Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon)

John George Woodroffe was born on 15 December 1865 in Calcutta, the son of an English barrister practicing in British India. He was educated at Oxford and trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple in London before returning to India, where he built a substantial legal career: advocate at the Calcutta High Court from 1890, standing counsel to the Government of India, and eventually a Puisne Judge of the High Court of Calcutta from 1904 to 1922, briefly serving as officiating chief justice of Bengal in 1915. He was knighted for this legal career.

Alongside his judicial work, Woodroffe developed a serious scholarly interest in Sanskrit and in the Hindu tantric texts and practices of Bengal, an interest that deepened through his contact with Bengali pandits and practitioners. After retiring from the bench in 1922 he returned to England, where he served as reader in Indian Law at Oxford from 1923 to 1930. He died on 16 January 1936 in Beausoleil, in the south of France, at seventy.

His scholarship depended heavily on collaboration with Bengali pandits, above all Atal Bihari Ghosh, a practicing tantric initiate and manuscript collector whose knowledge of primary texts and living practice Woodroffe relied on throughout his Avalon publications, though Ghosh's own contribution went largely uncredited on the title pages in the convention of the time. Beyond his tantric scholarship, Woodroffe also wrote and lectured on Indian legal subjects, including a set of Tagore Law Lectures on Indian company law delivered at the University of Calcutta, reflecting the same seriousness he brought to law as to his esoteric research.

Woodroffe published his tantric scholarship under the pseudonym Arthur Avalon, a name that let him keep his considerable output on a subject then widely dismissed or sensationalized in colonial writing separate from his judicial identity, though his authorship of the Avalon books was an open secret among contemporaries and is well established today. Working closely with Bengali collaborators, most importantly the pandit Atal Bihari Ghosh, he translated and annotated a series of tantric texts and published his own studies, of which The Serpent Power (1919), a translation and detailed commentary on two Sanskrit texts describing kundalini and the subtle body's chakra system, is by far the best known and most durable.

Where most prior European treatment of tantra had been either dismissive or lurid, Woodroffe presented it as a coherent philosophical and yogic system with its own internal logic, doing more than any other single Western writer to establish Shakta tantra as a subject worthy of serious study. The vocabulary his books fixed for the chakras and kundalini in English remains the vocabulary most Western yoga and tantra writing still uses, even where his own broader interpretive framework has since been revised by later scholarship.