Mohini Chatterji’s role in the Theosophical Society was pivotal but brief, lasting only from 1882 through 1887. Chatterji was a great grandson of Ram Mohun Roy and his wife was the great granddaughter of Debendra Nath Tagore (1817-1905). As a promising young lawyer, Mohini attended the final annual meeting of the TS in Bombay in November 1882, as the headquarters moved to Madras at the end of the year. Mohini went to Europe with Olcott and Blavatsky in 1884 and was hugely successful in the propaganda role for which he had been recruited. He was well-spoken, well educated, and handsome, and the latter quality made him attractive to female Theosophists, one of whom produced a hundred love letters from him after learning of the existence of his wife in Calcutta.(52) During the years of his TS involvement he did more than any other Indian to promote Western appreciation of Hinduism, and to integrate Hindu ideas with a Western esoteric framework. In April 1886 his extended visit to Dublin made a lifelong impression on William Butler Yeats, whose poetry reveals the influence of Hindu ideas absorbed from Mohini. Most notably, Yeats wrote a poem in 1928 entitled “Mohini Chatterjee,” which brought attention to him in his old age when he was largely forgotten by Western Theosophists.
Before his resignation, Mohini joined forces with Arthur Gebhard in a privately distributed manifesto challenging the leadership of the Theosophical Society and the powers of its president in particular. Dated September 23, 1886, the joint statement appeared under the title “A Few Words on the Theosophical Organization” and was denounced by Blavatsky in a letter to William Q. Judge (1851-1896) as “ungrateful, cold, and unjust to poor Olcott and cruel” adding that Mohini was “now regarded as a Jesus on wheels and a Saint” who owed his fame to “Olcott’s advertisements of him and my enthusiastic claims for him.”(53) Mohini’s change of perspective, after years of serving faithfully as a supporter of her claims about the Mahatmas, is also evident in her complaints to Judge, Mohini was believed responsible for persuading two London Theosophists that the Masters “were no longer regarded as the living actual Adepts, but either white Magicians with grayish tints, or `fictions’… unreachable Beings they could neither communicate, nor take concern in worldly or private affairs could never write letters or send messages—therefore our Masters could never be MAHATMAS…Mohini is then exercising for over six months his influence over Miss Arundale to make her lose faith & belief even in the Masters.”(54)
Before leaving America, Mohini was embraced by the Boston Unitarians and Transcendentalists as evidenced by his role as a featured speaker at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the arrival of the Rev. Cyrus A. Bartol (1813-1900) as pastor of Old West Unitarian Church. He was thus returning to the alliances that the Brahmo Samaj had established in the 1830s with the Unitarians of Britain and America. Mohini’s presence as a speaker at this event is a reminder that Unitarianism was the first Western movement with which the Brahmo Samaj found common cause:
“It affords me very great pleasure to have this opportunity of saluting a body of men, brothers and Christians, in the name of the God who is the one God, no matter under how many different names and different forms he may be worshipped; the God who is the Father of all men, in whom we live and move and have our being… In the home of my childhood there was a book called ‘The Precepts of Jesus: Guide to Peace and Happiness.’ This book was written by an ancestor of mine. The great misunderstanding and misconception of the Christian faith that prevails in our country had given me such a false opinion of Christianity that I thought it would be a perfectly profitless thing to read this book… There is another reason why I have a personal pleasure in being here. Fifty-four years ago, four years before Dr. Bartol began his ministry here, an ancestor of mine died in Bristol, England, surrounded by Christians who believed in the unity of God. Therefore it is to me a matter of delight that I have this opportunity of addressing you as men, as brothers, and as Christians.”(55)
Mohini was not simply embracing Christianity and rejecting Theosophy; his position was nuanced but he was moving out of the orb of Blavatsky’s influence by returning to the conciliatory and pro-Western stance of the early Brahmo movement. Having served as a Theosophical missionary to the West, he was rejecting his role as the spokesman of Mahatmas who were harshly critical of Christianity, and returning to an earlier model of Indo-Western relations that did not exalt Indian religions over others. The celebrity he achieved in England, Ireland, and America may have turned his head as Blavatsky and her supporters believed. But his remarks at Bartol’s anniversary celebration indicate a genuine change of heart about a cooperative rather than competitive attitude of Hindus to Christians, which was a return to the path of his ancestors.
Cyrus A. Bartol
Having gotten too close to the flame of Blavatsky’s political involvements might have burned him, according to evidence unearthed in Christy Campbell’s 2002 The Maharaja’s Box. Campbell discovered a letter written by Philip D. Henderson (1840-1918) in 1886, when he had become the “general superintendent of the Thugee and Dacoity department,” reporting to Foreign Secretary Sir Henry Mortimer Durand (1850-1924). Henderson had been responsible for surveillance of the Theosophical Society since its arrival in India in 1879, and had become concerned about TS involvement in attempts to incite the exiled Maharaja Dalip Singh to open rebellion against the British. This led to an investigation of Dalip Singh’s associations in England, and on June 15, 1886 Henderson reported to the Police Commissioner of Madras:
“When Colonel Olcott was in India in 1882-83, he founded a secret society among the admitted. The purpose of this secret society is said to be to send information to Russia, and the headquarters are now said to be in Madras. An agent of the society was sent to England and is supposed to be the medium, or one of the mediums, of transmitting information. This man is one Mohini Mohun Chatterji… I heard from England myself that Mohini Mohun was in the habit of seeing a great deal of Duleep Singh … at the present time the necessity for vigilance to intrigues going on in India has been impressed on the Government of India.”(56)
In light of the fact that Mohini’s dealings with the maharaja came to the attention of the Government of India, it is conceivable that attempts were made to dissuade him from continued association with Blavatsky and the TS, and that his distancing himself from her was motivated by pressures brought to bear behind the scenes. Whatever the combination of factors, after his resignation in October 1887, Mohini had no further dealings with the TS other than assisting G.R.S. Mead (1863-1933) with an 1896 translation of the Upanishads, which he did under a pseudonym.
52 Letters of H.P. Blavatsky to A.P. Sinnett (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1973), 297.
53 H.P. Blavatsky, “The Original Programme of the Theosophical Society,” Compiler’s Notes, H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, Vol. VII, 136.
54 Ibid., 137
55 The West Church, Boston. Commemorative Services on the Fiftieth Anniversary of its Present Ministry… (Boston: Damrell and Upham, 1887). 68-70.
56 Christy Campbell, The Maharajah’s Box. (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2002), 254-255.