This is the opening of my chapter “Theosophy in the Bengal Renaissance” which is chapter ten of Imagining the East from Oxford University Press. In future blog posts I will add illustrations of relevant people and places, in five more segments of the chapter. I would like to acknowledge the tremendous assistance of editors Tim Rudbog and Erik Sand who helped me integrate several different biographical profiles and kept pushing me to explain the meaning of the facts I dug up, making connections between different biographies and not just reporting them individually. They also helped break the chapter down into digestible sub sections which I will post separately as series of blog entries adding illustrations not in the book from Oxford University Press.
INTRODUCTION
The Bengal Renaissance was a movement of religious awakening, literary creativity, political consciousness, and social reform, emerging in the late eighteenth century and ending with the death of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), first Indian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.1 A little known aspect of the Theosophical movement is its early and continuing association with the Bengal Renaissance, and the strong interest shown in this alliance by H.P. Blavatsky (1831- 1891). Her books show little trace of this involvement, but her journalistic writings show her to be a keen observer of the middle phase of the movement in the 1880s and especially of the three factions into which the Brahmo movement (which was inaugurated in 1823 as the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, renamed in 1828 as the Brahmo Sabha, and again as the Brahmo Samaj in 1843) had divided. This chapter examines the initial TS contacts with Bengal which developed while the organization was still based in New York, and describes the cooperative relationships with Bengalis that developed after Olcott and Blavatsky’s move to India. These relationships were largely with members of the Brahmo Samaj, which according to historian David Kopf “played a crucial role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India from 1820 to 1930.” 2 The most prominent Bengali Theosophist, Mohini Chatterji (1858-1936), began as a fervent disciple of the Theosophical Mahatmas, but after leaving India in 1884 he became a dissident and then an ex-Theosophist before returning in 1887. By the early twentieth century, Theosophy was losing favor among young Bengali intellectuals like himself. An eloquent explanation of this decline is found in posthumously published writings of Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) who, like Chatterji, was a descendant of Brahmo Samaj leaders.