Passages Through India

Passages Through India examines the phenomenon of western Indophilia, romanticised engagements around idealised, Hindu forms of India. It offers a nuanced account of the nature of intimacies cultivated between key Indian guru figures (Vivekananda, Gandhi, Tagore) and their western disciples. It investigates how ashrams and letters became affective sites to produce and sustain utopias and enchantments. Simultaneously, Western Indophiles were mobilised for Indian cultural and nationalist projects that reproduced dominant hierarchies of caste, class, race and gender. Focusing on two such projects - the abolition of indentured labour and dissemination of Vedantic Hinduism – this work shows how Indophile deployments came to represent and naturalise high caste Hindu claims to culture and respectability in a range of transnational arenas. Drawing on material in English, Hindi, Bengali and French, the book unifies distinct strands of discipleship within a shared tradition of Indophilia, and their profound consequences, both in India and abroad.