This new book from University of Toronto Press fulfills both a hope long expressed and a prophecy I have made, that real significant progress in research on Blavatsky will occur only when a scholar immersed in her Russian writings takes them into account as historical documents. Her chapter on Blavatskaia, as she spells it, is 38 pages so twice the length of usual chapters in academic collections. “Collective biography” has been much on my mind lately, as it covers two of my SUNY Press books as well as Pell Mell and the editorial work I did with Patrick Bowen in Letters to the Sage. All these were focused on the late nineteenth century. But the genre also includes books I admire by Ronnie Pontiac and Gary Lachman whose work spans centuries and millennia. A Woman’s Empire features eight authors of one gender, ethnicity, nationality and era. It is one of the best recent examples of an engaging collective biography that also goes into great scholarly depth in its research. Especially interesting is the author’s discussion of the concurrently published (by the same publisher, Katkov) Durbar in Lahore which by comparison to Caves and Jungles of Hindustan is a more straightforward non-fiction travel book that has yet to be published in book form in English translation.(KPJ)
Propagandist of Russian Imperialism: Madame Blavatsky in India, Chapter Three of A Woman’s Empire, Excerpts:
From Apreleva’s closely observed sketches of Central Asian life, which require the reader to interpret the Russian imperial role in Central Asia, we turn in Part Two to two far more outspoken writers who place Russian imperial efforts into the context of Great Game rivalry with the British, Elena Blavatskaia and Iuliia Golovnina. Chapter three addresses the former, the famous Madame Blavatsky, and her quasi-travel-writing narrative texts written about India. In these texts, while India and the British control of the country are Blavatskaia’s main focus alongside her thoughts, observations, and proclamations about numerous topics, the issue of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus and Central Asia is never far from the surface. Blavatskaia often uses British examples in order to promulgate Russian counterexamples, typically defending the Russian empire as a “better” one and serving as a Russian propagandist.(p111)
Caves and Jungles of Hindostan is certainly also a travel narrative, despite its relative distance from factual reliability… Others included Narayana, a mysterious travelling companion, and The Thakur, or Gulab Lal Singh, the latter of which can be described as “a fictionalized character in the narratives published in the volume From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan. The character broadly corresponds to Helena Blavatsky’s spiritual Master.”(119) (citation to an online website). Not only that, but as K. Paul Johnson points out, his presence sometimes serves as a way to give the Indians a voice against the British: “Miss B—is clearly providing an opportunity to demonstrate the hatred felt by Indians toward the British. Not only does Gulab-Singh exhibit an attitude which is both threatening and derisive, but he also asserts that a successful uprising will occur the moment his brotherhood decides to allow it. Such a portrayal of the Theosophical Mahatmas was quite different from that conveyed to Anglo-Indians like A.P. Sinnett!”(119-120)