Theos-Talk Archives (October 2004 Message tt00245)

Hello Paul,

I would be interested in knowing something about the audience the Indian 
Books Centre had in mind for The Masters Revealed. My off handed guess 
is that your mini-biographies of various people in Indian history might 
have been the major appeal for them. BTW, the two Indians in our study 
group both concur that HPB is all but completely forgotten in India and 
Besant is well on her way to becoming so. They both travel to India for 
one to three months every year to visit relatives, so they are well up 
on what is going on there.

I agree with you that merely living somewhere does not by itself provide 
historical expertise. One the other hand, I'll have to give it to 
Dallas that there is also something to be said in favor of writing about 
what you are already familiar. Though you may not have made a study of 
Virginia history, I bet you know quite a lot more than you realize, and 
certainly far more than I do. Ideally, if I were to write about 
Virginia history, I would want to move there for a few years, get to 
know the people, absorb the culture, walk the streets, visit the 
monuments and sit in on the historical society meetings. I grew up and 
lived in Los Angeles for about forty years, and found in my travels that 
while everyone has heard of Los Angeles, they have some pretty funny 
notions about the culture there.

--j



kpauljohnson wrote:

> Dear Jerry,
>
> Thanks for the words of defense. Reading your post I picked up on the
> unfounded accusation that no one in India would take TMR seriously. 
> In fact, it was reprinted by a leading scholarly publisher in India in
> 1997, the Indian Books Centre in New Delhi.
>
> I've lived almost all of my 50 years in Virginia, and possess no
> qualifications whatsoever to write about Virginia history. The notion
> that residence in a place provides historical expertise about it that
> trumps "outsiders'" research is quite, well, outlandish!
>
> Been working on developing expertise in North Carolina history for
> several years, though.
>
> Paul
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