Blavatsky on the Nilgiri Sannyasis

E.H. Morgan, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 18 pages

An eighteen-page compilation in four parts, opened by a contents page. The first is from Five Years of Theosophy: Mystical, Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical, and Scientific Essays selected from “The Theosophist,” London: Reeves & Turner, 1885, pages 72–75 — a verbatim translation of a Settlement Officer's statement made to Mrs E.H. Morgan. The frontispiece is Kandelmund Toda, plate 5 from Richard Barron's Views in India, chiefly among the Neelgherry Hills, of 1837.

The four parts move outward from a single testimony to a public exchange. The first is the Settlement Officer's own statement, given verbatim rather than summarised, reporting that sannyāsis were sometimes met with on a mountain called the Velly Mallai hills — a first-hand account from a colonial administrator with no interest in the subject, which is precisely why it is reproduced in that form. The second turns to witchcraft on the Nilgiris, and the third to what happened when Isis Unveiled was brought to the Todas, the indigenous people of those hills. The fourth is Blavatsky's own letter to the editor of The Spiritualist, in which the material is defended in print. Setting an official's plain report first and the controversy last is the arrangement the file depends on: the reader meets the evidence before meeting the argument about it, which is the same method used in “The trans-Himalayan Mahatmas” in the Higher Ethics series, where letters from correspondents are printed in full before any reply.

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