Rating: 
Summary: Interesting tales, but a third-hand view of India
Review: Paine tells engaging stories about Curzon, Besant, Forster, Naipaul, Isherwood, Mirra Richard. But these are 2nd hand stories, and they are stories that reflect India another step removed. In itself the book is fine, but it fails to live up to the promise in the title. Paine should have looked at Thoreau, Emerson, Schopenhauer, Schrodinger for more direct influences. Or even if he chose this frame, the least he needed was to understand `Father India' for himself. If he had, a lot of rhetorical questions he asks in the book from time to time would have yielded their answers. Where is the tiger in the jungle? to repeat Hesse's old question. Since Paine doesn't know, his stories rank at the level of an English professor spinning yarns not about a subject directly, but about the lives of various people who dealt with it!
Rating: 
Summary: An exciting account of people transformed by India
Review: This book has all the delights of a tale of adventure, but with real rather than imaginary people. They found their way to India which worked an ancient magic on them, and they were never to be the same after that experience. Some remade their personal selves, and some went on to work changes on their Western culture like Martin Luther King, Jr. Some did both, like the novelist E.M.Forster (A Passage to India). He found peace there with his previously tormented sexuality, as well as to go on to mightily disturb the presumptive colonial mentality of his English countrymen with his novel. This is but two of the fascinating, well-told biographies in the book. The fact that the carefully researched tales are true somehow makes them even more interesting and psychologically penetrating.I found it so gracefully written -- with such verve and wit -- that its literary style could put envy into the heart of many a writer of fiction. FATHER INDIA is a great pleasure to read and to savor. R.G. Kainer
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