Passages through India: Indian gurus, western disciples and the politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940

In: Global South Asians

Abstract

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 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