The Search for “Snow White Turbans”: The Theosophical Society, Sikhs, and Conceptualizing Degeneration at the End of the 19th Century

This paper examines how Helena Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society, alongside her Theosophical counterparts conceptualized Sikh bodies at the end of the 19^th Century. Situating Sikh bodies in Theosophical understandings of race, this paper demonstrates how Blavatsky’s coupling of science and religion through a disembodied spirituality both disturbed and upheld colonial imaginaries of the body alongside the racialized and gendered theories that underpinned them. Within this Theosophical logic, pure Sikhs bodies bridged the gap between Blavatsky’s incorporeal Masters and colonial reality, functioning as bodies unburdened by temporal constraints. Sikhs, therefore, within Blavatsky’s fantastic racial landscape, signaled the possibility of thwarting the horror of degeneration presented by lived bodies on the subcontinent including Hindu Brahmins, Muslims, and secular Europeans.

Yet, according to Blavatsky, colonial rule reduced this pure Sikh body from its former heights. This descent was symbolized most convincingly in deposed and exiled Maharaja Duleep Singh, who, Blavatsky argued, though the son of the famed Maharaja Ranjit Singh, succumbed to the allures of a decadent Europe. Against Duleep Singh, Blavatsky highlighted, what she termed, the “feeble” body of Duleep Singh's mother, Maharani Jind Kaur. Jind Kaur, Blavatsky posited, had to reject a sacred form of grieving located within sati [widow-burning] in order to fight for the lost Sikh Empire. For Blavatsky, Jind Kaur's “feeble body” functioned as a receptacle to embody the ghostly resurrection of Ranjit Singh and redeem the debased Sikh body politic. Through Jind Kaur’s body, Blavatsky constructed a ‘legitimate’ anti-colonial politics, defying and upholding colonial narratives of race as well as rescue and reform associated with women in the colony. Therefore, though Theosophical renderings reveal the power of colonial rule and its attempt to continuously manage bodies, the Theosophical Society also demonstrates how the body refused such conscription, remaining open to numerous articulations.