Father India : Westerners under the Spell of an Ancient Culture

<P>Over the past hundred years, India has held an enormous fascination for western intellectuals and artists. <I>Father India</I>explores the life-changing influence of the subcontinent on western ideas and modernity by narrating the curious, spellbinding stories of a succession of twentieth-century Europeans and Americans--including Annie Besant, E. M. Forster, Carl Jung, William Butler Yeats, V.S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood, and Martin Luther King Jr.--who acted out their most secret dreams in India. 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. <I>Father India</I> tells the story of those people who attempted to comprehend or even to perfect western civilization through India, and of how their successes and failures retunred to the modern West a changed understanding of itself.</P>