Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 3 September 1886.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, pp. 44–5).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: The sketch is no doubt prompted by the government's financial policy – ‘a thief which took and restored not again’ – and by the difficulty of fixing blame for that policy. The imagery and action satirise the Theosophy movement, then attracting much attention in India, where Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of the movement in 1875, had taken up residence in 1878. RK recalled her vogue thus: ‘At one time our little world was full of the aftermaths of Theosophy as taught by Madame Blavatsky to her devotees. My Father knew the lady and, with her, would discuss wholly secular subjects; she being, he told me, one of the most interesting and unscrupulous imposters he had ever met’ (Something of Myself, p. 35).

RK also satirises the movement in ‘The Sending of Dana Da’ (Soldiers Three), which opens thus: ‘Once upon a time, some people in India made a new Heaven and a new Earth out of broken tea-cups, a missing brooch or two, and a hair-brush. These were hidden under bushes, or stuffed into holes in the hillside, and an entire Civil Service of subordinate Gods used to find or mend them again.’

Reprinted in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets and in Harbord, ii, 1088–90.

Now, because IT was a thief which took and restored not again – not once but twelve times yearly – and wrote vain tales, and wrought confusion in places and brewed anger among men, I said:– “I will go forth and will not rest until I find the Government of India; and I will straightway disembowel IT and force IT to disgorge. Needs must that IT is somewhere to be found concrete, and therefore vulnerable.” With me came the Greybeard of the Himalayas – even the great Mahatma Koot Humi Lal Singh – the Wizard of the Broken Tea Cup. We sware by the Public Works Department and the heads of all the Members of Council, from the young man who sits on the left of the Viceroy to the old men who nod and wink at either end of the long polished table, that we would find the Government of India