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.
Among its members was Dadabhai Naoroji, who would go on to sit in the British House of Commons. Speaking in Brighton in 1868 he said of his mother lodge that its founding had “broken the spell of ages”.
That is where most tellings of this story stop. It is a good place to stop if you want a comfortable article.
What happened ten years later
In 1853 Lodge Rising Star wrote to the Provincial Grand Lodge with a question. It wished to initiate a French gentleman. Was that permitted?
The answer was that the interests of the Craft would be best served if Lodge Perseverance confined itself to Europeans and Lodge Rising Star to Indian candidates.
Read that again. Ten years after Rising Star was founded to end an exclusion, the same authority formalised a new one. It did so almost in passing, in reply to an administrative query about one Frenchman. The lodge created so that Indians could be Freemasons was now the lodge where Indians were to be kept.
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, won something real in 1843 and then watched a good part of it close again while he was still alive. 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).