Who Was Annie Besant? An Introduction to An Introduction to Yoga

Annie Besant was a lot of things in her accomplished life. Born Annie Wood in 1847, she was a pretty prominent radical in England during the 1870s and 1880s, and getting a whole lot done as a socialist and feminist and a supporter of Irish Home Rule. She was prosecuted in 1877, along with her friend Charles Bradlaugh, for publishing a book advocating for birth control.

As a labor organizer, she was instrumental in the success of the Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 that led to the formation of the Matchmakers’ Union. Annie was even the leading speaker for the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society, keeping herself super busy as a committed activist of labor rights and women’s rights.

Things started to change in 1890 after Annie met Helena Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, which is a belief system that accepts ideas like reincarnation and karma and the evolution of the soul over many lifetimes. Theosophists also believe in the existence of “Masters,” who are living and highly spiritually evolved human beings that live in remote places and possess exceptional spiritual insight. Basically like a small council of super-enlightened dudes who are steering the goodness in humanity.

Annie took all this on pretty embracingly, and it steered the course of the rest of her life. She began traveling to India, and helped establish the Central Hindu School in 1898, and the Hyderabad (Sind) National Collegiate Board in Bombay (Mumbai), India in 1922.

She became the president of the Theosophical Society in 1907, and Annie was also the first female president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. We should probably be presenting these accomplishments in chronological order, but Annie was so all over the place in her activism and Theosophy doings that it’s editorially difficult to separate her work.

At one point, Annie became the legal guardian of a young boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had been taken under the wing of the Theosophical Society because Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater figured the kid had such an extraordinary aura that he would be the “channel through which the World Teacher would speak,” according to a review of Peter Michel’s book about Krishnamurti. He was around 14 years old, and Annie thought he was an (the?) incarnation of Buddha and the new Messiah. That never came to be, of course, and Krishnamurti even outright repudiated that later in life, but he and Annie remained close.

Annie was also a strong proponent of Indian national consciousness, and wrote that the country exists “for the profit of her conqueror,” heavy stuff from a white lady at this point in the 20th century, and she created the All India Home Rule League in 1916, the first political party in the country to state regime change as its primary goal. She was pals with Mahatma Gandhi, and there are parks and roads in India that are named for her.

In addition to all of that, she wrote the book you have in your hands right now, An Introduction to Yoga. To be sure, Annie Besant’s book on yoga contains pretty much nothing about physical postures and flexibility. She won’t be teaching you the downward dog. Rather, it’s about the philosophical and spiritual discipline side of yoga — and as you can imagine, there’s some Theosophy incorporated into her takes on yoga. But yoga wasn’t really a thing for Americans in 1908, and this book helped normalize it to a Western audience.

You should be totally clear that this book is much more of an introduction to the philosophies behind yoga, so if you’re looking for instructions and techniques on how to incorporate the more athletic components and how-tos of practicing yoga for flexibility and other physical health benefits, you’ll probably be pretty disappointed with this book. To be honest, it may feel like you’re reading a term paper on philosophy.

But if you’re interested in the beginnings of how yoga and Eastern philosophy was articulated to English-speaking folks decades before yoga studios opened in the American suburbs, Annie Besant’s An Introduction to Yoga is a valuable and historic example of one of the earliest attempts to bring the benefits of yoga to a larger audience.

Click on the book to buy An Introduction to Yoga!

Cover Image: Photo of Yoga in Seoul is by jodukrae per Wikimedia Commons under license by Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Photo of Annie Besant is per Wikimedia Commons. Photo of yoga person on book cover within the cover image is by Pexels from Pixabay.

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