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Liber XXXIII · Theosophy

Liber XXXIII · Theosophy · Chapter X: Theosophical Society

Theosophy in India: Adyar, Olcott and the Asian Revival

How the Theosophical Society settled at Adyar near Madras in 1882, and how Olcott and Blavatsky shaped the Buddhist revival in Ceylon and Hindu reform.

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The international headquarters of the Theosophical Society has stood at Adyar, on the southern edge of Madras (now Chennai), since December 1882, when Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott moved there from Bombay. From this riverside estate the Society linked Western occultism with movements of Hindu and Buddhist revival, helped shape modern Sinhalese Buddhism through Olcott's work in Ceylon, and drew many Indians into its lodges at a time when colonial rule and Christian missions were reshaping Indian religious life.

From New York to Bombay, 1879§

By 1878 the Theosophical Society, founded in New York three years earlier, had stalled in America. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled had praised the wisdom of India, and the founders had entered into correspondence with the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement led by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, even agreeing for a time to merge with it. In December 1878 Blavatsky and Olcott sailed for India, and they reached Bombay on 16 February 1879.

They set up house in the Girgaum district, met Indian reformers, journalists and Parsi and Hindu intellectuals, and in October 1879 launched the monthly journal The Theosophist, which Blavatsky edited. Their arrival was watched with suspicion by the colonial police, who briefly kept them under surveillance as possible Russian agents. The alliance with the Arya Samaj soon broke down over doctrine, since Dayananda held to a personal God and the authority of the Vedas, while the Theosophists did not; by 1882 the two movements had parted.

Settling at Adyar in 1882§

As the Society grew, Bombay proved crowded and expensive. In 1882 the founders bought an estate known as Huddleston Gardens, with a large house and grounds on the bank of the Adyar River south of Madras, with help from Indian supporters. They moved in at the end of that year, and the Society's annual convention has met there most years since.

Adyar became a small world of its own. In 1886 Olcott founded the Adyar Library to collect Sanskrit, Pali and other Asian manuscripts and printed books, and it grew into one of the important Oriental libraries of South India. Indian members such as T. Subba Row, a Madras lawyer learned in the Vedanta, and the young Damodar K. Mavalankar worked alongside European residents. The grounds, with their great banyan tree, later hosted schools, a press and the cultural institutions of the twentieth-century Society.

It was also at Adyar that the crisis of 1884 broke. Alexis and Emma Coulomb, employed at the headquarters, gave letters to the Madras Christian College Magazine which they said proved that Blavatsky had staged phenomena. The resulting Hodgson Report of 1885, described in our biography of Helena Blavatsky, led her to leave India for good. Olcott stayed, and Adyar remained his home until his death there in 1907.

Olcott and the Buddhist Revival in Ceylon§

The most lasting effect of the Theosophists in Asia came in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Buddhist monks there were already engaged in public debate with Christian missionaries, most famously at Panadura in 1873, and reports of these debates had reached Olcott in America. In May 1880 Blavatsky and Olcott visited the island and at Galle formally took the five precepts, becoming, by their own account, among the first Westerners to declare themselves Buddhists in a public ceremony there.

Olcott threw himself into Buddhist organisation. He founded the Buddhist Theosophical Society, raised money for Buddhist schools to compete with mission schools, and helped found institutions that grew into leading colleges, such as Ananda College in Colombo. In 1881 he published The Buddhist Catechism, a question-and-answer summary of the faith approved by the learned monk Hikkaduve Sumangala; it went through many editions and translations. He lobbied the British authorities for the recognition of Vesak, the festival of the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death, which became a public holiday in Ceylon in 1885, and he helped promote the Buddhist flag designed in Colombo in the same period. The young Anagarika Dharmapala, later a key figure of modern Buddhism, began his career in Theosophical circles.

Protestant Buddhism§

Scholars such as Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere have called the movement that resulted "Protestant Buddhism": a lay-centred, text-based, rationalised Buddhism that adopted the methods of its missionary opponents, including schools, tracts, catechisms and associations. Olcott was one of its organisers rather than its creator, but his role is still honoured in Sri Lanka, where he is remembered on the anniversary of his death. The wider story of how such forms of Buddhism travelled west is told in our article on Buddhism in the West, and the tradition itself in our guide to Theravada Buddhism.

Theosophy and the Hindu Revival§

In India the Theosophists' message to Hindus was that their own scriptures and sages held a wisdom superior to that of the missionaries and the materialist West. At a time when English-educated Indians were often taught to see their traditions as superstition, this was welcome to many. Branches spread among lawyers, officials and teachers, and the Society published translations and cheap editions of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and other texts discussed in our guide to Hinduism and Vedanta.

After Blavatsky's death, Annie Besant, who arrived in India in 1893 and made it her home, carried this programme further. She helped found the Central Hindu College at Benares in 1898, which became the nucleus of Banaras Hindu University in 1916, and she wrote and lectured widely on Hindu religion. Olcott for his part opened free schools for children of the so-called untouchable castes in Madras in the 1890s.

Adyar and Indian Nationalism§

The Society's influence reached into politics. Allan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant who had been closely involved with Blavatsky's circle, was the principal founder of the Indian National Congress in 1885, and a number of early Congress figures had Theosophical connections. Mohandas Gandhi, as a law student in London in 1889, was introduced to the Bhagavad Gita in Edwin Arnold's verse translation by two Theosophists, an episode he recounted in his autobiography, although he never joined the Society.

Annie Besant became a prominent nationalist, founding the All India Home Rule League in 1916; she was interned by the British in 1917 and elected president of the Indian National Congress later that year. Her influence declined as Gandhi's mass movement rose, but the Theosophical contribution to the Indian cultural renaissance is acknowledged by historians, as is the role of Adyar in the career of Jiddu Krishnamurti, discovered on its beach in 1909, whose story is told in our article on Krishnamurti and the Order of the Star.

Criticism: Missionaries, Orientalists and Indian Reformers§

The Theosophists had many critics in India. Christian missionaries saw them as allies of heathenism and charlatans, and it was a missionary magazine that published the Coulomb letters. Academic Orientalists, notably Friedrich Max Müller, objected that the "esoteric Buddhism" of A. P. Sinnett and Blavatsky had little to do with the Buddhist texts they studied. Hindu reformers such as Swami Vivekananda, while sharing some of their aims, distrusted the Mahatmas and the Society's claims to secret knowledge.

Modern historians add a further critique: that Theosophy presented an idealised, spiritualised "East" constructed largely from Western needs, a form of Orientalism even when sympathetic. Others stress that Asians were active partners who used the Theosophists for their own ends, from Sinhalese Buddhist revivalists to Indian nationalists. Both views capture something of a relationship that was genuinely two-way.

Adyar Today§

The Theosophical Society (Adyar), the largest of the branches that emerged from the schisms of the 1890s, still has its world headquarters on the estate. The Adyar Library and Research Centre continues to publish editions of Sanskrit texts, and the annual international convention is held there each winter. Kalakshetra, the academy of classical Indian dance and music founded in 1936 by the Theosophist Rukmini Devi Arundale, began on the Society's grounds and became a major institution of South Indian performing arts. For the movement's wider history and teachings, see our overview of Theosophy.

Frequently asked questions§

When did the Theosophical Society move to Adyar?§

The founders arrived in India in 1879 and first settled in Bombay. They bought the Adyar estate near Madras in 1882 and moved there at the end of that year, and it has been the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society (Adyar) ever since.

Why is Henry Steel Olcott honoured in Sri Lanka?§

Olcott helped organise the late nineteenth-century Buddhist revival, founding Buddhist schools, writing The Buddhist Catechism and campaigning for Buddhist rights such as the Vesak holiday. He is remembered there as a benefactor of Buddhist education.

Did Blavatsky and Olcott become Buddhists?§

Yes. In May 1880, at Galle in Ceylon, both publicly took refuge and the five precepts before a Buddhist monk. Their Buddhism was, however, filtered through Theosophical ideas of a universal esoteric wisdom.

Was the Theosophical Society involved in Indian independence?§

Indirectly and directly. A. O. Hume, a founder of the Indian National Congress, had been close to Blavatsky, and Annie Besant led the Home Rule League and presided over Congress in 1917, though the later independence movement went in other directions under Gandhi.

Sources and further reading§