The Special Perspective From India : Books: As a Westerner and a woman, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller came to grips with the paradoxes of life while living on the subcontinent.

It was 3 a.m. on a July night in Tokyo when Elisabeth Bumiller, pregnant with her first child, finished writing the last paragraph of her book on Indian women. Her husband was asleep, the house was quiet, her mood was sad.

“ ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’ I thought. ‘It’s all over.’ The last chapter of my life with India was closed--literally.”

Yes and no. Finishing “May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons” has not broken the bond between Bumiller and India. As foreigners and writers have documented for centuries, India has a way of overwhelming those who dare to take it on, and it does not let go. Bumiller is simply one of the latest to dare.

A reporter for the Washington Post who accompanied her husband, Steven R. Weisman, to New Delhi, where he served as bureau chief for the New York Times, she lived in India for 3 1/2 years. She was overwhelmed by its poverty, grandeur and people--and she was confronted with her own humanity and feelings about being a woman. She calls “May You Be the Mother of Hundred Sons” her personal odyssey through India. (The title is an Indian blessing that Bumiller came to view as a curse.) The book chronicles her observations and exchanges with Indian women from all levels of society.

Now based in Tokyo, where Weisman is stationed with the New York Times, Bumiller, her husband and 4-month-old daughter, Madeleine, came to Los Angeles to combine a book tour with the introduction of the baby to grandparents.

A fresh-faced woman of 34, Bumiller talks with the same candor that characterizes her writing.

“Dowry burning” (setting fire to wives whose families fail to deliver sufficient dowry), wife beating, female infanticide, arranged marriages, illiteracy, work, drudgery, women as beasts of burden, abortion for sex selection among the upper classes, the tyranny of mothers-in-law, the women’s movement, women of achievement. It seems there was no aspect of India’s complex society she would not take on.

Her credentials?

“I was a party reporter for the Washington Post’s Style section!” she blurted out, laughing in incredulity.

Bumiller’s only previous exposure to extreme poverty came when she wrote a few stories on migrant farm laborers in central Florida during the year she worked for the Miami Herald; an occasional do-good stint delivering meals to the homeless in Washington; vague liberal guilt; amorphous feminist instincts. She had little knowledge of--or burning interest--in India.

Arriving at the New Delhi airport in a predawn fog in January, 1985, Bumiller writes sardonically: “I always thought it fitting that my first view of India should have extended no more than 25 feet in front of me.”

She was appalled at the pervasive poverty and ignorance; furious at the villagers who did nothing to prevent an incidence of sati , the immolation of an 18-year old widow on her husband’s funeral pyre (it will never be certain, she says, whether it was murder or suicide); unsettled by arranged marriages; and disapproving of the increasing, and crippling, importance of dowry among all the castes.

Female children are so undervalued in India that birth of a baby girl is often acknowledged in low-voiced shame. Or prevented. There are instances of female infanticide among very poor families. And among the affluent, there is a growing trend to abort female fetuses, she reports.

Bumiller came to sympathize more with the poor parents who “put to sleep” their infant daughters than with rich parents who could easily have raised them, but found too many daughters unfashionable.

She arrived at those sympathies while nevertheless accepting that it is “infinitely more cruel to murder a day-old infant than to abort a 10-week-old fetus.” And, she acknowledged, logic will not support her belief in the right to abortion versus her moral outrage at sex selection. (Her anger over sex selection led her to support Indian feminists’ demand for a ban on the “sex test” that precedes such abortion.)

But these unresolved conflicts are typical of her entire experience.

“Slowly I realized that the way Indian women live is the way the majority of women in the world spend their lives; it is Americans who are peculiar. Ultimately, I realized my journey to India was a privilege. Rather than going to the periphery, I had come to the center.” For all of that, however, she continually makes unflinching observations and passes judgments.

To do so is to ask for trouble--and Bumiller is getting it.

One Indian-born woman, American novelist Bharati Mukherjee has taken offense at “Hundred Sons.” In a review for Newsday, she delivered a broadside. The volley of accusations fired included “breathless,” “Eurocentrism,” “intrusive,” “double standard,” “Western free-choice fundamentalist.”

Mukherjee writes: “A vision of the author emerges: an earnest and intrepid notebook-waving white missionary-chronicler bringing righteous rage to bear on nasty local ways.”

Bumiller was unaware the review had run, and during an interview, took a quick, startled look at it, her face registering amazement, concession and perplexity.

“Well, I’m not devastated,” she said, putting it on the table. “It’s such a harangue. If it had been a more thoughtful piece that came to a negative conclusion, I would have been very upset.”

Nor, she said, was such a review completely unexpected. She had thought Indian women would be among her harshest critics, even though many women in India who know her personally have reacted favorably.

“For a lot of people--just the idea that I dared to do it, from an Indian woman’s point of view, is annoying,” Bumiller said. “People (in India) would say to me, ‘You’ve only lived here 3 1/2 years. How can you understand?’ It’s why I wrote from the point of view of one American woman. . . . I wrote a book I would have wanted to read before I went to India and it was not available.”

It is not coincidental, Bumiller said, that she who would focus on the status of Indian women and find the vast majority oppressed and subservient to men, came to India because of her husband.

She had wanted to be a foreign correspondent, and yet here she was following her husband so that he could be one, her own job with the Washington Post jury-rigged to fit the circumstances. Bumiller counts herself lucky that her editors, never having felt the need to have a Style writer in India, were willing, as she said, “to give it a try.” She worked as a contract writer for the paper for two years, then took a leave to write the book. (Now she has a similar arrangement for reporting from Tokyo and, in September, will resume writing for the Style section on a contract basis from there.)

Bumiller says that to a great extent she has made peace with balancing career and marriage, adding that her experiences in India certainly made her realize how important her marriage and family were to her, and to accept some of the differences between men and women.

The book may be completed, but her chapter on India is not closed.

Never having really confronted poverty before, she confronted some rich Indians, including one artist, with “how can you paint when there is all this suffering around you” questions. She was really, she said, asking it of herself. How could she--how can she--justify writing rather than direct action? There is, she knows, plenty of poverty and desperation in her own country.

“I think India did that to me: ‘Now what am I going to do?’ I don’t know. I’m not going to go live in a village. But you can’t go (into poverty) write about it, drop it. It’s an inconsistent life. I now live in Tokyo. I need to earn a living.”

Thinking out loud more than conversing, she said she hopes that writing itself is a form of response or help.

She subscribes to Indian periodicals, follows the gossip columns, reads about Indian film stars, pays a fortune for Indian food in a Tokyo restaurant. India, it seems, is in her bloodstream.

“I can’t imagine that not happening to most people,” she said, smiling in advance at the question she knew was coming next, ready with her answer.

“It’s true. Japan pales by comparison. It’s pleasant. It’s very interesting. It’s more important right now to the United States. But India was an adventure. It was many things, but it was never boring.”