With a new biographical afterword by Barnaby Rogerson

When Francis Yeats-Brown set off in 1905 to take up a commission in the British Indian Army, little did he know how deeply he would fall in love with the culture of India and her spiritual traditions. Between duties with his regiment, and enjoying the off-duty life of an officer – polo and hunting, ponies and dogs – he would disappear in search of a guru to lead him in the essentials of yoga, meditation and Hindu mysticism.

Yeats-Brown proves himself brave, funny and self-deprecating, such good company that we do not care that ultimately he never found the spiritual master he searched for, nor won the unattainable woman he desired. It is his idiosyncratic journey to establish some kind of truth, and the world he shows us on the way, that beguiles.

First published in 1930, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize of that year.

‘One of the most remarkable books in modern literature … I have known no other instance of the genuine psychological record of any intimate touch of a western mind with the mind of the East.’ Rabindrath Tagore, Spectator

‘… my Guru was neither Hindu, Muslim nor Buddhist monk. He was not even an Oriental, at any rate by place or birth or ancestry. He was an Englishman and a professional soldier.’ Lowell Thomas