Toward the middle of this detailed and thoughtful book, the author says his work is "about how different hopes for the West -- visions of another kind of West -- were glimpsed, of all unlikely places, on the Indian subcontinent."
Certainly it is true that by creating such bipolarities as East/West and them/us, the results include an amount of self-referential imaging. Asia serves as a mirror for Europe and America, reflecting fears, hopes and ambitions.
The mirror works two ways as well. The number of blond Japanese youth (blue- and green-tinted, too) indicates not only cultural panic, but a sincere form of self-searching. Foreigners by peroxide, the newly complacent find a kind of solace in imitation.
Though impersonation is rarely this basic, it is one of the ways through which creation of self is possible. Looking deeply into the eyes of the Other is a way to find a reflection of yourself. The intelligent modern traveler now voyages "not for profit or preaching, but rather to spill his innards all over the map -- a voyage outward and inward simultaneously."
Of all the Other Places available to the Westerner, India is the most fabled. For Arthur Koestler, it offered a way to look at the predicament of the West from a different perspective, "to afford an answer to our perplexities and deadlocked problems."
Not that, for him, it did. Like Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung before him, Koestler found no answers because he could not "cope." Bombay's heat and stench made him feel as though "a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head." If one defines a country in these terms, it can give you no answers.
Attitudes differ. I was once in Calcutta with Allen Ginsberg and was having trouble coping. Allen said, "Donald, you are in a place where you must either empty your pockets and join these people or you must pretend that neither of you are here and step over them." I said, "Maybe I could do both," and he answered, "No, not in this case. You are not made that way."
Allen was. When we parted I took the next plane home and he went out on the ghats to help burn bodies. Much later, when he returned, he told me that he had learned a lot and most of it was about himself.
Ginsberg, like many successful travelers, "felt India's difference just as keenly, but instead of feeling defeated, used its overwhelming dissimilarity to revise their questions and categories, and this act of revision often eased or dispelled quandaries for which there were no direct answers."
This book is about those travelers. Allen is not there, but the cast is otherwise enormous: Lord Curzon, Annie Besant, E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Martin Luther King, Jr., V.S. Naipaul, Madelaine Slade and many others.
Whether they wished to impose the West on the East or the East on the West, they were concerned (in Jung's words) "not with the niggardly Western either/or, but the Eastern both/and."
The attitude to emulate was that of Ramakrishna who, upon being told in shocked tones by some disciples that tantric folks performed sexual rites instead of religious rituals, answered after a moment of reflection: "It is a back door. But it is a door."
Each of the many Westerners who populate this lively account found different answers, but all shared an enlargement of comprehension and all found a way in which their answer was discovered in the rephrasing or even questioning of the question.
Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, spent only a short time in India, but he discovered that in America the real struggle was "not between Negro and white, but between justice and injustice." When Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization, he answered, "It would be a good idea."
The East/West opposition is obviously a false one. People share more than they don't. Yet the human mind has learned to articulate problems by setting up opposites: traditional/modern, practical/idealistic, masculine/feminine and so on.
Though technologies render obsolete and boundaries realign, humans think in terms of this/that, defining something by its dissimilarity to something else. However, and the proof is daily before us, it is also possible to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously, and still function.
Doing this in a creative and self-reflective manner is one of the ways that India, perceived as the most extreme Other, assists. The traveler's assumptions about politics, religion and identity in their own cultures are turned upside-down and laid open to question. We look into the distance and see ourselves.
The new edition of this informed and interesting 1998 book has changed its subtitle. It used to read "How Encounters with an Ancient Culture Transformed the West." Now it has itself turned upside-down to become "Westerners Under the Spell of an Ancient Culture," as though it has learned something by its own intense and informed scrutiny.
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