Passages through India

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.