FATHER INDIA: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West.

#### FATHER INDIA: How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West.

By Jeffery Paine. HarperCollins. 336 pp. $25

"Desperate souls flee to India," Paine observes in this engaging book about such desperation and flight, about escape euphemized, disguised, and in some cases realized as quest. Father India is a perceptive emotional audit of Western travelers "who quit more comfortable conditions to find somewhere, somehow, in India, an alternative track through modernity" that would help them fathom, if not transform, both themselves and the West.

Paine’s pilgrims—including statesmen, novelists, and psychologists—all shared the conviction that India, "conceived as something simultaneously geographical and intellectual, both an outward and inward location," might provide powerful understandings of psychological, social, and transcendental realities. The dramatis personae of Father India are Lord Curzon, Annie Besant, E. M. Forster, V. S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood, and, clustered around Gandhi, other such Westerners as Mirabehn and Martin Luther King, Jr. A supporting cast includes Lord Kitchener, Madame Blavatsky, C. W. Leadbeater, Mirra Richard, Carl Jung, and William Butler Yeats. There are also cameo appearances by Sri Aurobindo, Cesar Chavez, Krishnamurti, and many more.

These characters represent various modes of confrontation with India: "Forster in his Indian costume or Naipaul with his Indian heritage attempted an Indian-western fusion at the personal level of their own identity; Curzon and Besant attempted such a fusion politically through changing social institutions.... [Isherwood and others] melded East-West religious ideas about the universe." Forster and Naipaul are further typified as "unofficial ambassadors of European civilization on a safari in search of self." Upon arrival in the distant land of sundry promises, all these seekers "started projecting onto India the unconscious assumptions of their religion, their society, or their own identity." But if India was, for them, a kind of Rorschach test, it was also shock treatment: "Obstacles were in fact what most travelers encountered in India."

While religion, politics, and psychology are the explicit themes around which the book is structured, the leitmotif, the unruly power underlying and connecting these thematic realms, is sex. To one degree or another, most of the characters in the book have a problem with pleasure. The essay on Isherwood at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood exposes the two sides of one desperate soul: "the holy monk and the gay libertine." The Indian endeavors of Forster, Kitchener, Leadbeater, and others are understood in light of their homosexuality. Discussion of the sexual ambivalences of Gandhi, Besant, and practically everyone else uncovers the intimate impulses behind public postures.

Orphaned by their Western heritage and looking to "Father India" for guidance, authority, or even love, most of these travelers struggle with desire. In that tussle, they suffer a transformative ache and loneliness to which Paine is acutely sensitive. His portraits illuminate the folly inherent in the genius of his subjects and, at the same time, the genius that transforms their folly.

—Lee Siegel