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Lead book review

The phoney mystics who fooled the West

Many suspect mystics have exploited naive westerners in search of spiritual enlightenment over the past century, Philip Hensher discovers

2 September 2023

9:00 AM

2 September 2023

9:00 AM

The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West Mick Brown

Hurst, pp.400, 25

In recent years when we’ve talked about the relations between India and the West, we’ve gone back to stressing the impossibility of interchange. A hundred years ago, E.M. Forster ended A Passage to India with the certainty that Aziz and Fielding could not be friends. Forster thought things would be different after Indian independence, but the spectres of cultural appropriation and the assertion of ongoing imperialist guilt have discouraged equal exchange.

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