IN SEARCH OF HER AYAH is a story of shifting emotions and responses -- lust and desire; betrayal and revenge; mystery and adventure; and love and trust -- as told through the eyes and the strokes of a paint brush of four individuals with vastly different backgrounds and perspectives. This sad and happy story is played out across the world: from the tranquil remnants of a once bustling town on the coast of Oregon, to the peaceful beauty and charm of Victoria, in the steaming heat and poverty of India, in the metaphysical world of the wonders and magic and tragedy of Tibet, in the towering Himalayas, and finally in a transplanted French chateau near Portland. "Although the main characters of Tom Morison's epic novel are fictional, they could have lived. The Oregon village of Beaver is a composite of existing coastal towns with their boisterous past. The poor throngs of India are all too real -- drivers do play chicken on the narrow roads. There is a little temple high above Gangtok where once a Buddhist artist painted wild and beautiful scenes on the interior's walls. And the tragic story of Tibet is all too well known. IN SEARCH OF HER AYAH rings true." -- Bruce Batchelor, publisher About the Author Tom Morison is an economist by training, receiving a doctorate degree from Franz Joseph University in Innsbruck, Austria. He was an investor by occupation, but his real love is writing about and painting the images from a life of travel and adventure around the world. He has written three previous books: POUNCE, a financial satire; THE GATE OF MISTS, a climbing mystery; and 13.2, a parody on aging. And now, IN SEARCH OF HER AYAH.

About the Book AN INTIMATE AND REMARKABLE STORY OF ONE WOMAN’S EXPERIENCE OF WAR. It is December 1941. Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor. After a series of victories in Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore, the Japanese are closing in on India. And the British colony must meet the demands of the war outside its borders, even as the Independence movement gathers steam within. That’s when Katherine Riddle comes home to Pipli with bruised dreams and a broken heart. Fed on gossip fuelled by rumours, the little railway colony is on edge. Nobody is immune—not even her stoic father, Terrence. Nor the always placid Ayah. And especially not the tongue-tied Indian assistant stationmaster. Set in the last years of the British Raj, this is an unusual novel about being torn between two worlds.

This book visits modernism within a comparative, gendered, and third-world framework, questioning current scholarly categorisations of modernism and reframing our conception of what constitutes modernist aesthetics. It describes the construction of modernist studies and argues that despite a range of interventions which suggest that philosophical and material articulations with the third world shaped modernism, an emphasis on modernist "universals" persists. Ramanathan argues that women and third-world authors have reshaped received notions of the modern and revised orthodox ideas on the modern aesthetic. Authors such as Bessie Head, Josiane Racine, T.Obinkaram Echewa, Raja Rao, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sembene Ousmane, Salman Rushdie, Ana Castillo, Attia Hossain, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Sahar Khalifeh, are visited in their specific cultural contexts and use some form of realism, a mode that western modernism relegates to the nineteenth century. A comparative methodology and extensive research on intersecting topics such as post-coloniality and the articulation between gender and modernist aesthetics facilitates readings of the modern in twentieth century literature that fall outside standards of western modernism. Considering the relationship between aesthetics and ideology, Ramanathan lays out a critical apparatus to enhance our understanding of the modern, thus suggesting that form is not universal, but that the history of forms, like the history of colonialism and of women, indicates very specific modalities of the modern.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.