Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  INDIA

  1878-1884

  I

  Bombay

  The voyage to India was a nightmare. It had taken the Canada two days just to leave American waters because it lost the tide. “Fits of fear lasted till 11,” she wrote in Olcott’s diary on December 19. “The body is difficult to manage.” They had three days of good weather before being struck by rain and gale winds that tracked them all the way to the entrance of the English Channel. Excruciating seasickness afflicted all ten passengers, with the exception of Helena who, thinking of the Eumonia and Petri’s prophecies, was merely terrified, although she dared not reveal it. Occasionally Henry would stagger from his bunk and try to cheer her up with a comic song, and one evening the captain regaled them with “fearful stories of shipwreck and drowning,” to which Helena listened deadpan. “Oh for India and HOME!” she wrote, but she could not shake the feeling that she would never reach England, much less India. She proceeded to feed her anxiety by eating “like three hogs” and baring her teeth toward an Anglican clergyman whose profession she reviled, Olcott recalled, “with expressions fit to curdle the blood.”1 But apparently the clergyman took her ranting good-naturedly, because when the Canada finally docked at Gravesend on the morning of January 3, 1879, he begged her for a photograph.

  H.P.B. and Henry were guests of the American medium Mary Hollis Billing and her physician husband in suburban Norwood. From almost the moment Madame stepped into the Billing home, she started performing phenomena in a fevered way that suggests extreme nervousness. Fearful that Henry might still develop cold feet and slink back to New York, desperate to impress Charles Massey and the other London Spiritualists, she felt compelled to attempt a few miracles. Convincing Mary Billing of the reality of the Indian Brothers did not prove difficult, and the flattering suggestion that her spirit guide “Ski” was probably one of their messengers was readily accepted; indeed both Mary and “Ski” were all too eager to believe and render services. Thus one foggy evening, when Henry, Massey and Dr. Billing returned to the house, Mary told them that a tall, handsome Hindu had been there conferring with Madame on occult business and that he had happened to mention passing the three men earlier on the street. That was true, Henry exclaimed at once, because he recalled glimpsing over his shoulder a man with the unmistakably transcendent face of an adept. His companions, more cautious, allowed that it might have happened but in the dense fog they certainly could not swear to it. After dinner, at Mary’s instigation, Helena fished around under the table and “materialized” a Japanese teapot and later, as Massey was preparing to depart, she told him to reach into his overcoat pocket. To his amazed delight, he withdrew an inlaid Indian cardcase containing a slip of paper that bore Hurrychund Chintamon’s autograph.

  There was more to come. During a séance on the evening of January 6, “Ski” directed Olcott to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum where he would find a note from a Brother under the left foot of Figure 158. The next morning, accompanied by Billing and Wimbridge, Olcott hurried around to Tussaud’s, where of course he found the note. Even he had to admit there was no hard evidence for this phenomenon because Helena and Mary had visited the British Museum on the morning of the sixth and could easily have ducked into Madame Tussaud’s to plant the note; still, in his opinion, it was genuine. All told, these miraculous events had their desired effect on Massey too because, by his moral code, no woman as high-born and frank as Madame Blavatsky could be capable of willfully stooping to trickery.

  On January 14, Helena mailed her sister a packet of photographs of herself, and judging by the brief enclosure it is clear that she continued to be frightened. “I start for India. Providence alone knows what the future has in store for us.” The pictures might be the last sight Vera would have of her; if she should perish, she hoped that her family would not forget her. “I shall write from Bombay if I ever reach it.” Four days later she went up to Liverpool with Olcott, Wimbridge and Bates, spent the day killing time at the Great Western Hotel, and at 5 p.m., in a driving rainstorm, boarded the Speke Hall. Helena’s heart sank at her first sight of the decrepit ship with its filthy cabins and carpets stinking of mold and dampness, and even Henry thought it “a wretched omen.”2 No food was served during the first twenty-four hours on-board and had it not been for the bread and butter they unearthed from a bon voyage basket, they would have gone hungry.

  One of the first things Helena noticed was that the vessel had been loaded almost to the water’s edge with what she learned was railway iron. She expressed her displeasure so vituperatively that, according to Olcott, she was “unanimously voted... a nuisance.”3 Two days out she badly bruised her knee when rough seas flung her against a table leg in the dining salon, and after that she remained in her cabin bellowing at the stewardess, a Mrs. Yates. Olcott remembered that her cries of “Meeses Yetz” could be heard over half the ship.

  By the time they anchored at Malta on January 28 to fill the coal bunkers, H.P.B.’s gloom had begun to lift and she went ashore with the others to tour the picturesque town and fortress. Five days later, reaching Port Said, the ship began to puff its way through the Suez Canal, at which time passengers discarded their heavy winter clothing and donned tropical outfits and pith hats. Henry, who did not own a pith hat, strutted on deck wearing the turban that Master M. had given him in New York, a bit of irreverent clowning that H.P.B. did not particularly appreciate. She was not amused when Henry played the fool. That night the Speke Hall tied up opposite the village of Khandara and the Theosophical party visited an Arab coffee house where they sipped black coffee and sampled the local tobacco. Helena was beginning to relax, but just as she teetered on the brink of belief that they would reach their destination, a flue in the boiler burst and this necessitated two more stops for repairs.

  Helena remained on edge for the rest of the trip. Her terror of death at sea might seem a bit paranoid but, in fact, it was not entirely so. Perhaps she was picking up some kind of premonitory vibration, because six years later the Speke Hall would go down in the Indian Ocean without a single survivor.

  The sun was shining gloriously in Bombay when they arrived in the early morning of the sixteenth of February, after having risen before dawn to glimpse the Elephanta Caves. Olcott’s friend Moolji Thackersey and two companions came out to the ship in a bunder boat but, contrary to expectations, there was no sign of Hurrychund Chintamon or of a group even vaguely resembling a welcoming party from the Arya Samaj. The glow of anticipation having slightly dimmed, the newcomers collected their baggage and clambered aboard a boat to head for land. Henry solemnly knelt and kissed the granite quay before stepping ashore, but Helena did not permit herself such extravagant gestures. Her disappointment palpable, she kept scanning the dock in hopes that a welcoming committee would materialize. The scene she visualized, in vain, she described in a letter to Vera:

  We were met by a band of local, half-naked dancing girls, who surrounded us chanting their mantra and led us in state—all the time bombarding us with flowers—to a—maybe you think to a carriage? Not at all, to a white elephant! Good Lord, the effort it cost me to climb over the hands and backs of naked coolies to the top of this huge animal... The others were placed in palanquins, and lo! to the accompaniment of acclamations, tamborines, horns, with all sorts of theatrical pomp, singing and a general row, they carried us—humble slaves of God—to the house of the Arya Samaj.4

  In lieu of that, she stood uncertainly on the quay with Olcott, Wimbridge and Rosa Bates in the burning noonday sun, all four looking lost and wilted. After a while, they saw running toward them a breathless, moon-faced Hindu who introduced himself as Chintamon and offered a number of implausible excuses for his tardiness. Although everyone smiled and insisted it did not matter, Helena felt it was a poor omen. Clearly Chintamon had thought so little of their coming that he had not bothered to inform the Arya Samaj.

  Driving through the vast commercial bustle of downtown Bombay, she felt her dismay receding, for spread before her was
the world she had dreamed of. Staring out of the carriage, she was confronted by Arabs from Muscat jostling Malays and Chinese, Parsi in their sloping hats, Rajputs, Afghans from the Northern frontier, and many that she could not identify. Carts drawn by sleepy-eyed oxen threaded their creaking way between tram cars, buggies, victorias, palanquins and handsome English carriages. People were doing a thousand things in the streets and sidewalks, gutters and open shops: barbers shaved their customers, sitar players twanged their wires, worshipers stood with clasped palms before images of Rama, beggars squatted in the blinding sunlight and rocked themselves to and fro, bare-limbed Indian women glided along with baskets of chuppattis or cow dung on their heads and with naked babies astride their hips. And overhead, in every open space, the feathered date trees waved, the sacred fig sheltered squirrels and parrots, and the air was literally peopled with the wheeling and screaming of gray-necked crows.

  Olcott wrote in his memoirs that he would never forget the intoxication of his first sight of Bombay; Helena did not record her feelings, could not even honestly express them because she had told everyone that she had seen the sights of India many times. Before leaving New York, Henry had asked Chintamon to rent them a modest house in the Hindu quarter and hire the minimum amount of necessary servants “as we did not wish to waste a penny on luxuries.”5 For the second time that day, Chintamon proved his unreliability because they learned that he had not rented a house, but instead was taking them to his own hastily vacated bungalow. The small house on Girgaum Back Road had practically no furniture and of course no such Western conveniences as indoor plumbing, but they assured Chintamon that it was charming. With the perfume of the flowers and the fronds of cocoa palms nodding over the roof, it truly did seem like paradise after their dismal weeks on the Speke Hall. That afternoon, several Hindu women, friends of Chintamon’s, called on H.P.B. and Rosa, and later in the day Ross Scott, a fellow passenger on the ship, who was coming out for a civil-service job, also paid a call. Helena had taken a fancy to the coarse-humored Irishman and when Scott begged for proof of her powers, she took from her pocket a handkerchief embroidered with “Heliona” and swiftly changed the name to “Hurrychund.” Violently impressed, as were the dozen Hindus watching, Scott gave her a five-pound contribution for the Arya Samaj.

  By the next morning, word of their presence spread through the native community and precipitated a rush of visitors. For two days they floated along blissfully: Chintamon invited three hundred people to a reception at which Helena and Henry were welcomed with garlands, limes and rose water, and Henry felt so touched that he began to cry. They took the six-mile boat ride across the harbor to the Elephanta Caves, inspected the sculptures of Shiva as half-man, half-woman, and enjoyed themselves thoroughly at a picnic luncheon. That evening, their necks wreathed with jasmine garlands, they sat in the box of honor at the Elephinstone Theatre for a special performance of a Hindu drama. During the intermission they listened to complimentary welcoming speeches from the stage. When the play had not yet ended at three in the morning, they excused themselves and departed, eyes barely open. It was, as Olcott called it, “unalloyed happiness.”6

  The next morning their bubble exploded when Chintamon presented them with an exorbitant bill for rent, food, repairs to his house and, appallingly enough, even the hire of the three hundred chairs for their reception and the cost of a welcoming telegram he had sent them en route. With a gasp, Henry stared shakily at the itemized bill and thought that at that rate they would soon be penniless. Helena protested furiously that Chintamon had given them the impression they were to be his guests. The session grew stormy and when Helena asked what had become of the six hundred rupees she had forwarded to him for the Arya Samaj, he confessed that he had failed to report its receipt and had, in fact, pocketed the money. Cruelly disillusioned, she and Henry resolved to have no further dealings with Chintamon and decided that the first order of business was to look for a house of their own. Nearby they found a small bungalow at 108 Girgaum Back Road for less than half the rent Chintamon had charged them and bought a few pieces of furniture. Through Moolji Thackersey they acquired a servant, a fifteen-year-old Gujarati boy named Vallah Bulla, which H.P.B. shortened to Babula. There were some who would say, later, that Babula once had been a conjurer’s assistant and had been selected by H.P.B. to function as an accomplice. According to Olcott, he had previously worked for a Frenchman who was a former steward at Bombay’s Byculla Club, and he had a gift for languages, speaking five of them including English and French.

  Anglo-India in the 1870s was a country in which European visitors deposited their calling cards at Government House and socialized exclusively with other whites who unthinkingly referred to the natives as “niggers” and complained of their deceit and laziness. That Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott chose to make their residence in a native section of Bombay and fraternized exclusively with Indians was enough to raise eyebrows. Loathing official life, Helena did not go near Government House and she was revolted by the Anglo-Indians’ barbaric and righteous attitudes toward Hindus. If she and Olcott had been anonymous travelers, little note would have been taken of their choice of company, but there was no ignoring Madame. Less than a week after the Theosophists’ arrival, they came under the contemptuous scrutiny of the Bombay Review. It quoted Rosa Bates as having said that she was “not a Christian,” and went on to blast the Theosophists for “wanton aggressiveness”7 in insulting the Christians in India. Helena could not resist shooting back a huffy retort calling the paper “a bigoted, sectarian organ of the Christians” and pointing out that among the two-hundred-and-forty million population, Christians “count but as a drop in the ocean.”8 Not content to leave it at that, she recklessly sprayed insults about the Bible, the British government, and the Sepoy Mutiny, which she blamed on the missionaries.

  Basically a non-political person, Helena’s pugnaciousness made her seem political, and the suspicious government immediately pricked up its ears, less because of her anti-Christian remarks than because she was Russian. For seventy years, England had been at odds with Russia over Afghanistan and in 1873 it obtained promises that the country would remain outside the sphere of Russian influence. However, a few months before Helena’s arrival, Amir Sher Ali Khan had ostentatiously received a Russian delegation at Kabul while refusing a British delegation permission to cross his frontier. A few weeks after Helena’s arrival in Bombay, the British would invade Afghanistan. British officials were consequently in no mood to take lightly any Russian visitor, especially so obvious a troublemaker. Concluding that Madame Blavatsky must be a spy, they placed her under police surveillance; fortunately, having followed Olcott’s advice, she had been carrying an American passport, otherwise, sterner measures would probably have been taken.

  All this publicity would reap undeniable benefits, for it enabled H.P.B. and Olcott to proselytize among Bombay’s intellectual Hindus, many of whom seemed eager to join the Theosophical Society. Even more encouraging, Helena received an unusually warm note from Alfred P. Sinnett, editor of the Pioneer, a powerful, ultra conservative English daily that was virtually the mouthpiece of the British government. To her surprise, Sinnett hoped very much to meet her if she ever visited Allahabad and, moreover, would be interested in publishing an article about the Theosophical Society.

  Helena was too happy to be unduly annoyed by either espionage charges or hostile newspaper articles, which insisted upon calling her a countess. Life on palm-shaded Girgaum Back Road had almost a dreamlike quality. Awaking at dawn to the cawing of crows, she dressed in light clothing and spent her days entertaining visitors on the veranda while Babula fanned her with a painted punkah. The balmy air was so fragrant with flowers that it made one forget the icy March winds sweeping through the streets of New York or Odessa. H.P.B. was so relaxed that she did not even feel much like writing letters, and in the end it was Henry who dutifully wrote William Judge, advising him to “keep the Society alive and active.”9 On April 2, a disappointed Ju
dge responded with a complaint about the meagerness of Henry’s letter. How in heaven’s name was he to keep the Society alive when “we are entirely without money?”10 And a week later he wrote again to wonder why H.P.B. had not written to him herself. Obviously he felt neglected and deprived: “Oh! how I wish I was with you at 108 Girgaum Back Road in your Bungalows. Have you been to any place where there are elephants in the grounds and a tame tiger?”11 He could not understand Olcott’s purposely vague condemnations of Chintamon, since Madame had assured him that Chintamon’s leader, Swami Dayananda, was an adept. Had the Masters made a mistake? “What the deuce does it mean?”12 he demanded.

  Henry silently pondered the same question. Writing continually cheerful letters to Judge, his sister, and his sons, he mentioned that all of them were in good health and described how they had been feted by the Hindus, but he said nothing about his own abysmal depression. Not only had Chintamon’s perfidy and the police surveillance thoroughly demoralized him, but he was also desperately worried about money. The trade arrangements he had made in the U.S. did not seem to be working out, and even though he made repeated visits to Bombay firms, he had little success peddling his alarm clocks. And in addition to this stressful pursuit, he was straining to establish the Theosophical Society as being of serious purpose. Hindus had begun to join the Society, but some of them were frightened by the surveillance rumors and at least one eminent physician hastily resigned. On March 23, Henry delivered a sober lecture at Framji Cowasji Institute on “The Theosophical Society and Its Aims,” and a week later he wrote an article along similar lines for the Bombay Gazette.

  Still, his low spirits began to chill Helena, who felt impelled to take steps to snap him out of it. She herself had begun to grow uneasy over the inauspicious start they had made in India; indeed, there must have been moments when she was more frightened than Henry. In New York, she had used her powerful evocative ability to persuade Olcott of the Brothers’ reality and had promised these mighty sages would protect and look after them in their new home. It had been one thing to sit in her living room at the Lamasery spinning gorgeous hallucinations, but entirely another actually to arrive in her dreamland only to discover that holy men such as Chintamon were really liars and thieves.