T. Subba Row

Tallapragada Subba Row (1856–1890) was an Indian lawyer, a scholar of Vedānta and one of the most profound thinkers of the early Theosophical Society. He studied at the Presidency College in Madras and took his B.A. first in the whole Presidency; he served in Baroda and later practised as a vakil of the High Court of Madras.

H. P. Blavatsky valued him as a metaphysician and Vedāntic scholar and quotes his lectures on the Logos more than once in The Secret Doctrine. Yet he also argued with her: he preferred the fourfold division of the principles of man, which goes back to the Māṇḍūkya Upanishad, to the sevenfold division of the Theosophists. In 1888 he left the Society.

He wrote little. His chief legacy is the four lectures on the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gītā delivered at Adyar in December 1886 from a few notes on a slip of paper and taken down by a shorthand reporter. It is a book about the Logos: about Parabrahmam, Mūlaprakṛti and the Light of the Logos, about the human monad and its way to union with the Logos. Kṛṣhṇa in it is the Logos, Arjuna the human monad.

Subba Row died in Madras in 1890, at the age of thirty-three. S. Subramaniam's memoir of him opens the second edition of the lectures and is published here with them.