Description:
When Lord Curzon, E.M. Forster, Mirra Richard, Margaret Bourke-White, and Christopher Isherwood left their familiar surroundings in places like London, Paris, and Washington and made their way to "exotic" India, they used the experience to question "what they had oppressively taken for granted about society or religion or sometimes their very selves." So writes literary journalist Jeffery Paine, who examines the Western encounter with India--and the Indian encounter with the West--to show how both worlds influenced and changed each other. Paine writes at length, for instance, about the English freethinker Annie Besant, who traveled to India in 1893 to study Hinduism; her sometimes botched but politically charged English translation of the Bhagavad Gita helped give rise to the modern New Age movement, and it also persuaded one reader, Mohandas Gandhi, to return to India from his home in London and devote himself to politics. Elsewhere Paine considers the travels of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who returned from India with new views of the individual psyche and the collective unconscious, and of the Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul, whose "estranged explorations of uprootedness" among Indians at home and abroad won him literary praise and honor. Through such interpreters, Paine writes, India extended the Western perimeter of vision, and it continues to do so today. Of a piece with Jonathan Spence's The Chan's Great Continent, an examination of China's influence on the West, Paine's imaginative journey through India makes for illuminating reading. --Gregory McNamee
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