Author: Jeffery Paine
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 404
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0140287582
Description
What do you think of Western civilization? Mahatma Gandhi was once asked. It would be a good idea, he replied. However the West might be perceived by India, there is another dimension to the relationship that India has had with the West. Documenting the fascination that India has always held for Western intellectuals and artists, Father India delineates how this society of ancient traditions left the West Unexpectedly affected.
Jeffery Paine narrates the curious stories of a succession of twentieth-century European and American stalwarts, including Lord Curzon, Annie Besant, E.M.Forster, Carl Jung, Mirra Richard, V. S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood and Martin Luther King Jr., who acted out their most secret dreams in India, seeking from India a perspective on their own culture. In the process their unconscious assumptions about politics, religion and identity in their own cultures were turned upside-down and laid open to question. This book tells the story of those people-- and Gandhi too-- who attempted to comprehend or even perfect Western civilization through India, and describes how their successes and failures returned to the modern West a changed understanding of itself.