Tallapragada Subba Row (1856-1890) was a mystic and a Theosophist from a Hindu background. In 1882, he invited Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott to Madras, where he convinced them to make Adyar the permanent headquarters for the Theosophical Society. Upon this meeting and thereafter, Subba Row became able to recite whatever passage was so requested of him from the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, and many other sacred texts of India. He had, apparently, never studied these things prior to the fateful meeting, and it is stated that when meeting Blavatsky and Damodar K. Mavalankar, all knowledge from his previous lives came flooding back.
Among the many memorable works he left to humanity, they include his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, Esoteric Writings, and his Collected Writings in two volumes.
The essay The Occult World was included in the Subba Row's Collection of Esoteric Writings, published by the Bombay Theosophical Publication Fund in 1910. In it Subba Row exposes a series of considerations regarding the considerable interest produced on the Western public by the theosophist Alfred Percy Sinnett's books The Occult World (1881) and Esoteric Buddhism (1883).