Traveling India in the Age of Gandhi

by Jeffrey N. Dupée

Overview

Traveling India in the Age of Gandhi is a study of "armchair" travel writers who journeyed to India during what has often been termed the "Age of Gandhi," placed between 1914–1948. Most of the travel writers surveyed understood this era to be a unique time in world history—in India and elsewhere on the globe. The lingering trauma of World War I, the rise of radical state ideologies in Russia, Italy, Japan, and Germany, world-wide depression in the 1930s along with a host of other unsettling political, cultural, and technological realities revealed a world of bewildering complexity and uncertainty. For many of the travel writers surveyed in this work, India was the main drama in a shifting global landscape. Moreover, many viewed it as the ultimate travel experience, a journey that tested one's capacity to fully engage the earth's most compelling forms of human diversity and suffering. Although a few notable figures are included, most of the authors in the study constitute a breed of largely forgotten travel writers. This work is an attempt to extract the core of their observations, impressions, and conclusions concerning what they saw and experienced, particularly concerning Indian aspirations for independence and India as the world's most exotic human landscape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781461693116
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	04/15/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	150
File size:	467 KB

About the Author

Jeffrey N. Dupée is an Associate Professor of History at La Sierra University, Riverside, California. He received his B.A. in History from Walla Walla College and his Ph.D. in European History from Claremont Graduate University. His disciplinary concentrations include Modern Europe and 19th and 20th century imperialism, with a research focus on Western travel writers. He is the author of British Travel Writers in China: Writing Home to a British Public, 1890–1914.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Acknowledgements
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 India's Lure: Traveler Motivations and Aspirations
Chapter 4 Katherine Mayo and the Great 'Mother India' Debate
Chapter 5 The British Colonialist Debate: 'A Pigmentary Aristocracy?'
Chapter 6 The Independence Debate: Wrestling with the 'Peter-Pan Theory'
Chapter 7 The Ghandi Debate: Indian 'Fakir' or Heroic Independence Leader?
Chapter 8 'An Observation of No Value': India's Poverty, Disease, and Suffering
Chapter 9 The Search for the Elusive Indian
Chapter 10 The Search for the Elusive Spirituality
Chapter 11 The Paradox of Caste: East and West
Chapter 12 From Bazaar to the Bizarre: India as Terra Exotica
Chapter 13 Benares: Journey to the Soul of India
Chapter 14 Calcutta, Delhi, and Bombay: Urban Itineraries
Chapter 15 Princely States and Pauper Villages
Part 16 Bibliography
Part 17 Index