East of Home

by Santha Rama Rau

Overview

In 1947, Santha Rama Rau went to Japan with her father, India’s ambassador to Tokyo. A year later, she went to China with friends, hitchhiked to remote provinces of the northwest, and traveled through Indo-China and Siam to Indonesia to live for several months in a Balinese village. East of Home is the report of a fascinating trip, full of information about the people of Asia, their customs, theater and dance. It also shows how a young Indian woman, educated in the West, encounters Asia for the first time and discovers herself as an Asian.

“An informal and pleasantly engaging book about [Santha Rama Rau’s] travels in the Far East... personal, colored by her acute consciousness of being an Asian among Asians.” — The New York Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148854081
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	10/31/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	303
File size:	354 KB

About the Author

Santha Rama Rau (1923-2009) was the first widely-read female South Asian writer in the United States. Born in Madras, India, into an elite Indian family — her father, a high-ranking civil servant, became ambassador to Japan and the United States, and her mother was a founder of International Planned Parenthood —, she grew up in India, Great Britain, and South Africa and made the unusual choice of attending college in the United States rather than in England. She became Wellesley College’s first graduate from India. Between 1945 and 1970, she worked as a journalist for publications as varied as the New Yorker and the Reader’s Digest, writing mainly travel stories from Asia, Africa and the former Soviet Union. Many were collected as East of Home (1950), View to the Southeast (1957) and My Russian Journey (1959). Santha Rama Rau also wrote an autobiography, Gifts of Passage (1961), several novels, and adapted the E. M. Forster novel A Passage to India for Broadway and the London stage.