Annie besant
Annie besant

Annie Besant

Annie Besant inspiring personality

Born: 1st October 1847

Died: 20th September 1933

Annie Woods was born on 1st October 1847 in London. Her father died when she was five and she had an unhappy childhood. Ellen Marryat (her mother’s friend), took responsibility and ensured that Annie received a good education. Annie married Frank Besant in 1867, who was a clergyman; they had two children. But Annie’s expanding anti-religious views led to their separation and they took divorce in 1873. Annie joined as a member of the National Secular Society, which advocated ‘free thought’. She also became a member of the ‘Fabian Society’, the noted socialist organization. During the 1870s, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh revised the weekly National Reformer, which supported advanced ideas for that time on topics like womens’ right to vote, trade unions, birth control, and national education. She supported a few workers to validate a better working environment/conditions. In 1888, she helped female workers to organize a strike at the Bryant and May match factory, east London. The women protested low wages and the dreadful effects of phosphorus fumes on their health in the factory. The strike in the end led to their heads purposefully improving their working situation. In 1893, Besant visited India for the first time. She later settled in India and got involved in the Indian Nationalist Movement. She established the Indian Home Rule League (1916), of which she became president. During the late 1920s, Besant travelled to the United States with her pupil and Jiddu Krishnamurti (her adopted son), whom she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha, though Krishnamurti rejected these claims in 1929. 

Besant was also, incidentally, one of the founders of the Banaras Hindu University—the scene of a women’s agitation today—her intention being to create an institution “not to enable a man to earn forty or sixty rupees a month, but to raise (his) intellect”. In 1914, she joined the Congress party, and exactly a century ago was elected its president. Her nationalism became a headache for the colonial authorities (who called her a “great nuisance”) and her home rule movement was deemed positively seditious. With World War I raging, and Besant ceaseless in her newspaper activism and speeches, she was arrested and parked in Ooty for some time. The Indian public, however, saw in her a hero, her eventual release received with great jubilation. Annie Besant died on 20th September 1933, India.

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