India Seen Afar

A poet and a Blake and Yeats scholar, Raine set out to find the ``India of the imagination'' in the 1980s at the age of 74. Her odyssey around the subcontinent revealed an India permeated by ``a universal sense that `everything that lives is holy' '' and a simultaneous awareness of the multiple levels of experience. While she does not ignore India's ``boundless poverty'' or the spreading ``wound'' of Westernization, Raine believes that ``India has not lost her soul at the price of technology--yet.'' Woven throughout are kaleidoscopic impressions of faces and sacred spaces, of sculpture-filled caves, the healing flow of the Ganges and the disquieting works of India's modern painters. Her narrative--rhapsodic, digressive, at times effusive--contains a deep pool of wisdom, refreshingly free of stereotyped images, in touch with the eternal India. (Aug.)