Book Review: How Annie Besant, a woman of uncommon confidence, refused to be bullied by men

"We are a family of Theosophists,” I have heard all my life. I mostly understood that to mean being like my sage, gentle great-grandfather who was a Theosophist. In family conversations, the term was invoked to explain liberalism, a social conscience and a detachment from rituals and outdated mores. Annie Besant features in this lore because, like many girls in that generation, my aunt was named for her. So who was Annie Besant, this figure that appeared in both family lore and school history textbooks?

Clare Paterson’s The Nine Lives of Annie Besant is an account of Besant’s lives, as the author describes them, within this janma 1847-1933, and not a revelation about previous incarnations. In this life-span, she reinvented herself repeatedly, sometimes to survive her circumstances and sometimes despite them. Theosophy brought her to India and her part in India’s freedom movement through the Home Rule League was the very last part of her journey.

Annie Wood acquired her famous last name through a brief, abusive marriage to a clergyman in Hastings in 1867 which gave her two children. She courageously walked out after six years with her daughter, struggling for several years thereafter to gain custody of her son. The marriage was shaken as well by her loss of her Christian faith and this contributed to the stigma she endured thereafter. In the next phase of her life, Besant became a Freethinking pamphleteer and public speaker and started her journey as a writer. She spoke and wrote on a wide variety of topics, from atheism to women’s rights, undaunted and irrepressible.

One of these was sex education—regarded even in 2025 with suspicion. Along with her collaborator Charles Bradlaugh, Besant published and promoted a doctor’s graphic manual on birth control meant for the uneducated public. Being an atheist, committed to science and secularism were bad enough, but Besant was irrepressibly outspoken as well. This cost her custody of her daughter and the prospect of a college degree.

In 1885, and the beginning of her “next life”, Besant attended a meeting of the Fabian Society. It marked not just the beginning of her engagement with socialist ideas but also the entrance of George Bernard Shaw into her life. While contemporaries thought this new engagement was at odds with her previous ones, she believed Fabian Socialism was the natural next step (“I am a Socialist… because I am a believer in Evolution”). In 1887, her presence and role in defending protestors arrested at a trade union rally in London buttressed her socialist credentials and she wrote that the magistrate was “too astonished by my profound courtesy and calm assurance to remember that I had no right to be here…”. By the time she joined the Fabians, Besant had gained enough celebrity to add ballast to any movement, including trade unionism which followed from her socialist turn.

Paterson does not evade the possibility of Besant’s relationships with the many men she became close to in each phase but there is no prurient speculation. She rightly states, “Judgements about people’s love lives are tricky in retrospect, with very little evidence to go on.” While Besant seems to have brought the same intensity to relationships, platonic or otherwise, as she did to her work, through her nine lives, the men were never the cause of her many pivots; her intellect was.

This period, the late 1880s, is also when she first encountered Theosophy. The turn of the 20th century saw the emergence of new movements—socialist, suffragist, labour, peace—and a fascination with occult and spiritualism. Besant was not immune. Initially derisive, she found herself drawn to theosophy and sought out Madame Blavatsky, one of the founders. From that point, her story twins with that of the Theosophical Society (TS) although her other concerns continued.

As traumatic as her beginning was, this biography tells the story of a person, who through her ability, adroit positioning and good fortune, quickly becomes prominent wherever she goes. Thus, barely a year elapsed between her first encounter with Madame Blavatsky in 1889 and her assuming leadership of Blavatsky Lodge in London. “Annie moved on up the line like a steam train,” as Paterson writes. M.K. Gandhi listened to her talks in this period, including at Blavatsky Lodge in London. As children, future Indian leaders Sri Prakasa and Jawaharlal Nehru listened to her speak on Theosophy.

Besant moved to the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar in present-day Chennai in 1893 at the age of 46, having already accomplished more than most in a lifetime. Theosophical writing, including that by Besant, had been presaging a new messiah. This was Jiddu Krishnamurti, whose story many others have told. Taking on the role of his spiritual and temporal mother, she took charge of every aspect of his life and his brother’s, even taking them to England for their studies. Initially agreeable because this would get them a good education, their father, as he saw the young Krishnamurti being promoted as a spiritual leader, sued Besant to regain custody of his children. One of his charges related to prominent TS member Charles Leadbeater’s reputation as a child abuser.

In 1906, child abuse charges were brought against Leadbeater, who taught at the Adyar campus. The accusation was that Leadbeater taught masturbation to young boys. Besant was equivocal and worked out a compromise whereby Leadbeater simply relocated. Paterson acknowledges that in our times, this move would be seen as enabling an abuser, while pointing out that from Besant’s point of view, sex education was important. However, she chose to ignore the question of what Leadbeater might really have been doing or the power difference between him and the young boys.

Besant’s ninth life, Paterson writes, was her engagement with Indian politics. She had begun as a Theosophy preacher, urging Indians to rediscover and reclaim their heritage. This resonates with one strand of Indian nationalism coming out of social reform movements, like the Arya Samaj. In 1913, she felt spiritually moved to devote herself to political work in India. During World War I, she pressed on for greater self-government for India through the Home Rule League, founded in 1916.

The membership of the Theosophical Society and the Home Rule League grew in tandem and overlapped. The colonial government considered her a threat and placed her under house arrest for a few months in 1917. In solidarity, she was elected president of the Indian National Congress that year, the first woman to hold this office.

In this, her last life, we find that the fiery English radical held very conservative positions when it came to India. While she had once been a staunch republican and had spoken critically of the Empire, she came to view British rule in India as a good thing for Indians, if only they would recover their pride in their heritage. She advocated devolution of power or dominion status, not full independence. Slowly, steadily, through actions that suggested that she knew better, she seems to have antagonised people who started out by admiring and supporting her. When Gandhi’s call for satyagraha and full independence resonated with and mobilised Indians, Besant yielded ground less than gracefully, making herself somewhat irrelevant.

Paterson writes about a 1916 programme to inaugurate the Banaras Hindu University, organised by Besant, where Gandhi was also invited to speak. Gandhi’s speech critiqued the use of English by Indians, western fashions, ornate dressing and the colonial bureaucracy. The relationship between Gandhi and Besant never seems to have recovered from this event. But what Gandhi said highlighted a huge shortcoming of Besant’s foray into Indian politics—she spoke in English to those who spoke English. Her definition of Indian heritage, learned through Theosophy which drew on Brahminical textual knowledge, was removed from the everyday beliefs, practices and experiences of most Indians. At that point, her audience and her supporters were mainly upper caste or dominant caste professionals or landowners. She drew them first to Theosophy and then the Home Rule League but her reach ended where Gandhi’s, and later B.R. Ambedkar’s, began.

In every chapter, the book faithfully reports on the taunts and criticisms heaped on Besant, making her very much like women in the public sphere in our times. She was a woman with a lively intellect who followed its dictates with uncommon self-confidence. Unlike Gandhi, whose transparency is a process, this biography shows Besant’s to come from unbounded belief that she is right. Moreover, we meet a person who learned to be ruthless in putting her interest first—whether intellectual or political or spiritual. In the language of our times, it is a survivor’s story. And while we applaud their survival, we also judge women icons for doing the things it takes to survive and thrive. In Besant’s case, it involved changing course, moving between networks, strategically seeking influence and speaking with the entitlement that we expect of male leaders.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist and peace educator.