Father India

Over the past hundred years, India has held an enormous fascination for western intellectuals and artists. Father Indiaexplores 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. Father India 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.