Customer Reviews

Western Sadhus and Sannyasins in India

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The spiritual seekers of the 60's and 70's by and large travelled to Asia, found gurus, lived in ashrams, and then came home. But Marcus Allsop has tracked down those who decided to renounce their former lives and stay in India. Living as ascetics near ashrams or in the backcountry, these Westerners have been assimilated into Indian culture, yet serve as unique witnesses to the interface between the "spiritual" East and the "material" West. Each individual Marcus meets reveals a depth of character that illuminates the attraction of Indian spiritual practices to the dispossesed and the just plain curious.

The book is an short and an easy read, but with further reflection, the depth of the themes revealed herein can be worthy of a lifetime of study.

This would have been a five-star book if the typeface was more readable. Unfortunately the designer didn't realize that most of us read better with serifs. People with astigmatism: beware.

Given the fascinating topic, I really did want to like this book. Unfortunately, it suffers from several defects. First off, Mr. Allsop's writing is just plain bad: clunky and verbose, full of cliches (and even more full of grammatical errors), and peppered throughout with obscure Sanskrit words that are often not in the (rather brief) glossary at the back of the book. Second, the introductions that precede the interviews themselves are all irritatingly hagiographical. Because of an inability to distance himself from the sadhus and sannyasins he meets (he seems, quite frankly, sadhu-struck), Mr. Allsop is unable to present to the reader a flesh-and-blood person, and he fails to give the reader a tangible sense of how these people live their lives day to day and year to year in their adopted country. Third, the interviews themselves are singularly unilluminating and uninteresting: all twelve had a boilerplate quality to them. To a person, each interviewee (there are exceptions within some interviews here and there of course, but very few) came off as one-dimensional and had very little to say beyond vaporous musings about dharma and sammadhi and such, or a simplistic ragging on the West (a couple interviewees struck me as being mentally disturbed, but who had the good fortune to find a place for themselves in India). I suspect, however, that the interviews read the way they do because of the direction (or lack of it) provided by Mr. Allsop. (I imagine that the interviews would've been infinitely more interesting if, say, V.S. Naipaul were the interviewer.) Finally, the typography of the book is absolutely atrocious (as the previous reviewer also pointed out). The entire book is set in a 13/18 sans serif font. Most books are set in a 10/12 serif font (serifs, for those of you who don't know, are the little lines above and below certain letters). A sans serif font does not have these little lines and thus makes reading difficult; in fact, sans serif is almost exclusively used as a display font (a heading, for example). Furthermore, the tracking of the words (i.e., the spacing between individual letters in a word) is so tight as to make reading physically uncomfortable. As far as I can tell, this hideous font was used simply to bulk up the book (it would've been half the length if printed in a standard font). In conclusion, this book was a vanity project that was rightly turned down by mainstream publishers. Oh, that William Dalrymple could have written this book!