Annie Besant

Annie Besant (born October 1, 1847, London, England—died September 20, 1933, Adyar, Madras [now Chennai, Tamil Nadu], India) was a British-born social reformer, political organizer, and religious leader who lived many different lives in England and India that were connected by intertwined threads of service to humanity and religious inquiry. As a child and young adult she was deeply committed to Christianity. She turned to atheism in the early 1870s, and in 1889 she joined the Theosophical Society. Her involvement with the Theosophical Society took her to India in 1893, and from 1907 until her death she served as its president and resided at the Theosophical Society’s headquarters in Adyar, Madras (now Chennai), India. In her earlier life in England she was a vocal proponent of socialism, advocated for the working class, and supported the availability of birth control. In India Besant’s social reform efforts continued as she established educational institutions and became a leader in the Indian Independence Movement. She established Central Hindu College (later part of Banaras Hindu University) and served as the first woman president of the Indian National Congress. A prolific writer, Besant published more than 300 books and pamphlets and thousands of articles during her lifetime. The neighborhood of Besant Nagar, just east of Adyar in Chennai, is named for her.

Early life

Annie Wood was born in London to William and Emily Wood, who were predominantly of Irish descent. Wood’s father was from a Roman Catholic family but had skeptical tendencies, and her mother was a member of the Church of England and very religious. Her father was trained as a physician but worked in business, and he died when she was five years old. Her mother then moved the family to Harrow to run a boardinghouse for schoolboys while Wood’s elder brother attended Harrow School. When she was eight, Wood went to live with and receive an education from Ellen Marryat, a sister of naval novelist Frederick Marryat. Ellen Marryat was an evangelical Christian, and under her tutelage and influence Wood became a passionate Christian while reading widely and acquiring skills in writing and research.

In 1867 Wood married Frank Besant, an Anglican clergyman and brother of novelist Walter Besant. Although initially hesitant because marriage was not a priority for her, she consented to the match with the hope that she might be of service to the people in his parish. She entered marriage with no education about sexuality and found that experience exceedingly jarring. Furthermore, her husband expected her to submit to his authority, which made married life difficult for her. In her autobiography, she described her unsuitability for married life and called herself “a woman of strong dominant will, strength that panted for expression and rebelled against restraint.”

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Annie Besant gave birth to two children, Arthur Digby in 1869 and Mabel in 1870, who both contracted whooping cough in 1871. The experience of watching her children suffer from sickness caused her to contemplate the question of how a benign God could allow evil and the suffering of the innocent. This confrontation with theodicy followed her rising doubts upon noticing discrepancies in the Gospels and sent her down a path away from Christian belief. In 1872, amid domestic conflict with her husband, she went to stay with her mother in London, where she met with Freethinkers—Victorian-era atheists, agnostics, humanists, and secularists—who similarly challenged the Bible and Christian doctrine. Her belief in Christianity gradually unraveled, as did her marriage to Frank Besant; they separated in 1873.

Early activism

Leaving behind her husband and Christianity, Besant moved to London with her daughter, Mabel, and befriended the atheist and social reformer Charles Bradlaugh. She joined the National Secular Society in 1874, and in support of atheism, Irish Home Rule, and women’s rights, she wrote pamphlets and articles, edited journals, and gave public orations. In 1877 Besant and Bradlaugh republished a book on birth control, Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832), for which they were charged with breaking obscenity laws in Victorian England. They were found guilty and sentenced to fines and imprisonment, but the judgment was overturned on appeal. Not to be deterred, Besant, who was among the first British women to speak publicly about birth control, published an original pamphlet on birth control, The Law of Population (1877), which drew upon economist Thomas Malthus’s concerns that overpopulation would eventually exceed food supply.

Annie Besant’s outspoken activism for atheism and birth control was cited as evidence by Frank Besant when, in 1878, he successfully obtained custody of Mabel. Annie Besant obtained visitation rights to her children but found it difficult both for her and for Mabel, so she discontinued the visits. (When her children became young adults, they reconnected with her and joined the Theosophical Society.) In her autobiography Besant wrote of her feelings at this time: “Robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all helpless children I could aid.”

In the 1880s Besant became a prominent socialist and was an active member of the Fabian Society, an organization that sought to refashion Great Britain into a socialist state. Through her activities in the Fabian Society Besant worked closely with George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist and social critic. In 1888 Besant was elected to the London School Board in Tower Hamlets. In her campaign and on the board she sought to offer secular education without fees and to provide poor students with free meals and medical exams.

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Besant published the strikingly titled essay “White Slavery in London” in her weekly journal The Link in 1888. The piece reported on the low wages, horrendous working conditions, and health hazards from exposure to white phosphorus suffered by the young women and girls who worked at the Bryant & May matchstick factory. The owners of the factory demanded that the workers deny Besant’s exposé; they refused, and the company dismissed workers. The workers walked out to strike, notably known as the Match Girls’ Strike. Besant helped the women organize a trade union, the Union of Women Match Makers.

Involvement with Theosophy

In the late 1870s and through the 1880s Besant developed a keen interest in world religions, despite her avowed atheism. Her magazine writings included myths translated for children and reviews of books on religions of India. She also began questioning atheism’s implied materialism and felt a need for spiritual fulfillment. In 1889, at the request of editor W.T. Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette, Besant wrote a book review of Helena Blavatsky’s two-volume Theosophical work The Secret Doctrine (1888). The book deeply affected Besant—whose published review of it was favorable—and set her on a new life path, away from atheism and England and toward Theosophy and India.

The Theosophical Society was cofounded by Blavatsky, a Russian-born religious mystic, along with Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge, in 1875. The teachings of the society emphasize universal brotherhood, human service, a spiritual evolutionism drawn from both Eastern and Western esoteric traditions, and the ongoing role of suprahuman masters of wisdom. After the book review was published, Besant met with Blavatsky in London and officially joined the Theosophical Society in May 1889. She plunged vigorously into the work of lecturing and writing on Theosophy. Her numerous books and articles on Theosophy helped popularize its ideas in clear language. After Blavatsky’s death in 1891, Besant became one of the leading figures in the Theosophical Society and toured the world promoting it. She first visited India and Sri Lanka in 1893 on a lecture tour for the Theosophical Society, and she later made India her home, settling first in Benares (Varanasi) in 1895. She was elected international president of the Theosophical Society in 1907, succeeding Olcott, and until her death held that role while residing principally at the society’s headquarters in Adyar.

In 1909 the Theosophist and occult writer C.W. Leadbeater spotted on the beach near the Theosophical Society’s headquarters a young boy who Leadbeater claimed had a remarkable aura. Leadbeater perceived that the boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, could be a great speaker and the physical vehicle for Maitreya, the expected World Teacher according to Theosophists. When Besant met the boy, she concurred with Leadbeater’s assessment, and she, along with other members of the Theosophical Society, educated and prepared him for his envisioned role. She cofounded the Order of the Star in the East, an organization centered on Krishnamurti, to prepare for the World Teacher’s arrival. However, in 1929 Krishnamurti dissolved the order and rejected spiritual leaders and organized religions, declaring that “Truth is a pathless land.” Despite the change, Besant accepted his decision as part of his teaching and remained supportive of his ongoing mission.

Education and cultural revival in India

When Besant first traveled to India in 1893 she felt immediately connected to the country. She believed that she had lived there in a past life, and she adopted Indian customs such as wearing saris. She studied Hinduism extensively, learned Sanskrit, and translated the Bhagavad Gita. Besant cooperated with Indian Theosophists and Hindu scholars in her work, although her tendency to interpret Hindu traditions through a Theosophical lens sometimes resulted in scathing critiques from orthodox Hindus and some religious leaders, such as Aurobindo and Vivekananda.

Besant regarded Hinduism as the religion that most fully expressed the central ideas of Theosophy, particularly reincarnation, spiritual unity, self-sacrifice, and service. She defended Hinduism against the derogatory colonial and missionary portrayals of the religion as idolatrous, polytheistic, superstitious, fatalistic, and intellectually inferior to Christianity and Western rationality. She lectured and wrote extensively on her view that Hinduism and Indian culture are the essential bedrock of India’s national self-respect as she sought to revive Indians’ pride in Hindu society.

Some of Besant’s views of Hinduism were idealized visions of Hindu society that overlooked realities and inequalities on the ground. Her romanticized perspectives on Indian culture were partly the consequence of her Theosophical convictions and respect for Indian culture. In contrast to her social advocacy and women’s rights work in England, when she first arrived in India she defended an ideal of harmonious hierarchical social structure according to varna, and she favored traditional domestic roles for women within a patriarchal system. She defended traditional mores such as women’s seclusion and the prohibition on widow remarriage. Besant regarded these social norms as models of duty, self-sacrifice, and service that she hoped to make the root of a revived traditional Indian culture.

Her views shifted during her time in India, however, and about the turn of the century she began to oppose child marriage while supporting education for women, albeit an education strongly rooted in domesticity and training in religious knowledge. She came to denounce the caste system as a corruption of the original varna system, which she continued to idealize, and she saw the divisions of caste as impediments to universal brotherhood. In 1913, as Besant became more active in the nationalist political scene, she began to speak more openly in favor of social reform in India. She called for caste to be abolished, for foreign travel to be allowed without loss of caste, for women to be equal to men and not secluded, for women’s education and vocational training, and for widow remarriage. In 1917 she helped found the Women’s Indian Association to promote women’s rights, women’s education, and women’s roles in politics, particularly in the Indian Independence Movement.

Service to humanity was a key component of Besant’s vision for Theosophy, which gave the esoteric religious organization a practical dimension and continued her earlier socialist activism. Besant was particularly intent upon educational reform in India. She held that colonial education—through government institutions and missionary schools that emphasized Western subjects—was alienating Indians from their traditions by excluding pedagogy in Indian religion and culture. In contrast she sought to promote “the wedding of Western education with religion and Eastern ethics” (Besant, An Autobiography, 2nd edition, preface to 3rd impression [1908]). Her ideal educational system for India was based on what she presented as a traditional Hindu education that trained students in the physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual aspects of life. Besant endeavored to create a national education system in the country, controlled by Indians and focused on Indian culture, that would restore Indian pride and train Indians for self-governance.

In 1898 Besant established Central Hindu College in Benares, which combined education in modern science and secular subjects with Sanskrit and Hindu religious and ethical instruction shaped in part by her Theosophical ideas. She followed that effort with the Central Hindu Girls’ School in 1904, an institution that prepared mainly upper-caste Hindu girls for domestic roles as wives and mothers. In 1916 Central Hindu College was formally absorbed into Banaras Hindu University, founded by scholar and Indian nationalist Madan Mohan Malaviya, which remains one of India’s preeminent institutions of higher learning. In 1921 Banaras Hindu University conferred on Besant an honorary degree, and she subsequently referred to herself as Dr. Besant.

Political efforts in India

Annie Besant’s promotion of pride in India’s Hindu cultural identity and her call for India’s cultural renewal led to her conviction that India required self-governance to flourish. In 1914 she furthered her nationalist efforts by founding the weekly magazine Commonweal and buying a newspaper, the Madras Standard, and renaming it New India. Through those she broadcast the need for Indian self-governance. That year she was a delegate to the Indian National Congress, the predominant political party of the Indian Independence Movement.

Besant favored a model of Indian self-rule in which India would have dominion status and remain connected to Britain as an equal partner in an Indo-British commonwealth. In 1916 Besant founded the All-India Home Rule League, which operated alongside the parallel Home Rule League established by nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak’s League focused on Maharashtra (excluding Bombay), Karnataka, the Central Provinces, and Berar, while Besant’s Home Rule League functioned throughout the rest of India.

Besant helped to forge key alliances of Indian nationalist leaders that culminated in the Lucknow Pact in December 1916. The pact brought together two wings of the Congress Party, often called the moderates and extremists. The moderates favored incremental reform through constitutional changes within the colonial framework using meetings, petitions, and the press. The extremist faction, led by Tilak, favored immediate independence, the Swadeshi Movement, and boycotts, and they tended to promote their nationalist movement with overtly Hindu symbolism. Besant, however, stood between these two groups, supporting both a Hindu revival and a continuing connection to Britain. Besant also worked with Muslims in her independence efforts, and during the Lucknow Pact meetings she was instrumental in bringing the Muslim League, led by Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to join with Congress in calling for constitutional reform as a step toward Indian self-government.

For her political work toward Indian self-government, the British colonial government in 1917 interned her—along with fellow Theosophists and Home Rule organizers George Arundale and B.P. Wadia—in Ootacamund (now Udhagamandalam, or Ooty) and later in Coimbatore. They were released after 94 days because of widespread popular outcry. After her release, in December 1917 she served as president of the 32nd session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta (Kolkata), the first woman to do so.

To many Indians during the independence movement, Besant was a beloved and respected figure. But she did have her detractors, especially close to her base in Adyar. The new India envisioned by the Home Rule movement did not feature regional divisions based on local languages and cultures. Politically involved Brahmins from the Telugu-speaking Andhra region—at the time included within the mostly Tamil-speaking Madras Presidency—desired a Telugu-majority province and feared Besant’s Home Rule vision would prevent that. They were also concerned that Besant was almost entirely affiliated with Tamil Brahmin leaders in the city of Madras. Besant’s idealized vision of Hinduism often reflected the views of the high Brahmin class, and she also associated mostly with Brahmins, who constituted the vast majority of the Indians in colonial government jobs. In the early 20th century, Tamil non-Brahmin movements arose in opposition to Brahmin cultural and political strength, and they rejected Home Rule on the grounds that it would leave non-Brahmins powerless. Writers supporting the southern Indian non-Brahmin cause often attacked Besant and Home Rule in their publications and questioned her authority as a foreign-born person to lead the independence movement.

Besant’s status as a leading figure in the fight for Indian self-governance began to fade when the movement shifted toward the goal of full independence and adopted new strategies to achieve it. Although she initially rejected the reforms suggested by the Montagu-Chelmsford Report as insufficiently permitting self-governance, she later came to accept them as a step in the right direction, a perspective that put her at odds with the increasingly independence-oriented Congress Party. As Mahatma Gandhi became the dominant voice in the movement after 1920, Besant’s distaste for his strategies pushed her further from the movement’s mainstream and out of favor. She disagreed with Gandhi’s method of satyagraha, which involved civil disobedience and mass noncooperation, because she feared such actions could lead to disorder. She preferred a path to self-rule within the limits of the law and in negotiation with British colonial administrators.

Besant assisted in drafting the Commonwealth of India Bill, presented to Parliament in 1925, which asked for Britain to grant India dominion status as part of a British Commonwealth. The bill did not advance. By the late 1920s the tide in the independence movement shifted fully toward a clean break and full political independence for India, leaving Besant’s preference for continued ties to Britain unpopular. Although her political influence diminished, she continued in her wide-ranging efforts of social uplift and her work for the Theosophical Society from her base in Adyar.