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Marina Alexandrova, “The Unveiling of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky”, in New Age in Russia, 26/02/2020
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translated from Russian by Olga Fyodorova
From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan: Letters to the Homeland (Pre-reform Russian: «Изъ пеще́ръ и де́брей Индоста́на: пи́сьма на ро́дину»; tr. Iz peshcher i debrei Indostana: pis'ma na rodinu)
was written by Blavatsky under the pen name Radda Bai in serial
installments (letters) from 1879 to 1886 in Moscow in the periodicals Moskovskiya Vedomosti and Russkiy Vestnik, edited by Mikhail Katkov. The first part of these letters was published in a single volume in 1883 as an appendix to the journal Russkiy Vestnik.
(Cranston, S. L. HPB: the extraordinary life and influence of Helena Blavatsky, founder of the modern Theosophical movement, 1993).
p. 56, 336)
In all of Bhurtpore, and it seems, in the entire kingdom of the Jats, numbering 100,000,131 people, there is not a single European doctor, but there are only native "hakim" (healers). Going anywhere that day was unthinkable; and so, having sent the carriages away until another morning, we carried the unfortunate Englishwoman to the tiny telegraph operator's room at an equally tiny railway station and tried to revive her by home remedy. But there was not even ice at the station - the first medicine for heat apoplexy. Remembering the box with vodka and ice of the blond spy following on our heels, we sent Y *** to his compatriot to explain our difficulty and humbly ask him if he would not yield for the dying English lady a little bit of his stock while it is sent to us from Agra. The spy listened very politely and - refused! A small piece won't help and he himself can get sick here from the heat ... Babu, whom had been insulted by Miss B ***, tried the last desperate resource and - was her and our saviour. He ran with Narayan into the field and brought a whole bunch of herb called kuzimakh. This herb, which has the properties of nettles, covers the body after one light touch with a rash and terrible blisters. Without saying a word, he asked me to put on gloves and rub the legs of Miss B*** with kuzimakh. His face and hands instantly swelled like a bubble, but he paid no attention to it. I confess that I have carried out the task entrusted to me with a vicious zeal. For some reason, I hoped ... I felt that the Thakur would not allow such a tragic end as the death of an Englishwoman during our journey, and it suited me fine to give her an unpleasant but beneficial itch for several days. After five minutes of rubbing, the legs of the Englishwoman turned into bloody blisters, but she opened her eyes and had the pleasure of seeing (at least I hoped) how the "son of a contemptible race" was taking care of her. But the Babu did not stop at this: whereas at nine o'clock in the evening W ***, her compatriot, under the pretext of ill health and fatigue, went to bed in the next room, the little Bengali did not leave her for a minute. He alone changed her head bandages with ice, which was finally sent from Agra in the evening as a result of our telegram, and left her only the next morning, when an English doctor arrived with the first train.
Learning about the strange medicine of the Babu, the doctor muttered something under his breath, and then declared that even kuzimakh was good, like any other counter-attraction of blood from the head. Having ordered to take the patient back to Agra, and upon recovery immediately back to Bombay, he took 50 rupees and went to have breakfast while waiting for the return train, asking W ***, en passant, to see to it that those “negros” would not bother him. W ***, feeling that I was looking at him, blushed very much, but promised - without making the slightest comment. He went with her, because it was impossible to let her go alone in such a condition, and it was impossible for us to leave without seeing Swami Dayananda.
But let's go a few hours back. The day before, in the evening after the disaster and when the patient fell asleep, the four of us: the Thakur, the colonel, Narayan and me, gathered together behind the small garden of the station, near the tents that were pitched for us. The tents belonging to the Thakur, appeared in a few minutes, as if summoned by magic from the ground, and were very curious. At other times, their internal arrangement, where there was a corridor, a bedroom, a living room, and even a bath room, would have attracted all the attention of our inquisitive president, especially their rather oriental furnishings. But at the present moment he was too excited. His only thought was the responsibility of his position as President of the Society; the thought that our company is upset, and one of its members, no matter how guilty, was in danger of death. Uncertainty of the future and sincere grief due to the factual impossibility of reconciling two so opposite elements in the Society presided by him and entrusted to him, like the arrogant Englishmen and the natives, who, like fire and water, only hissed at the slightest contact, all this did not give him rest. And the poor colonel, in the greatest confusion, strolled back and forth in front of the awning of the middle tent, where the Thakur, calm and serene as always, smoked on the carpet at the door.
Finally, he uttered his desperate monologue. “Undoubtedly,” he reasoned, “Miss B *** is a terrible, awful woman! Selfish and quick-tempered, as ... as ... a Mexican mare!” –he cut short, not finding a better comparison. “All this is so. In addition, she is an Englishwoman, pompous and starched like her own skirts, and ready, like that frog in the fable, to swell every minute with pride due to her own and national greatness! She is rather stupid, in a word! But nevertheless she is a member of our Society! Isn't that so?” – he ended by addressing me.
“Only as long as she remains a 'member' nothing will come of this Society,” I replied. “She herself does not follow its constitution, and leads others astray.”
“But she’s still a useful member of the Society,” he argued. “She is helpful because she is both the English and a patriot. Mr. Y *** and her, both serve us as a bulwark ... a living protest, so to speak, well, at least against that idiot over there in a white tunic who is now drinking his almost twentieth peg on the veranda and takes us for spies, like himself ... And now, if she dies, what are we going to do?”
“Don't worry, Colonel; she will not die,” - the Thakur said indifferently.
“Won’t she? Do you give me your word in that, my dear Thakur?” - exclaimed the delighted American.
“And ... and you ... excuse me, my dear, my highly respected friend, will you not send other such symptoms on her?” – asked the colonel mysteriously looking around and bending low over the Takur’s carpet.
I was sitting obliquely, leaning against the awning post, and listening in silence. At the president's words, I shuddered: they were an echo of my own unexpressed and deeply buried feelings, but, nevertheless, a true echo. Narayan, with an extinguished biri (a kind of small cigar made of the green leaves of the mango tree) in his teeth, was standing near Gulab-Singh. A black shadow also passed over Narayan's face, and he quickly looked up at the colonel. In this look, both anger and a mute reproach to the insolence of the questioner were clearly read.
In the deep and dark, like an abyss, mysterious eyes of the Thakur, I did not notice this time that burning, lightning-like light that illuminated them, as a lightning illuminates the distant sky, when Miss B *** behaved so unbearably stupid and insulting towards everything native; I did not find in them that sharp spark that, I confess, always frightened me, awakening a vague feeling of some kind of superhuman fear, which I was ashamed of, but could not overcome. At that moment his gaze remained calm and indifferent: only a slightly mocking smile raised the corner of his mouth...
“Your question, in other words, is a direct accusation that “I sent the initial illness on her?” – he asked, looking the Colonel straight in the eyes.
The colonel blushed from ear to ear, but did not demean himself to useless denial. He looked directly and boldly with his half-blind, honest eyes into the Thakur’s face and, stammering, confessed:
“Yes, as I understand this unfortunate circumstance ... But you needlessly call it “accusation”...”
“H’m! However, one cannot say that such a suspicion was very flattering,” - after a pause, but still smiling, said the Rajput, looking into the distance. “To take revenge on a woman for the intemperance of her stupid language by almost death is even less in the customs of the robber tribe of Rajistan than it is in the taste of educated Europeans. But I have no right to blame you for such a thought, since knowing that you have formed some exaggerated, high concept of my ... psychological power, I, nevertheless, left you to your own conclusions and inferences ... In your own way, you are right...”
“He would build his own happiness on the misery of another, can never become be a Raja Yogin!..” said the voice clearly.
The next day we put Miss B ***, weak but already scolding, into the carriage and sent her back to Agra in the care of W *** and the doctor. On the parting greetings of the Babu, who was taking care of her until morning, she answered with a gracious, but stately and rather cold bow of her head. As for the Hindus, she did not shake hands with anyone; but W ***, ashamed of our presence, hastily and as if hiding behind the backs of the audience, shook hands with all of them, except for the Thakur, who was not present at the farewell. The doctor, raising his hat slightly in front of us and with an unlighted cigar in his teeth, was about to turn to the "silent general" with the order to get him a fire. But he was immediately taken aback by the colonel, who, taking Mulji's arm, shouted aloud: “Hey! Who's there! Send a footman here!”, - boldly looking into the eyes of both the doctor and the “spy” who had already appeared on the platform. Miss B *** in tears threw herself into my rather cold embrace and for two minutes wiped her nose on my breast.
Finally, the last call freed us from this unsympathetic element, and we all sighed, as if a heavy mountain had been lifted off our shoulders. We were left alone, face to face with our Hidus and the Anglo-Indian spy. But on the same day he mysteriously disappeared somewhere and was replaced before our return to the English territory, as we learned from the Thakur, by Muslim spies.
In the evening of the same day, we went to the capital of the Maharaja, where we spent the first night in the palace of the independent prince of India. That story, however, and the narrative about our further adventures are yet to come.
RADDA-BAI.
Footnotes
________________________________________
1- In India, doctors call this kind of death heat apoplexy.
2- Guru is a teacher.
3- A kind of a secular monk, from birth dedicated to celibacy and obliged to study siddhis - the science of theurgy or white magic and miracles.
4- Telling us: “I will come back!” (Fr.) – Ed.
5- This system of the philosophy of asceticism is the most difficult to understand in India. Like the Chaldean Kabbalah, according to which Simeon Ben Yohai composed the Hebrew Kabbalah in the first century, or some treatises of the alchemists, each noun in it means something else according to a secret key. This key, according to generally accepted concepts, is in the possession of some Raja Yogis, and the Brahmans have no idea of the real meaning of these teachings.
6- Avani means “stream” or “river”, bai means “sister” and is added to every female name by both the Parsis and the Hindus.
7- Akasa is the ether of our teachings and, moreover, something else indescribable in our language and for which the metaphysics of the West has not yet found suitable name.
translated from Russian by Olga Fyodorova
From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan: Letters to the Homeland (Pre-reform Russian: «Изъ пеще́ръ и де́брей Индоста́на: пи́сьма на ро́дину»; tr. Iz peshcher i debrei Indostana: pis'ma na rodinu) was written by Blavatsky under the pen name Radda Bai in serial installments (letters) from 1879 to 1886 in Moscow in the periodicals Moskovskiya Vedomosti and Russkiy Vestnik, edited by Mikhail Katkov. The first part of these letters was published in a single volume in 1883 as an appendix to the journal Russkiy Vestnik.
(Cranston, S. L. HPB: the extraordinary life and influence of Helena Blavatsky, founder of the modern Theosophical movement, 1993).
p. 56, 336)
All of the above is not a digression from my story, but a necessary explanation of what has to be explained. "Letters from the Caves and Jungles of Hindustan" is not a geographical and ethnographic description of India with fictitious heroes and heroines woven into it, but rather a diary of the main members of the Theosophical Society, whom both spiritualism and materialism in Europe and most importantly - negligent orientalists have already begun to take into account.
Embarrassed by the conduct of Miss B *** and getting into the carriage of the Bhurtpore Maharaja, we were startled by the contact with it. It was a huge half-open landau, half-prehistoric, quite comfortable, however, and capable of easily accommodating six or even eight people. But its seat before our arrival managed to turn into a chair on which the victims of the Inquisition were once fried ... On the steps and iron sheathing of the landau one could cook eggs, and after touching it with a bare hand the skin on my palm peeled off ... Withdrawing my hand in horror, I did not dare to get in; and even the dashing colonel stopped in embarrassment ... In such a chariot, probably only Beelzebub, the prince of hell, rides around!
“You can’t go in this carriage until evening,” the Thakur remarked, frowning. “You’ll have to spend the day nearby. You can stay at the buffet until I send for the covered carriage...
We held a consultation. The magical gardens of Deeg, watered with 600 fountains (the historically known heritage of the Bhurtpore Maharajas) were 18 miles away; the state capital was 5 miles away; the place where we can have breakfast 15 miles away. The train was late, and it was already ten o'clock. To ride in the midday heat, when even then we were quite dizzy and everything went dark before our eyes, would be madness. All felt so except the Thakur, even the Indians turned pale, that is, they had earthy complexion, and fanned themselves with scarves... And the Babu seemed to be blissful. With uncovered hair, as always, and bouncing on the front seat, on which he had already sat with his legs, crossed, he dived in the waves of hot air, as another dives in the cool streams of the river, assuring that it is not so hot yet, and that in Bengal such a day would be considered cool by many.
While the Thakur was giving the order, and the two bodyguards galloped off somewhere for the carriage, Miss B ***, completely exhausted from the heat and finding fault with everything and everyone, considered it her duty to be offended by the words of the Babu:
“C'est du persifflage, cela!” – she kept on repeating, fanning herself in excitement. “He feels cool when we are all dying from the heat!”
“Well, what is it to you? Can you forbid a person to feel differently from how you feel?” - I persuaded her, anticipating a new quarrel between them.
“But he said it on purpose! He is laughing at us,” the spinster muttered loudly. “He, like all Indians, hates us, the English! He is rejoicing at our suffering!”
“It’s in vain to think so,” the Babu teased her from the carriage. “I do not at all hate our good masters. Only when they are hot, I always feel cool and - vice versa ... Will you sit down next to me, and I will fan you with your fan ... You know how I ... respect you!”
“Thank you!” - she burst out. “You can sit in the sun, which is powerless as such as you ... regular amphibians!” - she said in rage.
“Do you mean salamanders?” - the Babu bared his teeth. “Don’t be mistaken, chand ka tukra sahib!”
“I ask you not to teach me, even if I was mistaken!” – screamed she, turning pale with rage. “It's not your ... race to teach us - the English!”
“I seriously advise you to be more careful ... in this heat,” interjected the Thakur, dismounting from his horse and stressing on the last words meaningfully. “The slightest excitement can be disastrous in our climate, which even the English authorities have not yet managed to enslave.”
Again, the same sharp lightning flashed in the Rajput's half-closed eyes, and his nostrils fluttered slightly at the tone of contempt with which she uttered the words “your race.” But the enraged islander could no longer be held in check, and there was no way to stop her. She began to complain that she was taken by deception to the country where there is not a single Englishman to protect her, where the natives mock her and insult in her person the greatness of the whole nation, the Queen herself. She spoke such nonsense that we, puzzled, silently looked at her like at as a mad woman. W *** took her by the arm and tried to take her to the buffet. He was terribly embarrassed, but as an Englishman, he probably considered it beneath his dignity to make her listen to reason and thus, at least indirectly, justify the native in a quarrel with the daughter of the “superior race.”
Taken away by W ***, Miss B *** was already heading for the station, and I, standing under a huge canopy umbrella, which was opened over the colonel and me, was only expecting to receive the binoculars and gripsack left in the carriage, when suddenly Narayan Krishnarao, Mulji and the Babu, as if by agreement, approached the colonel and began asking permission to return with the same train to Agra and then home. Our venerable president waved his both arms. He will not part with them ... that quarrel is nothing and will be forgotten in an hour.
“I’ll never let you go! I'd rather be back with you myself!” – he replied loudly.
At the first words of the conversation, the Englishwoman stopped and pricked up her ears. Hearing what was the matter, she tore her hand out from under the arm of W *** and, running up, rattled off about the fact that those gentlemen Hindus (mockingly pressing on the word gentlemen) – anticipating her own request.
“We can no longer be in the harmony necessary for a pleasant journey,” she announced. “Let Mr. President choose now between the European members and Asian ones!”
“There can be no choice,” he began slowly, very angry, and in his embarrassment, beating the hot ash out of the pipe onto the pillows of the landau of His Grace. “All members of the society entrusted to me in New York, no matter what race or religion they belong to, are equally respected by me and dear to the General Society. Therefore I refuse to choose; but I sustain my right to resolve disputes and misunderstandings between members. I heard every word of your rather loud talk and I must confess that I do not find in it anything resembling a quarrel! The venerable Miss B *** flared up and uttered insolence (emphasizing the word insolence) to the Babu. He remained silent and acted like a gentleman. I hope that Miss B *** will now understand that he is offended, but not she, and in his person the rest of the native members; I hope that she will add her request to mine that they would forget this insignificant outburst and ask our kind, respected friends not to leave us...”
Miss B *** was shaking all over with rage.
Standing a couple of steps from me and leaning on the saddle, the Thakur had his eyes fixed on her, which were shining at that moment with some ominous phosphoric radiance. Narayan, casting down his eyes and dropping his head, was silent; but a large drop of blood appeared on his severely bitten lip...
“What! Me... should I ask him for an apology?” - hissed the Englishwoman. “Me ... when he...”
“Not an apology, but to give a hand of reconciliation… you are asked,” W *** interrupted her.
He was pale and spoke with apparent effort. Natural honesty fought in him with an innate national arrogance and, unfortunately, the latter won. At the angry glance that a compatriot threw in his direction, he caught himself and added:
“Apologizing for the interference, I allow myself to explain the just expressed desire of the President only in the sense conveyed by me ... Because ... you should agree ... that American ideas about decency are diametrically opposed to ours (the English), and I cannot suppose for a single minute of such absurdity that even Mr. President could come up with the idea to propose to a lady ... an English lady ... to apologize to ... to ... to ... a man!” – he finished, stammering, and evidently replacing the last word with the term he managed happily to swallow.
“Why not?” – answered the Colonel quite calmly. “You may suppose it, as it was precisely such an absurdity that I had in mind”
“Well, I don't even think to demand, or even hope for an apology!” - interposed the Babu good-naturedly. “I do not even understand to this day what I have done wrong to the venerable Miss B ***, whom I have always respected as a mother...”
If lightning fell at the feet of a forty-five-year-old spinster at that moment, it would not have produced such a terrible effect as this innocent word “mother” uttered in complete innocence by a twenty-year-old fellow. Knowing her strongest weakness, I was positively frightened, expecting that she would pounce upon the Babu like a wild cat. The Thakur silently threw aside the reins of his horse and, taking a step forward, fixed an even more attentive gaze at the raging Englishwoman.
She turned purple all over. The veins on her neck swelled like twines, and she screamed almost foaming at her mouth: “What? .. mother! .. mother ... you ... me ... you! .. You should know, sir,” - she suddenly added, majestically drawing herself up – “that you are not obliged to respect me as a mother, but as a member of that great nation that holds ... your most ... contemptible ra...”
The Thakur suddenly and rapidly stretched out his hand to her... Choking and muttering incoherent sounds, she suddenly crashed like a beveled sheaf, wheezing and in convulsions, right into the arms of W ***, into whose arms Gulab Singh deftly threw her falling body...
“It is, as I warned her,” the Thakur said quietly and calmly, bending over the trembling body. “Heat apoplexy; take her to the ladies' restroom!”
