Dusky Countenances: Ambivalent Bodies and Desires in the Theosophical Society

In 1884, Mohini Mohun Chatterji, an esteemed member of the Theosophical Society, initiated an affair with Miss Leonard, a fellow member. Though the affair quickly came to an end, allegations of sexual impropriety, miscegenation, reached Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky quickly rushed to Chatterji’s defense and scorned the multiple women who, she wrote, “burn with a scandalous ferocious passion” for the “poor Hindu boy” who was too “pure” to engage in such liaisons. Though Blavatsky vigorously defended Chatterji against such charges, public opinion, and eventually her own, swayed and Chatterji became, as The New York Times described, a “black man” who “abused his lady-killing powers.” This article examines how Chatterji’s body, simultaneously rendered sensual and sacred, an object of desire and revulsion, played a critical role in both his acceptance within Theosophical circles and his eventual withdrawal from the Society at the end of 19th Century. By tracing these vertiginous sexualized, gendered, and racialized aspects of historical relationships within the Theosophical Society through Chatterji’s body, this article foregrounds the multiple ambivalent relations and conditions of desire, contra essences, that constituted colonial ideology and its traumatic interpellative logic.