The Spread of Freemasonry in India

The history of Freemasonry dates back several hundreds of years. Recently, the credit for introducing India to the freemasonry cult goes to writers like Dan Brown and Ashwin Sanghi. The Freemasons belong to a secret society right from the period of King Solomon. They are often compared with the infamous Illuminati group which is believed to be trying to dominate the world. What is the aim of Freemasonry? The Freemasons pledge to be good citizens by practicing the highest moral and social standards in friendship, charity and integrity. They try to encourage their members or brethren to serve their own community in order to exemplify that they are a society of upright men. They are believers in one God or ‘Father of Universe’ and they go by the motto of ‘brotherly love, relief and truth’. Freemasonry came into India through the British and the Scots. The Grand Lodge of England elected a Grandmaster after a meeting of London’s local lodges in 1717. A united constitution was then drawn up and came into recognition by all the lodges there. The Worshipful Master was elected in a democratic tradition. He was then authorized to select his team of officers, starting from Senior Warden, Junior Warden, Senior and Junior Deacon, Inner Guard and Outer Guard (Tyler). In 1729, a petition was proposed by few brethren in India to set up a Grand Lodge in Calcutta. A Provincial Grandmaster was appointed to oversee Masonic activity in India and the Far East in 1728. It took the next forty-seven years for an Indian to become the first Mason. He was Umdat-ul-Umrah. He was followed by P.C. Dutt. Eventually, the Grand Lodge of India was born in 1895. Since then, Freemasonry did grow in India and one hundred and twelve years later, there are 380 lodges in 140 locations all over the country. There are about twenty thousand Freemasons in India. In Hyderabad, Freemasonry started in October 1988 with the lodge meeting in the upper storey of the existing Goshamahal Baradari. This building was used prior to this event as a military barrack. This was the birth of Lodge Hyderabad, Lodge Deccan and Lodge Morland. In 1912, The Nizam of Hyderabad, Asaf Jah VI, Mahboob Ali Pasha granted a sum of Rupees ten thousand to create a nucleus fund for building a Masonic temple and this work was carried out by Right Worshipful Brother Terence Keyes, the British Resident in Hyderabad.