NDA (II) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 149 of 146

Correct — C, Annie Besant. Besant became President of the Theosophical Society in 1907 and held the office until her death in 1933, by which time its international headquarters were at Adyar in Madras. The stem's verb is worth noticing — it says led, not founded, and that is the correct word for her. The Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott; Besant came to it much later, after meeting Blavatsky around 1890, and it was under her presidency that the Society became a force in Indian public life, connected to the Central Hindu School she helped establish at Banaras in 1898 and to the Home Rule agitation she launched in 1916.

• (a)A. O. Hume — Allan Octavian Hume was a retired officer of the Indian Civil Service and the moving spirit behind the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, serving as its first General Secretary. A different organisation entirely, though from the same decade.
• (b)Arthur Griffith — Arthur Griffith was an Irish writer and politician who founded Sinn Féin in 1905 and later served as President of Dáil Éireann. He is placed here because of the genuine Irish connection running through Besant's own Home Rule movement, but he had no part in the Theosophical Society.
• (d)Lord Dufferin — Lord Dufferin was Viceroy of India in the mid-1880s, the period in which the Indian National Congress held its first session. He belongs to the colonial administration, not to any of these societies.

The Theosophical Society was one of the nineteenth century's most influential meeting points between European occult and Indian religious thought. Its move to Adyar in the early 1880s put it inside Indian intellectual life, where it did two things at once — it gave educated Indians a Western endorsement of their own philosophical inheritance, and it drew a stream of European sympathisers into Indian causes. Besant is the clearest example of the second, moving from theosophy to educational work at Banaras, then to the Home Rule League, and in 1917 to the presidency of the Indian National Congress, the first woman to hold it.

The precise reason this item is answerable is the verb. Founded and led are not the same claim, and a question set on the Theosophical Society will usually be testing exactly that distinction — Blavatsky and Olcott founded it in New York in 1875, Besant led it from 1907. If the stem had asked who founded it, none of the four options would have been correct. The other three names are all from Indian or Irish public life of roughly the same period, so elimination by era does not help; it has to be done by organisation.

• The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott.
• Its international headquarters moved to Adyar, Madras, in the early 1880s.
• Annie Besant became its President in 1907 and remained so until her death in 1933.
• She helped establish the Central Hindu School at Banaras in 1898 and became the first woman President of the Indian National Congress in 1917.
• A. O. Hume was the first General Secretary of the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885.

• Reading led as founded and answering Blavatsky or Olcott; the Society's founders and its best-known Indian leader are different people.
• Attaching Besant to the Congress's founding; she presided over it in 1917, thirty-two years after it was founded.
• Assuming an Irish name in an Indian history option list must be relevant; Griffith belongs to Irish politics alone.

Asked as a person-to-organisation item that turns on the difference between founding a body and leading it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 at New York by

  • (a)Annie Besant and A. O. Hume
  • (b)Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott
  • (c)Dayanand Saraswati and Keshab Chandra Sen
  • (d)Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita

  Answer(b) Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott — Annie Besant joined much later and became President in 1907.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The first woman to preside over a session of the Indian National Congress was

  • (a)Sarojini Naidu
  • (b)Annie Besant
  • (c)Nellie Sengupta
  • (d)Kamala Nehru

  Answer(b) Annie Besant — she presided in 1917; Sarojini Naidu became the first Indian woman president in 1925.