India Through a Traveller's Eyes

The purpose of Pearl S. Buck's visit

Pearl S. Buck, the celebrated American author of The Good Earth and a Nobel laureate, shares her deep, lifelong connection with India, which had always formed the background of her life through family stories and her reading of Buddhist texts. Unlike tourist-travelers who visit India solely to admire historical monuments like the Taj Mahal or the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri, Buck's visit had a much deeper, human purpose: she travelled specifically to meet two groups who she believed held the key to the nation's soul, the young intellectuals in the cities and the vast peasantry in the villages.

The anguish of the young intellectuals

In the cities Buck met groups of highly educated, passionate young Indian intellectuals whom she found deeply restless, embittered and frustrated. Under British colonial rule the only employment open to educated Indians was the extremely limited and subordinate Civil Service, leaving thousands of cultured, brilliant young minds jobless, with no outlet for their creative and intellectual energies.

This systemic oppression turned their hearts against the British. Buck explains that when the Second World War broke out, these intellectuals made a conscious, unified decision to withhold their support from the British war effort, demanding complete and immediate national independence instead.

The real indictment of colonialism in the villages

While she observed 'rot at the top' in the cities, Buck found the true, devastating indictment of British colonialism in the miserable Indian villages. She was deeply shocked by the extreme poverty, which she found far worse than anything she had ever seen in China. Under British administration, the average life span of an Indian was a tragic twenty-seven years.

Buck was deeply moved and saddened by the sight of the village children, tiny, thin, big-bellied infants with huge, sad, dark eyes that seemed to silently accuse the world of their suffering.

Indian family life and reverence for age

Despite the crushing poverty, Buck's narrative is filled with admiration for the innate nobility, cleanliness and rich culture of the Indian people. She praises the structure of the Indian joint family, highlighting the deep, universal reverence shown toward age, experience and wisdom.

She recounts a visit to a modern, educated village family where she was treated to country fare served on fresh green banana leaves instead of metal plates. The active master of the house was a younger brother, while the eldest brother lay paralyzed on a bed inside a clean wire-netting cage in the yard. Despite his helplessness, this eldest brother was treated as a saint and a wise man; the villagers gathered around his cage daily as he lay on his back, listening to their problems and offering wise counsel.

The omnipresence of religion

Buck concludes by reflecting on the spiritual nature of the country, noting that religion is ever-present in Indian life, manifesting in both its best aspects (tolerance, peace and hospitality) and its worst (fanaticism and superstition). She notes that her book Come, My Beloved was written against this rich Indian background to explore the universal human search for God. For Buck, the true beauty of India lay not in its ancient stone monuments, but in the unyielding resilience, hospitality and spiritual depth of its people.