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"Passages through India offers a study of the phenomenon of Western Indophilia: romanticised engagements around Hindu ideas of India. It argues that affective practices cultivated between major Indian guru-figures (Gandhi, Tagore and Vivekananda) and their white disciples serviced a larger politics of respectability, tied to the exigencies of Indian cultural and nationalist politics. Indophile deployments in transnational projects like the abolition of indentured labour and global Hinduism, while anti-colonial, were not quite emancipatory. Such deployments - in Africa, America, Fiji and India - frequently reproduced deep hierarchies around race, class, caste and gender. Unifying distinct strands of western discipleship within a shared tradition of Indophilia, Passages through India offers a new methodological framework that situates self and subjectivity as central to processes of global mobility and migration"--
List of contents
List of Figures; Acknowledgements; Section I. Introduction: Indophilia and Its Wider Worlds, 1890-1940; 1. Languages of Longing: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Letter-Writing; Section II. 2. Home in the World: Indophiles and the Ashram; 3. India, Indophiles and Indenture: Cultural Politics of a Transnational Discourse, 1911-1931; Section III. 4. Practices of Discipleship: Vivekananda and His Women Disciples, 1890-1910; 5. Vedanta and Its Variables: The Politics of a 'World Religion', 1890-1910; Epilogue: What Settles After; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Somak Biswas is Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London. He works on the intersections of South Asia, Britain, imperial and global history. He is also a member of the Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick.
