Passage to India (1 Viewer)

[PolarBear]

Members of the Bombay Sappers & Miners Telegraph Section set up communication lines to connect the North-West Frontier with HQ back in Bombay.

Figures from NWF Set 124 by Wm. Hocker

 

[thebritfarmer]

Sheer brilliance Randy, Mike is gonna love this.

 

[jazzeum]

With apologies to E.M. Forster I assume

 

[PolarBear]

With apologies to E.M. Forster I assume

Yes and David Lean but ultimately Walt Whitman:

Passage to India!
Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man,
The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again.

Lo soul, the retrospect brought forward,
The old, most populous, wealthiest of earth's lands,
The streams of the Indus and the Ganges and their many affluents,
(I my shores of America walking to-day behold, resuming all,)
The tale of Alexander on his warlike marches suddenly dying,
On one side China and on the other side Persia and Arabia,
To the south the great seas and the bay of Bengal,
The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, castes,
Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender and junior Buddha,
Central and southern empires and all their belongings, possessors,
The wars of Tamerlane,the reign of Aurungzebe,
The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the
Arabs, Portuguese...

 

[Andanna]

Walt Whitman?

The guy from Camden, NJ?

Did he ever go to India?

Sorry for my ignorance.

 

[PolarBear]

Walt Whitman?

The guy from Camden, NJ?

Did he ever go to India?

Sorry for my ignorance.

In the 1st half of the 19th C American Transcendentalist intellectuals such as Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman were reading and studying Indian philosophy (e.g. Upanishads). They did not visit there but many 19th C Americans did. There is an excellent book called Yankee India that describes American contact with India at that time. The irony is that Throreau's philosophy of civil disobedience influenced Gandhi who later used it to gain India's independence from Great Britain.

 

[Andanna]

Thank you, I never took Whitman for an internationalist. I suspect I need to revise my views on him.

 

[1879fanatic]

Members of the Bombay Sappers & Miners Telegraph Section set up communication lines to connect the North-West Frontier with HQ back in Bombay.

Figures from NWF Set 124 by Wm. Hocker

Yes, I do love it... The poles, and wire, and sand, and figures, and backdrop...
Great,
Mike