A Theosophical Garden City: designing household life in Bombay, circa 1924

Histories of the Garden City in the colonial world have brought attention to planning professionals, colonial officials, and native elites who instituted new economic and political practices through the construction of garden cities and suburbs. Less well known is that the Theosophical Society, a worldwide heterodox religious movement, appropriated the imagery and terminology of the Garden City to imagine a novel form of suburban living and political community in late colonial South Asia. Although Theosophists were among the earliest residents of Letchworth, in 1924 the Theosophical Society created a ‘Theosophical Garden City’ on the outskirts of Bombay that bore little resemblance to British garden cities and suburbs. Formed amid growing demands in India for national independence, this Theosophical Garden City envisioned India as a federation of localities within a polycentric ‘world-empire’. Examining architectural and town plans for the Theosophical Garden City, this article argues that the creation of a Theosophical community, and the imagining of India’s future place in a global union of nations, depended less on the display of esoteric symbols in communal gathering spaces and more on the design of household life.