Rukmini Devi Arundale Birth Centenary volume

Publisher – Kalakshetra Foundation

Author - Shakuntala Ramani 

On February 29, 1904, in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, Rukmini Devi was born into a brahmin household. Her mother Seshammal loved music, and her father Neelakanta Shastri worked as an engineer for the Public Works Department. The family regularly moved, and he had transferrable work. In 1901, he was first introduced to the Theosophical Society. Nilakanta Sri Ram, her brother, later rose to the position of Theosophical Society President. Neelakanta Shastri, a devotee of Dr. Annie Besant and a major proponent of the Theosophical Movement, retired to Adyar in Chennai and built a house there close to the Theosophical Society Adyar’s headquarters. She became good friends with Dr. George Arundale, a well-known British theosophist who was also the principal of the Central Hindu College in Varanasi and a close colleague of Annie Besant. To the surprise of the then-conservative society, they were married in 1920 when she was 16 and he was 42, making them both 26 years older. After getting married, she embarked on a globe tour where she met other theosophists and became friends with James Cousins, a poet, and Maria Montessori, a teacher. She was elected president of the World Federation of Young Theosophists in 1925 after serving as president of the All-India Federation of Young Theosophists since 1923.