Sometime in the 1830s a Parsi merchant in Bombay applied to join a Masonic lodge. He was a man of standing. He traded, he later sat as a judge, he campaigned all his life for the education of Indian girls at a time when that was an unpopular thing to campaign for. The lodge he applied to was Perseverance, founded in Bombay in 1828. It refused him.
The reason was not his character. It was that he was Indian.
His name was Manockjee Cursetjee. He lived from 1808 to 1887 and by every account he was not a man who took a refusal quietly. What he did next is the reason I am writing this.
He went to Europe. In 1842 he was initiated into a lodge in Paris, which had no objection to him whatsoever. He came back to Bombay a Freemason. That alone would make a decent story. It is what happened after he returned that matters.
The Scotsman
In Bombay he found an ally in Dr James Burnes.
Burnes was a Scottish surgeon in the service of the Honourable East India Company. In November 1836 the Grand Lodge of Scotland commissioned him Provincial Grand Master over Western India with authority to establish lodges there. He reached Bombay at the end of 1837 and on 1 January 1838 he opened the Provincial Grand Lodge of Western India. That date is the beginning of Scottish Freemasonry in this country. Everything that follows, including our own lodge, descends from what Burnes did that morning.
There is a detail about him that I cannot resist. His great-grandfather was an uncle of Robert Burns, whose family name was spelled Burnes in that generation. The man who planted Scottish Freemasonry in India was kin to the poet who is toasted in Masonic dining rooms every January. The line from Tarbolton to Bombay is not a metaphor. It is a family tree.
December 1843
Cursetjee had been refused. Burnes had the authority to charter lodges. Between them they did the obvious thing.
On 15 December 1843, in the Town Hall at Bombay, Lodge Rising Star of Western India was constituted under the Scottish Constitution. Its stated purpose was the admission of Indians to Freemasonry. Burnes was its first Master. Cursetjee was its first Secretary and later served twice as its Master. It carries the number 342 today and it is still working.
Indian Freemasonry grew from that door. Another Parsi of Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji, helped found the Marquis of Dalhousie Lodge in London in 1867 and was its first Secretary. In 1892 he was elected to the British House of Commons.
That is where most tellings of this story stop. It is a good place to stop if you want a comfortable article.
What the fix did not fix
Perseverance did not change its mind. Cursetjee had applied to it three times and been turned down each time. When he came back from Paris a Freemason, it refused him again.
Look at what the answer to that was. Nobody opened Perseverance. A second lodge was built beside it, founded, in the District history’s own words, for the introduction of “native gentlemen” into the Craft.
The exclusion was not ended. It was routed around. The lodge created so that Indians could be Freemasons was a separate room, and the old room kept its door as it was.
I include this because leaving it out would be dishonest and because it makes Cursetjee larger rather than smaller. He was not carried forward by an enlightened institution. He pushed against one and won something real in 1843, but not the thing he had first asked for. He remained a Scottish Mason to the end of his life anyway.
Why this belongs on our website
Lodge Al Ameen was constituted on 7 February 1946, eighteen months before Independence, chartered by the Grand Lodge of Scotland. We work under that Grand Lodge today.
So the Scottish Constitution that gave Manockjee Cursetjee a lodge in 1843 is the one that chartered us a century later. The distance between those two facts was walked by men like him.
We meet in Bengaluru under a Scottish charter. Our lodge takes its name from the Arabic for the trustworthy. Every man proposed to us is weighed on his character, which sounds unremarkable until you know how recently it was not the practice.
That standard was not handed down to us. It was argued for, by a merchant from Bombay who was told no, went to Paris, came back and built the room he had been kept out of.
Historical detail in this article draws on the History of Scottish Freemasonry in India prepared by Bro. Bomi S. Mehta, Rt. Wor. District Grand Master of the District Grand Lodge of India 1997 to 2007, published on the website of the District Grand Lodge of India (Scottish Constitution).