Madame Blavatsky on the Slander of the Anglo-Indian Journals

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 21 pages

Twenty-one pages in two parts, written because silence had stopped being an option. In the face of sustained attack by the Anglo-Indian and English journals, she writes, the Society was obliged to enter the arena of controversy under the penalty of having its silence construed as consent — and the torrent of letters arriving from all sides had compelled her to lower the flag of truce previously offered to the spiritualists.

The second part takes its heading from the commandment against bearing false witness, and turns the argument on the missionary press of Bombay: that sanctioning and spreading flagrant untruths and malicious innuendo is a dishonourable act, the more reprehensible for its source. The image she uses for the Indian dailies and weeklies is characteristic — peacock's feathers clumsily covering the ugly bird beneath, now ruffled and standing on end, no longer able to hide the ravenous crow. The observation that closes the argument is the most useful one: that the editors who did their best to injure the Theosophists not only failed but helped the Society's branches to multiply worldwide, which is a claim a reader can check against the record.

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