HIGHER THAN TRUTH

Joseph Best
Higher Than Truth
Published in
21 min readFeb 15, 2023

[S1E12] MURPHY RANCH — SHADOW WAR: PART 2

DID NAZI OCCULTISTS BUILD A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR DOOMSDAY MANSION IN LOS ANGELES DURING WWII?

Graveyard at Elveden Church. (Source)

Note: Higher Than Truth is an ongoing series taking deep dives into strange mysteries, conspiracies, and forgotten history. Please refer to the table of contents for all articles in their chronological order.

What avail your wealth, your learning,
Empty titles, sordid trade?
True self-rule were worth them all!
Nations by themselves are made!
—A.O. Hume,
Old Man’s Hope (1886)

By 1700 the Indian subcontinent contained the world’s largest economy, ahead of both Western Europe and Qing China. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company expanded its control of the area for the next hundred years until the Indian Rebellion of 1857 was suppressed and the British Government took over. The Sikh Empire — a sprawling state sharing borders with Tibet and Kashmir — ruled by Maharajah Ranjit Singh, was the last to fall. On November 1, 1858, Queen Victoria issued a proclamation that promised Indians they would have similar rights to those held by her British subjects — but with no Constitution to back it up, Victoria’s word meant little when that promise was inevitably broken.

Maharajah Ranjit Singh. (Source)

The first nationalist independence movement, the Indian National Congress, was formed in 1885 by Allan Octavian Hume, a British civil servant and ornithologist. As a civil servant, Hume worked under the Viceroy of India, Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, whose controversial tenure included the confiscation of newspapers deemed “seditious” and the enactment of disastrous policies that some believe contributed to a famine that killed an estimated 8.2 million Indians.

After his outspoken criticism of Bulwer-Lytton, Hume was removed from his post in 1879, the same year the Russian mystic, Helena Blavatsky, arrived in Bombay with Henry Steel Olcott to set up new headquarters of the Theosophical Society. As she planned her voyage from New York to India, Blavatsky wrote a letter to a friend in preparation of her work there,

…inquiring about the Theosophical Society “establishing relations with some Sikhs” with particular attention to the possibility of his personal acquaintance “with any descendant of [Ranjit] Singh.”

Commemorative stamp of A.O. Hume. July 31, 1973. (Source)

Blavatsky’s role in the early Indian independence movement was discussed briefly in [S1E10] — Ârya, in connection with The Great Game: a geopolitical battle between Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States for control of India, Tibet, Afghanistan and all of Central Asia. Specifically, we examined her relationship with Mikhail Katkov, a Moscow newspaper publisher and political conspirator, who favored reactionary right wing domestic and foreign policies, and “encouraged a Russian attack on British India.” Says author K. Paul Johnson:

Katkov’s agenda was a major (but not necessarily the primary) factor determining Blavatsky’s own activities from 1878 through 1886, in ways that she deliberately obscured in her Theosophical writings…That Blavatsky was Katkov’s employee throughout her years in India has never been given adequate weight in assessment of her motives.

Hume met Blavatsky for the first time on December 2, 1879 and together they worked with other neo-Hindu organizations like Arya Samaj to encourage nationalist sentiment among mostly high caste Hindus with Western educations. For a time the groups combined to form the Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj, though this official association lasted only a year.

Over time, Hume also became convinced that Blavatsky possessed paranormal gifts after experiencing several seemingly inexplicable events in her presence. Over a dinner party one evening at Rothney Castle, Blavatsky asked Hume’s wife to think of an object she’d like returned and, sure enough, a brooch she’d lost years earlier suddenly reappeared wrapped in paper in the garden. Hume and his wife soon joined the Theosophical Society in August of 1881.

A.O. Hume’s home in India, Rothney Castle. (Source)

Coincidentally, much of Blavatsky’s supernatural teachings appear to have been influenced by the writings of science fiction author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, father of Hume’s old boss. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, with its story of advanced telepathic beings harnessing secret powers from lost civilizations inside a hollow earth who will replace mankind, was conveyed by Blavatsky as evidence of occult truths intentionally hidden by the powers that be. This work would also go on to inform different conspiracy theories after WWII. — More on this in future episodes.

The Nazis Came From Middle Earth (and Possibly Still Live There). New York Mag. November 15, 2013. (Source)

Although his interest in the Theosophical Society waned by the following year — he resigned in 1882 — Hume grew ever more convinced of the need to formally organize a pan-Indian group in opposition to British colonial rule. Three years later, the Indian National Congress convened for the first time. Part of Hume’s conviction came from the cruelty and ineptitude he perceived displayed by the British during his time as a civil servant. But, Hume said, what ultimately inspired him to fight for India’s independence was a series of documents he read that “convinced him large sections of the Indian population violently opposed British rule, and some even plotted rebellion.” Where did he find these documents?

They materialized from the aether.

(Source)

According to an account by William Wedderburn, a founding member of the Indian National Congress as well as a personal friend of Hume’s:

These documents were communications he had received supposedly from the Mahatmas — Koot Hoomi and Morya. In one of the letters the Mahatmas supposedly sent…they explained how the Great White Brotherhood had successfully controlled the Indian masses in the Rebellion of 1857 so as to preserve Imperial rule, which apparently was necessary to bring India to its allotted place in a New World Order…Now the Mahatmas seemed to be directing Hume to maintain the correct balance between East and West.

As early as October of 1880, Hume became involved in a now-famous (within Theosophical circles) event known as The Mahatma Letters. According to theosophists, the Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya — spiritually evolved beings appearing in human form who resided in the Himalayas — began communicating with them by materializing letters out of nowhere. Sealed envelopes dropped on pillows from the ceiling or appeared inside wooden boxes that no one had touched.

Portaits of Morya (L) and Koot Hoomi (R). (Source)

While the majority of the letters materialized for more established members of the Society, the phenomena piqued Hume’s curiosity and he wrote a note which was placed in a locked box — Blavatsky always acted as intermediary — that was opened on November 1, 1880 to reveal a new message in its place: a reply from Koot Hoomi. Even in their first correspondence, the Ascended Master from Tibet emphasized to Hume the potential importance his actions might have not just for the people of India, but for the spiritual evolution of all humanity:

This is the moment to guide the recurrent impulse which must soon come, and which will push the age toward extreme atheism, or drag it back to extreme sacerdotalism, if it is not led to the primitive and soul-satisfying philosophy of the Aryans.

Hume and the Congress Swastika, the motto reads In hoc signo vinces — ”in the sign you shall conquer.” (Source)

Hume left the Theosophical Society before it was rocked by the scandal of the Coulomb Affair, in which long time employees of Blavatsky accused her of staging “fraudulent séances by using a false-sided cabinet and ghost-likedoll named Christofolo.” An investigation carried out by Richard Hodgson of the Society for Psychical Research backed up these accusations in a publication titled The Hodgson Report — including a debunking of the “brooch incident” with Hume’s wife. (Blavatsky denied the allegations, but her reputation was badly damaged. Theosophists defend her to this day, and their rebuttals can be read here.)

Letters published from Blavatsky to the Coulombs mention Hume in particular:

The letter must fall on his head like the first, and I am begging Koothoomi to send it to him. We must strike while the iron is hot. Act independently of me, but in the habits and customs of the Brothers. If something could happen in Bombay that would make all the world talk it would be grand. But what!

…Mr. Hume wants to see Koothoomi in his astral form at a distance, so that if he complies (with his request) he may be able to say to the world that he knows he exists, and to write it in all the papers; for at present he can only say one thing, viz. — that he believes firmly and positively, but not that he knows it because he has seen him with his own eyes…If something unheard of should take place in Bombay, there is nothing that Mr. Hume would not do for Koothoomi on his demand.

During the investigation, Hodgson interviewed Hume, who told him:

…that despite all the frauds perpetrated, there have been genuine phenomena, and that, though of a low order, Madame [Blavatsky] really had and has Occultists of considerably though limited powers behind her; that [Koot Hoomi] is a real entity, but by no means the powerful and godlike being he has been painted…

But if Koot Hoomi and Morya weren’t the “godlike” beings Blavatsky claimed, who were they? In his book, The Masters Revealed, K. Paul Johnson argues that Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters were not, in fact telepathic beings living in Tibet, but were contemporary associates to whom she assigned pseudonyms in order to hide their true identities: Ranbir Singh and Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia.

Ranbir Singh aka Morya (L) and Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia aka Koot Hoomi (R). (Source and Source)

Coincidentally, this is almost exactly the same tactic Blavatsky believed Bulwer-Lytton used in his novels. In an 1875 edition of The Spiritual Scientist, Blavatsky wrote:

Bulwer’s novel “Zanoni,” which is one of the most fascinating he ever wrote, embodies a great deal of information concerning the claims of the occultists which should be read by every intelligent Spiritualist. It is asserted Zanoni and Mejnour are merely pseudonyms for personages who have actually existed and that magical powers were exercised by them quite as remarkable as those attributed to the characters in the book.

Why might Ranbir and Thakur have agreed to play the role of Blavatsky’s Ascended Masters? For one, they were descendants of Ranjit Singh, the revered Sikh ruler who fought off the British longer than any other. And for another, according to researcher Christy Campbell, they were told of a prophecy in which an exiled Maharajah would one day defeat the British and rule all of India — with the help of Russia.

To fulfill the prophecy, they turned their eyes to Duleep Singh, the exiled son of Ranjit, and enlisted the aid of “a right-wing Moscow newspaper magnate, Irish nationalists and Sikh patriots…”

Duleep Singh. London, England. 1875. (Source)

Duleep Singh was just five years old when, after the assassination of his father’s first three successors, he was crowned Maharaja of the Sikh Empire on September 16, 1843. Two years later, the East India Company declared war on the Sikhs and, upon winning the First Anglo-Sikh War, maintained Duleep as a figurehead but imprisoned his mother, Jind Kaur. Of his mother, Blavatsky wrote:

Alone and surrounded by treachery she risked all for the sake of her son. Having induced a large following in [Punjab] to revolt against the projects of the East India Company, she placed herself at the head of her army and, it is said, fought no worse than the bravest among her Sikhs.

She was later exiled, and would not reunite with Duleep for thirteen years.

At the end of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the British officially deposed Duleep on December 21, 1849 and then transferred him to England, where he was anglicized and barred from contact with all Indians except servants. He was nine years old when he signed away the empire and presented Queen Victoria with the Kohinoor — a 105.6 carat diamond that sits in the crown to this day.

Queen Victoria became the godmother to his children.

India became “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire.

Queen Elizabeth II, seen wearing the platinum crown that holds the Kohinoor diamond. (Source)

During his early years in London, Duleep lived in homes owned by the East India Company and was provided with an annual stipend of approximately $3,000,000. Under the tutelage of Anglican missionaries, he converted to Christianity before he turned fifteen. Despite his opulent surroundings and the companionship of Queen Victoria’s children, Duleep grew restless and expressed a desire to return to India — the East India Company’s Board of Directors suggested he tour Europe instead, which he did.

Duleep Singh, aged 16, on the Lower Terrace of Osborne House, Isle of Wight. 1854. (Source)

When he turned eighteen, it was determined that his mother (now blind) no longer posed a threat, and she was allowed to join him in England — “She was shocked to discover Duleep as a clean-shaven young man and told him bluntly that she did not repent the loss of [the] Sikh Kingdom so much as the loss of his Sikh faith.” He grew out his beard and purchased a country estate in Elveden, where he held elaborate hunting parties. Known as “The Black Prince of Perthshire,” he gained a reputation as among the best shots in England.

Duleep is seated second from left, next to the Prince of Wales — later King Edward VII. (Source)

When his mother died in 1863, Duleep asked permission to return her to the city of Lahore — their hometown in the state of Punjab. This request was denied, but he was allowed to scatter her ashes in the Godavari River in Nashik — nowhere near Punjab. While returning to England, Duleep visited a Christian mission in Cairo and met Bamba Müller, the illegitimate daughter of a German banker and an Abyssinian Coptic Christian slave. Although Duleep spoke no Arabic and she spoke no English, he donated $1,000 to the mission and they were married the following year. They had six children.

Duleep Singh attends the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. 1863. (Source)

Beginning in 1870, Duleep re-established contact with his relatives in India — including his cousin, Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia (aka Koot Hoomi). It was through these correspondences that he learned of an alleged prophecy made by 17th century Guru Gobind Singh:

“When the Russian troops invade the country, agitation will prevail in London and the British army will march to India. A Sikh martyr will be born and will reign as far as Calcutta. Duleep Singh will shine among the Khalsa and will drive his elephant throughout the world.”

Other versions weren’t quite so specific — the returning hero was named Dipa (pretty close to Duleep), and the battle was between an allegorical bear (Russia) and a bulldog (Britain) — but like any good prophecy, the details were vague enough to be interpreted as needed. It’s easy to see how Duleep’s story could be crafted into a “chosen one” narrative by either faithful believers or cynical manipulators.

Duleep Singh. (Source)

Now in his 40’s, Duleep re-examined his childhood and started calling Queen Victoria “Mrs. Fagin” in reference to the Charles Dickens character, Fagin — “receiver of stolen goods.” Explains historian William Dalrymple:

“I can tell you the case that hurts and nags at me the most is the one in which the little boy is forced to sign the Kohinoor over…You take a mother away from a child, you surround him with grown ups speaking a different language, who are in military or State regalia, you tell him he must sign this over or else…What else is he meant to do? How can anyone call that a ‘gift’? It beggars belief!”

As with every great hero’s journey, Duleep resisted the call. But unlike the heroes of myth, he waited far too long to answer it. The years ticked by. Duleep became bored and turned to drinking, gambling, and extramarital affairs. His fortune dwindled, his estate fell into disrepair, and his resentment towards the British grew.

In 1883, Duleep invited his cousin, Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia (aka Koot Hoomi), to visit him in England. Thakur cordially accepted, and informed Duleep that he intended to leave India some time in the Fall, when he would first visit Sikh priests in Punjab to verify the prophecy. While Thakur planned his journey and Madras newspapers published rumors that “the Theosophical founders were political agents,” Henry Steel Olcott received an unsigned message in June 1883 from the Ascended Masters advising him that Koot Hoomi would soon require a new author for his letters:

“Unless you put your shoulder to the wheel yourself, Kuthumi Lal Singh will have to disappear off the stage this fall. Easy enough for you.”

In September 1883, Blavatsky told Olcott that Koot Hoomi wanted him to visit Ranbir Singh (aka Morya) with her in Punjab. They arrived in Lahore on the evening of November 18th, where they were greeted by members of the Singh Sabha Movement, a Sikh organization founded in opposition to Christian proselytizing and British occupation. It was during this time that, according to Blavatsky and other members of the party, they were visited “in the astral” by the Mahatma Koot Hoomi.

Coincidentally, Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia was the leader of Singh Sabha and this is the exact same time period when he was in Punjab on his way to England. Due to travel restrictions, his trip to see Duleep Singh was delayed for months. The following April, Blavatsky wrote a letter from Paris to the assistant who would betray her, Alexis Coulomb, in which she mentioned the location of the Mahatmas: “there is one here now and there will be also in London.”

Thakur Singh Sandhanwali arrived in London in September of 1884.

Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia with sons before leaving for England to meet with Duleep Singh. 1884. (Source)

Sinking in gambling debts, Duleep was encouraged by Thakur’s insistence on the veracity of the prophecy — an 1885 border skirmish between Russian and British forces on the Afghan frontier, known as The Pandjeh Incident, further supported the idea that the prophecy was coming true. So Duleep left his family “in a shell of a house that was surrounded by packing crates,” to go to Paris, where he was introduced to Elie de Cyon, a physiologist most famous for his pioneering work on the hearts of frogs. This brings up the obvious question: why? Cyon’s real name was Ilya Fadeyevich Tsion and through his friendship with Blavatsky’s publisher, Mikhail Katkov, he also worked in Paris as,

…an unofficial political agent, newspaper correspondent and editor, self-made diplomat, and cosmopolitan gentleman…involved at a very high social level in several activities to establish a Franco-Russian alliance against Germany, both in military and financial terms.

Ilya Fadeyevich Tsion — aka Elie de Cyon aka Elias von Cyon. (Source)

Cyon and Katkov, who hated the British, promised their support in Duleep’s new quest to reconquer India. As discussed in [S1E10] — Ârya, Katkov belonged to a right wing military group whose ideologies didn’t always align with the Tsar’s, so while his support for Duleep was accompanied by collaboration from higher ups in the Russian government, it was by no means an officially recognized policy. Other members of this group included Blavatsky’s uncle, Rostislav de Fadeyev, as well as the only Russian official with whom Blavatsky maintained regular correspondence, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Dondukov-Korsakov.

The plan, then, was for Duleep to drum up support in India before traveling to Russia where he would appeal to Tsar Alexander III for military back up. With the Russians behind him and the Indians rebelling at home, Duleep would fulfill the prophecy and unite an independent India.

In March of 1886, Duleep gathered Bamba and the children and set sail on the P&O Steamer Verona for his triumphant return to India. Within weeks, British forces stopped his ship at Aden, Yemen and arrested him — “Passengers and crew cheered in support as the Maharajah and his brood, all prisoners of state, filed down the gangway.”

His family went back to England without him, but his daughter Sophia had contracted malaria on the trip and his wife caught it while caring for her. Bamba slipped into a coma and died months later. Upon hearing the news, Duleep sent his eldest son a telegram: “Heartbroken — will write next week.”

Maharani Bamba Duleep Singh. 1864. (Source)

Duleep’s attention was elsewhere. Enraged at his treatment by the British in Aden, he publicly converted his faith back to Sikhism and privately wrote a lengthy letter to the Russian ambassador explaining his position:

As the Indian administration has branded me with disloyalty, when I was not disloyal to them, therefore I now seek revenge…I now desire to pay my homage to His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Russia in order to lay my service at his disposal.

When no answer from the Tsar arrived, Katkov personally invited Duleep to Moscow anyway and offered full backing from his newspaper, The Moscow Gazette. With Bamba now dead, Duleep brought along his eighteen-year-old English mistress, Ada Douglas Wetherill, a domestic servant he first met back in London. They traveled by train to Berlin, where a pickpocket stole Duleep’s cash and travel documents. Panicked, Duleep gave German police the name of another traveling companion as his own: Patrick Casey, an Irish revolutionary friend of both Katkov and Cyon.

In a strange twist, news of “this horrid conspiracy” alarmed Blavatsky:

Either through genuine misunderstanding, or as a deliberate diversion, she claimed that France [not Russia] was the external force diabolique and used her information to counter doubts about her loyalty to India…In great alarm, she wrote to a [British theosophist]:

“I am ready to become an infamous informer to your English Govt., WHICH I HATE, for their sake, for the sake of my Society, and of my beloved Hindus…”

While Blavatsky turned informant against the movement she had thus far enabled, Duleep traveled North as “Mr. Casey.” Somehow, this bit of subterfuge was less than convincing — the Indian prince with the Irish name was met first with “confusion and then ridicule” by the British agents watching his movements — but in March of 1887, Duleep’s entourage was allowed through the Russian border after Katkov pulled some strings at the Interior Ministry. Newspapers at the time speculated why Duleep was allowed in the country without a passport:

Many wondered if Katkov was supplying [Casey] with Russian dynamite and if the Russians were eager to undermine Britain by working with the [Irish revolutionaries] in reigniting a dynamite campaign.

Duleep reached out to the Tsar again in May, this time suggesting that if he were provided with an army of 200,000 at his disposal, he could guarantee the “easy conquest of India.” He wrote:

“My loyal subjects would also destroy all railways, telegraphic and other communications and blow up bridges and cut off all supplies while the revolting Princes would harass the British troops left behind as a reserve.”

Though Tsar Alexander III showed a sliver of interest in this proposal, he was wary of engaging in another bloody conflict and the circumstances were further complicated by the fact that his wife, Tsarina Marie Feodorovna, was the sister of the Princess of Wales — “so the Tsar was the brother-in-law to the heir to the British throne.”

Tsar Alexander III and Tsarina Marie Feodorovna. 1893. (Source)

Nothing went right for Duleep Singh in Russia.

Unbeknownst to him, several close associates (including Ada, his mistress) were conveying his movements and correspondences to the British government. Every letter he wrote was copied and passed along to British agents keeping tabs on him. But his luck only got worse from there:

When his biggest Russian supporter, Mikhail Katkov, died of a stroke on August 1, 1887, Blavatsky wrote a heartfelt obituary in Katkov’s honor:

“For four days I have been in a daze…He is no Russian and no patriot, who in these trying days does not recognize this death as an irreparable loss for our long-suffering fatherland; and that no other similar true sentinel of its national interests lives now…Forever shut is the watchful eye which safeguarded both the honor and the interests of Russia.”

Katkov’s death was followed two weeks later by the sudden fatal illness of Duleep’s other major patron, Thakur Singh Sandhanwalia, on August 18.

Within months of his arrival, all of his backers disappeared. The Russian government, already disinclined to help, further distanced itself from him:

“…it would be far better not to associate Duleep Singh with Russia but to carry on regarding him as an honorable foreigner, who is compelled to seek asylum with us.”

Duleep was “allowed” to live near Kiev for over a year, but his financial situation worsened and he moved back to Paris with Ada, who he married after having two more children. After suffering a stroke in 1890, he begged Queen Victoria to forgive him for what he had done “against you and your government.” Victoria saw him the following year where, she said, “he burst into a most terrible and violent fit of crying…I forgave him.”

Postcard of Hotel de la Tremoille. (Source)

Duleep Singh died in a modest room at the Hotel de la Tremoille during an epileptic seizure on October 22, 1893 at the age of 55. Reportedly:

…his belated realisation that his second wife Ada was, perhaps, a planted spy whose duties were to monitor his intentions and activities caused him a mental shock that hastened his “dark and mournful end.”

He visited India only twice in his lifetime. He was given a Christian burial at Elveden next to his wife, Bamba, and his son, Edward. He had no grandchildren. The prophecy did not come to pass.

Graves of Maharaja Duleep Singh, wife Maharani Bamba and son Prince Edward Albert Duleep Singh. (Source)

While the Duleep Singh affair fizzled out in unspectacular fashion, its complexities and contradictions provide a model for understanding — or, at least, recognizing — the pattern of events that would take place during the Hindu-German Conspiracy in America decades later.

On Blavatsky’s role in the drama, K. Paul Johnson writes:

She both was and was not a Russian spy; that is, she had no official status as a government agent, but she was supplying intelligence to Katkov which he fed to his military friends. She was motivated primarily by what she saw as Indian rather than Russian interests, but was quite unrealistic in assuming that the two were entirely compatible. She saw her ends primarily as spiritual ones, but she was quite willing to use political means to reach them. Her ambivalence and complexity defy all simplistic explanations.

So who do we root for in this story? The British government oppressing the people of India while supporting leftist Russian revolutionaries opposed to the Tsar? Russian militarists like Katkov who opposed democracy in Russia but supported Indian and Irish revolutionaries opposed to British colonialism? The Theosophical Society who, under the direction of a “rigidly hierarchical” cosmogony of “Masters”, supported Indian nationalists with the goal of reinstating a monarchy — but worked against those same freedom fighters just as they assembled the means to fight?

After Gavrilo Princip stepped into the street and shot Franz Ferdinand in 1914, he stated:“I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.” But does independence mean freedom? Does unity mean peace?

Dr. Amrik Singh, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Punjabi Language at Sacramento State University, argues:

Without the tacit patronage of the British rulers, the Indian National Congress, Arya Samaj, and Singh Sabha movements could not have flourished. The British encouraged them to certain defined limits of conduct, so that reciprocal rebels could create Alternative Indian Nationalism under the overall supervision of the British Empire.

[The] Reciprocal rebel replicates in all fields: anarchism, extremism, and communism, all varieties of nationalisms, sectarianism, and pacifism. The political scene may create illusion of great uprising, but the ruler remains confident of his directorial role, both in creating the movement and suppressing the movement.

As economic conditions worsened for Sikhs under British rule, they turned their eyes to a new country that had only recently defeated its British masters and fought a bloody civil war to abolish slavery.

Sikh Railroad Workers in California. (Source)

Beginning at the end of the 19th century, thousands of Sikhs arrived on the West Coast of North America to find a better life as farmers and railroad workers in a land where, they were told, “all men are created equal.” By 1913, the first Indian immigrant became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

A.K. Mozumdar. 1929. (Source)

His name was Akhay Kumar Mozumdar, a lecturer and preacher, who got his start in 1905 addressing Seattle’s Queen City Theosophical Society where he, “healed people with the cosmic rays generated by a mere touch of his fingers.” He called his teachings Universal Truth.

Because of his Indian nationality, his petition for citizenship was initially denied in 1912— “The Naturalization Act of 1790 set the initial rules on naturalization: ‘free, White persons’ of ‘good character’, who had been resident for 2 years or more.” But at a court hearing the following year Mozumdar made an impassioned plea to the judge:

“I am a high-caste Hindu of pure blood, belonging to what is known as the warrior caste, or ruling caste. The pure-blooded Hindus are divided into three castes — the priestly caste, the warrior or ruling caste, and the merchant caste. The blood is kept pure by rigid rules of exclusion.

Very few of the high-caste Hindus come to the United States. The great bulk of the Hindus in this country are not high-caste Hindus, but are what are called sikhs, and are of mixed blood. The laboring class, those who do the rough manual labor, are not high-caste Hindus at all, but are in an entirely separate class, having quite a different religion and a different ancestry. The high-caste Hindus are of Brahmin faith…

The high-caste Hindus always consider themselves to be members of the Aryan race, and their native term for Hindustan is Arya-vartha, which means country or land of the Aryans.”

Thus, having proved that a “High-caste Brahmin” was “Aryan” and therefore “white”, on May 3, 1913, A.K. Mozumdar’s petition to become an American citizen was accepted. The linguistic-racial-political-spiritual concepts of Aryanism had become law.

And so, two years later, when German spies traveled to California and offered their help to struggling Sikh immigrants—neither “pure blooded” nor “high-caste”—they accepted.

Would the next generation of reciprocal rebels win their independence? Find out next, on:

[S1E13] Murphy Ranch—Shadow War: Part 3

The Tacoma Daily News. September 5, 1907. (Source)

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Joseph Best
Higher Than Truth

Deep dives into the conspiracies, mysteries, and urban legends behind the philosophical fringe history of the alt-right.