Editorial Reviews  
Amazon.com  
Pramila Jayapala rejected her indigenous Indian culture when she was a young child, having been taught and raised in Western schools and ideology. For years, Jayapala held this uncomplicated opinion: "India repressed and backward, America creative and advanced." But after working a soulless job in investment banking and marketing, she finally came to realize that "there was a woman within me, waiting to emerge, a persona that included a complexity of new images of homeland, identity, life values, and work." Eventually she left Seattle, Wash., where she had worked, to embark on a two-year pilgrimage through India. Japayala takes us on the underground tour--letting us see this complex and spiritually fascinating country through Western eyes but with a native guide. She openly questions the feminine and class restraints of India, yet somehow she never becomes self-righteous or didactic. Through this brave, unflinching voice we find a mentor for self-discovery as well as a model for how to know and question our own homelands. At its core this is a global manifesto in which Jayapala recognizes that spiritual growth is the only way to bring about social and political change. But at its heart this is a dynamic spiritual memoir as Jayapala continually returns to her personal journey, including the gripping crescendo--a miraculous story of her son's premature birth in Bombay. --Gail Hudson 
Book Description  
India is a fascinating country that is often frustratingly inaccessible to outsiders. In this book, Pramila Jayapal, an Indian-born, Western-educated woman, returns to her country of birth and gives readers an inside look at a society that is highly contradictory. She finds a people struggling to reconcile change with tradition, just as she confronts her own mixed feelings about her native land. Jayapal received a grant from the Institute of Current World Affairs to make this return to India and write about her personal experiences and her perspectives on modern India. She spent two years immersed in the life of this extraordinarily complex society. Through her vivid descriptions and uniquely bicultural and female perspective, she gives readers access to India's complex array of societal issues while allowing readers to experience India as the dynamic place it is. 

About the Author  
Pramila Jayapal was born in 1965 in Madras, India, and left the country when she was five. She grew up in Indonesia and Singapore, coming to America at the age of sixteen for college. Prior to her return to India in 1995, she was the director of an international loan and technical assistance program that worked with women and children in developing countries, including India. She has a B.A. in English Literature and Economics from Georgetown University and an MBA from Northwestern University. She lives in Seattle, Washington. 

The publisher, Seal Press , July 19, 2000 
Advance praise for Pilgrimage from the back cover: 
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Sister of My Heart: "Writing with heart and intelligence, Jayapal invites us into a unique India, one that has seldom been written about-an India at once traditional and modern, progressive and prejudicial, filled with unexpected challenges and wondrous grace. In reading this book, we begin to question our own sense of self and home, our duty to the world we live in." Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner: "Pilgrimage is a rich, beautifully narrated journey through a landscape of both geography and spirit. One is entertained, educated and transformed in Jayapal's capable hands." Terry Tempest Williams, author of Leap: "Pilgrimage is a beautiful sojourn through both the internal and external landscapes of Pramila Jayapal. Pilgrimage inspires us to understand what separates and binds us together as human beings." Paul Hawken,author of The Ecology of Commerce: "Jayapal has slipped through a looking glass and takes the reader into an India that no contemporary literature touches in the same way. The author bears the ironies of her native country lightly and gracefully as she crisscrosses the land and plumbs her roots, carefully revealing a compelling and sometimes searing search for a women's self and place." Shashi Deshpande, author of A Matter of Time: "What makes Pilgrimage unique is its almost frightening honesty, its rigorous and unsparing self-examination and its determination to eschew both sentimentalism and generalization. These qualities take it beyond a cliched quest for roots and identity, beyond a First World-Third World confrontation, even beyond an attempt to understand the true meaning of progress and development."