Discovering Newly Independent India: A Young Woman’s Adventure

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A young Sydneysider in London, Lenore Blackwood, was getting work as an actress, pulling beers to pay the rent, and reading about Gandhi, Nehru, Menon and the very new Republic of India. Before the Hippie Trail opened, before Westerners in serious numbers heard the spiritual song of the ashram, or the material one of getting a foothold in the world’s second biggest market, Lenore wanted to go where very few Westerners went.

For seven months in the 1950s she crossed the new nation from the Himalayas to Kerala and independent Ceylon. She visited cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Benares, cities whose names were already becoming extinct on the lips of the world. The diarist joined pilgrims to see the icy lingam of Shiva, one of the most arduous pilgrimages on Earth. She sought out be-by-herself walks through nature to see art: through exotic acacias and abandoned garden flowers, an elephant mother-and-infant’s bath time, climbed to high places, and on to temples to rival those of Athens or Rome, and where the rulers’ respect for the sculptors’ trade surpassed them both. Welcome to the wonder Lenore Blackwood felt.

Yet most of this book is about people she met. Prem and his family stand out, then and for life thereafter.

This is a book for Westerners who find the sub-continent and its people fascinating, and for the Indian diaspora.