Finding India

Synopsis

Finding India reflects on the development of independent, democratic India over the first fifty years of its independence through the eyes of an English doctor, who focuses more on people than on the place, and shares revealing personal experiences of colonialism, poverty, and caste.

Driven by study and work, not travel or tourism, Michael Farthing is led into the pressing issues of the day—politics, health, education, and the economy – and, subsequently, fiction, film, and fine art inspired by the nation as it re-emerges in the modern world weighed down but also inspired by cultures going back not only for centuries but for millennia.

The story begins in an isolated mission hospital in an impoverished village in South India as humans take their first intrepid steps on the moon. The story ends more than forty years later, in the same hospital, when India had become one of the fastest growing world economies, a leader in information technology and manufacturing, and a nuclear power with its own space exploration program.

A deeply personal story spanning half a century, Finding India includes 125 illustrations, and is an amateur’s attempt to come to terms with India by gazing back in time.