A Debt of Gratitude to Lord Lytton

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages carrying a short piece Blavatsky wrote for The Theosophist volume I number 2, November 1879, pages 34 to 35, republished in her Collected Writings volume II under the title "A Thunder Cloud with a Silver Lining". *It is a piece of the movement's own history rather than a doctrinal study*, and it is about a specific and unpleasant episode.

The small party of New York theosophists had arrived in Bombay eight months earlier and had scarcely been greeted before being accused of political intrigue. Someone whose name, she says, must never pollute the columns of the journal had warned the police that they had come with a dark political purpose, and they were followed as spies. She describes the effect in the language of Isaiah — numbered with the transgressors, bruised for the iniquities of another — and the tone is of relief rather than triumph, since by the time she writes the surveillance has been called off. The credit is given to two people: an English friend at Simla whose noble and unselfish exertions brought the matter to the Viceroy's notice, and the Viceroy himself, Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, first Earl of Lytton, who after satisfying himself that the theosophists had been misrepresented gave formal orders through the political department that the espionage should stop. The piece quotes the Allahabad Pioneer of 11 October for the public account of the matter, which explains that a groundless calumny had preceded the party to India and that the police had put a very clumsy construction on the orders they were given. Behind the gratitude is a general claim worth noticing — that the Society's difficulties in its earliest years were as much political and social as intellectual.

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