Rebels Against the Raj

Chapter 1
Mothering India

I

In the year 1893, three Indians destined for greatness made their mark in countries outside India. In April of that year, Mohandas K. Gandhi enrolled as a lawyer at the Natal Bar, en route to becoming the leader of the Indian community in South Africa and in time the leader of the freedom movement in his homeland. In July 1893, his fellow Kathiawari, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji (always known as ‘Ranji’), played for Cambridge versus Oxford in the annual University Match at Lord’s, en route to becoming the first great cricketer of Indian origin. In September of that year, Swami Vivekananda made a stirring speech in the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago, en route to becoming the authoritative voice of a Hindu Renaissance.

These overseas debuts, all in the same year, were intimations of much more than personal fame. They presaged three different ways in which Indian culture was to profoundly impact the world. Gandhi’s leadership of the freedom movement inspired anti-colonial struggles across Asia and Africa, as well as movements for racial justice in North America. Ranji’s success on the playing fields of England was the forerunner of the emergence of cricket as India’s national sport, and of India as the epicentre of world cricket. Swami Vivekananda blazed the trail for other Indian seers and prophets to travel overseas, taking their ideas with them. The subsequent spread of Hindu spirit-uality and of the practice of yoga across the world, owe their distant origins to that famous speech made by the Swami in Chicago.

In a striking juxtaposition, even as Gandhi, Ranji and Vivekananda were seeking to take their ideas and expertise outside India, a Western woman was making the reverse journey, bringing her ideas and (as it were) expertise to India. For it was also in 1893 that the first of our renegades, Annie Besant, arrived on these shores.

Mrs Besant (as she was usually known)1 was born Annie Wood in London on 1 October 1847. She was three-quarters Irish. Her father, a doctor who went into the City, died when she was five. Annie was brought up by her mother and a wealthy aunt. As a teenager, she travelled with her aunt in Germany and France, while reading widely and learning the piano.

The young (and talented) Annie was courted by a Cambridge-educated priest named Frank Besant. They married in December 1867, and moved to Cheltenham, where Frank had a job as a teacher. The bored housewife wrote short stories while having two children – a boy and a girl – in quick succession.

By 1871 – merely four years into the marriage – Annie and Frank had begun to quarrel. The next year she became interested in Nonconformism, before moving on further afield, to atheism. In September 1873 the couple separated, each keeping one child. Annie was now living in London, spending long hours in the British Museum, reading Darwin, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill and the like. In August 1874 she heard the legendary atheist Charles Bradlaugh speak for the first time. He was forty; she, just twenty-six. Soon Annie became an active member of Bradlaugh’s National Secular Society. Before the year was out, she was speaking from its platforms, and making a name as an orator. With Bradlaugh she travelled up and down the country, speaking on secularism, science, and the rights of women. Her mentor was a famous public speaker, but his young protégée was not far behind, being described in the provincial press as ‘a lady of refinement [and] genius’ with a ‘matchless power of reasoning and eloquence’.2Audiences were not always so generous; at several places the duo were heckled by devout churchmen and even had stones thrown at them.

Under Bradlaugh’s influence, Annie became a fervent republican, opposed to imperialism and all its works. In 1876 she organized a petition to oppose the Prince of Wales’s forthcoming trip to the subcontinent. She got more than 100,000 people to sign the petition, which, almost a mile in length, was presented to the House of Commons. (The Prince’s trip went ahead regardless.)

In 1877 Mrs Besant’s first book appeared, a collection of her essays called My Path to Atheism. She was now seriously studying religious texts, all the better to refute them. Her critical gaze began turning Eastwards, as she read books on Buddhism and Hinduism and the religions of ancient Egypt. A newer faith that came to her notice was Theosophy, a mystical movement begun by a Russian émigrée called Madame Blavatsky and her American associate Colonel H. S. Olcott. Apart from the United States, Blavatsky also found disciples in Ceylon and in India, where her Theosophical Society had purchased a large and beautiful tract of land on the banks of the Adyar river in Madras.

Culturally as well as geographically, India was vital to the devel-opment of Theosophy. Mrs Blavatsky spoke of being in communion with spiritual masters in the Himalaya. She was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and by the works of the great Oxford Sanskritist F. Max Mueller, and herself visited India in 1879–80. Among the early converts to Theosophy was Allan Octavian Hume, the ornithologist and reformist civil servant who helped found the Indian National Congress. As one historian of Theosophy has written: ‘India, Blavatsky maintained, was the source of all human knowledge. Everything the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Jews, Greeks and Romans knew, they had learned from the Indians.

Annie Besant’s own first impressions of Theosophy were under-whelming. In an article of 1882 she dismissed it as ‘a dreamy, emotional, scholarly, interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past’.4 She was herself now moving rapidly to the Left, befriending Karl Marx’s disciple (and future son-in-law) Edward Aveling and the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw. The playwright had great affection and admiration for Mrs Besant, for her intelligence and force of character, and especially her oratorical skills. Of one public debate where he had to take the podium after her, Shaw wrote that when a speaker on the other side had finished, ‘Mrs Besant got up and utterly demolished him. There was nothing left to do but gasp and triumph under her shield.

In 1885 Mrs Besant joined the Fabian Society, and threw herself into socialist causes, leading marches of underpaid workers and craftsmen. In 1888, Theosophy entered her life once more. Sent a book by Madame Blavatsky to review, she was drawn to, indeed enchanted by, its contents, writing in her autobiography of how 

as I turned over page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen as part of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear.

Mrs Besant asked to meet the author of the book. The meeting took place in a house in London, where Mrs Blavatsky – a large, corpulent figure dressed in black, with her head covered and her piercing eyes looking out – ‘talked of travels, of various countries, easy brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers rolling cigarettes incessantly’. One meeting was enough to convert the once sceptical Irishwoman, and two months later Mrs Besant was formally inducted as a member of the Theosophical Society, kneeling before Madame Blavatsky and receiving, through her, the blessings of the Himalayan Masters she claimed to communicate with.

When Mrs Besant joined the Theosophical Society, its three aims were: ‘To found a Universal Brotherhood without distinction of race or creed; to forward the study of Aryan literature and philosophy; to investigate unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers latent in man.’ (The second aim, with its unfortunate racial tinge, was later modified to mean the study of comparative religion.) By June 1889, the middle-aged convert was writing essays for Lucifer, the magazine of the Theosophical Society. In the same year, Mohandas Gandhi, then a law student in London, was writing a series of essays for the journal of the Vegetarian Society of London. The young Gandhi was becoming increasingly interested in Theosophy, and almost certainly attended a series of lectures that Annie Besant delivered in August 1889, of which Lucifer remarked that ‘the Hindu gentlemen who were present, conspicuous by their quiet mien, nodded their frequent approval in silent but significant manner.

In her early years as a Theosophist Mrs Besant retained her interest in socialist causes. However, after Madame Blavatsky’s death in May 1891, she ‘perceived she had a higher mission’. She undertook three lecture tours in the United States in quick succession, her words and her energy leading to her being hailed by the Chicago Tribune as ‘the most prominent theosophist of the day . . . on whom the mantle of Madame Blavatsky has fallen. 

The moving spirits of the Theosophical Society, Colonel Olcott and C. W. Leadbeater, wanted Mrs Besant – at this time regarded ‘as the greatest speaker of her sex in either Europe or America’9 – to tour India, where, they thought, the growing English-speaking middle class could provide ready converts to this hybrid faith, which (unlike Christianity) treated Hinduism with respect. Mrs Besant herself was extremely keen to visit the land where her teacher’s own teachers were believed to reside. On 20 September 1892 she sailed from New York to London, and, after a brief halt there, carried on to Marseilles, where she took the steamer Kaiser-i-Hind, bound for Colombo. The plan was for a brief, six-week tour of Ceylon and India in the cold weather, following which she would return to England.

She stayed forty years.