Mayo's Mother

THE FACE OF MOTHER INDIA--Katherine Mayo--Harper ($3.50).

The distinction of The Face of Mother India lies in its 406 photographs, covering typical Indian scenes that range from broad panoramas of the Himalayas to pictures of street fighting, of obscene idols, of corpses being burned beside the Ganges. Katherine Mayo supplies a text to accompany these views in a brief, anti-Hindu, over-simplified sketch of Indian history from the Muslim invasion of 999 A. D. to the trials of Mahatma Gandhi in 1935. Readers who do not share her passionate hatred of Hindu ways are likely to remain unimpressed by her purple prose, her tirades against native terrorists and agitators. Holding that "terrorism" in India is now devoted to the "overthrow of any non-Communist government . . . by multiplication of single murders, by mass killings," she lists a number of atrocities, suggests that Gandhi's essential purpose is the extermination of the Muslim population, ends with a fervent plea that Mohammedans may not be provoked to attack the British as a result of Hindu intrigues.

Turning from this hysterical and somewhat cryptic analysis to the photographs in the volume, readers may get an impression of an India far more serene than Katherine Mayo's words suggest. Pictures include queer ones of a holy man sitting comfortably on nails, a shot of the spiderweb suspension bridge, made of cane and rattan, that stretches 800 ft. across the Dihang River in Assam. Another holy man, dressed only in covering of thorns and spikes, is pictured twanging away cheerfully on a native banjo, while a holy woman of Benares is shown practicing devotion by staring into the sun without winking. Despite glimpses of temple prostitutes, riot victims, child wives, the gigantic temple car being pulled through the streets, the most dramatic pictures are simple landscapes of the gaunt country around Khyber Pass, inhabited only by fighting men, with troops, tanks and airplanes revolving around a crude sign that reads: "Frontier of India, Travellers Are Not Permitted to Pass."

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