The past weeks have confirmed that India is becoming more important than ever to Europe. When traditional alliances prove unreliable, we are bound to explore new routes and levels of cooperation with dependable partners. After a recent visit to Delhi by its President and College of Commissioners, the European Commission emphasized the importance of intensifying the cooperation between India and Europe and raising the partnership to an unprecedented level, including an ambitious Free Trade Agreement and the building of an India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). When President Macron hosted Prime Minister Modi last February, he explicitly presented this visit as the fostering of a relationship that offers an alternative to the great power rivalries dividing our planet; the Spanish and Indian governments also announced that 2026 will become a joint Spain-India year. Across Europe’s nations and regions, one bilateral agreement and economic mission to India follows the other, accompanied by growing calls for a transformation of their India strategy.
In these new circumstances, it is crucial not to be guided by old stereotypes and stale clichés concerning India and its people. Yet, when today’s Europeans wish to learn about Indian culture and society, they confront an obstacle: a centuries-old body of ideas with roots in the early modern and colonial eras, which has often constrained rather than enabled relations. Surmounting such an obstacle requires that we gain insight into its nature and scope, into the crystallization and foundations of this body of ideas, its hold onto our minds, and alternatives available to us. That is precisely what the COST Action Europe’s Representations of India: Texts, Images, and Encounters (ESIND) sets out to do.
There has never been one European idea or image of India. Even though British, French, and German orientalist accounts gained dominance in late 19th-century Western Europe, we mostly remain ignorant of the many ways in which people from the various parts of Europe and the surrounding regions have viewed and described India’s people, culture, and society over the centuries. And that needs remedying. After all, the study of sources and cases from Central, Eastern, Northern, Southern, and Western Europe, from smaller countries and in lesser known languages, is crucial to understanding how European thinking concerning India took shape, which general limits are shared by it, and where we can find crucial divergences and different accounts.
In the past months, we have learned from each other about a 17th-century Icelandic sailor-cum-soldier who reported on his adventures on the Indian Subcontinent and a late 18th-century Greek scholar who spent 47 years in Kolkata and Varanasi translating Sanskrit texts into Greek, about an 18th-century Dutch-German man and a 20th-century Czech woman both of whom lived in India for decades, fell in love there, and published devastating critical accounts of British colonialism, about the Belgian Carmelites, Estonian Jesuits, Greek orthodox and Slovenian women missionaries that worked in the country during the past centuries. And all of this is but the beginning.
Given that researchers from 34 countries have now joined ESIND, we are bound to discover much more through joint research on the varied ideas and images of India that emerged in the many countries of Europe and the surrounding regions, from early modern times until today. Together, we will build a network of researchers with the shared aim of mapping and analysing the growth and range of these representations of India and identifying their impact on past and present intercultural encounters. We will share the results by creating a reservoir of resources, including sources and excerpts translated from Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian, and many more languages into English. And we will also partner up with non-academic partners involved in Europe-India interactions in education, business, politics, the media, and the cultural sector, including associations of Indians living and studying in European countries.
If these goals appeal to you, it is our pleasure to invite you to explore the new website of the COST Action ESIND, which we are launching today, and to join the ESIND network by becoming a participant in the Action.
Martin Fárek and Jakob De Roover
Chair and Vice-Chair of the ESIND COST Action
