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Annie Besant
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Dr. Annie Besant is one of those foreigners who inspired the love of the country among Indians. have long been laid on the alter of the Motherland."Annie Besant, born of Irish parents in London on October 1, 1847, made India her home from November, 1893. Dr. Besant, said Mahatma Gandhi, awakened India from her deep slumber. Before she came to India, Dr. Besant passed through several phases of life-housewife, propagator of atheism, trade unionist, feminist leader and Fabian Socialist. By 1889, "there was scarcely any modern reform (in England) for which she had not worked, written spoken and suffered."Dr. Besant started the Home Rule League in India for obtaining the freedom of the country and reviving the country's glorious cultural heritage. She started a paper called "New India."
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A British social reformer and Theosophist, Annie Besant was one of the most active and remarkable personalities of her time. Born Annie Wood, in London, she married a Church of England clergyman named Besant in 1867, but the marriage failed. An ardent Anglo-Catholic as a girl, she moved towards atheism and became a leading figure in the National Secular Society. In 1877 she published The Gospel of Atheism and was unsuccessfully prosecuted for selling 'obscene literature' - a tract advocating birth control. She campaigned for feminist causes, led the London match girls' strike of 1888, and became a member of the executive committee of the Fabian Society. In 1889 she announced that she had abandoned atheism and had joined the Theosophical Society.
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Annie Besant, a disciple of Madame Blavatsky, had raised Krishnamurti from childhood to be the heir to the Theosophical Society; in other words a second coming of Christ. Krishnamurti rebelled and struggled against that legacy his entire adult life. Remy saw the parallels and found his way back from the mental and sexual abuse Helene Lazareff put him through.
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Annie Besant (1847-1933) joined the National Secular Society in the 1870s and became a journalist on the National Reformer. She ... became secretary of the Malthusian League and was prosecuted, along with Charles Bradlaugh, for the publication of works on birth control. In the 1880s, she became a Socialist and joined firstly, the Fabian Society and then in 1888, the Social Democratic Federation. In 1888 she founded with another radical journalist, W. T. Stead, the Law and Liberty League and its journal 'The Link', in which she campaigned on behalf of the match workers' strike. The same year, she was also elected to the London School Board. From 1889, she became interested in theosophy, whose basic concepts were based on Hinduism, and became president of the Theosophical Society from 1907 until her death.
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IN 1893 Annie Besant visited India and Sri Lanka with a view to promoting Theosophy and starting schools for girls. But she soon succumbed to the warning given by "thoughtful Indians" that female education was suspect because Pandita Ramabai, a convert to Christianity, had used the education of child widows for purposes of conversion. "The unhappy perversion of an Indian lady," said Annie Besant, "had shaken the confidence of the Hindu public with respect to girls' education, and they feared Christian proselytising under the garb of interest in education." Instead she concentrated on boys' education and started a modern school for Hindu boys in 1898, the Central Hindu College in Benares. By 1904, Besant turned to female education and wrote on the topic of "The Education of Indian Girls". But her views were traditional; she spoke of the ancient Hindu ideal, even quoting from the laws of Manu, and discouraged modern education for Indian girls. She wrote:
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Annie Besant (nee Wood) was born in 1847 to a largely Irish and entirely middle-class family then living in London. Her father remained something of a religious sceptic, while her mother moved from evangelicalism to theological liberalism, slowly rejecting doctrines such as Biblical infallibility, eternal damnation, vicarious atonement, and the equality of the Son with the Father in the Trinity. Annie herself had a rigorous evangelical upbringing under the watchful eye of Miss Marryat, a spinster with whom she lived following the death of her father in 1852. Miss Marryat allowed no books on Sundays other than the Bible and Sunday at Home, and her charges soon learnt the theatre was a devilish thing. Annie absorbed the religious spirit of the house, freely determining never to go to a dance even if someone invited her to do so. Later she recalled how 'the strong and intense Evangelicalism of Miss Marryat coloured the whole of my early religious thought'. Nonetheless, she thoroughly enjoyed the ritualism, incense, and pomp of Roman Catholicism, all of which she witnessed when visiting Paris in 1862.
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Annie Besant