Rebels Against the Raj Page 2
These renegades came to the subcontinent from diverse social and intellectual backgrounds. In India, they all combined writing with activism; otherwise, what they did in their new homeland varied greatly too. Two worked up north, in the high and cold Himalaya; two in deepest South India, close to the hot and humid coast. Of the women, one based herself in the great cities of Madras and Banaras; the other two were inspired to settle in villages instead. Two men married Indians and raised children with them; another brought his white-skinned wife and sought to make her an Indian too. One woman fell passionately in love with an Indian man but could not marry him; one man stayed unmarried and was almost certainly gay, taking Indian lovers.
The first of these rebels arrived in India in 1893, the last died in India in 1984. Their lives thus span a century of tumultuous history for India and Indians, incorporating the two World Wars, the rise and maturation of the freedom struggle, Independence and Partition, and the emergence of a postcolonial state and society.
In this shaping and re-shaping of modern India these individuals were active participants. Their work spoke directly to what was happening on the ground. For these men and women were anti-colonial crusaders as well as nation-builders. The education of the girl child was an abiding passion for at least three of them; building the country’s intellectual and scientific capacity an abiding passion for two others. For them all, freedom from British rule was only the first step for India; they wished also for their adopted country to be free of injustice, inequality, poverty, ignorance, and disease. Notably, in their conscious endeavour to change India they unconsciously changed themselves too. Two Christians became former Christians as a result of their experiences; a fanatical Communist became a vigorous anti-Communist.
The lives and doings of these individuals constitute a morality tale for the world we currently live in. This is a world governed by paranoia and nationalist xenophobia, with the rise of jingoism in country after country, and a corresponding contempt for ideas and individuals that emanate from outside the borders of one’s nation. Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India, Donald Trump and the white supremacists in America, Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers in England, Xi Jinping and his Confucian Communist Party in China – all see themselves as uniquely blessed by history and by God. No foreigner, they believe, can teach them anything.
This book tells us that they can.
PART I
CROSSING OVER, CHANGING SIDES
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 spirituality 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’.[2] Audiences 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 development 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.’[3]
Annie Besant’s own first impressions of Theosophy were underwhelming. 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.’[5]
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.[6]
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’.[7]
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’.[8]
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.
II
Annie Besant first saw the country she made her own on the morning of 16 November 1893. On this day she landed at the southern port town of Tuticorin, before making her way up the coast to Madras, where the Theosophical Society had its headquarters, in a plot of land along the Adyar – now a stinking sewer suffused with the city’s wastes, but then a briskly flowing stretch of mostly clean water.
Madras (still many decades away from being renamed Chennai) was the third largest city in the subcontinent. It was from here that the British administered the southern parts of their Raj. In 1893 Madras had a population of about half a million; employed in the colonial government and in the colonial army, but also in trades and services. The city was a centre of textile and leather production, and had a whole array of English-language educational institutions, the products of which were potential recruits to the Theosophical cause.
In her first winter in India, Mrs Besant toured South India by train and occasionally by bullock-cart. She spoke in (among other places) the cities of Madurai, Tirunelveli, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. Early in the new year she headed north, making her first acquaintance with Banaras. She also made a detour to see the Taj Mahal in Agra.
In her first years in India, Mrs Besant spent much time attending to, and seeking to resolve, the factional conflicts within the Theosophical Society, these partly based on personal rivalries, and partly on whether to adopt the Buddhist or the Brahminical approach to reincarnation. She also made long tours overseas – to New Zealand and Australia, to the United States, and of course to England and Europe, seeking to build the network of the society and enlarge its membership base.
In the wider international fraternity of the Theosophists, Mrs Besant came to be known as ‘Mother’. In Madras, which was in effect her main base, she was known as ‘Periamma’, the Great Mother; in North India, as Bari Memsahib, the Big (or Biggest) Lady Sahib. She toured the country ‘lecturing on Hinduism, Mesmerism, Temperance, Vegetarianism, etc.’. One early report on her activities says she ‘consistently covered Hindus and their religion with almost sickening flattery’. The flattery was returned, with interest, an Indian newspaper calling her ‘the veritable goddess of Ind coming from the far off West for the spiritual regeneration of the land’.[10]
In England, Mrs Besant had been prevented from obtaining a degree from the University of London. This prompted an intense ambition to start a university of her own in India. When wealthy Hindus evinced an interest in funding such an enterprise, she took it up more seriously. In July 1898 – less than five years after landing in India – she announced the establishment of a ‘Central Hindu College’ in the ancient temple city of Banaras. The Maharaja of Banaras chose to gift her land and buildings – although he later had misgivings. The Maharaja of Kashmir chipped in with funds. Hostels and classrooms were built, to which students came from across India. The University of Allahabad – seventy miles upstream on the River Ganga – gave the new college accreditation. The institution had boys alone; so, in 1904, Mrs Besant started a residential Hindu Girls School, a revolutionary idea at the time.
In 1895, barely a couple of years after she moved to India, Annie Besant gave a lecture in several cities bearing the title ‘The Means of India’s Regeneration’, a talk radiating prescriptive energy about what her adopted land could do to recover her place as one of the great nations of the world. Mrs Besant wanted a strong classical core to Indian education, hoping that ‘a public opinion could be formed, sufficiently strong, which made a knowledge of Sanskrit a real necessity, so that no man would be regarded as an educated man unless a knowledge of Sanskrit formed part of his education’. Turning to secular learning, she deplored the fact that the history and geography textbooks in use were so utterly alien to Indian realities. These books acquainted the schoolboy with English kings and queens, English towns, and English industries, ‘leaving him without any knowledge of the detailed history and geography and products and industries of his own country, where the whole of his life is to be spent, and to which his thoughts should be ever turned’.[11]
In another lecture, Mrs Besant explained how the Central Hindu College would blend the modern with the traditional, with the curriculum being equally strong in classical Sanskrit texts as well as in modern works in English. ‘Do you not see’, she remarked:
that there are two Hindu nations in this land – one of Pandits, profound in their learning, scholarship, thought and knowledge, but knowing nothing outside Samskrit literature. They know nothing of modern thought, modern life, the modern spirit. On the other side there is a Hindu nation growing up, knowing nothing of Samskrit literature and of the sacred Books, growing up utterly westernized. There is a great gulf between them and the nation of Pandits. The Pandit cannot influence the English-educated boy, because he does not sympathise with him in his hopes and aspirations. You cannot influence the young unless you sympathise and feel with them. We want to bridge the gap between these Hindu nations, and we build this double bridge of Samskrit and English. We lead both classes, so that both shall know English and both shall know Samskrit; we thus hope to join the two Hindu nations and make them one in the service of their Motherland.[12]
These words were spoken in 1903, by which time Mrs Besant had been a decade in India. She had started a college for boys as well as several schools for girls. Her views on gender relations had markedly changed from her days in the West. As a socialist and suffragette, she had demanded full equality between the sexes. Now she was more inclined to the Hindu view that women’s roles and responsibilities were different from (and somewhat subordinate to) men’s. So, as she wrote in 1904, ‘the national movement for girls’ education must be on national lines: ‘it must accept the general Hindu conception of woman’s place in the national life’. That is to say:
It must see in the woman the mother and the wife, or, as in some cases, the learned and pious ascetic, the Brahmavadini of older days. It cannot see in her the rival and competitor of man in all forms of outside and public employment, as woman, under different economic conditions, is coming to be, more and more, in the West…. [T]he national movement for the education of girls must be one which meets the national needs, and India needs nobly trained wives and mothers, wise and tender rulers of the household, educated teachers of the young, helpful counsellors of their husbands, skilled nurses of the sick, rather than girl graduates, educated for the learned professions.