father_india
Father India by jeffery-paine, published by HarperCollins in 1999, is a 324-page exploration of the profound impact India has had on Western thought over the past century. This edition delves into the lives of notable twentieth-century figures, including Lord Curzon, Annie Besant, and Martin Luther King Jr., who sought insights into their own cultures through their experiences in India. The book narrates how these individuals, driven by a sense of discontent, journeyed to the subcontinent in search of new perspectives on modernity and identity.
Readers will find a rich tapestry of stories that illustrate the transformative encounters between these Western intellectuals and Indian culture. The narratives reveal how their quests for understanding often challenged their preconceived notions about politics, religion, and self-identity. By examining the motivations and reflections of these cultural figures, Father India presents a nuanced view of the interplay between Western civilization and Indian philosophy, ultimately shedding light on the complexities of cultural exchange and the quest for meaning in a rapidly changing world.
Official synopsis Publisher
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. These major culture figures–including Lord Curzon, Annie Besant, E. M. Forster, Carl Jung, William Butler Yeats, V. S. Naiipaul, Christopher Isherwood, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others–acted out their most secret dreams in India.
Troubled by a vague but persistent discontent, most of the characters portrayed in this book journeyed to India seeking a perspective on their own culture from outside it. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, for example, unable to find within western intellectual tradition an antidote to fascism, scoured India for a different way to integrate an understanding of evil into the human psyche. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to discover a new basis for American politics, incongruously, in India. And V. S. Naipaul came to search for family roots but ended up inadvertently placing the Enlightenment values of individuality, rationality, and progress in a living crucible there.
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 upside-down and laid open to question.
“What do you think of western civilization?” Gandhi was once asked. He answered, “It would be a good idea.” This book is about a good idea in India, Father India tells the story of those people–Curzon, Besant, Forster, Naipaul, Isherwood, Mirra Richard, and oddly, Gandhi, too, as well as a chorus of minor characters–who attempted to comprehend or even to protect western civilization through India, and of how their successes and failures returned to the modern West a changed understanding of itself.
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