CA23144 - Europe's Representations of India: Texts, Images, and Encounters (ESIND)

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 20 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.