Droga do Indii i z powrotem
The Passage to India and Back Again

Summary/Abstract: The article indicates transformations of the topos of the passage to India in contemporary culture, with the point of departure being its Romantic version depicted in a poem by Walt Whitman. Attention is also drawn to its characteristic application in works by Paul Brunton, Herman Hesse, and Carl Gustav Jung, followed by the use made by counterculture. The fundamental question posed by the author is: how does popular culture use the staffage of the spiritual journey? What meanings are evoked with the assistance of the passage to India topos? Literary and film examples are employed to demonstrate the mechanism of the transformation of such topics under the impact of the dissemination of therapeutic culture and its diffusion in assorted domains of life, the rationalisation of the empirical market, the reinforcement of the sphere of consumption that comprises building material for creating identity. In this manner, analysis of the topos turns into a strategy granting insight into more general cultural processes.

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