HPB-SB-8-259: Difference between revisions

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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued|On India’s Coral Strand|8-258}}

{{Style P-No indent|influence of the leader of Brahmaism and broken up his church into factions. Though his first Arya Samaj was organized less than five years ago, to-day, what with the enrolled members and known sympathizers, there are now over a million natives who accept Dya Nand’s doctrines. Our Theosophical Committee held a week’s discussions with him at Saharanpore and Meerut, N. W. P. Suffice it to say that a close alliance of our two societies has been agreed upon. And speaking of alliances, we have just effected one with the Ceylon Buddhists, two of whose foremost men have accepted places in our General Council. All the treasures of their libraries are offered for our inspection, and their ablest scholars are ready to translate from Sanskrit and Palisach works as may appear most important that Western scholars should be made familiar with. Writes a venerable priest, sixty-five years of age, chief of a great vihara: “To use an Oriental simile, I and my many disciples anxiously wait your arrival at Point de Galle like a swarm of peacocks, who joyously long for the downpour of a shower.”}}

I have tried to give our people some general notion of the seething multitude which inhabits the peninsula of Hindostan, about which they know so little, and, for commercial reasons, should know so much. Poor as they are, the Hindoos still buy enormously of British manufactures, and are yearly taking increasing quantities from Germany, France, and other countries. At Bombay alone there were imported, in 1878, from Great Britain, 11,419,227 pieces of dry goods, shirtings, long cloths, prints, jacconets, madapollams, cambrics, T. cloths, domestics, mulls, figured shirtings, lappets, and dhoties. A customer, this, not to be despised.

I know an American lecturer on mesmerism who makes it a rule to always leave upon the mind of his “subject” some pleasant impression, to chase away any evil effects that might follow the excitation of the more turbulent mental organs. Let me imitate him so far as to tell you a comic misadventure that has befallen us. Some malignant agent of the idolaters, or perhaps of the missionaries, put into the head of somebody in authority the idea that we were—Russian spies! Our unprecedented intimacy with the natives could, of course, bear no other explanation. So, without their stopping to reason upon the transparent absurdity of the thing, our every movement has been dogged by detectives, who have even come, in what they imagined were disguises, into our semi-weekly ''durbars'', and given an attentive ear to our debates with Shaivas, Vishnavas, Zoroastrians, Vedantists, Moslems, and Jains upon the esoteric meaning of their several Scriptures, and the points of their philosophies! More power to their elbows; if they have transcribed their notes, the future historian of the Theosophs will find a placer in the record books of the Bombay secret police! It has been hinted that Mme. Blavatsky’s Caucasian nativity is the ''bête noire'', and I am pointed to the precedent of a poor Russian lady pianist, Mme. Duboin, who played magnificently all through India, but was incontinently set down as a secret emissary of Kauffmann! But our Russian friend spent the last six years in America on purpose to denationalize herself, and get under a flag that represented her republican principles; so it must be either of our distinguished friends, the idolaters or the missionaries, whom we have to thank for their distinguished attentions. Happily, however, time teaches sense even to the police, and baffles the fell designs of theological foes.

  | publication date = 1879-07-13

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