Annie Besant (née Wood; 1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was a British socialist, theosophist, freemason, women's rights and Home Rule activist, educationist and campaigner for Indian nationalism.

[1] When World War I broke out in 1914, she helped launch the Home Rule League to campaign for democracy in India, and dominion status within the British Empire.

In the late 1920s, Besant travelled to the United States with her protégé and adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti, who she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha.

[4] She consulted Edward Bouverie Pusey: by post he gave her advice along orthodox, Bampton Lecture lines, and in person he sharply reprimanded her unorthodox theological tendencies.

Encouraged by Scott, Besant wrote an anonymous pamphlet On the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth, by "the wife of a beneficed clergyman", which appeared in 1872.

[24] Besant opined that for centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil and that the greatest saints of the Church were those who despised women the most, "Against the teachings of eternal torture, of the vicarious atonement, of the infallibility of the Bible, I leveled all the strength of my brain and tongue, and I exposed the history of the Christian Church with unsparing hand, its persecutions, its religious wars, its cruelties, its oppressions.

"[26] Besant and Bradlaugh set up the Freethought Publishing Company at the beginning of 1877;[4] it followed the 1876 prosecution of Charles Watts, and they carried on his work.

[34] In time the League veered towards eugenics, and it was from the outset an individualist organisation, also for many members supportive of a social conservatism that was not Besant's view.

[41] When Aveling in a speech in 1884 announced he had become a socialist after five years close study, Besant argued that his politics over that whole period had been aligned with Bradlaugh's and her own.

[42] Aveling and Eleanor Marx joined the Social Democratic Federation, followers of Marxism, and then the Socialist League, a small Marxist splinter group which formed around the artist William Morris.

[45][46] It followed a noted public debate at St. James's Hall on 17 April 1884, on Will Socialism Benefit the English People?, in which Bradlaugh had put individualist views, against the Marxist line of Henry Hyndman.

[4] Besant's involvement in the London matchgirls strike of 1888 came after a Fabian Society talk that year on female labour by Clementina Black.

They were mainly young women, were very poorly paid, and subject to occupational disease, such as Phossy jaw caused by the chemicals used in match manufacture.

"[54] William Morris played some part in converting Besant to Marxism, but it was to the Social Democratic Federation of Hyndman, not his Socialist League, that she turned in 1888.

From the early 1880s Besant had also been an important feminist leader in London, with Alice Vickery, Ellen Dana Moncure and Millicent Fawcett.

She wrote in the National Reformer: "Ten years ago, under a cruel law, Christian bigotry robbed me of my little child.

Besant helped Tillett draw up the union's rules and played an important part in the meetings and agitation which built up the organisation.

"They were all initiated, passed, and raised into the first three degrees and Annie returned to England, bearing a Charter and founded there the first Lodge of International Mixed Masonry, Le Droit Humain."

[70] Until Besant's presidency, the society had as one of its foci Theravada Buddhism and the island of Sri Lanka, where Henry Olcott did the majority of his useful work.

[72] Besant set up a new school for boys, the Central Hindu College (CHC) at Banaras which was formed on underlying theosophical principles, and which counted many prominent theosophists in its staff and faculty.

[73] In April 1911, Besant met Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and they decided to unite their forces and work for a common Hindu University at Banaras.

Blavatsky had stated in 1889 that the main purpose of establishing the society was to prepare humanity for the future reception of a "torch-bearer of Truth", an emissary of a hidden Spiritual Hierarchy that, according to theosophists, guides the evolution of mankind.

[75][76] In 1909, soon after Besant's assumption of the presidency, Leadbeater "discovered" fourteen-year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986), a South Indian boy who had been living, with his father and brother, on the grounds of the headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, and declared him the probable "vehicle" for the expected "World Teacher".

[78] Early in their relationship, Krishnamurti and Besant had developed a very close bond and he considered her a surrogate mother – a role she happily accepted.

)[79] In 1929, twenty years after his "discovery", Krishnamurti, who had grown disenchanted with the World Teacher Project, repudiated the role that many theosophists expected him to fulfil.

He dissolved the Order of the Star in the East, an organisation founded to assist the World Teacher in his mission, and eventually left the Theosophical Society and theosophy at large.

[80] He spent the rest of his life travelling the world as an unaffiliated speaker, becoming in the process widely known as an original, independent thinker on philosophical, psychological, and spiritual subjects.

As early as 1902 Besant had written that "India is not ruled for the prospering of the people, but rather for the profit of her conquerors, and her sons are being treated as a conquered race."

Google commented: "A fierce advocate of Indian self-rule, Annie Besant loved the language, and over a lifetime of vigorous study cultivated tremendous abilities as a writer and orator.

She published mountains of essays, wrote a textbook, curated anthologies of classic literature for young adults and eventually became editor of the New India newspaper, a periodical dedicated to the cause of Indian Autonomy".