Father India
Jeffery Paine · 1998
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About the book
Over the past hundred years, India has held an enormous fascination for western intellectuals and artists. Father India explores the life-changing influence of the subcontinent on western ideas of modernity by narrating the curious, spellbinding stories of a succession of twentieth-century Europeans and Americans. These major cultural figures - including Lord Curzon, Annie Besant, E. M. Forster, Carl Jung, William Butler Yeats, V. S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others - acted out their most secret dreams in India. Gandhi's answer to the question "Why now?" as he observed one westerner after another come to his own ashram, is telling: The contemporary West had misplaced its soul, and pilgrims to India were on a mission to retrieve it. In the process, their unconscious assumptions about politics, religion, and identity in their own cultures were turned upside-down and laid open to question.
First sentence: If they had only been content to be brutes, plunderers, and oppressors, how much easier, how much better in the long run, it all might have gone.
Book details
- Year
- 1998
- Language
- English
- Publisher
- Harper Perennial
- Editions
- 2
- Pages
- 336
- ISBN
- 9780060931018
Data source: Wikidata
