In Light of India

Author: Octavio Paz
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 209
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8172233841

Description

As in all of his essays, he brings poetic insight and voluminous knowledge to bear on the subject; the result is a series of fascinating discourses on Indian’s landscape, culture and history.

In 1951 Octavio Paz traveled to India to serve briefly as an attaché in the Mexican Embassy. Eleven years later he returned as Mexico’s ambassador and served for six years. In Light of India is Paz’s celebration of that country and his most personal work of prose to date.

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS

Octavio Paz is one of the great European cultural icons of the 20th century … a poet beyond praise, a critic beyond criticism and an essayist whose insights illuminate our mediocre culture with the gorgeous richness of a stained-glass window.

-Richard Gott, Guardian

A tour de force- generous, engrossing insightful mind, a volume about ethos by a youthful old man. Its scope helps explain once again, why Paz, Mexican by birth and cosmopolitan by education, is this century’s intellectual conscience.

-Ilan Stavans, Washington Post

This is the only kind of book worth reading, implicitly a report on being alive from a passionate intelligence, gifted with culture, honesty and self-awareness.

- Herbert Lomas, London Magazine

Contents

1.The Antipodes of Coming and Going

Bombay
Delhi
Return

2.Religions, Castes, Languages

Rama and Allah
The Cosmic Matrix
Babel

3.A Project of Nationhood

Feasts and Fasts
The Singularity of Indian history
Gandhi: Center and Extreme
Nationalism, Secularism, Democracy

4.The Full and the Empty

The Apsara and the Yakshi
Chastity and Longevity
The Critique of Liberation
The Contraptions of time

5.Farewell

6.Acknowledgements