文章基本信息

标题：India in Mind
作者：Daniel Sullivan
期刊名称：The Weekly Standard
印刷版ISSN：1083-3013
出版年度：2005
卷号：March 7, 2005
出版社：The Weekly Standard

India in Mind

Daniel Sullivan

India in Mind edited by Pankaj Mishra (Vintage, 332 pp., $14). More than a collection of writings about India, this volume is an anthology of reactions from outsiders to the strange reality that is the Indian subcontinent.

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The contributors are mostly English and American, but they include Continental Europeans, Mexicans, and expatriated Indians. The native Indian editor, Pankaj Mishra, has not included any of his compatriots, since his aim is to show the many ways that Westerners have attempted to "understand India through their own cultural and intellectual inheritance."

Admitting that his anthology tells us "as much about the traveler as the world he describes," Mishra identifies the world's mental picture of India with "a variety of assumptions and prejudices whose history goes back to Herodotus, to the earliest images of India in the West."

This is an India, therefore, very much in the minds of its describers. These range from the obscenely self-absorbed, such as Allen Ginsberg, to the idealistic, such as Herman Hesse, to the philosophically disgusted, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, to practitioners of travel journalism, such as Robyn Davidson and Paul Theroux. Although Mishra might have thinned out some of the selections, on the whole they form a compelling story, ranging over two centuries, about the various ways Westerners have looked at India as either an answer to or a confirmation of their most haunting fears.

Were this all, though, one might consider this volume primarily of Western interest. But the best of Mishra's selections do more than react to India from a Western perspective. The contributions of Mark Twain and Andre Malraux reveal the Westerner learning to appreciate that there are mysteries at the bottom of this great civilization, even if he cannot understand them. In viewing a foreign land as alien as India is to the European, such a traveler's sight evolves with what he sees; this seems the meaning of taking "India in mind."