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Women's movement in India
In recent years, lectures at the Tamil Nadu Archives have been few and far between. Waiting for the interest from four modest endowments to sufficiently accumulate, the Archives has been able to organise a lecture only once in one or two years. If the returns from each endowment were enhanced with a request to the descendants of those who created the endowments, we could have four lectures a year. I, for one, am sure the T.T. Vasu family will gladly make up the shortfall for an annual T. T. Krishnamachari Endowment Lecture, for which Vasu had created the endowment.
When I went to the Archives recently, it was as much because I thought the occasion was the first T. T. Krishnamachari Endowment Lecture as it was to hear Dr. P. Jagadeesan, former Vice-Chancellor, Bharatidasan University, and former professor of History, University of Madras, speak about `Social Changes and Popular Movements in 20th Century Tamil Nadu.' Few people in Tamil Nadu take an objective look at what has been happening in the State since 1900.
Dr. Jagadeesan is one who has been studying this fascinating period of our history. There were many things he talked about that I could relate here, but the one thing he mentioned that specially grabbed my attention was his remarks on the Women's Indian Association, which he said had been founded by Dorothy Jinarajadasa. The Sri Lankan connection implicit in the name Jinarajadasa made me explore the trail. And this is what I found.
The Women's Indian Association was founded in Adyar in 1917 by Annie Besant, Dorothy Jinarajadasa and Margaret Cousins. Besant was the founder president, Dorothy, the founding secretary. She had come to India with Besant and Margaret Cousins. Others who served as honorary secretaries included Cousins, Malati Patwardhan, Ammu Swaminathan, Mrs. Dadabhoy and Mrs. Ambujammal. The movement they started, one of the first women's movements in India, developed a network throughout the country. Dorothy Jinarajadasa in particular toured India to inspire women to set up local branches, which the founders hoped would get women to play a greater role in education, politics and particularly social reform to end child marriage and encourage women's education and widow remarriage. The women of India must be banded together in improving themselves and in serving their country, they believed. Annie Besant was to, on behalf of the WIA, present a memorandum to Montagu, then Secretary of State for India, requesting franchise for women on the same terms as men.
Curruppumullage Jinarajadasa was the chief international advocate of the Theosophical Movement to which he was drawn as a 13-year-old boy in Ceylon by Bishop C. W. Leadbeater who was helping the Buddhist Theosophical Society that Col. H. S. Olcott, one of the founders of the Movement, had helped to establish. Jinarajadasa claimed the Bishop was his blood brother from another life. Leadbeater took him to England and there, Jinarajadasa took a Cambridge degree at St. John's College. He also became a Barrister of the Inner Temple. Back in Ceylon, he became principal of the first Buddhist `public school' in the island that Leadbeater had helped found: Ananda College. He then returned to Europe to study in Italy and at the same time become fluent in French, Spanish and Portuguese. From 1904, he toured the world lecturing on the Theosophical Society, starting new chapters and enrolling new members.
When Annie Besant died in 1933, Jinarajadasa declined the presidentship and decided to continue his lecture tours and spread the Theosophical faith. But when Dr. G. S. Arundale died in 1945, Jinarajadasa agreed to succeed him, though he continued to spend much of his time travelling. In fact, when he died in 1953, he was in the U.S.
He married Dorothy M. Graham, a British feminist and fellow Theosophist, in 1916. She travelled with him for several years, but then decided to stay put in India and concentrate on the Women's Indian Association.
S. MUTHIAH
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