Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940

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.