Hurrychund Chintamon
1870-1877 Initial Contacts (from Theosophy in the Bengal Renaissance, Chapter 10 of Imagining the East)
Old Diary Leaves describes a visitor who recognized Bombay Arya Samaj leader Moolji Thackersey (d1880) in a photograph on the wall of the New York apartment that Colonel Olcott (1832-1907) shared with Madame Blavatsky. “One evening in the year 1877 an American traveller, who had recently been in India, called…he did know Moolji Thackersey and had recently met him in Bombay.(3) This photograph had been allegedly taken on a transatlantic voyage from New York to Liverpool in 1870, where Olcott met Moolji Thackersey and another Indian traveler named Tulsidas Jadarjee, five years before the formation of the Arya Samaj. Hurrychund Chintamon, with whom Olcott began corresponding after Thackersey introduced them, was the second Indian entered in the Adyar Membership records now available online from The Art Archive. The first, Jadarjee, #120 in the entries, precedes #123 Chintamon and has been considerably more elusive. Herbert Monachesi (d1900) gave his name as Tulsidas Jadarjee in an October 6, 1875 New York Mercury article “Proselyters from India,” claiming that Thackersey and his travel companion had been on a Hindu missionary journey to the West.(4) Newspaper accounts in New York (November 12, 1869), Louisville (November 20, reporting their presence in Chicago), New Orleans (December 3), Macon (December 24, reporting their presence in Mobile), Charleston (December 26), and Philadelphia (January 6, 1870) trace their travels around the United States on a business mission to study the cotton business in hopes of establishing direct trade. The New York Times for January 13, 1870 included the names “Moolja Thackersy, Toolsidas Jadarzee,” and “Colonel. Hy. S. Olcott” as having departed the previous day on the steamship Java, bound from New York to Liverpool.(5)
James Peebles (1822-1922) has been suggested as the possible visitor of Olcott’s anecdote, but he was out of the country throughout 1877 and thus less likely as the visitor in question than a heretofore overlooked colleague of Olcott, David E. Dudley, MD.(6) Like Olcott, Peebles did make a journey to England in 1870 that led to acquaintance with Indians who became pivotal in the establishment of the TS in Asia. Two years later his travels in India made him a catalyst in the relations between the Brahmo Samaj and western Spiritualists. His acquaintance with the Brahmo Samaj had begun in 1868 when Keshub Chunder Sen (1838-1884) wrote a letter to a Free Thought Convention, in which “Dr. J. M. Peebles and Miss Lizzie Doten (1827-1913) spoke for the Spiritualists…there was also an inspiring letter from Keshub Chunder Sen, the great leader of the Brahmo Somaj movement in India.”(7) In 1870, Sen wrote a note to Peebles while both were in London, leading to a meeting about which Peebles later wrote: “This educated and gentlemanly missionary from India, attired in the vesture of his native land, made quite a sensation when reaching the great metropolis of her Majesty’s domains… we learned that he was well acquainted with Peary Chand Mittra, and other leading Spiritualists of India. Multitudes in this distant country accept the central thought of Spiritualism; that is, intercourse with departed spirits.”(8) Sen wrote of the meeting in a diary entry: “Tuesday, 26th April. Mr. Peebles, United States Consul in Asia Minor, calls on me with a friend of his who, it appears, is a spiritualist. They are both very liberal-minded, and they most warmly sympathize with me in my desire and efforts to promote theism. Mr. Peebles asks me to visit America where he will be going in next June. He is enthusiastic about it.”(9)
James Martin Peebles
In his 1875 travel memoir Around the World Peebles also describes meeting Brahmo Samajis in Calcutta, one of whom had translated Emma Hardinge’s Spiritual Commandments into Bengali and distributed it as a pamphlet.10 In 1871, Hardinge (not yet Britten) had written a glowing three page preface to the first biography of Peebles, The Spiritual Pilgrim by J. O. Barrett (1823-1898). The following year he met the Cairo Spiritualist circle in which Blavatsky had been involved.(11) In light of these circumstances, we can surmise that Peebles vouched for Blavatsky’s Spiritualist credentials to Olcott, and endorsed her phenomena that are described in People From the Other World. This 1875 book describes the séances at the Eddy brothers’ farmhouse in Vermont where Olcott first met Blavatsky. Peebles also is featured in the narrative as a man who “is well known as an eloquent speaker and scholarly writer upon Spiritualism, but that doesn’t imply that he is either a fool or knave.”(12)
Henry S. Olcott
Although in 1874 Peebles had been present at the time of the first acquaintance of Blavatsky and Olcott in Vermont, he kept distance from her thereafter. Adyar membership records indicate that Peebles was not an early TS member. In fact he condemned Blavatsky and supported her accusers the Coulombs in 1884 during the Society for Psychical Research investigation of the TS. Near the end of his life he repeated his condemnation of Blavatsky in Five Journeys Around the World (1910), writing that “Continental, English, and American Spiritualism and Spiritualists were shamefully misrepresented in India a number of years ago by Madame Blavatsky and a number of her biologized subordinates.”(13) Clearly, Olcott was chief among the “biologized subordinates” yet in the same book Peebles wrote “Adyar is not only restful, inviting to study and meditation, but the centre of Theosophical culture, research, and authority for the enlightened Theosophical world. Happy were the days and weeks that I spent in this palace of books, companioned with Col. Olcott, the only living founder of modern Theosophy!”(14) After Blavatsky’s death he finally joined the Theosophists in 1894 and was on collegial terms with Olcott on a return trip to South Asia three years later.(15)
Emma Hardinge Britten
Art Magic and Ghost Land, published in 1876, were the first expressions of interest in India in books by a TS founder. Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) has been largely written out of the early TS narrative and deprived of her rightful status as a founder. Although she has been perceived in terms of the polarities East vs. West and Spiritualism vs. Theosophy, she wrote as a Theosophical Spiritualist and a reconciler of Eastern and Western traditions. In Art Magic she wrote that “the same imperishable sources of knowledge from which the ancients derived their opinions and framed their systems of Theosophy, are open to the students of the nineteenth century in all their fullness,”(16) and eight years later in Nineteenth Century Miracles she asserted that “’Theosophy’ and `Occultism,’ are terms of world-wide import.”(17) Despite her open break with the TS due to its hostility to Spiritualism, in 1884 Britten still maintained that “India has been the cradle of all known theological beliefs…the actual marvels wrought by religious ascetics, in the realm of matter and force, have opened up a new and highly suggestive page in the study of Occultism and Psychology.”(18) Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, refers to Bengal briefly in each of its two volumes. In Volume I, Blavatsky gives a first-person narrative of a “Magical Séance in Bengal,” in which she describes having made “hundreds of experiments with cats, dogs, monkeys of various kinds, and once, with a tame tiger” in the Western Ghat mountains, and then describes witnessing a tiger, a lion-monkey, and an oriole being mesmerized all in the same “séance” attended by nine persons in Bengal.(19) In the second volume, she describes an encounter with snake charmers by a British “Captain B” before recounting another tale of mesmerizing a tiger, this time in a village near Dacca.(20)
Swami Dayananda Sarasvati
Correspondence between the Theosophists and the Bombay Arya Samaj began in November 1877 when Olcott contacted Moolji Thackersey. In December, Blavatsky wrote for the first time to Peary Chand Mittra (1813-1883), asking “in what pagodas are the records preserved? Where are these temples situated and what are their names, and how old is each known to be?”(21)
Although Blavatsky corresponded with the Arya Samaj before making contact with the Brahmos, in The White Buddhist, Steven Prothero notes a letter written June 5, 1877 from Olcott to Mittra which thus occurred months prior to TS contact with Dayananda and his disciples.(22) Peary Chand Mittra was the first Bengali member of the TS, and the third Indian admitted, member #135 in the Adyar membership books with an entry date of December 9, 1877. Although Olcott would later claim that his motivation to move to India predated creation of the TS, an 1876 letter to Stainton Moses (1839-1892) shows him resistant to Blavatsky’s desire to relocate to India. She had been convinced that criticisms by D.D. Home (1833-1886) had destroyed her credibility in Europe and America. This letter, published in Light in 1892, seeks the assistance of Moses’ spirit guide Imperator:
“I wish you would ask Imperator, with my compliments, if he can’t do something, in the psychological way, to prevent Madame Blavatsky from going to India…She is a changed woman these past few weeks. She is moody, reserved, and apparently desperate. The calumnies circulated in Europe and here have cut her so deeply; she feels such a disgust with our world; she so longs for her sacred Ganges, and the society of her Brethren, that I am afraid we will lose her.”(23)
Daniel Dunglas Home
In November 1877, after the decision had been made to move to India, Blavatsky wrote a letter to A.N. Aksakov (1832-1903) in Russia that confirms Home’s hostility as a factor: “It is for this that I am going for ever to India, and for very shame and vexation I want to go where no one will know my name. Home’s malignity has ruined me for ever in Europe.(24) Perhaps what changed Olcott’s mind were Blavatsky’s elaborate claims on behalf of Swami Dayananda. She had portrayed him as part of her Great White Brotherhood of adept sponsors, and Hurrychund Chintamon had also encouraged Olcott’s religious adherence to the Swami. On February 18, 1878, Olcott wrote through Chintamon to Dayananda, “we come to your feet as children to a parent, and say, ‘Look at us, our teacher; tell us what we ought to do. Give us your counsel and your aid.”(25)
This sequence of events revises the traditional understanding of the TS move to India. Rapprochement between western Spiritualists and the Brahmo Samaj was behind the scenes of the early TS through Peebles, Sen and Mittra during the writing of Britten’s Ghost Land, well before the connection to Swami Dayananda developed. Theosophical tales about Indian missionaries to the West were likely derived from Brahmo activities and orientation. Arya Samajis cared no more about European contacts than did Tibetan Buddhists, but Bengalis were more global in perspective and did send missionaries to the West. The first to play this role in the early Victorian period was Brahmo Samaj founder Ram Mohan Roy; most visible in the 1880s was his great grandson Mohini Chatterji (1858-1936).
(endnote numbers continue from the previous installment)
3Henry S. Olcott, Old Diary Leaves (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1974, 1975) Vol. I, 395.
4 Josephine Ransom, Short History of the Theosophical Society (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1938), 98.
5 “Passengers Sailed,” New York Times, January 13, 1870, 8.
6 Dudley’s role in the TS move to India is discussed in my editorial foreword to the 2021 reprint of Chintamon’s 1874 Commentary on the Text of the Bhagavad-Gita. In The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977), Michael Gomes noted that the American traveler “is usually identified as Dr. James M. Peebles” and asserts that Peebles had indeed met Thackersey, but cautions that Peebles was out of the U.S. throughout 1877. In 1980, Marion Meade reported as fact that Peebles was the visitor; the most recent book to name Peebles as the visitor to Olcott is Diane Sasson, Yearning for the New Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 57. My The Masters Revealed variously asserted this as a possibility and a fact, despite noting Michael Gomes’s objections re chronology. Joscelyn Godwin and Gary Lachman have more cautiously and accurately described this as a possibility rather than a fact.
7 Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual Meeting (Boston: Free Religious Association of America, 1907), 22.
8 James M. Peebles, Around the World (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1875), 251.
9 Keshub Chunder Sen, Diary in England (Calcutta: Brahmo Tract Society, 1894), 79.
10 Peebles, Around the World (Boston: Colby and Rich, 1875), 252.
11 Edward Whipple, A Biography of James Martin Peebles, M.D., A.M. (Battle Creek: The Author, 1901), 529
12 Henry S. Olcott, People From the Other World, (Rutland: Tuttle, 1972), 308.
13 James M. Peebles, Five Journeys Around the World (Battle Creek: Peebles Publishing Company, 1910), 432.
14 Ibid, 419.
15 At this point a timeline may be helpful in clarifying Peebles’s travels in relation to those of others. 1) 1870— Olcott meets Thackersey and Jadarjee en route to London; Peebles meets Keshub Chnder Sen in London. 2) 1871— Britten writes preface to the first biography of Peebles. 3) 1872—Peebles meets P.C. Mittra and other Brahmo Samajis in Calcutta, and visits Cairo and learns of Blavatsky who has left for Odessa, or perhaps met her before her departure as evidence is conflicting. 4) 1874 Peebles is at the Chittenden VT home of the Eddy Brothers when Olcott and Blavatsky met there.
16 Emma Hardinge Britten, Art Magic (New York: The Author, 1876), 29.
17 Emma Hardinge Britten, Nineteenth Century Miracles (New York: Lovell, 1884), 304.
18 Ibid., 294
19 H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1976), Vol. I, 467-468.
20 Ibid., Vol. II, 622-623. The otherwise unidentified “Captain B” may be a veiled reference to Richard F. Burton, who referred to snake charmers in several of his travel narratives and who joined the TS in late 1878.
21 Letters of H.P. Blavatsky, Vol. I (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 2003), 391.Blavatsky was seeking information on the oldest astronomical calculations preserved in India.
22 Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 206.
23 Stainton Moses, “The Early Story of the Theosophical Society,” Light, Vol. XII, No. 602Jul 23, 1892, 356.
24 Letters of H. P. Blavatsky, Vol. 1 (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 2003), 361.
25 Krishna Singh Arya and P.D. Shastri, Swami Dayananda Sarasvati: A Study of His Life and Work (Delhi: Manohar, 1987), 17-18.