Description of the Action
Europe's Representations of India: Texts, Images, and Encounters
As India and Europe are becoming increasingly important to each other as economic, political, and strategic partners, sensitive issues arise in their encounters. Today, it is crucial to gain insight into the ways in which Europeans have understood India and how this has shaped their interactions with Indians in the past and present. The Action will examine the development of Europe’s representations of India and their impact on encounters between the two regions. ESIND will create a multidisciplinary pan-European community of researchers, engaging in comparative research on the crystallization of European representations of India in many different regions and languages. The network will pay special attention to sources from Central, Eastern, and Southern European countries, which remain underexamined today, even though they are essential to understanding how European thinking concerning India took shape, which general limits are shared by it, and where we find crucial divergences. It will also focus on Europe-India contact zones and on authors with extensive experience living in India, who developed alternative ideas about its people and their cultural traditions. ESIND will build a database with a new set of public resources for research and teaching on Europe-India encounters, containing English translations of source material from more than 25 European languages and visual images from historical texts about India. The Action will thus contribute to (a) creating new knowledge in areas of fundamental research, policymaking, intercultural understanding, and education and (b) training a new generation of researchers concerned with the relations between Europe and India.
Background
India is becoming increasingly important to Europe as a strategic and economic partner
India is becoming increasingly important to Europe as a strategic and economic partner. At this juncture, where sensitive issues of intercultural understanding need to be addressed, it is crucial for Europeans not to be guided by old prejudices and stereotypes concerning India. More than ignorance, it is the presumption of knowledge about each other’s cultures and societies that creates obstacles in our relations.
While this goes both ways, it is more visibly present among Europeans since they draw on a centuries-old body of representations of India with roots in the early modern and colonial eras. Today, we urgently need to gain insight into the ways in which different regions and people of Europe have experienced and described India and how this has shaped their encounters with Indians.
Objectives
ESIND aims to
- (a) examine the representations of India that developed in lesser studied regions and countries in Central, Eastern, Southern, Northern, and Western Europe and engage in comparative research on the ways in which India has been experienced and described by people from different parts of Europe and in different historical eras,
- (b) create a European research community and formulate a shared research agenda for the study of Europe’s representations of, and encounters with, India,
- (c) train a new generation of scholars working on these themes in research and the systematic analysis and dissemination of ideas,
- (d) build a digital platform with a set of public resources for research and teaching on Europe-India encounters, including English translations of source material from more than 25 languages,
- (e) connect its academic network to a set of non-academic organizations and partners involved in Europe-India interactions in education, business, politics, the media, and the cultural sector.