MRS ANNIE BESANT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22065, 22 September 1933, Page 7

MRS ANNIE BESANT

DEATH ANNOUNCED CALCUTTA, September 20. The death is announced at Madras of Mrs Annie Besant. Mrs Annie Besant, who was horn in London in 1847, joined the Theosophical Society in 1889, and since then she travelled to many parts of the world in its interests. Much of her life was spent in India, where she was instrumental in founding a school and college at Benares, and in recognition of her services to education she was made a Doctor of Literature by Benares University. She was elected president of the Theosophical Society in 1907. As a leader of Indian thought she founded the Indian Home Rule League, of which she became president in 1916. She wrote many books on all the phases of thought with which

she had been allied, publishing her autobiography in 1893, and “ The Religious Problem in India” in 1902. In 1917 Mrs Besant was elected president of the Indian National Congress. Scarcely three years had passed when the great position she had won among Indians was practically lost by her, so far as the general public was concerned. This was when Mr M. K. Gandhi launched his campaign of “ Non-Co-operation ” against Idle British Government, calling upon lawyers, schoolboys and others to “ non-co-operate,” because of the injustices committed by the Government. One part of his campaign was the breaking of certain laws, which would be announced to the people, and such infraction was to be a political demonstration to bring pressure to bear on the Government. To break a bad law because it was bad and to suffer for. it individually with a view to changing it into a good law—that Mrs Besant could support; but, to bteak a bad law, not because it was bad, but because it was law—that she could not suffer, because that made for anarchy and lawlessness. Mrs Besant thoroughly believed in “ Passive Resistance,” where the individual pits his conscience against an evil law, dares to break that law, and suffer the law s penalties, but only in order that the evil law might later be changed. But she refused to countenance the breaking of any general laws not selected by tpe individual, but thrust upon him at the dictation of someone else’s policy, and particularly as a way of bringing pressure to bear on Government policy. This divergence between her and Gandhi persisted steadily, because she held that any movement for “mass action or “ direct action ” released forces which must degenerate into violence and would in the long run be to the detriment of India’s national life. She stood by the constitutional method for political reforms. Though she became unpopular and lost her position as a leader she still went on with her work for India. Mrs Besant proclaimed that the handsome young Brahmin, Krishnamurti, was a reincarnation of the Diety; that he was the “ Exalted One,” for whose visitation Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, and others had been waiting for centuries. One of the aims of Theosophy is to unite all religions, and it was Mrs Besant’s expectation that she would bo able to lead the way in combining all religions into a new, world-wide religion centred around Krishnamurti. She visited New Zealand several years ago, and spoke in Dunedin. Describing a meeting in Queen’s Hall, London, last year, a British correspondent thus wrote of Mrs Besant’s speech to 3000 people: —Mrs Besant plunges straight into her subject, and without a note and without pause easily holds the close attention of her audience for over an hour. A born orator, she has a dignified, rather elevated style and a deliberate delivery. Her articulation is perfect. She is clearly heard in every part of the hall, and when she becomes passionate her voice rings out with clarion note. When she is protesting against social injustice, or pleading for some urgent reform, one realises that the speaker, though she has undergone many changes, is yet the same Annie Besant who °4O years ago, with Charles Bradlaugh, from the Hall of Science in Old street, denounced what she regarded as the evils of that time.