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Mystical Imperialism, Excerpt from "Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia"
by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac
© 1999 by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER TEN: Mystical Imperialism
THE YEAR IS 1891. A RUSSIAN FRIGATE, THE PAMIAT AZOVA, lies in Colombo harbor. The imperial party, composed of the twenty-two-year-old Tsarevich Nicholas and a miscellany of Grand Dukes, Princes, and Guard Officers, is stopping at Ceylon. The heir to the Throne of all the Russians is midway through a ten-month Asian Grand Tour suggested by his father Alexander III in the hope that Nicky will get to know his future Central Asian subjects and, equally important, forget his mistress, the tiny ballerina of the Maryinsky Theater, Mathilde Kschessinska. In India, Nicky has found the tiger shoots and balls irritating, complaining to his mother, the Empress Marie Feodorovna, "How intolerable it is to be once again surrounded by Englishmen in their scarlet uniforms." She has replied, urging him to be "very courteous to all the English who are taking such pains to give you the best possible reception." She warns that he must set his personal comfort aside -- "you will do this, won't you, my dear Nicky?" Above all, he must" dance more and smoke less in the garden with officers just because it is more amusing." The Tsarevich must "leave a good impression with everybody everywhere."
Perhaps the most important member of the party in the context of our story is Prince Esper Esperovich Ukhtomsky (1861-1921), whom we will meet again as the sponsor of Agvan Dorzhiev at the Russian court. Ukhtomsky's father founded a steamship company to link the Baltic with India and China via the Black Sea. His son, while still a St. Petersburg student, developed a scholarly interest in Buddhism and had become Russia's most important collector of Tibetan and Mongolian art. Upon graduation, Esper Esperovich entered the ranks of the Department of Foreign Creeds in the Ministry of the Interior. He is now its chief. He is a member both of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and Eastern Asia. A staunch protector of the Buriats, the Mongol people living around Lake Baikal in Siberia, Ukhtomsky leads the Eastern lobby which also includes such influential figures as the Finance Minister, Count Sergei Witte, and the Buriat society doctor, Pyotr Badmaev. These men are advocates of an aggressive forward policy in Asia, and are known collectively as vostochniki, or "Easterners," or in their most extreme mode as proponents of Zheltorossiya, or "Yellow Russia."
Chosen to accompany the Tsarevich on this trip, Ukhtomsky will recount their adventures in the multi-volumed 'Travels in the East of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, when Czarevitch 1890-91, in which he will give vent to his pan-Asiatic notions: "We are, and must be supported by the idea of an ever-possible advance of the irresistible North over the Hindu Kush." The book will be published in many editions, assuring Ukhtomsky's future position as Tsar Nicholas's consultant on eastern affairs.
The Tsarevich is hardly ignorant about the East. In 1881, when the intrepid Przhevalsky became his tutor on Central Asia, Nicholas was much taken by the explorer's exploits and tales of lamas and Buddhism. Nor will the intensely religious Nicholas be immune to occult persuasions -- after the birth of the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexis, the Romanov court would become a collective for seers, monks, and mystics. As Count Witte explained: "A soft haze of mysticism refracts everything he beholds and magnifies his own functions and person."
Now his imperial highness informs the Russian Consul in Colombo that he wishes to "have the honor of meeting" Colonel Olcott (1832-1907), a retired American officer who sports an enormous Santa Claus beard and is the champion of a worldwide Buddhist revival. It happens that Henry Steel Olcott, now resident in Colombo (the Sinhalese are Buddhists), is also the "chum" and associate of the Tsar's compatriot Helena P. Blavatsky. Together in 1875 they founded the Theosophical Society.
The Russians have already called at Adyar, near Madras, where the Society has established its international headquarters. Ukhtomsky is convinced of the deep spiritual kinship between Russia and "the East," in which he includes Islam, Brahminism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. In his book, Ukhtomsky inserts remarks assuredly designed to alienate his British hosts:
Olcott, in the fourth volume of his memoir, Old Diary Leaves, recalls the delightful hour-long meeting with the Tsarevich's party aboard the frigate. He is particularly drawn to Ukhtomsky "because of his intense interest in Buddhism, which for many years he has made a special study among the Mongolian lamaseries." The Prince invites Olcott to make a tour of the Buddhist monasteries of Siberia and asks for a copy of the Theosophical Society's Fourteen Propositions so that he "might translate them and circulate them among the Chief Priests of Buddhism throughout the Empire." Which, Olcott notes with satisfaction, he did. As for his compatriot Mme. Blavatsky, Ukhtomsky is enthusiastic about the "Russian lady who knew and has seen much."
The age of mystical imperialism had dawned.
NOT JUST RUSSIA BUT ALL EUROPE WAS DRAWN TO THE ESOTERIC religions and spiritual spices of the Orient. Starting in the Georgian Age, British merchant fleets sailed homeward with mystical creeds and Sanskrit grammars mixed with more earthbound cargoes. The timing was propitious: the light from the East arrived at a moment of moral crisis and revolutionary upheaval in the West. Chance seemed to clear the path. Alexander Hamilton, an East India Company servant fluent in Sanskrit, was taken prisoner in Paris during the Napoleonic wars, and taught Sanskrit, then almost unknown in Europe, to his fellow captives. One of his pupils was the Romantic poet Schlegel, who returned to Germany in 1808 and wrote the first book there on the language and creeds of the Indies, sparking a fashion. So smitten was the philosopher Schopenhauer on reading The Upanishads that he called it "the solace of my life," adding hopefully, "it will be the solace of my death."
This anxiety about the afterlife became especially acute after the appearance in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species, with its unspoken challenge to Genesis. Across Europe and America, disciples flocked to new faiths of every kind, ranging from the occult arts to the science of spiritual healing. Unbelievers scoffed and cried fraud, but persons of standing in the West concerned themselves with Spiritualism, Reincarnation, Channeling, the Brotherhood of Masters, Great White Lodges, Cosmogenesis, and a host of Secret Doctrines said to spring from the timeless wisdom of the East. Still, even as they scoffed, the worldly saw a gleam of utility in the otherworldly. Thus it happened that in Russia and England the Mystical Channel developed into an interesting new medium for imperial intrigues, or in some cases anti-imperial agitation. It was, however, a medium that eluded easy manipulation, and a cloak of ambiguity shielded its avatars, so that it was often hard to say who was using whom.
This was especially true of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91), whose precise loyalties were the focus of exasperated speculation for decades in Britain and Russia. Madame Blavatsky, the author of The Secret Doctrine and other bulky occult works, has never been out of print or entirely forgotten. Self-described as "a hippopotamus of an old woman," HPB, with her hypnotic gaze, seems to spring from faded photographs. In his memoirs, Rudyard Kipling recalls that his father, Lockwood, who knew her well, spoke of Madame Blavatsky as "one of the most interesting and unscrupulous impostors he had ever met."
Soon after her arrival in 1879 at Simla, then in its heyday as summer capital of British India, everybody who counted had an opinion about HPB, as she was commonly known. She sailed to India from New York, where she first gained her reputation as a clairvoyant and where she and her devoted disciple, Colonel Olcott, had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. "TS" Lodges rapidly multiplied, and HPB and the Colonel were anxious to propagate the new faith in India, nearer to its cradle in Tibet.
Blavatsky's fascination with Tibet and Buddhism dated from her childhood. Her maternal grandfather, Andrei Fadeyev, was administrator for the Kalmyk settlers in the Caspian seaport region of Astrakhan, and while her father was away on military duty, Blavatsky's mother -- who wrote a novel about Kalmyk life -- took her to live with the Fadeyevs. Distant ethnic cousins of the Buriats, the Kalmyks had migrated from Dzungaria in Central Asia to the lower Volga region in the seventeenth century but were still practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. Helena met and was impressed by the Kalmyk leader Prince Tumen [Prince Tseren-Djab Tumen' (1824-1864)] and his Tibetan lama.\
Somewhat later she would claim that the tenets of Theosophy had been vouchsafed to her by just such lamas, her "Himalayan Masters" during the seven years she claimed to have spent in Tibet. There she learned of a divine hierarchy of Masters, or Mahatmas, the terms being synonymous, who belonged to an invisible Brotherhood headed by the Lord of the World who inhabited Shambhala, the source of universal wisdom, located by Blavatsky beyond Tibet, somewhere in the Gobi Desert.
First in the chain of command was Buddha, then came a series of Masters, of whom the most accessible to HPB were Morya (known simply as M) and Koot Hoomi (called KH), each in the Hindu mode enjoying a variety of incarnations and tasks (KH attended the University of Leipzig and curated an underground Occult Museum). Others in the Brotherhood included Jesus, Confucius, Solomon, Lao Tze, Moses, Abraham, Plato, Mesmer, and the two Bacons, Roger and Francis. The Brotherhood was hidden from most mortals, and was sometimes persecuted by humans under the influence of the Dark Force, but it communicated with Adepts, like Madame Blavatsky, through letters written in gold ink or other psychic means. According to Peter Washington in his history of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon (1995), her cosmology was a blend drawn from Buddhism and other more improbable sources, notably the mystical novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Fascinated, baffled, and scandalized by this new High Priestess and her American consort, the powerful along with the obscure, Indians as well as Europeans, flocked to Theosophy, so that by 1885, 106 lodges had been chartered in India, Burma, and Ceylon, out of 121 lodges worldwide. An important reason for its popularity among Indians was that Theosophists took Buddhism and Hinduism seriously, not with the sneering condescension of many Europeans. In fact, it was her extravagant regard for Hindus and visible contempt for their rulers that caused HPB to be regarded as a spy and placed under British surveillance.
The movement also had its political spillover among Europeans. A notable convert was Alfred Percy Sinnett, the influential editor of The Allahabad Pioneer, then the leading newspaper in India, whose rising star was Rudyard Kipling. Another catch was Allan Octavian Hume, the wealthy son of the radical Scottish parliamentarian Joseph Hume. "AO" was a decorated hero of the Great Mutiny, the "pope" of Indian ornithology, and a high-ranking civil servant. Hume eventually broke with Blavatsky, and took up the national cause.
In 1885, on retiring from the civil service, Hume summoned the first meeting of the Indian National Congress, in the hope of winning a greater role for Indians in administration under the British Crown. Over time, under Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress became the main propellant of independence, and in India today Hume's role as forerunner is still remembered and acknowledged. (The thirteen-year-old Nehru was, in fact, initiated into the Theosophical Society by its third leader, Annie Besant, and the "thrilled" youngster later saw "old Colonel Olcott with his fine beard.")
Mystical Imperialism, Excerpt from "Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia"
by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac
© 1999 by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
CHAPTER TEN: Mystical Imperialism
THE YEAR IS 1891. A RUSSIAN FRIGATE, THE PAMIAT AZOVA, lies in Colombo harbor. The imperial party, composed of the twenty-two-year-old Tsarevich Nicholas and a miscellany of Grand Dukes, Princes, and Guard Officers, is stopping at Ceylon. The heir to the Throne of all the Russians is midway through a ten-month Asian Grand Tour suggested by his father Alexander III in the hope that Nicky will get to know his future Central Asian subjects and, equally important, forget his mistress, the tiny ballerina of the Maryinsky Theater, Mathilde Kschessinska. In India, Nicky has found the tiger shoots and balls irritating, complaining to his mother, the Empress Marie Feodorovna, "How intolerable it is to be once again surrounded by Englishmen in their scarlet uniforms." She has replied, urging him to be "very courteous to all the English who are taking such pains to give you the best possible reception." She warns that he must set his personal comfort aside -- "you will do this, won't you, my dear Nicky?" Above all, he must" dance more and smoke less in the garden with officers just because it is more amusing." The Tsarevich must "leave a good impression with everybody everywhere."
Perhaps the most important member of the party in the context of our story is Prince Esper Esperovich Ukhtomsky (1861-1921), whom we will meet again as the sponsor of Agvan Dorzhiev at the Russian court. Ukhtomsky's father founded a steamship company to link the Baltic with India and China via the Black Sea. His son, while still a St. Petersburg student, developed a scholarly interest in Buddhism and had become Russia's most important collector of Tibetan and Mongolian art. Upon graduation, Esper Esperovich entered the ranks of the Department of Foreign Creeds in the Ministry of the Interior. He is now its chief. He is a member both of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and Eastern Asia. A staunch protector of the Buriats, the Mongol people living around Lake Baikal in Siberia, Ukhtomsky leads the Eastern lobby which also includes such influential figures as the Finance Minister, Count Sergei Witte, and the Buriat society doctor, Pyotr Badmaev. These men are advocates of an aggressive forward policy in Asia, and are known collectively as vostochniki, or "Easterners," or in their most extreme mode as proponents of Zheltorossiya, or "Yellow Russia."
Chosen to accompany the Tsarevich on this trip, Ukhtomsky will recount their adventures in the multi-volumed 'Travels in the East of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, when Czarevitch 1890-91, in which he will give vent to his pan-Asiatic notions: "We are, and must be supported by the idea of an ever-possible advance of the irresistible North over the Hindu Kush." The book will be published in many editions, assuring Ukhtomsky's future position as Tsar Nicholas's consultant on eastern affairs.
The Tsarevich is hardly ignorant about the East. In 1881, when the intrepid Przhevalsky became his tutor on Central Asia, Nicholas was much taken by the explorer's exploits and tales of lamas and Buddhism. Nor will the intensely religious Nicholas be immune to occult persuasions -- after the birth of the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexis, the Romanov court would become a collective for seers, monks, and mystics. As Count Witte explained: "A soft haze of mysticism refracts everything he beholds and magnifies his own functions and person."
Now his imperial highness informs the Russian Consul in Colombo that he wishes to "have the honor of meeting" Colonel Olcott (1832-1907), a retired American officer who sports an enormous Santa Claus beard and is the champion of a worldwide Buddhist revival. It happens that Henry Steel Olcott, now resident in Colombo (the Sinhalese are Buddhists), is also the "chum" and associate of the Tsar's compatriot Helena P. Blavatsky. Together in 1875 they founded the Theosophical Society.
The Russians have already called at Adyar, near Madras, where the Society has established its international headquarters. Ukhtomsky is convinced of the deep spiritual kinship between Russia and "the East," in which he includes Islam, Brahminism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. In his book, Ukhtomsky inserts remarks assuredly designed to alienate his British hosts:
Clearly history is preparing new and complex problems in the East for the colonizing states of Western Europe, which are not really at home in Asia (as we Russians always have been, and still are, without being aware of it) ... The journey of the Tsarevich through the civilized countries of the East is full of deep significance for Russia. The bonds that unite our part of Europe with Iran and Turan, and through them with India and the Celestial Empire, are so ancient and lasting that, as yet, we ourselves, as a nation and a state, do not fully comprehend their full meaning and the duties they entail on us, both in our home and foreign policy.
Olcott, in the fourth volume of his memoir, Old Diary Leaves, recalls the delightful hour-long meeting with the Tsarevich's party aboard the frigate. He is particularly drawn to Ukhtomsky "because of his intense interest in Buddhism, which for many years he has made a special study among the Mongolian lamaseries." The Prince invites Olcott to make a tour of the Buddhist monasteries of Siberia and asks for a copy of the Theosophical Society's Fourteen Propositions so that he "might translate them and circulate them among the Chief Priests of Buddhism throughout the Empire." Which, Olcott notes with satisfaction, he did. As for his compatriot Mme. Blavatsky, Ukhtomsky is enthusiastic about the "Russian lady who knew and has seen much."
The age of mystical imperialism had dawned.
NOT JUST RUSSIA BUT ALL EUROPE WAS DRAWN TO THE ESOTERIC religions and spiritual spices of the Orient. Starting in the Georgian Age, British merchant fleets sailed homeward with mystical creeds and Sanskrit grammars mixed with more earthbound cargoes. The timing was propitious: the light from the East arrived at a moment of moral crisis and revolutionary upheaval in the West. Chance seemed to clear the path. Alexander Hamilton, an East India Company servant fluent in Sanskrit, was taken prisoner in Paris during the Napoleonic wars, and taught Sanskrit, then almost unknown in Europe, to his fellow captives. One of his pupils was the Romantic poet Schlegel, who returned to Germany in 1808 and wrote the first book there on the language and creeds of the Indies, sparking a fashion. So smitten was the philosopher Schopenhauer on reading The Upanishads that he called it "the solace of my life," adding hopefully, "it will be the solace of my death."
This anxiety about the afterlife became especially acute after the appearance in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species, with its unspoken challenge to Genesis. Across Europe and America, disciples flocked to new faiths of every kind, ranging from the occult arts to the science of spiritual healing. Unbelievers scoffed and cried fraud, but persons of standing in the West concerned themselves with Spiritualism, Reincarnation, Channeling, the Brotherhood of Masters, Great White Lodges, Cosmogenesis, and a host of Secret Doctrines said to spring from the timeless wisdom of the East. Still, even as they scoffed, the worldly saw a gleam of utility in the otherworldly. Thus it happened that in Russia and England the Mystical Channel developed into an interesting new medium for imperial intrigues, or in some cases anti-imperial agitation. It was, however, a medium that eluded easy manipulation, and a cloak of ambiguity shielded its avatars, so that it was often hard to say who was using whom.
This was especially true of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91), whose precise loyalties were the focus of exasperated speculation for decades in Britain and Russia. Madame Blavatsky, the author of The Secret Doctrine and other bulky occult works, has never been out of print or entirely forgotten. Self-described as "a hippopotamus of an old woman," HPB, with her hypnotic gaze, seems to spring from faded photographs. In his memoirs, Rudyard Kipling recalls that his father, Lockwood, who knew her well, spoke of Madame Blavatsky as "one of the most interesting and unscrupulous impostors he had ever met."
Soon after her arrival in 1879 at Simla, then in its heyday as summer capital of British India, everybody who counted had an opinion about HPB, as she was commonly known. She sailed to India from New York, where she first gained her reputation as a clairvoyant and where she and her devoted disciple, Colonel Olcott, had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. "TS" Lodges rapidly multiplied, and HPB and the Colonel were anxious to propagate the new faith in India, nearer to its cradle in Tibet.
Blavatsky's fascination with Tibet and Buddhism dated from her childhood. Her maternal grandfather, Andrei Fadeyev, was administrator for the Kalmyk settlers in the Caspian seaport region of Astrakhan, and while her father was away on military duty, Blavatsky's mother -- who wrote a novel about Kalmyk life -- took her to live with the Fadeyevs. Distant ethnic cousins of the Buriats, the Kalmyks had migrated from Dzungaria in Central Asia to the lower Volga region in the seventeenth century but were still practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. Helena met and was impressed by the Kalmyk leader Prince Tumen [Prince Tseren-Djab Tumen' (1824-1864)] and his Tibetan lama.\
Russian and other foreign travelers who visited the migratory Kalmyks in the 18th and 19th centuries took note of their musical ability. They reported that most of the musicians playing the dombra, a two-stringed, triangular-shaped musical instrument, were women. (The instrument's strings were made from sheep intestines.) One of the most prominent foreign visitors was Alexandre Dumas père (1802-1870), a famous French novelist and dramatist, who visited the Kalmyk steppe in October 1859. He was entertained at a dinner in his honor at the mansion of Prince Tseren-Djab Tumen' (1824-1864) by an orchestra of Kalmyk musicians who played overtures by Mozart and Rossini.
-- Kalmyks, by Encyclopedia.com
Somewhat later she would claim that the tenets of Theosophy had been vouchsafed to her by just such lamas, her "Himalayan Masters" during the seven years she claimed to have spent in Tibet. There she learned of a divine hierarchy of Masters, or Mahatmas, the terms being synonymous, who belonged to an invisible Brotherhood headed by the Lord of the World who inhabited Shambhala, the source of universal wisdom, located by Blavatsky beyond Tibet, somewhere in the Gobi Desert.
First in the chain of command was Buddha, then came a series of Masters, of whom the most accessible to HPB were Morya (known simply as M) and Koot Hoomi (called KH), each in the Hindu mode enjoying a variety of incarnations and tasks (KH attended the University of Leipzig and curated an underground Occult Museum). Others in the Brotherhood included Jesus, Confucius, Solomon, Lao Tze, Moses, Abraham, Plato, Mesmer, and the two Bacons, Roger and Francis. The Brotherhood was hidden from most mortals, and was sometimes persecuted by humans under the influence of the Dark Force, but it communicated with Adepts, like Madame Blavatsky, through letters written in gold ink or other psychic means. According to Peter Washington in his history of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon (1995), her cosmology was a blend drawn from Buddhism and other more improbable sources, notably the mystical novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
Fascinated, baffled, and scandalized by this new High Priestess and her American consort, the powerful along with the obscure, Indians as well as Europeans, flocked to Theosophy, so that by 1885, 106 lodges had been chartered in India, Burma, and Ceylon, out of 121 lodges worldwide. An important reason for its popularity among Indians was that Theosophists took Buddhism and Hinduism seriously, not with the sneering condescension of many Europeans. In fact, it was her extravagant regard for Hindus and visible contempt for their rulers that caused HPB to be regarded as a spy and placed under British surveillance.
The movement also had its political spillover among Europeans. A notable convert was Alfred Percy Sinnett, the influential editor of The Allahabad Pioneer, then the leading newspaper in India, whose rising star was Rudyard Kipling. Another catch was Allan Octavian Hume, the wealthy son of the radical Scottish parliamentarian Joseph Hume. "AO" was a decorated hero of the Great Mutiny, the "pope" of Indian ornithology, and a high-ranking civil servant. Hume eventually broke with Blavatsky, and took up the national cause.
Hume met Blavatsky and Olcott at Allahabad, and, after spending some time with them, concluded most of the phenomena linked with her, about which Sinnett wrote a book, were genuine (Sinnett 1881). Hume, the son of Joseph Hume, a Radical social reformer who had been active in the movement to repeal the Corn Laws, joined the East India Company in 1849 and rose to a high position in the Indian Civil Service, though he never got the seat on the Viceroy's Council for which he hoped (Wedderburn 1913). It is possible that one of the reasons he failed to attain the highest offices was his clear commitment to social and political reform in India. In 1882 he retired to Simla, where he became a confident of the new Viceroy, Lord Ripon.5 Hume joined the Theosophical Society in 1880, became the President of the Simla Branch in 1881, and seems to have provided the financial backing that enabled Blavatsky to begin publishing The Theosophist.
Before long, Sinnett and Hume began to send letters to, and supposedly receive letters from, two of the Great White Brotherhood - Koot Hoomi and Morya.6 The process of communication depended on the role as an intermediary of Blavatsky, whose authority over the Theosophical Society rested largely on her unique ability supposedly to communicate with the Mahatmas. Hume and Sinnett wrote their letters and gave them to Blavatsky who placed them in a wooden box, from where they dematerialised, supposedly having been called away by the Mahatmas. The replies from the Mahatmas apparently precipitated from nowhere, they were found sitting in the shrine, they fell from the ceiling, or they dropped on to a pillow. Understandably Hume became a bit discouraged by this indirect form of communication, and so he began to try to exercise his own occult powers in the hope of developing an ability to communicate directly with the Mahatmas. Eventually, in 1883, he broke with Blavatsky and resigned his post in the Simla Branch of the Society. He did so just before the now notorious Coulomb Affair. (When Blavatsky and Olcott returned to London early in 1884, they left Monsieur and Madame Coulomb in charge of the Theosophical Society's headquarters at Adyar; the Coulombs then made a number of allegations about the fraudulent ways Blavatsky produced the phenomena associated with her, and an investigation of the shrine in her room lent support to what they had said.) Hume, however, continued to believe in the existence of the Mahatmas and their mission despite both the Coulomb Affair and his personal disagreements with Blavatsky (Ripon Papers). Certainly he thought that the Mahatmas guided not only his spiritual growth, but also, as we will see, his political work...
Hume was probably the single most important individual for the formation of the Indian National Congress. He said that in 1878 he read various documents that convinced him large sections of the Indian population violently opposed British rule, and some even plotted rebellion (Wedderburn 1913: 78-83).11 These documents were communications he had received supposedly from the Mahatmas - Koot Hoomi and Morya. In one of the letters the Mahatmas supposedly sent Sinnett, they explained how the Great White Brotherhood successfully had controlled the Indian masses in the Rebellion of 1857 so as to preserve Imperial rule, which apparently was necessary to bring India to its allotted place in a new world order (Morya 1923: 324). Now the Mahatmas seemed to be directing Hume to maintain the correct balance between east and west (Ripon Papers). Certainly Hume thought the Mahatmas were superhuman beings with a special interest in the welfare of India. He believed their occult powers meant they possessed an unquestionable knowledge of Indian affairs; and, of course, their intense spirituality meant they were undeniably trustworthy. From their exalted position, the Mahatmas saw India was in danger, and, knowing of Hume's interest in the East and his political contacts, they had come to him to avert the danger. They had decided to reveal some of their wisdom to him so he could do what was necessary to forestall chaos. Even after Hume had turned against Blavatsky, he continued to believe in the Great White Brotherhood, their powers and their mission. Now he thought the Mahatmas, with their impeccable credentials, had chosen to pass some of their understanding on to him so he might act accordingly. They had warned him of an impending catastrophe so he might ward-off the disaster of which they wrote. His desire to do so now informed his political work. Hume tried to influence politics in two ways. First, he tried to convince Ripon to reform the administration of India so as to make it more responsive to the Indian people (Ripon Papers). Second, he tried to promote an all-India organisation so as to give voice to the concerns and aspirations of the Indians themselves (Wedderburn 1913).
Early in 1885, Hume helped to bring about the formation of the Bombay Presidency Association. Really, however, he wanted to create an all-India body, and he immediately used the Bombay group as a springboard from which to advance his idea of an Indian National Union. Soon he acquired the backing of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, as well as the Bombay group, for a proposal to schedule an all-India political conference to be held in Poona during December 1885. His quarrel with Blavatsky meant, however, that he had to work hard to win over the theosophists of the Madras Mahajana Sabha and the Indian Association of Calcutta. By May, he had visited Madras not only to discuss his proposals for the Poona conference with the members of the Mahajana Sabha, but also to put forward his views on the way the Theosophical Society should revive itself in the wake of the Coulomb fiasco. He did enough to convince the local leaders to fall in with his plans for an Indian National Union. Next Hume travelled to Calcutta where he seems to have contacted several prominent members of the Indian Association. Although Sen decided to give his backing to Hume, many of the others did not, preferring instead to go ahead under Banerjea's leadership with their alternative conference. An outbreak of cholera in Poona forced Hume to change the venue of his proposed conference, but, finally, in December 1885, the Indian National Union convened in Bombay (Indian National Congress 1885). Those present immediately renamed themselves the Indian National Congress, and when the Congress next met in December 1886, it did so in Calcutta, thus ensuring the adherence of Banerjea's alternative National Conference (Indian National Congress 1886).
The Indian National Congress was formed by nationalists from all over India together with a retired British official. Hume worked alongside some of the people he had met at the annual conventions of the Theosophical Society -- Malabari, Rao, and Sen - in order to arrange the founding conference of Congress. The Theosophical Society made it possible for someone like Hume to work in the way he did alongside Indian nationalists, and if he had not done so, it would have been, at the very least, more difficult to found an all-India political body. "No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress," G. K. Gokhale later wrote: "if the founder of the Congress had not been a great Englishman and a distinguished ex-official, such was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or other to suppress the movement" (Wedderburn 1913: 63-4).
-- Theosophy and the Origins of the Indian National Congress, by Mark Bevir
In 1885, on retiring from the civil service, Hume summoned the first meeting of the Indian National Congress, in the hope of winning a greater role for Indians in administration under the British Crown. Over time, under Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress became the main propellant of independence, and in India today Hume's role as forerunner is still remembered and acknowledged. (The thirteen-year-old Nehru was, in fact, initiated into the Theosophical Society by its third leader, Annie Besant, and the "thrilled" youngster later saw "old Colonel Olcott with his fine beard.")