The Nine Lives of Annie Besant

PREFACE

'One of the outstanding events in my life is the day when I first met Annie Besant.'

Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, 1947.

In Delhi in November 1917, Mr Sempkins, Officer on Special Duty in the Criminal Intelligence Department, stamped TOP SECRET in red ink on a manila file on his desk. It contained a typed report, ready to be sent to London, about the subject of his investigation, who inspired significant nervousness among politicians. His was a near-impossible task, charged as he was with reviewing his subject's life so far and evaluating the danger they now posed to government in London and Delhi. The potential threat was not a terrorist or a warlord, but a diminutive, white-haired lady who had just celebrated her seventieth birthday. Annie Besant was not much over 5ft in her socks, but she made men of rank across two continents quake in their boots.

The joy today of reading Sempkins' thirty-six-page report, which is buried deep in the ocean of paperwork of the old India Office in the British Library, is the pleasure of looking across a life and seeing its twists and turns.1 With Annie, those changes were magnified into rollercoaster rides and the direction of travel could only be appreciated after the event. Every decade was tumultuous. If you drew her life as a line it would be a series of zigzags, and if it were a weather map, there would never be a dull day. It would show fog and bright sunshine, heavy banks of rain clouds and shards of bright light.

Sempkins and his readers in the upper echelons of government in London and India were well aware of the basic facts. His subject started out as an ordinary middle-class girl, intelligent, inquisitive, intellectual and very religious. She married a clergyman and promptly lost her faith. She refused to be the model of a Victorian wife and mother, became an atheist and morphed into an activist and a thorn in the side of power. One of the best-known women in the country, she was the defendant in a sensational obscenity case and then the spark that lit the match workers' strike in east London. A socialist, she delivered speeches to huge crowds, wrote prolifically, courted controversy, and then, perhaps most remarkably of all, in middle age, embraced the occult. At this point, the subject of the report appeared to abandon all previous beliefs as well as her homeland. Her new mother country was India and in her twenty-four years there to date, she had stirred up even more trouble than she had at home.

As Sempkins sat in his Delhi office reviewing his subject's story, he concluded that she adopted different causes like new sets of clothes, and he could not refrain from moving from objective fact to his own commentary. He freely admitted she was the most fantastic orator, and her speechmaking and control of public crowds were brilliant, but he could not deal with her hairpin turns. He called them her 'violent changes',2 which made it sound as though they were accompanied by aggressive mood swings (they were not). 'The main characteristic of this remarkable lady,' he wrote, 'is her ill-balanced enthusiasm which frequently leads her into gross inconsistencies. She is also inordinately self-opinionated.'3 He might well have added 'for a woman'. This person was, according to this analysis, deluded, pathetically enthusiastic and repeatedly wrong.

Sempkins was in accord with many of those who have since written about Annie Besant, especially when it came to her conversion to the esoteric movement of Theosophy, which the official called 'the most sudden of all her changes'.4 This new, occult religious system was the work of a Russian mystic, and was influenced by a brotherhood of adepts known as the Masters, or Mahatmas. Theosophists held that there was a deeper reality beyond the known world. The eastern-inspired belief system had spread across continents and was now led by Annie. (I use her first name. She was called many things, from Chief to Mother, but in the East End of London she was simply known as Annie.) Annie's transition from political firebrand to religious disciple and occult practitioner is what, for many commentators since, constituted her downfall and the reason for relegating her to the margins of history. Up to that point, they say she was a marvel. She was a woman in a man's world, fighting for compassion for the poor and social justice for all. Indeed, her contribution to politics and society was impressive enough to justify her place in our pantheon of change-makers in the nineteenth century. If only she had stopped there, the argument goes, or stuck with a single cause, she could have been a heroine, but instead she got religion and, worse still, she embraced magic. She has been treated in a pick 'n' mix way by biographers who have selected the persona they like and shut their eyes to the uncomfortable pieces that, in their view, do not fit the whole picture.

In many respects, the time when Sempkins was making his assessment was the most remarkable phase of Annie Besant's life. It was another cycle of reinvention and a new form of her activism to find the truth and make a better world. As Theosophical leader, she had a global role from London to Sydney. She practised her occult skills, and asked her gurus or Masters to tell her what to do, and they sent her magical messages instructing her to tackle politics in India. At a time when the whole imperial relationship was being interrogated, she became a fervent home rule activist and, surprisingly as a foreign woman, the figurehead of the nationalist campaign.

That was the problem that Sempkins was asked to consider in November 1917. In the previous twelve months, Annie had caused inordinate problems for politicians, east and west. She was discussed in parliament in London, and written about almost obsessively by newspapers in India and Britain. She was banned, censored, sued and locked up. Britain was at war, there were mass casualties in the trenches, and the balance of power between the old Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe was at risk. Britain's imperial role was teetering. One elderly lady who should have been at home with her feet up in front of the fire only had to open her mouth to make people rally round. She was a political loose cannon, and an uncontrollable force of nature. What is more, Annie had just been elected president of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. She had a huge base among nationalists as well as among Theosophists, the sort of support that is every politician's dream.

This formidable woman now at the centre of the imperial picture was refusing to toe the government line. She was in an extraordinary position of power as president of both a new world religion and of the mainspring of Indian nationalism. Sempkins noted that 'it is apparent [.] that Mrs. Besant intends to make her year of office a period of the most strenuous political agitation'.5 This was not the conclusion anyone in the London or Delhi government offices wanted to hear. Moreover, this sari-clad, white septuagenarian did not conveniently fit any box, which made her hard to get the measure of. She had many strings to her bow and each time she attacked her chosen target with complete commitment, making her a model of can-do activism. She had galvanising enthusiasm and the appeal of an evangelist, and yet she was a Victorian woman active in a period well before British women had the vote. No wonder she caused consternation. I imagine Sempkins sealing up his file of bad news in a buff envelope, handing it to his secretary, and anticipating the horrified reactions from his political masters to more trouble ahead. Meanwhile, Annie would be receiving occult visions and strength from her mystic Masters.

Her exploits through the years shone a light on many contemporary controversies. When Sempkins detailed her rebellious activities in his report, I suspect as much in awe as in frustration, he said that 'the perpetual struggle of the violent reformer against constitutional authority continued'. Indeed he thought it had not only continued but escalated. Critics past and present accuse Annie Besant of inconsistency, but she was always a rebel, with numerous causes. Theosophists taught that living things were reincarnated after death, but Annie did not wait for death to renew her. She renewed herself. She was busy pursuing truth and social justice all her days and to achieve her ends she frequently changed her means. In 1960, biographer Arthur Nethercot wrote The First Five Lives of Annie Besant, about her time as a social reformer, which was followed by another volume, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant, about what he saw as her distinct change of direction with Theosophy. I see her life as more of a piece, and her choices as more developmental and harmonious. I picture Annie from oppressed housewife to Theosophical president, and see how, in order to be true to her values, she reimagined herself nine times within one lifetime.

Unlike Sempkins, I am not limited to assessing her priority as a danger to the state. Untangling who she was nearly a century after her death requires squinting to catch traces of her ghostly image talking to her ethereal Masters, and then opening my eyes wide to assimilate her torrent of evangelical words in print. What can we make of the fleeting appearances in the flesh of mystic gurus, or their curious handwritten messages to their followers? How do we account for her acceptance in India as a key proponent of nationalism, or her switch from atheism to mysticism? There are no...