Finding India

A British doctor's experiences and reflections on independent, post-colonial India over 50 years and the nation's continuing influence on contemporary British life and culture.

Finding India is an exploration of the development of independent, democratic India over the last fifty years through the eyes of an English doctor. During this journey, which was driven by study and work, not travel or tourism, the author is led into the pressing issues of the day – politics, health, education and the economy and latterly into the fiction, film and fine art inspired by this ancient nation as it re-emerges in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Finding India begins and ends in an isolated mission hospital in an impoverished village in South India as man took his first intrepid steps on the moon and ends as India declares itself as one of the fastest growing world economies, a leader in information technology and manufacturing, and a nuclear power with its own space exploration programme. In Finding India we meet some remarkable people: dedicated Indian surgeons struggling to do the best they can with limited resources; the temple barbers of Tirupathi; Aunty Doll and her Anglo-Indian family in Bangalore; and Billy Cameron the Scottish tea planter in Kerala.

Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson (their first performance together since the film, Brief Encounter) join us as they film Paul Scott’s Staying On for Granada Television and the Maharajas of Jubbal, Patiala, Jodhpur and Dewas Senior make their entrances and their exits. We meet the distinguished Singh family in New Delhi, who over several generations were responsible for the construction of India’s new capital city; we indulge a Francophile restauranteur in Pondicherry; we are kept waiting by Ravi Shankar and his sitar in Calcutta; and then at last we return to the mission hospital to note the changes over more than 40 years.

Finding India is a personal story that is more about people than places and aspires to have a veracity and an honesty that arises from a lifetime of direct experience.

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