Beatrice Pitney Lamb (1904 - ) Author of several books including India: A World in Transition. She was Editor of the United Nations News for several years and has written and lectured extensively on Indian affairs. Beatrice Lamb first visited India in 1949 on an assignment for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mrs. Lamb saw the many-hued soul of India revealed through its people, living, working and worshipping.
She has noted:
"In addition to the still visible past glories of art and architecture, the wonderful ancient literature, and other cultural achievements of which educated Indians are justly proud, the Indian past includes another type of glory most tantalizing to the Indians of today - prolonged material prosperity. For well over a millennium and a half, the Indian subcontinent may have been the richest area in the world. As early as the first century A.D. a statesman in ancient Rome wrote in worried vein about the squandering of Roman wealth on Indian luxuries.....Although direct relations between Europe and India were cut off by the Arabs in the Middle Ages, the legend of the wealth of the "Indies" continued to grip Western minds. The power of this legend caused Columbus in 1492 to take his dangerous journey westward across the Atlantic, seeking to re-establish direct contact with India. As late as the 18th century, British observers were repeatedly struck by the material prosperity of the land they were beginning to conquer."
(source: India: A World in Transition - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb p. 19 and 358).
"In India I have found great beauty of a kind far too rare in the United States. Instead of the hard, taut, anxious faces, so common in America, I have seen many there that were calm, open, untroubled, serene. I have seen dignity and grace of movement derived not from training but from inner peace and wholeness."
(source: Why India? - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb).
"Recently, increasing numbers of Westerners in revolt against what they have found to be the shallow, gadget-dominated, spiritually empty civilization of the West have turned to "Hinduism" in search of greater meaning or purpose in life. There is no doubt that the great Hindu tradition offers profound spiritual insights, as well as techniques for attaining self-realization, detachment, and even ecstasy."
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"Recently, increasing numbers of Westerners in revolt against what they have found to be the shallow, gadget-dominated, spiritually empty civilization of the West have turned to "Hinduism" in search of greater meaning or purpose in life. There is no doubt that the great Hindu tradition offers profound spiritual insights, as well as techniques for attaining self-realization, detachment, and even ecstasy."
(source: India: A World in Transition - By Beatrice Pitney Lamb p. 19 and 358).