as Society president would be colored by the combative radicalism that had characterized her career in England. Throughout 1870s and 80s, Besant had been a passionately loved and hated figure in Great Britain, a firebrand activist for labor rights, birth control and secularism, and a close associate of the famous atheist Member of Parliament Charles Bradlaugh. As a declared atheist and materialist throughout that period, Besant had some distance to travel to become a believer in the immortal “Mahatmas” of the Theosophical universe. She shocked friends at detractors alike with her speed in traversing that distance: Within a few short years of her first encounter with Blavatsky the former atheist was on her way to India to continue the religious revival that had been so effectively advanced by the efforts Olcott and Blavatsky.

 Unlike Olcott, who took a pluralistic approach to Asian religions, Besant focused primarily on Hinduism, which she combined with her own belief in the esoteric knowledge of Blavatsky and fellow Theosophist Charles Leadbeater. As was the case with Blavatsky’s psychic “events,” the esoteric phenomenon that Besant pursued with Leadbeater proved to be more of a liability than an asset to the Society, especially in light of the credible allegations of pederasty that marred Leadbeater’s career.[23] 

 In the area of political organization and savvy, on the other hand, the assets that Mrs. Besant brought to the Society were inestimable. Between 1907 and 1928, she tripled the size of the Society from 15,000 to 45,000 members.[24]  In 1895 she advanced Olcott’s already prodigious school-building mission into the realm of higher education by raising enough funds in India to found Central Hindu College in Benares. In this effort she was greatly helped by Jawaharlal Nehru’s father who was an influential pandit and lawyer in Allahabad. The college was successfully established in 1898 and had over one thousand pupils within its first year of operation.[25] 

 In describing the work of her predecessors, she wrote, “Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky saw that not until India recognized the value of its ancient faith could there be any bond of unity among the Indians, separated by provincial jealousies and hatreds.”[26]  Besant also recognized the political significance of such a revival: 

The Indian work is first of all, the revival, strengthening, and uplifting of ancient religions . . . The success with which this has been accomplished by the Theosophical Society is acknowledged on all sides, friendly and hostile, and this revival of the old faiths has brought with it a new self-respect, a pride in the past, a belief in the future, and, as an inevitable result, a great wave of patriotic life, the beginning of the rebuilding of a nation.[27]

 During the First World War, after she had founded the Home Rule League and ascended to the Presidency of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi ranked Annie Besant “among of the most powerful leaders of public opinion” in India.[28] At the outset of the war, many Indians, including Gandhi, expressed an ardent support for Britain, as evidenced by the large number of Indians who volunteered to serve in Europe.[29]  Perhaps because of her personal identification with the cause of Irish nationalism, Besant showed considerably less reverence, or even charity, toward the British Empire in its hour of need.[30]  She boldly reasoned that Britain’s crisis could be India’s opportunity, and declared of India in 1915,  “She did without England for millennia and flourished amazingly; she could do without England for millennia to come . . .”[31] At a time when only 15,000 British troops remained in India and the Empire’s resources were stretched to the breaking point, Besant established the Home Rule League and began to agitate so vociferously for Indian Home Rule in Theosophist publications that she was jailed in 1917 by the British authorities.[32] This move was undoubtedly a blunder on the part of the British because it made Annie Besant a hero and household name throughout India, effected her election to the presidency of the Indian National Congress that year, and prompted Indian leaders such as Mohandas K. Gandhi to engage in more radical forms of protest than they had previously contemplated.

 Ironically, Besant began the war years at the forefront of Indian politics by agitating for Home Rule through the organs of the Theosophical Society, but by the end of this period she was suddenly in the wake of Gandhi himself as the charismatic Mahatma began to pursue more ambitious goals for India through the technique of Satyagraha, or nonviolent resistance.  Perhaps because Gandhi and his followers bore no official allegiance to the Society, the former radical Besant found herself uncharacteristically alarmed by the audacity of their tactics. Because of her regrettable public remarks about Gandhi’s strategy, the zenith of Besant’s popularity in India was quickly followed by its nadir. When strikes that had been initiated by Gandhi unfortunately led to riots in Delhi, these were suppressed with shootings, and number of innocent people were killed. Besant openly declared her support for the British tactic in this case, declaring, “a government’s first duty is to stop violence . . . [B]efore a riot becomes unmanageable brickbats must inevitably be answered by bullets in every civilized country.”  As these remarks were followed in the same month by the General Dyer’s infamous massacre in Amritsar, Besant’s reputation in India was irrevocably damaged, and the slogan “brickbats and bullets” came to be used against her by her opponents.[33]

 As her tactics for achieving change in India suddenly seemed antiquated in light of Gandhi’s campaign, her goal of Home Rule for India within the British Empire also became far less appealing to the emerging Indian leadership during the interwar years. Nehru, years before he became the first Prime Minister of an independent India, expressed it this way: “We want Independence and not Dominion or any other status. Every thinking person knows that the whole conception of Dominion status belongs to past history; it has no future.”[34]  Nehru also made clear that he wanted India to be a secular state, and rejected the appeal to religion in politics as “medieval” in nature and a “stalking horse” for the “protection of vested interests.”[35] Besant’s vision for India’s future, as well as her tactics, had been tried and found wanting by the two men who would, respectively, be the moral and political leaders of the emerging Indian nation.

Indian Critiques of Theosophy

 As the enormous gains that the Theosophical Society made in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicate, something in the Society’s aims and practices struck a chord with an important subset of the Indian people. In this case, the decisive factor was not that the Society’s ideas and aspirations appealed to a vast number of people in India, but that they had a special appeal to a certain class, namely western-educated Hindus who responded to Theosophy’s fascination with Asian values and its critique of Western materialism.  When this message reached such individuals as Gandhi and Nehru, it radically changed their views of their homeland and of themselves, even if they did not accept all or even most of Theosophy’s religious tenets. Both of them acknowledged that it strengthened their sense of themselves as Indians rather than subjects of the British Empire at a key moment in their lives.

 It is important to note, on the other hand, that there were prominent and educated Indians during this period who offered cogent religious and political critiques of the Theosophical Society and its goals for India. On the Religious front, the Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekenanda, who had developed an international reputation thanks to his impassioned defense of eastern religion at the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893[36], offered the following blistering critique of Theosophical mysticism:

[Theosophy is an] Indian grafting of American spiritualism with only a few Sanskrit words taking the place of spiritualistic jargon―Mahatmic missals taking the place of ghostly raps and taps and Mahatmic inspiration that of obsession by ghosts . . . [T]he Hindus have enough of religious teaching and teachers amidst themselves even in the Kali-Yuga, and they do not stand in need of dead ghosts of Russians and Americans.[37]

 On the political front, the radical INC member Gangadur Bal Tilak offered this critique of Besant’s ideology and tactics:

Though I admire her eloquence, learning, and unfailing energy for work, I cannot bear for a moment the supremacy which she claims for her opinions in matters political under the guise that she is inspired by the Great Souls [Mahatmas] and that such orders as she professes to receive must be unquestionably obeyed. . . . Autocracy may be, and sometimes is, tolerated in theological and Theosophical Society matters, but in democratic politics we must go by the decisions of the majority . . . Congress recognizes no Mahatma to rule over it except the Mahatma of majority.[38]

 In both of these cases, the greatest weakness of the Society that these critics point to is its overblown emphasis on arcane knowledge and mysticism as the source of its authority. This strand of superstition and charlatanism, which was used most frequently as prop for the authority of the Society’s most dubious figures such as Charles Leadbeater, left Theosophy open to ridicule among educated people in India and the West, in spite the Society’s sincerity and efficacy in so many other areas, from building schools and colleges to advocating for Indian Home Rule.

 However one evaluates the merits or shortcomings of the Theosophical Society’s impact on Indian nationalism, its story is a variation of a very old theme that still continues in the history of humanity. From the founding of Christianity in a remote province of the Roman Empire to the rise of such international groups as Falun Gong and Al Qaeda in our own time, new religious sects and movements have proven time and again that they have the power shake the foundations of large nation states and empires, even as the leaders of those polities are more concerned with real or perceived threats from other nations states and empires.

R. S. Deese

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Primary Sources: 

 Besant, Annie. An Autobiography. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908

    ―How India Wrought for Freedom. Madras, India: Theosophical Publish House, 1915)

   —India, Bond or Free? A World Problem. London: G.P. Putnam’s Son, Ltd., 1926.

 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Isis Unveiled. 1877. 2 vols. Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1960.

 Haldeman, Rev. I.M. Theosophy or Christianity, Which? A Contrast. New York: Croscup Publishing Co., 1893

 Gandhi, Mohandas K. Autobiography. Mahadev Desai, trans. New York: Dover, 1983.

    —My Early Life (1869-1914).  Mahadev Desai, ed. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1932.

 Nehru, Jawaharlal. Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru. New York: The John Day Co., 1941.

 Secondary Sources:

 Campbell, Bruce F. Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

 Karanakuran, K.P. Religion and Political Awakening in India.  Delhi: 1965.

 Nerthercot, Arthur H. The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

 McLane, John R.  Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

 Prothero, Stephen. The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

 Seager, Richard Hughes. The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East-West Encounter, Chicago, 1893. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

 Spear, Perciaval. The Oxford History of Modern India, 1740-1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

 Taylor, Anne. Annie Besant: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.