Asian Studies - South Asia - India, Indian History - General & Miscellaneous, Asia - Civilization
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Overview
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--including Annie Besant, E. M. Forster, Carl Jung, William Butler Yeats, V. S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood, and Martin Luther King, Jr.--who 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 upsidedown and laid open to question. Father India tells the story of those people who attempted to comprehend or even to perfect western civilization through India, and of how their successes and failures returned to the modern West a changed understanding of itself.Book Details
Published
March 16, 2000
Publisher
New York, NY : HarperPerennial ; c1999.
Pages
336
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780060931018