Father India: How Encounters With an Ancient Culture Transformed the Modern West

"I don't quite know how Jeffery Paine has done it-- except by subtle and provocative genius-- but "Father India" is an utterly surprising and indispensible book... Learned... lively... It renders Jeffery Paine's vast knowledge intimately. Father India is a splendid achievement." --Howard Norman, author of "The Bird Artist"

"With wit and relish, "Father India" demonstrates both the fascination-- and the folly-- of seeking to solve the problems of one civilization by adopting solutions suggested by another. It's deftly drawn subjects range from Lord Curzon to E. M. Forster, V. S. Naipaul to Mahatma Gandhi, but their common experience attests to something all western lovers of India know--that no other place on earth has the same power to compel and confuse, delight and mystify." --Geoffrey Ward, author of "The Civil War

"Jeffery Paine's "Father India" is a work of extraordinary scope and quality... Imaginative and unusual... It's pages breathe with the perceptive intelligence of a very good writer and a masterly critic." --John Lukacs, author of "A Thread of Years"

"I admire "Father India" immensely. Jeffery Paine has taken a superb theme, the impingement of India upon the West, and has written a cogent, ramifying meditation on politics, religion, and the exigencies of personality. Like a good conversationalist, Paine intervenes but never obtrudes. It is a continuous pleasure to see such variety of experience justly and perceptively pondered: The strangeness of India is not cooed over--there is no gush--but it is allowed to persist, it is not domesticated or otherwise tamed." --Denis Donoghue, University Professor and Henry James Professor of English and American Letters, New York University