Annie Besant existed at the intersection of socialism, women’s suffrage and Theosophist mysticism. But her name is also inseparable from any history of the Indian independence movement, as it was Annie who started the Indian Home Rule movement along the lines of the one in Ireland.
Annie was perhaps the first powerful woman in Indian politics. Though British, she took up the Indian cause as her own – setting aside earlier causes and spending the last 40 years of her life in India. It was India that represented the best blend of all that she believed in during her 20s. She called the country the “mother of spirituality” and lamented the effect that British rule had left on the Indian people.
As a lifelong activist, many of Annie’s ideas were too big for her times. She married a cleric, the Reverand Robert Besant. But when she was just 26, she separated from her husband after refusing to take communion. Her atheist leanings were considered intolerable in an orthodox environment. As she wrote in her autobiography:
Then I did not guess how cruel men and women could be, how venomous their tongues; now, knowing it, having faced slander and lived it down, I deliberately say that were the choice again before me I would choose as I chose then; I would rather go through it all again than live.
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