Listening Like a Theosophist

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay focuses on the Theosophical Society (est. 1875), an occult movement that, through the efforts of Annie Besant, became closely associated with early Indian anticolonial politics. While the Theosophists spread their doctrine through global networks of print, I argue for the importance of another means by which they did so: the lecture. Through a close examination of a range of theosophical lectures and texts, I argue that the act of listening was central to the creation of a theosophical self which, in turn, was the starting point for a spiritually motivated and often very uneven vision of mass politics. By examining the potentials and limits of the intertwined acts of thinking, listening, and speaking, I chart out what it meant to listen like a Theosophist in early twentieth-century India.