INTRODUCTION
CHINTAMON IN THEOSOPHICAL HISTORY
Henry Olcott’s credulity has been repeatedly depicted as the defining factor in his collaboration with Helena Blavatsky. The confidence with which he and HPB went to India was inspired largely by correspondence with Hurrychund Chintamon and destroyed soon after they met in Bombay. Four years later, Chintamon’s revelations to Richard Hodgson and the subsequent SPR Report forever changed Olcott’s relationship with Blavatsky and led to her forced departure from India.
The membership book of the Adyar Theosophical Society lists Hurrychund Chintamon as the second Indian member of the Society. By their own admission, Blavatsky and Olcott had been defrauded by Chintamon and learned as much within days of their arrival in Bombay in 1879, being handed an exorbitant bill for a welcoming ceremony and then learning that funds sent from New York to the Arya Samaj via Chintamon had not reached the intended recipients. He was expelled from both organizations as soon as the Theosophists compared notes with the Arya Samaj leaders and recognized signs of embezzlement.
Chintamon had played a crucial advisory role in the move of the TS to India, heretofore associated solely with his leadership of the Bombay Arya Samaj and status as representative of Swami Dayananda Saraswati. In India, Chintamon is remembered less for his dealings with the TS and Arya Samaj than as the father of Indian photography. In Photography: an Illustrated History, Martin W. Sandler writes “The early popularity of photography in India, particularly in Bombay, was also due in great measure to the contribution of one pioneer photographer. Hurrychind Chintamon…the most masterful and most successful of the early Indian photographers who captured carte-de-visite images of literary, political, and business figures, Chintamon’s most famous carte was a portrait of the Maharaja of Baroda. Thousands of these images were distributed throughout India.”[i]
Presumably his photographic expertise accounted for his presence in London in 1871 among an entourage of Indian rulers. He began an association with Freemasons in London that continued for more than twenty years.
In 1878 Chintamon authored a small pamphlet Discourse on Aryans and Freemasonry. A history of Lodge Rising Star of Western India identifies Chintamon as the first Hindu accepted into the craft there: “For the first time it was in this year [1872] that a Hindu Brother named Harichand Chintaman sought admission in the lodge as a visitor. As on the ground of their being polytheists and not monotheists the Hindus were not taken in the Order, a discussion arose but ultimately the Worshipful Master admitted the Brother as he belonged to a regularly constituted lodge of Masons in England and also held a certificate from the Grand Lodge.”[ii]
In the early 1890s Chintamon was again actively involved in the world of London Freemasonry, long past his associations with the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, and HBofL. He was quoted in Ars Quatour Coronatum in discussion at a meeting of the Quator Coronati Lodge in 1891 on the subject of the relationship of Masonry to Hinduism.[iii] Hence his Masonic affiliation both preceded and survived his subsequent attachments to the TS and the Arya Samaj.
An 1878 letter from Blavatsky to Chintamon suggests that he was useful to the TS and Arya Samaj efforts to recruit Indian royals because he knew rajas and maharajas by virtue of having photographed many of them.
“As for the future Fellows of our Indian branch, have your eyes upon the chance of fishing out of the great ocean of Hindu hated for Christian missionaries some of those big fish you can Rajahs, and whales known as Maharajahs. Could you not hook out for your Bombay branch either Gwalior (Scindia) or the Holkar of Indore—those most faithful and loyal subjects of the British (?).“[iv]
Why would Blavatsky expect Chintamon to be able and willing to “hook” rajahs and maharajas? His photographic career led him to be acquainted with many of them, and both of these maharajas did in fact eventually support the TS, presumably through Chintamon’s influence. Mahatma Letter #54 from Koot Hoomi refers to him as “the man who robbed the Founders and Dayanand of Rs. 4,000, deceived and imposed upon them from the first (so far back as New York), and then exposed and expelled from the Society ran away to England and is ever since seeking and thirsting for his revenge…showing letters from her, received by him while she was in America; and in which she is made to advise him to pretend— he is a ‘Brother’ and thus deceive the Brtish theosophists the better….”[v] But in 1878, before meeting him, in an article “A Society Without a Dogma” HPB referred to “the famous commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita of our brother Hurrychund Chintamon” and quotes him to the effect that “In Hindustan, as in England, there are doctrines for the learned, and dogmas for the unlearned; strong meat for men and milk for babes; facts for the few, and fictions for the many, realities for the wise, and romances for the simple; esoteric truth for the philosopher, and exoteric fable for the fool.” Within a few years Chintamon would accuse Blavatsky of adding to the stock of Indian fictions and fables and produce documentary evidence that supported his accusation. Unlike the Coulomb accusers, however, Chintamon’s testimony was not public and self- incriminating. His complicity with Blavatsky in manipulating and misleading Olcott and Dayananda was never discussed publicly, perhaps as a reward for his usefulness to the Society for Psychical Research investigation of the Theosophical Society. Even after Chintamon’s departure from India, Swami Dayananda and the TS continued in amicable relations for another three years, but in 1882 the Swami publicly denounced the Theosophists, calling Blavatsky a fraud and juggler. Richard Hodgson’s 1885 Report relied in important details on the testimony of a correspondent of Blavatsky whose initials are H.C., and context makes it clear that Chintamon was his informant. A letter dated May 22, 1878 from Blavatsky to Chintamon was transcribed by Eleanor Sidgwick and is now the archives of the Society for Psychical Research. This date is highly significant as the official date of the amalgamation of the Theosophical Society and the Arya Samaj. The transcription was published in the first volume of the Letters of H.P. Blavatsky. Sidgwick paraphrases at times but mostly the letter seems to be directly transcribed. HPB acknowledges Chintamon’s last letter and discusses the amalgamation of the TS and the Arya Samaj. She writes that C.C. Massey, perhaps the most devoted member in England, is son of an MP and a congenital mystic, adding “I feel perfectly sure, that if Pundit Dayanand will write to him any request he will joyfully comply.” She then appeals to Chintamon to induce Dayananda to sign what might later be called two Mahatma letters, one to Massey and one to Emily Kislingbury, first English Spiritualist convert to the TS, composed by HPB.
In 1880 when Mahatma correspondence between Koot Hoomi and A.P. Sinnett was inaugurated, Dayananda was apparently taken by surprise and felt betrayed by this development. He wrote to her “Madame Blavatsky…whatever you had written to me from America, or discussed with me at Saharanpur, Meerut, Kashi, etc….does not seem to conform with your present activities.”[vi] Chintamon himself lent a hand with HPB’s schemes to impress Massey, however. Olcott and HPB stopped in London in early 1879 en route to Bombay from New York, and during this visit they saw Massey at the home of a mutual friend, the medium Mary Hollis-Billing. After materializing a Japanese teapot, HPB told Massey to reach into his overcoat pocket, where he found a card case containing Hurrychund’s signature on a slip of paper.
In the days immediately following her arrival in Bombay, before the irreparable break with Chintamon, HPB performed a phenomenon that again involved the use of his name. After meeting Ross Scott, who would become the son-in-law of Allan O. Hume, she offered to perform any phenomenon he wanted, and he asked that a handkerchief embroidered with her name be magically transformed into one embroidered with Hurrychund’s. In Olcott’s recounting of the story in Old Diary Leaves, Scott both chose unprompted the specific type of phenomenon—handkerchief replacement—and the name that he wanted on the handkerchief, and was so impressed that he immediately donated to the Arya Samaj: “She gave Scott to hold tight in his hand the embroidered corner of her handkerchief, retaining the opposite corner herself. After a minute or so she told him to look. He did so, found the substitution of names had been made, Hurrychund’s being there in the same kind of embroidery, and counted out into Hurrychund’s hand five golden sovereigns.”[vii]
In 1884, after meeting Chintamon and hearing his account of his dealings with the TS, Massey announced his resignation as British TS President, writing “The evidence for the existence of Adepts — or ’Mahatmas,’ since that term is now preferred — and even of their connection with individual members of the Theosophical Society, need not here concern us. We may, and I do, accept it; and yet see in their methods, or rather in the things that are said and done in their names, such deviations from our Philistine sense of truth and honour as to assure us that something is very wrong somewhere.”[viii]
What can we conclude from the brief involvement of Chintamon successively in the Arya Samaj, the TS, the HBofL, and the SPR? Olcott and Dayananda both entered into the TS/Arya Samaj affiliation in good faith, believing what they were told by HPB and Chintamon respectively. But HPB and Chintamon both acted in bad faith for different reasons and in different ways. Since Dayananda could not read English and the TS founders could not read Hindi, by acting as an intermediary Chintamon had the power to shape each group’s perception of the other. In his enthusiasm to promote the alliance he portrayed each group as being more compatible with the other in goals and beliefs than they actually were; it took several years for the resulting confusion to work itself out in a series of conflicts as Dayananda got better acquainted with Olcott and HPB. HPB approached the situation in bad faith in that her words indicated vast respect for the Swami as a spiritual teacher, yet at the same time she was concocting Mahatma letters to manipulate and deceive her closest supporters in England and intending that the Swami legitimize this fraud by signing the letters.
Chintamon was a whistle-blower in his role as informant to Richard Hodgson, as well as in his involvement with the HBofL founders. One of the greatest influences of his exposure of the 1878 correspondence with Blavatsky is that it drove a wedge between her and Olcott. When Hodgson repeated to him some disparaging statements that she had made to Chintamon about Olcott’s credulity, the Colonel was so despondent that he contemplated suicide by drowning:
“He made me suffer intensely in mind for a couple of days by declaring that Hurrychind Chintamon, of Bombay, had shown him a letter of H.P.B.’s to him, from New York, in which she said I was so under her hypnotic spell that she could make me believe whatever she liked just by looking me in the face, .it went to my heart that H.P.B., whose loyal friend I had been through everything, should have done this treachery to me; and merely to satisfy her vanity, it would seem. ..I have always said that the trouble of getting on with her, as Helena Petrovna, was infinitely more difficult than to overcome all the outside obstacles, impediments, and opposition that stood in the way of the Society’s progress. In my whole experience of the movement, nothing ever affected me so much as this. It made me desperate, and for twenty-four hours almost ready to go down to the beach and down myself in the sea. But when I put the question to myself what I was working for, whether the praise of men or the gratitude of H.P.B., or that of any other living person, all this despondency drifted away and my mind has never gone back to it. The sense of the paramount obligation of doing my duty, of serving the Masters in the carrying out of their lofty plans—unthanked, unappreciated, misunderstood, calumniated —it mattered not what—came to me like the flash of a great light, and there was peace.”[ix]
This passage provides sufficient clues for an interpretation of to the relationships among Chintamon the whistleblower, Hodgson the interrogator, Olcott the hostile witness, and Blavatsky the suspect. Whether motivated by revenge or a guilty conscience, Chintamon provided evidence that persuaded the SPR of the fraudulent nature of the Mahatma phenomena. But his attitude was not simply destructive towards the TS; apparently he also wanted to help bring about an alternative that would not be based on Blavatsky. T. H. Burgoyne’s writings evince a strong anti-Theosophical bias, and this antagonism was likely encouraged by Chintamon’s revelations. The compilers of The Hermetic Broterhood of Luxor conclude that in England “Chintamon allied himself with the rising Western opposition to esoteric Buddhism exemplified by Stainton Moses, C.C. Massey, William Oxley, Emma Hardinge Britten, Thomas Lake Harris, and others. From this formidable group, Burgoyne first contracted his hostility to Blavatsky’s enterprise that would mark all his writings.”[x] But Chintamon was also the source of genuine Sanskrit learning, and thus was able to serve as an instructor to Burgoyne on Hindu occultism. The astro-Masonic themes Burgoyne adapted from English sources were likely catalyzed to some extent by Chintamon, the only one of Burgoyne’s mentors who is documented to have such Masonic credentials.
Stephen Prothero attributes a permanent split between Blavatsky and the Colonel to the news conveyed by Hodgson about the correspondence between Chintamon and HPB:
Instead of pushing him to suicide, however, this revelation quickened Olcott’s resolve to distance himself from Blavatsky, if not from theosophy. Determined to bring the Coulomb affair and the Hodgson investigation to a speedy resolution, Olcott decided it was time for Blavatsky to go…. Olcott finally confronted his friend, demanding that she resign as corresponding secretary and leave India immediately. Now more bitter toward Olcott than toward Coulomb and Hodgson combined, Blavatsky sailed for Europe on April 2, 1885. She would never see India again…The TS was his organization and, as such, was under his control… the troubles that beset Blavatsky as a result of the Coulomb Affair, moreover, only strengthened Olcott’s hold over the society.[xi]
[i] Martin Sandler, Photography: an Illustrated History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 32
[ii] D.F. Wadia, History of Lodge Rising Star of Western India, no. 342 S.C. (Bombay: British Indian Press, 1912), p. 186
[iii] Ars Quator Coronatum, Vol. 4, p. 50 (London, 1891)
[iv] Report on Phenomena, p. 316
[v] Blavatsky Collected Writings, Vol. 1, p. 306
[vi] Dayananda Sarasvati, Autobiography of Dayanand Saraswati (New Delhi: Manohar, 1978) p. 68
[vii] Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, Vol. 2, p. 18
[viii] C.C. Massey, “Explanation of the Kiddle Incident in the Fourth Edition of The Occult World,” Light, July 26, 1884, pp. 307-309
[ix] Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, Vol. 1, p. 59
[x] The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, p.36
[xi] Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) pp. 119-121