Adyar

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Where the Adyar River gives out into the Bay of Bengal, on the southern edge of the city once called Madras, a banyan tree some four and a half centuries old has spent its life slowly becoming a forest — aerial roots let down from the branches thickening into trunks until the single tree covered some forty thousand square feet. For three centuries of those years the tree kept its own company. Then, in 1882, the estate around it was bought by the Theosophical Society, and for the next seventy years nearly everything consequential in the occult revival’s institutional life either happened beneath its canopy or within a few minutes’ walk of it.

Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott were shown Huddleston Gardens on May 31, 1882, during a South Indian tour: twenty-seven acres on the river’s south bank, a large colonial house, two outhouses, the banyan. Olcott wrote in his diary that the moment they saw the place they knew “our future home was found.” The Founders took up residence on December 19, 1882, and the Society — born in New York in 1875, removed to Bombay in 1879 — had its permanent international seat. From the beginning the estate was more than an address. In the Society’s own economy Adyar is a flaming center, a reservoir from which the powers of wisdom and compassion radiate outward into the world; Annie Besant worked there under a door-sign naming it the Masters’ home. The President resides on the grounds, the December conventions meet there, and the archives, presses, and library grew up around the original house the way the banyan’s secondary trunks grew up around the first.

The house itself was rebuilt almost at once. Improvements began in 1883, and within four years the first great alteration had produced the Headquarters Hall, where the Society’s chief assemblies have met ever since. The Hall is the first object — universal brotherhood without distinction of race or creed — stated in plaster and stone: bas-relief emblems of the living religions line the north, east, and west walls, the symbols of the extinct faiths keep the south, and over them runs the motto “There is no Religion higher than Truth.” A figure of Blavatsky modeled from the Schmiechen portrait stands beneath Olcott’s Latin dedication of 1899; his own statue was set beside hers after his death, the shared pedestal inscribed to the Founders. A library wing followed, its outer wall paneled with eight sculpted elephant heads.

Upstairs, adjoining Blavatsky’s rooms, stood the Occult Room and its Shrine — the cabinet through which letters from the Mahatmas, the hidden adepts whose correspondence with A. P. Sinnett had carried the movement into print, arrived and were answered. For one hard season it made Adyar the most scrutinized building in the esoteric world. In September and October 1884 the Madras Christian College Magazine published letters supplied by Emma and Alexis Coulomb, the estate’s former housekeepers, alleging that the phenomena were contrived; Richard Hodgson of the Society for Psychical Research came out that November and examined the rooms on the spot, and the SPR committee’s report of December 1885 pronounced the phenomena fraudulent. The quarrel over that verdict has run for fourteen decades and belongs to the history of the movement; what belongs to the estate is the departure. Blavatsky resigned her office, left Adyar on March 31, 1885, and never saw India again.

The estate’s deeper work went on regardless. The first Adyar Convention met in December 1883 — the gathering at which the Subba Row Medal was founded — and to the conventions of 1885 and 1886 T. Subba Row delivered the discourses on the Bhagavad Gita that became the movement’s doctrinal anchor in Hindu scripture. On December 28, 1886, Olcott dedicated the Adyar Library, begun from the Founders’ own books and fed by his campaign to rescue the palm-leaf manuscripts then “lying, uncared for, throughout India”; within a year it held some twelve thousand volumes and thirty-seven hundred manuscripts. The scholarly apparatus thickened around it: F. Otto Schrader, the library’s first Western director, served from 1905 to 1916; the Vasanta Press opened on the estate in 1909; the Theosophical Publishing House took its Adyar name in 1913. Between conventions, library, and presses, the compound became the most consequential English-language producer of esoteric Hindu scripture of its era. From 1898 the annual convention alternated between Adyar and Benares; it still fills the campus each December.

Olcott died at Adyar on February 17, 1907, and under Annie Besant the compound became a campus. By the end of 1911 she had grown its twenty-seven acres to two hundred and fifty-three, adding the properties now called Besant, Olcott, Blavatsky, and Damodar Gardens, and raising the quarters — Bhojanasala, the Quadrangle, Leadbeater Chambers — that turned an administrative estate into a residential one. The first object went up in masonry as well as bas-relief. A Buddhist shrine rose by the river in 1925, a gray sandstone Buddha above a lotus pond; the Hindu Bharata Samaja temple — the Temple of Light, which keeps no image in its sanctum, only a flame — received its first sunrise puja on December 21, 1925; the Church of St. Michael and All Angels serves the Liberal Catholic rite; a Zoroastrian temple, a mosque of 1937 modeled on the Mughal Pearl Mosque, and a Sikh gurdwara of 1978 completed the circle of the faiths.

That first puja was performed by a young man the estate itself had produced. In April 1909, walking on the Society’s private beach with his secretary, C. W. Leadbeater passed the adolescent son of a Society clerk and saw about him an aura without a particle of selfishness in it. The boy was Jiddu Krishnamurti; his training began on the estate, and At the Feet of the Master followed in 1910. The apparatus of expectation was assembled elsewhere — the Order of the Star in the East was named at Benares on January 11, 1911, with Krishnamurti at its head as the coming vehicle of the Maitreya, and from 1924 its annual camps met on the Eerde estate at Ommen in Holland. But the proclamation belongs to Adyar. At the Golden Jubilee Convention of December 1925 — the Society’s fiftieth year, with forty-one national societies and nearly forty-two thousand members — Krishnamurti addressed the Star Congress under the great banyan on the coming of the World Teacher, and on December 28 the address moved without warning out of the third person: “I come to reform, and not tear down; not to destroy, but to build.” To Besant, seated near him, and to the thousands under the tree, the voice was the Teacher’s own, sounding at last through the body prepared for it.

The end of that expectation did not come at Adyar, and the geography matters. On August 3, 1929, at the Ommen camp, Krishnamurti dissolved the Order of the Star before its assembled members — by then numbering in the tens of thousands — returned the properties and money given for the cause, and the following year resigned from the Society altogether. For decades he did not enter the compound that had found him; yet he held to the last that a presence dwells at Adyar of the kind one meets in a sacred shrine, and that the place should be kept as a holy temple is kept.

Besant died at the headquarters on September 20, 1933. Leadbeater lit her pyre; part of her ashes went into the Ganges at Benares, and the rest lie in the Garden of Remembrance that marks the cremation ground, where Leadbeater’s own ashes joined hers six months later. The campus she built kept producing institutions. Olcott’s free schools for oppressed-caste children, begun in 1894, continue as the Olcott Memorial School in Besant Gardens, still giving free schooling and meals. George Arundale, president from 1934, founded the Besant Memorial School; his wife Rukmini Devi founded Kalakshetra, the academy of Indian dance and music, under a campus tree on January 6, 1936 — its first pupil, Radha, would head the Society itself from 1980 to 2013 — before it moved to its own grounds in 1962, where a sapling of the great banyan had gone ahead of it in 1951. Maria Montessori arrived in November 1939 at Arundale’s invitation and inaugurated the first Indian Montessori training course in palm-leaf pavilions on the compound, lecturing in Italian with her son translating; the war kept her in India until 1946. The School of the Wisdom opened in Blavatsky Bungalow on November 17, 1949, and runs still. Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama have spoken under the banyan, whose main trunk fell in a storm in 1989; the tree continues through the trunks its branches had already planted. The estate today is some 250 acres of woodland inside Chennai, closed to casual visitors and opened for the December convention.

Diary leaves and catalogs

The estate keeps its own paper, and the paper keeps the estate. The purchase narrative is Olcott’s: Old Diary Leaves, the second series of his documentary history of the Society (Theosophical Publishing Society, 1900), covers the years 1878–83 and carries the firsthand account of finding Huddleston Gardens and the December move; the volume is online at the Internet Archive. What his collecting became is visible in F. Otto Schrader’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Adyar Library, volume I, on the Upanishads (Adyar Library, Madras, 1908; the scanned catalog is likewise online) — the moment a founder’s enthusiasm became a working orientalist research library, four years before Schrader opened the Adyar Library Series with his critical edition of the minor Upanishads. The chronology of the World Teacher years — beach, banyan, Ommen — is fixed from family papers and Society correspondence in Mary Lutyens, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening (John Murray, 1975; Open Library). Stephen Prothero’s The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Indiana University Press, 1996; Open Library) treats the library and the free schools as one project, Protestant method carrying Asian content; and Isaac Lubelsky’s Celestial India: Madame Blavatsky and the Birth of Indian Nationalism (Equinox, 2012; Open Library) places the estate at the operational center where the Society’s vision of India was assembled and fed back, through Besant’s politics above all, into Indian national life.

The library Schrader cataloged long ago outgrew its elephant-headed wing; since 1967–68 the Adyar Library and Research Centre has had a building of its own on the estate. It holds over a quarter of a million printed volumes and around twenty thousand palm-leaf manuscripts from India, Sri Lanka, China, and beyond — Chinese Tripiṭakas and a Tibetan Kanjur–Tanjur among them — publishes the journal Brahmavidyā, stands recognized by the University of Madras as a research center for doctoral work in Sanskrit and Indology, and since 2016 has been digitizing the collection leaf by leaf. Whatever else the estate has housed — Founders, scandals, a World Teacher found and lost — the bundles of incised palm leaf that Olcott’s agents gathered out of village India remain its steadiest tenants: the old wisdom the Society was founded to recover, acquired a manuscript at a time.

→ In the library: Besant — Esoteric Christianity (1901) · Leadbeater — A Textbook of Theosophy (1912)

→ Related: Theosophy · Helena Blavatsky · Henry Steel Olcott · Jiddu Krishnamurti · A P Sinnett · Maitreya