Research Overview
The ESIND COST Action focuses on five central questions guiding the network’s research:
Question 1
Which were the various ideas and images that emerged in the representations of India circulating in different regions of modern Europe?
Q1
Question 2
Did a body of standard representations gain increasing dominance in these different regions and, if yes, on which processes and mechanisms did it draw to do so?
Q2
Question 3
Which internal variation is present in European descriptions and depictions of India and which alternative ways of looking at Indian people and society emerged in Europe-India contact zones?
Q3
Question 4
Which impacts have the different types of representations had on encounters between Europeans and Indians from the early modern era until today?
Q4
Question 5
How could certain Europeans move beyond the constraints of a shared discourse and develop very different experiences and descriptions of India and its people?
Q5
By building an international network of researchers dedicated to the study of European representations of India and their role in Europe-India encounters, ESIND will address these questions, thus going beyond the current state of the art in four ways:
The focus will be on European regions whose sources concerning India remain under-examined as compared to the extensively studied British, French, and German sources. This includes authors and accounts from Central and Eastern Europe – Bulgarian, Baltic, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian… – but also lesser-known sources from Western and Southern Europe including from Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Low Countries, Norway, Portugal, and Spain. ESIND will make important excerpts from these sources available to the international research and teaching communities by creating a reservoir of resources and data on European representations of, and encounters with, India from many different parts of Europe. Sources and excerpts will be translated from Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and other languages into English, annotated, and published on the ESIND digital platform. Together with a selection of visual images and multimedia modules, these will form a new, publicly available set of resources for research and teaching on encounters between Europe and India.
i.
A large-scale comparative study across languages and regions requires investigations into a vast and diverse collection of European sources. Key questions can only be tackled at this scale. That is, to examine the process whereby representations of India were developed and disseminated and gained dominance in Europe, ESIND needs to involve researchers who study this process in different historical periods and in local sources, authors, and various types of texts and media across Europe. Only together can they figure out which variegated ideas about Indian culture and society circulated in the societies of the European continent. Only through comparative studies can they determine if ideas were shared in ‘pan-European’ fashion – irrespective of the linguistic, ethnic, political, or societal backgrounds of authors and their readers.
ii.
ESIND will pay close attention to Europe-India contact zones and to authors who had extensive experience there and developed alternative ideas about Indian people, customs, and cultural traditions, often ‘dissenting’ from standard accounts that emerged in Europe. Typically, these persons had close ties with India and its diverse communities, living there for years. Some examples: the Dutch-German Jacob Haafner, whose reports of his life in 18th-century India offer major criticism of colonial rule; Dimitrios Galanos from Greece, who spent 47 years in India translating Sanskrit texts; Milada Ganguli, a Czech scholar who married into Rabindranath Tagore’s family in the early 1940s and spent the rest of her life in India; etc. While the network’s main focus will be on European representations, its emphasis on contact zones will also enable researchers to examine how Indians responded to European ways of representing them and explore the symmetrical issue of how Indians characterized Europeans in these encounters.
iii.
By investigating European representations of India, ESIND aims to open up new routes for studying Europeans and their cultural experiences. When one person describes another, the resulting description also tells us ‘something’ about the describer. The same holds at the level of descriptions provided by members of a particular society or culture. If many Europeans have described another cultural world (the Indian) in such a way that the ensuing descriptions exhibit shared patterns, then we can examine the cultural conditions under which those descriptive patterns are generated. Since the patterns appear to reflect a structured experience shared by the describers, we can study the latter’s culture(s) through the medium of their descriptions of India. In this sense, to study European accounts of India is to initiate a process of understanding Europe and its cultural developments from a distinct angle. Such research calls for close cooperation between experts on European culture and history and experts on Indian culture and history.
iv.