A large-hearted liberal called BP Wadia

On 11th August 1945, two days after the Americans bombed the Japanese city of Nagasaki, the Foundation Day address of the IIWC was delivered by its founder-president Bahmanji Pestonji Wadia on its brand-new premises in Basavanagudi.

Last week, even as India prepared to celebrate the 75th anniversary of her independence, another midnight’s child, author Salman Rushdie, was horrifically assaulted in New York, leading to heated debate worldwide on the role of religion in creating conflict between people. That old debate was in fact the basis for the founding of a liberal Bengaluru institution – the Indian Institute of World Culture (IIWC) – 77 years to the day before the Rushdie assault.

Roopa Pai (HT Photo)

On 11th August 1945, two days after the Americans bombed the Japanese city of Nagasaki, the Foundation Day address of the IIWC was delivered by its founder-president Bahmanji Pestonji Wadia on its brand-new premises in Basavanagudi. Inspired by the message of universal brotherhood that was the primary objective of the Theosophy Movement, the IIWC aimed to ‘foster the growth of a truly cosmopolitan spirit among citizens of all nations’, and espouse ideals that were beyond the narrow confines of ‘any one age, climate, nation or creed.’

How did the institute, and its founder, the son and heir of a Parsi textile merchant from Bombay, end up in the leafy lanes of Basavanagudi? By a long and convoluted route. In 1900, right after he had completed his matriculation, 18-year-old Bahmanji went off to work in a British textile firm. But his determined refusal to indulge in any kind of moral hanky-panky saw him return to the family textile business soon enough. Just four weeks later, his father passed, leaving the young boy to shoulder the burden alone.

It was around this time that young Bahmanji was first exposed to the writings of the controversial Russian aristocrat and spiritual medium, Madame Helena Blavatsky, who, along with the American Henry Olcott, had established the Theosophical Society in 1875. Five years later, recognising theosophy’s close linkages with Indian spiritual thought, Blavatsky moved to Bombay with Olcott. The Theosophists were very unpopular with the Christian missionaries and the British administration, but Indians, caught up in a new nationalistic fervour, saw the Theosophists as their allies in the fight to reclaim their own heritage, long discredited by the colonisers. Once the British theosophist, Annie Besant, moved to India in 1893 and became deeply involved in the Indian freedom movement, theosophy took even firmer root. (One of its earliest fans was the Dewan of Mysore, K Seshadri Iyer. In 1909, Annie Besant herself laid the foundation stone of Bangalore’s ‘City Lodge’, built on land generously gifted to the Society by Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar, a few hundred metres away from the IIWC.)

So taken was Bahmanji by theosophy that in 1904, he sold his by-then prosperous family business, settled his mother and siblings, and devoted the next 18 years of his life to the service of the Society in Bombay and Madras (where, since 1882, the Society had its international HQ). Quitting the Society in 1922 to ally himself with the America-based United Lodge of Theosophists (ULT), a breakaway faction more closely aligned to Blavatsky’s vision, he spent the next five years in LA and New York, before returning to set up ULT branches in Bombay, Madras, Delhi and Bengaluru. Keen to set up a forum where the second objective of the Theosophical Movement – study of ancient and modern religions, philosophies and sciences – could be effectively pursued, he founded the IIWC in 1945.

For over seven decades now, the IIWC, which stands on a road named after Bahmanji – BP Wadia Road – has hosted countless lectures and programmes of music and dance, all free and open to the public. Its well-stocked library, with its specialist children’s section, continue to serve the community to this day.

(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)