Inherited Scripts: Orientalism and Mystical India, Part 2 of 3

Always Searching

When Justin Shetler disappeared into the Parvati Valley with a sadhu, he was stepping into a story that had been written long before he was born.

The mythical “India” many Western seekers carry in their heads didn’t just appear out of thin air. It’s the result of centuries of writing, painting, sermonizing, and photographing by colonizers, missionaries, and scholars. People who arrived with their own agendas and left with narratives that served them more than the people they described.

From the late 18th century onward, British Orientalists studied Sanskrit texts, Hindu philosophy, and Indian epics, not only to understand them but also to frame them for Western consumption.

When Sir William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, he fell in love with Sanskrit texts like Shakuntala. But he translated them the only way he knew how—through the lens of Greek classics and the Bible. A few decades later, James Mill wrote his History of British India without ever setting foot there, describing Indian culture as backward and despotic.

Colonial ethnographers romanticized some aspects of Indian spirituality while dismissing others as superstition. William Carey, arriving in Bengal in 1793, translated the Bible even as he condemned Hindu practices, overlooking that Christianity had already existed in India for centuries.

In the mid-19th century, British photographer Samuel Bourne lugged his huge camera into the Himalayas and produced dreamy pictures of temples, sadhus, and misty peaks. Back in London, these images confirmed for readers that India was timeless and mystical, while the realities of famine and politics were conveniently cropped out.

Two stereotypes emerged from all this: India as timeless wisdom, and India as backward chaos. Both were useful to the British Empire and beyond: one justified the “civilizing missions,” the other sold India as a curiosity cabinet.

Spirituality as a Colonial Export

Ironically, many Indian spiritual traditions gained fame in the West through the very structures of colonialism. Texts were translated, performances staged, and lectures given in London or Paris. The most marketable elements—yoga, Vedanta, certain forms of meditation—were cut from their original contexts and pasted as universal philosophies.

By 1893, Swami Vivekananda was in Chicago, dazzling audiences at the Parliament of Religions with his vision of Vedanta as a universal philosophy. A generation later, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi became a counterculture bible in California. Both men stressed the universality of their philosophies, but their Western audiences consumed them as spiritual “others.”

Meanwhile, at home, the British Raj often undermined or repressed living religious practices, such as closing temples, regulating pilgrimages, and policing gatherings, while happily exporting a purified, aestheticized version of Indian spirituality to the West.

Postcolonial but Not Post-Orientalist

Even after independence in 1947, the West’s appetite for the “mystical East” didn’t fade. It changed branding. The 1960s and 70s brought the Beatles to Rishikesh, hippies to Goa, and the counterculture’s embrace of gurus, ashrams, and psychedelic enlightenment.

The Beatles’ 1968 stay at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh turned meditation into a global craze, while hippies built whole enclaves in Goa. The empire was gone, but the Orientalist script survived, dressed in tie-dye instead of khaki.

Modern yoga studios, mindfulness apps, and wellness retreats are part of the same lineage. In 2014, the UN declared International Yoga Day, celebrating yoga as a gift from India to the world. But by then, yoga studios from Los Angeles to Berlin had already stripped away much of its religious and philosophical roots, selling it as a universal wellness fix. Another neat package, easy to consume.

The industry thrives on a spiritual shorthand: chakras, incense, sunrise chants. These aren’t inventions, but they’re often curated fragments of India, detached from the culture and society that gave them meaning.

It’s not that Western seekers shouldn’t learn from Indian traditions, but the relationship is rarely equal. When spiritual India is treated as a service economy, something to be visited, consumed, and left behind, it becomes harder to see its people as more than extras in someone else’s awakening story.

Why the Script Still Works

The old Orientalist fantasy persists because it answers a Western longing. For centuries, “the East” has been imagined as a place where modern life’s alienation can be cured, where there’s still authentic meaning to be found. India, with its visible spirituality and religions, complicated history, and contrast to Western cultures, fits the role perfectly.

That fantasy colors travel writing and Instagram posts, and it shapes the paths people take. It tells them what to look for, how to frame their experiences, and sometimes, tragically, how far they’re willing to go to live out the script.

On social media, this fantasy can swing both ways. Just as some travelers come chasing enlightenment, others build whole reels around India’s poverty, traffic, or chaos. The effect is the same: India is flattened into a caricature.

Imagine if someone filmed only Skid Row in Los Angeles and claimed it represented all of America. Every country has its shadows, yet India often gets held up as if those shadows are the whole picture. That, too, is a modern form of Orientalism: selecting what confirms a stereotype and ignoring the rest.

And that’s what makes “India Syndrome” such a slippery term. It goes beyond breakdowns in the Himalayas; it’s how the story of India, as inherited from colonialism, can seduce someone into abandoning their own reality.

Some, like Justin Shetler, vanish into that story entirely. Others return home with a few thousand photos and some harrowing stories to tell. Others collect what they believe are epiphanies, which slip into the ether after they slide back into their home’s routine. But even more don’t come at all, choosing instead to nibble on pieces of a 5,000-year-old culture that they feel will patch the void inside them. No matter how it’s done, the same script is still being performed.

The India so many Western travelers arrive seeking is rarely the India they actually encounter. Guidebooks, films, and memoirs have long trafficked in images of a timeless, mystical land—a place to be “discovered” rather than lived in. This is the shadow of Orientalism, the old habit of painting India as exotic, irrational, or spiritual in contrast to a supposedly practical, rational West.

And yet, the story isn’t that simple. Over time, many Indians themselves have adopted, adapted, and even marketed these same images. Yoga teacher training centers, curated “heritage villages,” or pricey retreats by the Ganges all cater to the longing of visitors who want to taste a certain kind of India. For some, these motifs have become a source of pride or income, often pragmatically so. For others, they remain frustrating distortions that compress the diversity and contradictions of the country.

The problem isn’t that seekers come; people have always traveled to India for learning, trade, or inspiration. The problem lies in the hunger for a single story: that India is here to provide spiritual rescue, that transformation is something to be consumed. That desire often blinds travelers to the ordinary ways people here live, worship, and endure.

Even my own experience here has been a constant negotiation with this script—resisting and repeating it, always aware it is much older than me.

Up Next: Part 3 – My time in India, and why so many white travelers chase meaning far away from home.

And if you haven’t read part 1, you can check it out here.

Note: All images from Pexels.