Wadia's Letter of Resignation from the T.S.

Bahman Pestonji Wadia · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 21 pages

Twenty-one pages carrying a single public document: B.P. Wadia's statement to all fellow theosophists and members of the Society, constituting his letters of resignation with his reasons for them, written from Los Angeles. *It is the latest document in this section by some decades*, and it is the only one written by someone leaving.

Bahman Pestonji Wadia was a Parsi theosophist of the first rank — a labour organiser in India, one of the founders of the Indian trade union movement, and for years among the most senior figures at Adyar — so the resignation of such a man was not a small event. The file gives his statement in full, addressed both to the General Council of the Society at Adyar and to the membership at large. Its central section is headed with the question he puts to every reader: What would H.P.B. do? His answer, and the charge the whole document exists to make, is stated as its own heading — the Theosophical Society is disloyal to theosophy. The argument is not that the doctrine is wrong but that the organisation had come to serve itself and its officers rather than the purpose it was founded for, which is the same complaint made in Blavatsky's own Original Programme thirty years earlier and reproduced elsewhere in this section. A note records that the author's quotations from Blavatsky have been checked and minimally corrected against de Zirkoff's Collected Writings. Read as the last item chronologically in a section that began with the founding essay of 1879, it closes the story the section tells.

Read the full text (PDF, 1.4 MB, 21 pages)