Annie Besant

Early life and theosophy

Annie Besant was born in London and, before her involvement in Indian affairs, had already built a public career in Britain as a freethinker, social reformer and campaigner for causes including secularism, birth control and labour rights, including support for the 1888 London matchgirls' strike. Married young to an Anglican clergyman, Frank Besant, she separated from him in the 1870s after losing her religious faith, and went on to co-edit the freethought journal the National Reformer with Charles Bradlaugh; in 1877 the two were prosecuted for republishing Charles Knowlton's birth-control pamphlet Fruits of Philosophy, a case that made her a prominent and controversial public figure and, in a separate proceeding brought by her estranged husband, cost her custody of her daughter. She was also active for a period in the Fabian Society before turning to theosophy. She joined the Theosophical Society, a movement blending elements of Hindu and Buddhist thought with Western esotericism, in 1889, and relocated to India, settling at the society's international headquarters in Adyar, Madras, where she became its president in 1907, a position she held until her death.

Educational and political work in India

In India, Besant combined theosophical activity with practical educational and political work. She founded the Central Hindu College in Banaras in 1898 to provide education combining Hindu religious instruction with a Western curriculum; the institution later formed the nucleus of Banaras Hindu University, established in 1916 under Madan Mohan Malaviya. From 1914 she moved increasingly into nationalist politics, editing the newspaper New India as a platform for the home rule cause, and in 1916 she launched the All India Home Rule League, campaigning, alongside a separate League founded by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, for Indian self-government on the model of dominion home rule, using the vocabulary and techniques of the earlier Irish home rule campaign. Her activities led the colonial government to intern her, along with two associates, from June to September 1917, an act that generated widespread sympathy and helped her secure election as president of the Indian National Congress at its December 1917 session, the first woman to hold that office. Weeks after her release, the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, issued a declaration committing the government to the gradual development of self-governing institutions in India, a statement widely, though not universally, read at the time as a response to the unrest her internment had provoked.

Later years

Besant's political prominence declined after 1918 as leadership of the nationalist movement passed to Mohandas Gandhi, whose programme of non-cooperation and mass civil resistance she did not fully embrace, preferring constitutional methods and continued engagement with the colonial government's reform proposals. She remained active into old age in theosophical and educational work, including promoting her ward Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom the Theosophical Society had presented, through an associated body called the Order of the Star in the East, as a coming spiritual teacher, a project Krishnamurti himself repudiated in 1929 when he dissolved the order and rejected the messianic role assigned to him. She died at Adyar in 1933.