Of ‘bees and ant’: And reading between Bharathiyar’s lines

On January 24, 1911, Dr Nanjunda Rao, a well-known medical practitioner, wrote a letter to a leading English journal in Madras. In the letter, he accused the Theosophical Society in Adyar of certain questionable practices, especially the one announcing Jiddu Krishnamurti as a ‘world teacher’.
A book, ‘At the feet of my master’, purportedly authored by Krishnamurti had just been released by the Society.Dr Rao claimed that as the language of the book was of such high standard it could not have been written by Krishnamurti, who was 16 at the time it was published.
This was followed by a number of similar letters to the same journal and an editorial in the journal read, “If there are people in southern India credulous enough to believe in effusions of this sort in the present century, may heaven help them!”

It was just four years earlier that Jiddu Narayanaiah, Krishnamurthi’s father, a Telugu Brahmin from Madanapalle and an employee of the colonial government, had shifted to the premises of the Theosophical Society in Adyar. Narayanaiah was attracted by the Society’s philosophy and joined it in 1907 after retirement.
He was given employment at the Society and provided a residence. As his wife Sanjeevamma had died, he moved there with his two teenage sons, Krishnamurthi (born on May 11, 1895) and Nityananda (born on May 30, 1898). Two years later, in May 1909, Charles Webster Leadbeater, an Englishman and preacher, who had become a member of the Theosophical Society in 1833, joined the Society’s campus in Madras a year later and had become a favourite of its president Annie Besant, chanced upon the two boys sitting on the beach.
At first sight, he felt 13-year-old Krishnamurthi possessed an extraordinary divine power, an observation shared by Leadbeater’s guru Annie Besant, who remarked that the boy be longed to the world and would be its teacher.
The society executed an agreement with the father that the boys would be left under Leadbeater’s care. Naraya naiah agreed as he felt the boys would be provided with education abroad.
It was felt by Dr Nanjunda Rao that the book ‘At the feet of my master’ ascribed to the young boy was written by Leadbeater himself and introduced to project the young boy to be having some extraordinary powers. It was then that Dr Rao questioned the idea of this divine power, though he was the personal doctor physician of Leadbeater.
Poet and freedom fighter C Subramania Bharati (Bharathiyar), who was in Pondicherry at that point, was not in agreement with what went on in the Society either. He was also highly critical of Annie Besant, as she was against nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s idea of freedom.
An ardent admirer of Tilak and an independent thinker, Bharathiyar authored a small book in English titled, ‘The fox with a golden tail – a fable with an esoteric significance’. It sold so well that a second edition was brought out in February 1914.
The opening paragraph read, “Once upon a time, there was an old she-fox whom the fellow-foxes of the fox land detested very much, for she was very plain-spoken and very proud. And so they cut off her tail as a sort of punishment . . .”Bharati continues, “. . . later, the shefox got an artificial gilt tail, and having fastened it to its back, emigrated to the ancient land of asses and apes.” Clearly Bharati had Besant in mind.
On the ‘gifting’ of the two boys to Leadbeater, he writes, “So she induced the chief of the elders to prevail upon a typically asinine member of the community to make a present of the latter’s two colts to herself so that she declared she might convert the little ones into golden tailed asses, by initiating them into all subtleties of the great fox race and by certain other mystic processes.”
It was only then that Narayanaiah realised his folly and asked Besant to return his sons. But not only did she refuse the request, she also asked Narayanaiah to leave the premises. In October 1912, Narayanaiah filed a suit against Besant. The Madras high court ruled against Besant and ordered that the two minor boys be treated as court wards. Narayaniah’s brief was argued by C P Ramaswami Iyer, while Besant argued for herself quite eloquently.
Not satisfied, she approached the privy council. By this time Krishna murthi had become a major and as he chose to be with Leadbeater, the case was dismissed. (Bharathiyar’s book was written before the privy council order).
Bharathiyar ends his narration thus: “She secretly fled away to the Republic of Bees and Ants where warrants from Ass-land could not be executed and it is understood that she has started a new cult there whose chief doctrine seems to be that the land of Bees and Ants will become a paradise the day on which they elect an old and tail-less fox as President of their Republic, a cult to which she has given the strange title of Foxo-Bees-Antism (a term unmistakably similar to Besant).
In two years from then there was an ocean of change in thinking and the leading daily did support Besant in her activities and her Home Rule movement. Krishnamurthi became a thought leader as soon as he could talk on spiritual matters with authority that was acquired in a short space of time, thus proving that he was indeed a chosen one.