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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 The right edge of the printed masthead is missing from the scrapbook clipping; the publication is identified as Indu-Prakash. |
A Native on Madame Blavatsky.
Sir,—In 1870 I had the pleasure of making my appearance in your valuable paper, on the subject of a printing press, printing types, papers and other materials having been discovered buried after a thousand years in Benares and removed to the London Museum in the time of the Governor General Sir Wm. Bentinck. I opened the epistle with these words, “There is scarcely any thing of modern invention of whose previous existence there has not been found or will not be found a trace in my beloved country” and I have now still greater pleasure in following up that letter about the falsification of the so called new invention in Europe of A. D. 1441 by inviting the bewildered attention of my Educatedcountry men through this your esteemed organ of our native community to a paragraph out of a long leader in the New York paper called the “World” containing the substance of a conversation held at the residence of Madame H. P. Blavatsky in New York between herself and the Reporter of that world-wide circulating paper. The article is dated Wednesday the 28th of March 1877 and headed “Ahamasery in New York” speaking of the possibility of suspending life for an indefinite period. Madame Blavatsky is reported as follows:—“The British Government tested it (viz. the possibility of suspending life) by hermetically sealing up the physical body of a Hindoo in a glass coffin in which it was kept for months, continually watched night and day by a military guard. When it was taken from the coffin the astral body and the soul rejoined the physical body and the apparent life was restored. In the case of the lower animals who have astral bodies this separation is easily accomplished. The very shepherds in Thibet—ignorant people—know the trick of doing this. They frequently put to temporary death such of their sheep or cattle as they wish to preserve for any time and then when they desire to do so, they bring them to life again. I have done this myself a number of times. It is done by certain manipulation of a certain artery in the neck. I prophesy to you that within a year from now scientists will discover, how this is done in the case of the lower animals?
Now the above prophesy would appear to have been fulfilled thus. The Brisbane Courier, from which the Pall Mall Budget and other London publications have copied the account, (they call the great discovery of anæsthetizing Sheep and other animals for an indifferent period by the use of a certain drug and then by the use of another bringing them to life again at pleasure) in an article dated January 11th 1879 says that a few months before that date “Signor Rotura called on Mr. Grant to invoke his assistance in a scheme for the transmission of live stock to Europe and averred that he had discovered the vegetable poison in South America allied to the well-known “Woolara” that had the power of perfectly suspending animation and that the trance thus produced continued till the application of another vegetable essence, which caused the blood to resume its circulation and the heart its functions.” The search for either of the drugs cannot but be supposed to have taken up less time than four months which places the discovery just at the period named by Madame Blavatsky and published by the “Now York World.”—To set people at rest who, Mr. Editor, have variously spoken against Mother Blavatsky what is any thing but fair and true to her belief in and to her power of essoteric knowledge, in reference to the paragraph published in the 15th column of the Bombay Gazette of the 18th ult. as also the quotation in the 20 column of the same paper from the Brisbane Courier under the head of “A wonderful discovery” I have endeavoured to prove that in this case Mother Blavatsky shewed once more her great science and prescience and also that this so called “wonderful discovery” which has made so much noise in England and has been noticed in subsequent vernacular publications is only another illustration of my opinion expressed thro’ you in 1870.—
From the foregoing Dear Editor you will not fail to perceive that the popular notion regarding the intrinsic properties of certain vegetables and plants for medication not yet discovered by western medicine is not at all fallacious. If what we Hindoos popularly ascribed to औषधी has stood the test of this century, the boasted 19th, may we not hope for a day when our opinions regarding the मणि or certain stones supposed to possess miraculous properties for medication and the efficacy of certain occult formula may not be mere medico fictions as they are now held to be but facts—accomplished facts and proved realities as His Majesty the Great King Shree Hursh says.—अचिन्त्योहि मणिमन्त्रौषधीनां प्रभावः
I call this great woman—Madame Blavatsky—my mother in the widest sense. She has, I freely maintain, brought life to dead India by her arrival from America which I hope and am certain, will shortly induce other theosophists to come and infuse more blood into our veins and invigorate us to our duty and to our future amelioration.—I am Dear Mr. Editor.—Your most obedient servant.
No. 39 Loharchall 8th July 1879.
Indian Theism.
Oxford, May 29, 1879.
It may interest the readers of the Athenæum to learn that a young Indian Pandit, named Syāmajī Krishna-varma, who, considering his age (scarcely twenty-three), is remarkably well versed in grammatical and Vedic literature, has recently arrived in this country, and has just been admitted a member of this University. He is the first real Indian Pandit who has ever visited England. We have had others here who have borne the name, but no real Sanskrit scholar has ever before had the courage to break the rules of caste, give offence to his own family, incur the odium and contempt of the whole fraternity of his brother Pandits, and expose himself to the certainty of excommunication on his return to India.
He is a native of Kutch, a country on the western coast of India, inhabited by rather more than half a million of hardy people, generally vigorous in mind as well as body, who speak a language called Kutchi, a mere dialect of Sindhi with a considerable admixture of Gujarātī. It has no literature, and is on its way to extinction. The educated classes in Kutch speak pure Gujarātī, which is itself deteriorating, and likely to die out, unless by our examination rules we do more to encourage its cultivation and the formation of a readable literature.
Pandit Syāmajī Krishna-varma is not a Brāhman, but he claims to belong to the Kshatriya caste. He has the prescribed Kshatriya termination, Varma (meaning “armour”), at the end of his name, and wears the sacred thread. Manu enjoins that the second part of a Kshatriya’s name should indicate “protection,” and that his Yajnopavīta, or sacred thread, should be made of hemp (ii. 32, 44).
The Pandit’s advent in this country is a remarkable sign of the times. In the first place, it proves that the educated classes of India are beginning to be intolerant of caste prohibitions. They are no longer willing to be cribbed and confined by restrictions which are really of comparatively modern origin, and derive no sanction from their own sacred works. They are beginning to find out that caste was made for man, and not man for caste, and that it is better to make caste their slave, retaining all that is good and useful in its rules, than be themselves the slaves of caste.
Pandit Syāmajī has no idea of giving up one iota of his own nationality. He intends on his return to go through the usual expiatory ceremonies (prāyas’c’itta) for readmission into caste. But he hopes on that very account to render more service to his country by the power he will thus acquire of leavening by his influence the circle of society in which he moves. Perhaps the chief point of interest connected with him is that he is a member of the Arya-Samāj, a new Theistic church, founded by a remarkable Pandit named Dayānanda Sarasvatī Svāmī, who came across my path two or three times during my travels in India.
I need scarcely tell the readers of the Athenæum that the origin of the Theistic churches of India dates from Rām Mohun Roy, who was born at Burdwān in 1774. He was a well-educated Brāhman, and, though not a professed Sanskrit scholar, was able, by help of his friends the Pandits, to translate some of the Upanishads, which he regarded as the real Bible of educated Hindūs.
He was the first religious and social reformer of what may be called the British Indian school—the first example of an entirely new type of religious thinkers produced by the introduction of English rule and English ideas into India. He was a rich man, and purchased a large meeting-house in Calcutta, where he founded the first Theistic church, or Brāhma-Samāj (called originally Brāhma-sabhā), in 1830. He was also instrumental in procuring the abolition of Satī by law in the same year.
Rām Mohun Roy, nevertheless, was a thorough Brāhman at heart, and had no idea of starting any new sect. He simply aimed at delivering his national religion from its idolatrous incrustations, and bringing it back to the pure Monotheism and philosophical Pantheism of the Veda and Vedānta. He came to England to exchange ideas with Western thinkers, and died at Bristol in 1833.
After an interval of stagnation, which threatened to be fatal to the new Theistic church at Calcutta, he was succeeded in his reforming work there by Debendranāth Tagore (son of the well-known Dwārakanāth Tagore), who is now sixty-one years of age. This second remarkable reformer gave organization to Rām Mohun Roy’s church, promulgated a Theistic Directory and rule of faith (called Brāhma-dharma), and was the real founder of the Adi-Brāhma-Samāj in 1844. But he, like his predecessor, is a Brāhman with an ineradicable vein of Brāhmanism running through his mind, and has done as little violence as possible to the old religion of his fathers, which he believes to have been originally monotheistic. It was reserved for a new reformer to break away entirely from the trammels of Vedic and Vedāntic theology, and acknowledge no other revelation than that written on creation, and engraved on man’s heart and inner consciousness—no other inspiration but that to be found in every good man and every good book.
This third great reformer, whose name is Keshab Chandra Sen, is of the Vaidya caste, and is now about forty-one years of age. His father, who was a rich man and a man of some literary culture,* gave him a thorough English education at the Presidency College, Calcutta. At first the youthful Keshab accepted the leadership of Debendranāth Tagore, and became a member of the Adi-Samāj; <... continues on page 8-262 >
* His grandfather was Rām Comul Sen, a man well known to my predecessor here, Prof. H. H. Wilson, and the author of a useful English and Bengālī Dictionary, to which my own lexicography is under some obligations.
Editor's notes
- ↑ A Native on Madame Blavatsky. by Bapoodalvie, Atma Ram (signed as Atma Ram Bapoodalvie), Indu-Prakash, July 14, 1879. A handwritten note in the margin beside this article reads: “See p.107.”
- ↑ Uncaptioned butterfly illustration. by unknown author
- ↑ Indian Theism. by Williams, Monier, Athenæum, The