Celestial India

Regarded, in these post-colonial times, with scarcely disguised condescension, Theosophy in its heyday was a movement seeking radical reappraisal of the imperial relationship with India and of the ‘civilising mission’. Born out of the Orientalist discovery of Sanskrit culture in the early nineteenth century, it was nurtured in the mid-century on emergent Aryan race theory and the turn towards spiritualism; and it celebrated its maturity, at the turn of the twentieth century, with little less than a bid to establish Hinduism as the basis of a new world religion, replacing an imperially inflected and increasingly discredited Christianity. In its last significant incarnation, it even addressed contemporary political issues, instilling confidence in a new generation of Indian nationalists to demand their freedom from British rule. Isaac Lubelsky tells this story mainly through the institutional history of the Theosophical Society and the remarkable characters who directed it. And remarkable they were: first and foremost, Madame Blavatsky, the minor Ukrainian aristocrat turned spiritualist medium (possibly via a period as a touring pianist in Italy) whose mystique did most to establish ‘the faith’ in America. Then there was Colonel Olcott, the inevitable New York lawyer whose entrepreneurial drive carried Theosophy beyond US shores, to Europe and eventually ‘home’ to India. Other principals included Charles Webster Leadbeater, whose questionable sexual mores hinted at scandal; Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was groomed (among other things) for gurudom and the role of World Teacher but preferred, instead, to become a Renouncer; and, most striking of all, the indomitable Annie Besant, whose career passed from the advocacy of atheism and birth-control to that of Hindu pantheism and Indian Home Rule—linked only, perhaps, by her persistent aversion to Christianity

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