The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  An unmistakable feminist current ran through Theosophical life. Throughout India, a great many women still remained in purdah, sealed off from the world outside their family homes. To justify their own presence on the subcontinent, British colonialists would sometimes dwell on the lamentable position of India’s women, though such Westerners were hardly champions of equality. It had been less than a decade since women in England (or the United States) won the right to vote. In almost all British churches, female ordination was still scarcely imaginable. Adyar, though, was the seat of a spiritual movement founded by one powerful woman and led by another. “Here,” writes Mackay, “it has been my privilege to meet women, some of whom have fought and are still fighting a noble battle for the general uplift and liberation of Indian womanhood, struggling not only against age-old religious prejudices but also against official inertia often amounting to passive obstruction.”

  How could Eugenia help being elated? She’d arrived there alone, directly upon landing in India, but her connection to Adair ensured her embrace. High-level Theosophists were allowed to build their own homes on the Adyar grounds, and Alice Adair’s was like a little museum, full of artistic treasures collected on her world travels. There, said a contemporary, “artists and art students met for free exchange of thoughts and ideas.”

  At the time, Adyar was buzzing in preparation for the annual Theosophical convention, which began in late December and drew more than two thousand people. During the gathering, writes one resident, “Adyar becomes a miniature world, and life becomes thrilling and fascinating…Soon the hooting of the horns of taxis and buses, the rattling noise of the jutkas, the tramp of the pedestrians and the shouts of the cartmen, announce the arrival of pilgrims from distant parts of the world—young and old, men and women of all types and classes, in pairs, in groups and in bus-loads.”

  The sleepy colony was momentarily transformed into a little city, “with bazaars and restaurants, shops and saloons and people of varying castes, colours and creeds.” Everywhere, international comrades (misfits, perhaps, in their own societies) reunited happily.

  Eugenia had no way of knowing the turmoil that was going on behind the scenes among the Theosophical leadership. In 1927, Krishnamurti was coming into his own as a spiritual teacher, but he was also developing real doubts about Theosophy. In 1925 his brother, best friend, and closest confidant, Nityananda, had died after a long illness. Nitya’s death shattered Krishnamurti and accentuated his skepticism about the reality of Theosophy’s pantheon of ascended Masters. Theosophical leaders had promised Krishnamurti that the Masters would protect Nitya. When their predictions failed, his mistrust grew.

  With the original Theosophical leadership dead, and old age finally catching up to Annie Besant, the movement was riven by power struggles. Among the new generation of leaders, an atmosphere of febrile and sometimes farcical innovation prevailed, with new rituals, rites, orders, and revelations proliferating like mad. George Arundale, a powerful Theosophist and bishop of the Theosophically inclined Liberal Catholic Church, claimed dramatic communications from the Masters. Many of these messages purportedly announced great leaps in Arundale’s own occult status, along with that of his beautiful Indian wife, Rukmini Devi, whom he had married several years earlier, when she was a teenager. Besant was convinced that the revelations were real, and soon announced the coming of the “World Mother,” a role meant for Rukmini.

  The attempt to create an organization around Rukmini like the one around Krishnamurti elicited widespread ridicule—newspapers predicted the coming of a World Father, a World Infant, and a World Great Aunt—and was soon abandoned. Meanwhile, as the Theosophical Society became increasingly ceremonial and hierarchal, Krishnamurti was developing his own ultra-spare, individualistic approach to spiritual life, which emphasized the need for everyone to find his or her own path, unencumbered by rules and dogmas. Arundale, seeing Krishnamurti as a threat, plotted against him, even at one point trying to convince Besant that dark forces possessed her beloved messiah.

  It would be more than a year before any of this burst into the open. Still, at Adyar, some were frustrated by Krishnamurti’s vagueness, his refusal to offer definitive answers to their plaintive questions. “Out of those who come to listen, many are up against life’s riddles as met within individual or national relations, and seek a new remedy,” writes one attendee. “Others come to him as to a dentist for a painless extraction of beliefs he condemns. Some perhaps expect a miracle and have no objection to pick up a ready-made liberation.” Krishnamurti refused to give them what they wanted, leaving many restless and unsatisfied.

  Not Eugenia, though. To her, everything seemed magical, and her faith in Krishnamurti was absolute. When the annual convention at Adyar was over, Krishnamurti set out on a punishing lecture tour throughout India, and Eugenia joined his entourage. With him, she felt healed. Often when they were to meet, she would compile a list of problems she wanted to speak to him about, only to forget all about them as soon as they were together. “At Krishnamurti’s side, everything became clear and perfectly comprehensible,” she writes.

  Eugenia had an almost supernatural ability to ingratiate herself with people, to make others want to do her favors. Though her family had lost all their belongings, she’d retained her aristocratic manners—indeed, social capital was the only kind she had, and she developed it to the utmost. Her ease among rich and powerful people, her subtle sense of entitlement, made her seem to them like one of their own, and wherever she went they tended to treat her with lavish hospitality. Soon, through Krishnamurti and Adair, she was meeting some of the most fascinating people in India.

  With Adair, Eugenia traveled to Calcutta, the onetime British capital. There, they attended an exhibition of young Hindu painters, one of whom was the nephew of the legendary Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s nephew offered to introduce Eugenia to his uncle. She’d adored Tagore’s poems since she was a young girl and was thrilled when she met him at his ancestral home in Calcutta, a house that had long been a center of the city’s cultural life.

  Thin and aristocratic, with the long, snowy beard of a prophet, Tagore was a giant of Indian nationalism—he wrote India’s national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana”—who, like Gandhi, believed that India’s strength lay in its rich and ancient spirituality. Yet he was also a world-traveling cosmopolitan, and there was much in the West that he admired. Gandhi’s idea of noncooperation with the British pained Tagore; he believed in appropriating the world’s riches wherever he found them and in making the best in Indian culture a gift to all humankind.

  “All humanity’s greatest is mine,” he writes. “The infinite personality of man (as the Upanishads say) can only come from the magnificent harmony of all human races. My prayer is that India may represent the co-operation of all the peoples of the world.” At Shantiniketan, a family-owned tract of land about one hundred miles northwest of Calcutta, he created first a school and then a world-class university, Visva-Bharati, which put these ideals into practice. It was deeply and authentically Indian, but also drew from the treasury of worldwide learning. Its Sanskrit motto is “Yatra visvam bhavati ekanidam,” which means, “Where the whole world meets in a single nest.” Tagore invited Eugenia to visit the school, and she went the next day.

  Visva-Bharati was built around three departments: fine arts, music, and Indology, which focused on ancient Indian languages and religious texts. Classes were coeducational and often held in the open air; each teacher had a special tree he lectured beneath. There was an air of cooperation, a blurring of the lines separating teachers and students. “You will find a famous European Scholar studying Bengali from a mere boy,” wrote one enthralled visitor. “[Y]ou will also be surprised to find the best minds of India keenly taking language-lessons from visitors from Europe, or following the lectures of young European students on themes like that of the new organized ‘Youth movement.’ ” In the evening, students and teachers would gather to chant Vedic hymns and sit in
silent meditation. Nearby, the affiliated Institute of Rural Reconstruction conducted experiments in modern farming methods, intended for the uplift of Indian villagers.

  Eugenia adored it. Here was everything she valued—art, spirituality, internationalism, social progress—all in one harmonious place.

  She also visited Gandhi’s legendary Sabarmati Ashram, outside the city of Ahmedabad, on the western side of the country. Sabarmati, a radically austere attempt at a self-sufficient utopia, was a collection of whitewashed huts surrounded by a few dozen acres of farmland on the banks of the Sabarmati River. There, almost two hundred devotees tried to live according to Gandhi’s ascetic ideals. Days began at 4:15 a.m. with prayer, and were later occupied with spinning, weaving, and farming. Everyone, including Gandhi, the most famous man in India, took turns cleaning the latrines. Celibacy was required, even for married couples. Food was strictly bland and vegetarian; spices or condiments were taboo. Even close friendships were frowned upon, since personal alliances could stand in the way of universal love.

  It sounds severe, even cruel, but there could be bliss in it, too. Madeleine Slade, a British admiral’s daughter who, like Eugenia, had gone alone to India on a spiritual quest, found rapture in renunciation. Gandhi christened her Mirabehn, or “Sister Mira,” and she, like other ashramites, called him Bapu, or “Father.” “By God’s infinite blessing I had arrived, not at the outer edge of Bapu’s activities, but right in the intimate heart of his daily life,” Slade writes. “The impact on my emotions was tremendous. From early morning to the last thing at night I lived for the moments when I could set eyes on Bapu.”

  Though awed by Gandhi, Eugenia lacked Slade’s taste for submission and martyrdom, and life at Sabarmati wouldn’t have tempted her. (It is unlikely that, in the whole of her almost 103 years, she ever cleaned a toilet.) Yet in visiting Adyar, Shantiniketan, and Sabarmati, she encountered a world in which everyone seemed to be engaged in fantastically earnest, radical experiments in living, in which spirituality and idealism infused daily existence in a way she’d never encountered in Europe. In India, life seemed heightened and profound and full of astonishing possibilities.

  As Eugenia crisscrossed India’s enormity, it wasn’t just rarified company that delighted her. Like many visitors, she was moved by the generosity of ordinary Indians, who invited her into their homes and shared their modest food with her. She discovered that she loved wearing a sari, loved sitting on the ground and using her right hand to eat from banana leaves in the south and metal talis in the north, loved the strange spicy dishes that most foreigners avoided. She adored the hot, mazelike bazaars where one could buy spices, scented oils, brilliant silks, armfuls of silver bangles, and a thousand other treasures. And she was taken by the insistent, all-pervading faith of India, the constant sense of transcendence.

  Though there were all sorts of regional distinctions, everywhere Eugenia went she was surrounded by images of the divine: sweet, elephant-headed Ganesh; beautiful, romantic Krishna; terrifying Kali with her lolling tongue and garland of human skulls; sacred cows with painted horns wandering in the streets, holding up traffic. Then there were the great serene mosques, with their graceful arches and cool marble; the Buddhist stupas and domed Sikh gurdwaras. It all left Eugenia ecstatic, ready to dedicate her life to the country that felt like her spiritual home.” “I wanted to do something for India, live for India, work for India, die for India,” she writes.

  When, after four months, it was time to go home, despair gripped her. Life in Europe seemed gray and meaningless, but she didn’t yet see a way to make India her home. On February 29, 1928, she boarded a slow ship in Bombay for Genoa. Krishnamurti was on the same boat, en route to London, and held discussions with his fellow passengers, but his presence only reminded her of the happiness that was slipping away from her. She lost her appetite and rarely spoke.

  From Italy, she took a train to Vienna, where Bolm was waiting for her. He assumed that she’d gotten India out of her system. He was, of course, entirely wrong.

  They returned to Riga, and Eugenia began to act again, but she was listless and despondent. As the months passed, her impending marriage loomed like a terrible trap. All she thought about was returning to India, but this appeared impossible. It was one thing, she knew, to go there as a tourist. It was quite another to go there to live, with no independent means or way to support herself. She tried to put the idea aside, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. Finally, she grew so desperate that a wild leap into a completely uncertain future began to seem easier than enduring her intolerable present.

  She ended her engagement to Bolm, telling him that she no longer loved him and that she planned to return to India for good. He was shocked, and argued with her, but she was firm.

  In the spring of 1929, Eugenia turned thirty—which made her, by the standards of the time, a pitiable spinster. But she was relieved to have escaped, at least momentarily, the comfortable prison of matrimony. Part of her craved stability, but it couldn’t compete with her need for adventure or her fear, after so many dislocations, of putting down roots anywhere. That summer, she returned to Ommen for the annual Star Camp. It began on August 2, with more than three thousand attendees. Theosophy was, at that point, the most constant thing in Eugenia’s life. But on the morning of August 3, Krishnamurti turned his followers’ lives upside down.

  Krishnamurti had never known anything but Theosophy. It had given him a life of comfort, stimulation, and worldwide adulation. Yet he could no longer pretend to believe in the ascended Masters, in magic, or in the ever-multiplying occult rituals that had come to dominate the Theosophical Society. So, in a speech delivered in the Ommen forest and broadcast on the radio, he renounced the entire mystical edifice that the Theosophists had built around him.

  “I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect,” he proclaimed. No organization should be formed “to lead or coerce people along any particular path.” Organizations, he said, are the enemies of truth, slating people into niches, crippling individualism. So, he announced, he was dissolving the Order of the Star in the East.

  “For eighteen years you have been preparing for this event, for the Coming of the World Teacher,” he said. “For eighteen years you have organized, you have looked for someone…who would transform your whole life…who would set you free—and now look what is happening!…In what manner has such a belief swept away all unessential things of life?”

  The Star Order, he argued, was nothing but a crutch, an impediment to true liberation. “[Y]ou have the idea that only certain people hold the key to the Kingdom of Happiness,” he said. “No one holds it. No one has the authority to hold that key. That key is your own self, and in the development and the purification and in the incorruptibility of that self alone is the Kingdom of Eternity.” He was adamant that he wanted no followers. “You can form other organizations and expect someone else,” he said. “With that I am not concerned, nor with creating new cages, new decorations for those cages. My only concern is to set men absolutely, unconditionally free.”

  The crowd was stunned. “Thousands felt betrayed and insulted,” writes Roland Vernon, one of Krishnamurti’s biographers. “He had abandoned his post, they thought, and in doing so had capitalised on their misfortune by exposing them as spiritual snobs and pious hypocrites.” Annie Besant, who, at eighty-one, had become a bit senile, seemed to be in denial about the fact that her beloved boy was giving up the role she’d created for him. “My fundamental belief in Krishnamurti as the World Teacher makes me more inclined to observe and study than to pronounce an opinion on the method chosen by one whom I consider my superior,” she told the Associated Press.

  Eugenia’s response was contradictory. She admired Krishnamurti’s courage and uncompromising individualism, and his denunciation of organizations surely influenced her own lifelong ambivalence about them. Perhaps his willingness to break with the past so decisively bolstered
her decision to do the same. Like him, she would become adept at reinvention. At the same time, for the rest of her life, Eugenia never stopped looking for a new messiah.

  Her immediate plans, though, remained unchanged. After Ommen, he returned to the Riga apartment she shared with her mother and began to prepare for India in earnest. She sold what was left of her furs, and some jewelry. She said good-bye to her mother, who would soon be moving to Prague for an acting job. Finally, in November, she sailed once again for India via Ceylon, with enough money to last her several months and no real idea what she was going to do.

  Despite everything that had happened, Krishnamurti had returned to India with Annie Besant in October 1929 for that year’s Theosophical convention. Besant was still like a mother to him—he referred to her as Amma—and he wouldn’t officially quit the Theosophical Society until the next year. Eugenia, not knowing quite what to do with herself, decided to go to Adyar as well. The atmosphere there must have been terrifically tense. Most of the Theosophical leadership was nice enough to Krishnamurti in person, but they attacked him behind his back. Ordinary Theosophists bombarded him with pleading questions. Besant, for her part, refused to recognize that things had changed; in a letter to a friend, Krishnamurti complained, “Amma says to me & at meetings, that I am the World Teacher & says she will go on with ceremonies etc. etc.!!” He must, he writes, “get out of all this rot.”

  Eugenia kept one foot in each camp, continuing to venerate Krishnamurti even as she stayed close to the Theosophical Society. After the end of the convention in Adyar, she installed herself in the cool, park-filled southern Indian city of Bangalore, a couple hundred miles away. There was an active Theosophical scene there, and Eugenia—who had started going by the Anglicized name Jane Peterson, perhaps to fit in better with the Brits who dominated expat society—quickly became a part of it. Most nights, young Bangalore Theosophists would gather to talk, listen to music, and improvise concerts. Eugenia had brought with her from Europe one of the furtrimmed Russian folk costumes that she used to wear during cabaret performances, and one evening she put it on and danced for her friends. At the time, India had only a few theaters and cinemas, and amateur theatricals were a big part of European social life. She was, it seems, a big hit.