Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  The irony is that as much as he wanted to salvage India, whose problems, he claimed, were greater than those of any other country in the world, his writings make clear that he also wanted humans to overcome narrow identities, respect one another, and expand their circles of identification. Or at least I think that’s what he wanted. One can never be quite sure with the elusive, charismatic Vivekananda. Yet I rather suspect that many contemporary Indians have mistaken one of their most interesting universalist thinkers for a simplistic nationalist.

  29

  ANNIE BESANT

  An Indian Tom-tom

  1847–1933

  What lingered in the memory was her silvery voice—the most beautiful, some said, they had ever heard. When India’s future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru listened as a child to Annie Besant speak, he was left “dazed and as in a dream.” This voice combined with intellectual vigor to make her, in George Bernard Shaw’s grudging estimation, the best orator in England. Yet it had required real daring to find. One day in her midtwenties, unhappily married to a stiff-backed Lincolnshire vicar, Besant locked herself alone in his church, climbed into his pulpit, and spoke to the empty pews. “I shall never forget the feeling of power and delight—but especially of power—that came upon me as I sent my voice ringing down the aisles.”

  Feeling boxed in by Victorian domesticity and the mainstream Christianity that sanctioned it, Annie Besant soon jettisoned her marriage and put her gift of persuasion to use. She became a polemicist for a sequence of ideas billowing out of the religious and social crises of the Victorian age: atheism, workers’ rights, women’s rights, birth control, free speech, Fabian socialism, and Irish Home Rule. By the time she was forty, critics were calling her “Red Annie,” and admirers were calling her one of the most remarkable women of the nineteenth century. By the time she reached eighty, she had become one of the most remarkable women in twentieth-century India.

  Possessed of an ego some thought too healthy for her sex, and habitually indifferent to convention, she was often made, as she put it, “a mark for ridicule.” This mockery began even before her life was changed by a gimlet-eyed Russian occultist named Madame Blavatsky. Blavatsky claimed to be the London receptor of world-changing messages received from Hindu sages in the Himalayas. In 1875, along with an American Civil War veteran, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, and others, she launched the Theosophy movement, a synthetic blend of European esoterica such as clairvoyance, elements of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, and scientism. By increasing its members’ spiritual powers, and then their leadership skills, Theosophy promised to create no less than a peaceful world order founded on human brotherhood.

  Theosophy was the intellectual flypaper of the Victorian age, capturing the minds of figures from Yeats to Kandinsky to Scriabin to Besant, who took it up with fervor in 1889. Conversion gave her a new past full of incarnations (among them the fifth-century Greco-Egyptian mathematician Hypatia) and a new proselytizing mission in India: she would engineer a spiritual and political awakening in the land whose religions had inspired her new faith.

  When she alighted in India in 1893, her first order of business was to build branches of the Theosophical Society, based in Madras, all over the country. In due course, she would also—as a sideline for a very busy woman—help create, through a young man named Jiddu Krishnamurti, the New Age self-improvement spirit of California. But Besant did more for India than import and export mystical fads. Hostile to what she called the “land-stealing, piratical policy” of the British Empire, whether in Ireland or India, she became an activist for nationalism, and eventually the leader of the Congress party. More resonantly, she was a catalyst for the intellectual and political elite who would eventually gain freedom and lead a new nation.

  * * *

  Besant grew up in London reading theology; she was raised by a rich evangelical benefactress who took her in after her father’s death when Besant was five. Yet in Lincolnshire, only a few years after her marriage, Besant had to confront the fact that she believed in neither original sin nor the divinity of Christ. Her vicar husband was not best pleased as she let herself loose into London’s radical circles.

  The Secular Society, the Dialectical Society, the Liberal Social Union, the Law and Liberty League—as Besant wrote later, she now lived “joyously and defiantly, with sheer delight in the intellectual strife.” And as she expounded on women’s rights and workers’ conditions, she continued to educate herself, studying Darwinism and new scientific theories, and becoming one of the first women to study for a science degree at University College London. In 1877, not yet thirty, she republished a “neo-Malthusian” book advocating population control as a means of addressing poverty and unemployment. Not long after, she wrote her own book endorsing contraception, which no woman before her had ever openly advocated. Already subjected to occasional kicks and stone throwing for her views, she was now tried for obscenity (an imprisonable offense).

  Escaping on a technicality, she was forbidden from seeing her children; this caused a personal anguish that seemed to make her even fiercer. In the mid-1880s her concerns about unemployment and poverty and a faith in social evolution led her to socialism. Joining the Fabians, she organized strikes and was elected to local government. Around this time, she also began to experiment with spiritualism and the paranormal, as did many of her fellow travelers. But Besant went further than the pack after reading Blavatsky, who posited an evolution, rooted in India and Hindu philosophy, toward a higher human race. She went to meet the chain-smoking occultist, looked into her mesmeric eyes, and felt mastered. If Besant found in Theosophy a program for human fulfillment and self-government even grander than socialism, there was, however, a small snag. Blavatsky considered reincarnation the key to the perfection of the races: contraception blocked such evolutionary upgrades, since it was likely to be practiced by those of superior intelligence. Without hesitation, Besant withdrew the best-selling book for which she had risked prison and her children.

  At the age of forty-six, Red Annie was ready to be reborn as the white-clad Bari Memsahib, transforming the esoterica of Theosophy into practical Indian politics.

  * * *

  It’s been said that the dominant narrative of Western colonial engagement is “We came, we saw, we were horrified, we intervened.” Yet Theosophy’s history in India is an example of what the philosopher Agehananda Bharati called the “pizza-effect”: the adoption by one culture, usually a more powerful one, of some aspect of a foreign culture, which is then embellished and returned home. The Americans did it with Neapolitan pizza; the Europeans did it with Hindu spirituality. Besant and other Theosophists, picking up on the passion of William Jones (21) and other “Orientalists” for ancient Brahminic texts, saw India as the cradle of civilization. With her oratorical genius, Besant proved to be a brilliant reexporter of this view.

  Theosophy spread in part through Besant’s steady stream of books, pamphlets, and articles. During her time in India, she eventually ran three newspapers herself, and published around a hundred works. But there was also the parlor affability of the weekly Theosophical Society meetings, in which the educated gathered to talk about self-rule and cultural revival, astral travel or voice contact with earlier selves. Besant’s enchantment with early Hinduism, alongside her anti-British stance, honed while advocating Irish republicanism, made her a roving salonnière of an eclectic flock: princes, progressives, and socialists; scientists, artists, and politicians—many of whom would play leading roles in twentieth-century India.

  Besant took a particular interest in the young in her expanding circle, and one of her early campaigns was to reform Indian education. The Raj’s educational system was founded on Lord Macaulay’s dictum that Indians must study European literature and history, and not fritter away time on worthless Indian texts. This, combined with missionary activity against Hindu superstition and idolatry, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century, the educated in India had limited access to their own traditions an
d little reason to value them. Besant’s push, ultimately victorious, was to bring elements of Western Indology to the curriculum. Later, she established the Central Hindu College, which taught Sanskrit and ancient Indian history in addition to English and British history. It would eventually become part of Banaras Hindu University, an important center of Indological scholarship. The version of Indian culture propagated there, though, was heavily Sanskritized and Brahminized, with little room for the civilization’s many other strands.

  Besant helped groom a generation of Indian nationalists, the intellectual crack troops of the growing cause. It wasn’t enough to give Indians pride in their own culture, she argued; the young also needed to gain the confident knowledge of British culture and manners that would allow them to be taken seriously as an opposition. Her college in Benares held mock parliaments to teach British debating techniques and Robert’s Rules of Order. Better still, she thought, was education abroad, beginning at a young age—in part so that India’s future leaders would not be saddled with the “chi-chi” accents of those who learned English too late. She campaigned hard to overcome the resistance of high-caste families who thought that overseas travel (believed to be polluting) would cause their children to be expelled from their castes.

  In 1901, Besant arranged a Theosophist tutor for Jawaharlal Nehru, the eleven-year-old son of a successful provincial lawyer. Over the next three years, the boy attended Theosophical Society meetings and helped his tutor decipher Sanskrit texts. Recalling science kit experiments and disquisitions about astral bodies, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, and other mystics, Nehru said later, “I felt that here was the key to the secrets of the universe.” He was dejected when, at Besant’s suggestion, he was sent away, at age fifteen, to study at Harrow.

  A different order of grooming was provided for a young Telugu Brahmin whom a colleague of Besant’s met in Madras in 1909. Besant identified the uncannily beautiful boy, Krishnamurti, as the reincarnation of Christ and the future World Teacher. The boy messiah was also dispatched to England for education and social polishing (which included regular visits to the gentleman’s outfitters Lobb, Asprey, and Beale and Inman), in preparation for his appointed role.

  It’s not accidental that these two young men were both Brahmin. Besant’s love of the Aryan and Vedic age led her to see the caste system as an evolutionary mechanism, reducing ethnic mixing and giving Brahmins brains unrivaled by those in any other class of people in the world. “Natural law has been utilised and the result is there before us,” she wrote. Now these brainy potential world brotherhood leaders just needed a bit of modernization—as the Japanese aristocracy had done, she noted, and the French ancien régime had not.

  * * *

  As in Britain, Besant’s strong views engendered enemies: low-caste leaders who resented her reinforcement of Brahmin superiority; missionaries who loathed her attacks on Christianity; Hindu reformers who found some of her views too conservative; and orthodox Hindus appalled by a white woman’s interference in what they saw as their domain. But Besant was famously thick-skinned, and early in the twentieth century, perhaps too impatient to wait for the Brahmins to achieve their destined perfection, she decided to be more political still.

  To the viceroy, she said she had come to see that educational reform without political reform was futile. To members of her Theosophical flock, she revealed that she had received a telepathic command from an ancient Hindu sage. Yet one clear impetus for her shift to politics was the intensifying freedom movement in Ireland. She thought that elements of the effective Irish political agitation, including mass public meetings and the clever use of the press and courts, could be emulated by Indians. In a series of 1913 lectures that became a book entitled Wake Up, India: A Plea for Social Reform, she argued for (among other things) mass education and foreign exposure, and against (among other things) child marriage. She would explain, “I am an Indian tomtom, waking up all the sleepers, so that they may wake and work for the motherland.”

  Her next move would also rouse up the Raj. In September 1915 she announced her intention to create a nationwide agitational movement for Indian home rule. Built on the back of the Theosophical branch network, it had as its goal greater Indian self-government. Others started to borrow the idea from Besant: six months later, the Maharashtrian radical leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak launched the Indian Home Rule League, focused on Maharashtra and the Karnataka region. Tilak, who had been forced out of the Congress with the defeat of extremism, and imprisoned until 1914, hoped he and Besant could win control of the organization, which had foundered after the imprisonment of many of its leaders, among them Chidambaram Pillai (30). They might have done so, and taken Indian nationalism in a different direction, had not Mohandas Gandhi (38), newly returned to India from South Africa, usurped for his own nationalist purposes the agitational energies stirred by Besant and her followers.

  Another of Besant’s important moves in this era would not be sustained: the bridging of religious difference. In 1916, in an attempt to gather more supporters and win control of the Congress, she helped broker an important agreement between Tilak and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (39). Jinnah, who would become the first leader of Pakistan, was then a liberal lawyer and politician, belonging both to the Congress and to a small organization of elite Muslims, the Muslim League. The issue of how Hindus would share power with the Muslim minority in a more self-governing India had been simmering, and the so-called Lucknow Pact now created a complex formula for electoral representation that would ensure Muslims a base number of seats. That the deal later broke down is sometimes seen as a missed chance to have kept Jinnah working with the Congress, and so to have averted the Partition of 1947.

  As Besant aged, her politics became more radical—something young Indians found appealing. After the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, the February 1917 Russian Revolution, and the American president Woodrow Wilson’s April 1917 War Message to the U.S. Congress defending the rights of small nations, Besant decided to test the boundaries of political expression, as she’d done in London. She wrote a series of articles bluntly denouncing British rule, celebrating the Easter Rising, and exhorting Indians to let cultural pride rise up into political action. The British, sensing growing discontent, decided she had to be silenced.

  In June 1917 the government of Madras interned her—a counterproductive move, as it turned out. In protest, young men across the country mobilized in passive resistance. Gandhi, who credited Theosophy for teaching him the value of Hinduism, arranged a mass petition for her release. Nehru made his very first public speech, in her defense. Besant’s Home Rule League multiplied in size to around twenty-seven thousand members as Congress moderates who had previously disdained Besant signed up. After three months of protest, the British, outmatched, released her. In November 1917, her fame never greater, she was elected president of the Indian National Congress.

  * * *

  From this peak, there would be a swift fall. Two events ensured the decline of her relevance: the British government’s refusal to redeem its promise to give more self-governing powers to India after its people fought in defense of empire in the First World War, and a British brigadier’s decision in April 1919 to open fire on unarmed protesters in Amritsar. Several hundred men, women, and children were massacred, and Besant, the British outsider, simply couldn’t match the shock and outrage of native nationalists. It was Gandhi’s turn now. Besant would live in India until her death in 1933, watching the struggle for freedom from the sidelines.

  Among her many legacies in India were two she didn’t intend. The first was the rise of an anti-Brahmin movement in the Dravidian south, which would come to split the nationalist movement there. While Besant’s views on Aryan virtues and Brahminic Hinduism were embraced by the Brahmin elite of Madras, the counterreaction against Brahminic revivalism in Tamil India was sharp. In 1916 a new, non-Brahmin political party was formed in Madras, which came to dominate the province’s politics for t
he next two decades. Later, under the leadership of Periyar (34), it became the Self-Respect movement. It spoke for Tamil nationalism and Dravidian identity, and after Independence pressed for caste-based reservations. It also launched a powerful critique of Hinduism itself, and its political descendants still dominate politics in Tamil Nadu.

  The second unexpected legacy emerged in the West, out of her belief that she had found, in the young Telugu boy “discovered” on the beach, the World Teacher. In 1927, now marginal to Indian politics, Besant bought a large stretch of land in the Ojai Valley in California. It was the other place, apart from India, where she believed a future higher race would emerge. There, she planned to install as World Teacher the young man now known simply as Krishnamurti.

  Two years later, however, after a spiritual crisis, Krishnamurti rejected Besant and the entire Theosophical enterprise. “You are accustomed to authority, or to the atmosphere of authority which you think will lead you to spirituality,” he told a stunned audience of three thosuand in the Netherlands, in remarks directed at Besant and her followers. He added, “You have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of happiness. No one holds it. No one has the authority to that key. That key is your own self.”

  From his base in California, Krishnamurti traveled the world teaching his own secular and radically individualist philosophy, which had little to do with Hinduism. His rise helped California become the New Age and self-help headquarters of the world. It was a pizza-effect boomerang, as people in the West now accepted the British-groomed Krishnamurti as an authentic Indian guru, telling them to believe in themselves.

  For all Besant’s impact, positive and negative, her Indian sojourn isn’t taken too seriously these days. In Britain, it’s often seen in spinster-gone-native terms, as eager over-assimilation. For Indian postcolonial critics, she’s a favorite whipping girl: lashed for imperial condescension and her part in a revivalist drift in India that shored up a Brahminical, Aryanized view of Hinduism and a hankering for its lost Golden Age. She is as much a “mark for ridicule” today as she was in Britain during her lifetime.