The relationship between the East and the West interested W. B. Yeats throughout his long and variegated life and career. Of the different Easts that attracted him, India held a special place, keeping him invested in its religion and philosophy, literature and mythology. This essay will focus on his 1930s engagement with Indian religious thoughts and practices through his immersive and sustained encounter with an Indian monk Shri Purohit Swami. A study of the introductory essays that Yeats wrote for their collaborative publications alongside his own visionary thoughts reveals how he reviewed and revised some of his earlier assumptions about India and Indian spirituality in that decade. In doing so, he often draws upon Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Orientalist notions in order to subject them to a critical re-evaluation. This essay will show how his deep investment in certain aspects of Indian thought inspired Yeats to question and challenge the philosophical ethnocentrism and Eurocentric historiography of Hegel, by occasionally employing the French writer Honoré de Balzac as a mouthpiece for his alternative perspectives on the East-West relationship.
Ashim Dutta (Sat,) studied this question.