Items

• Note on the Missions of the Discalced Carmelites at Malabar (Notice sur les Missions des Carmes Déchaussés au Malabar)
  The author wrote this description of the Malabar region of India with the goal to obtain funding, public support, and recognition of Belgian Christian donors and churchgoers for the Belgian Carmelite mission’s efforts to convert native inhabitants of Malabar. For this goal, pamphlets and booklets (such as this one) were produced which are today kept in various repositories, as in the libraries of Carmelite cloisters in Ghent or Bruges. It details how Carmelite missionaries' conversion of the so-called ‘pagans’ or ‘heathens’ to the Christian faith worked on the Malabar Coast (and inland villages in Kerala).
• The World in Small, or the Swift Traveller: The Land of the Great Moghul (De waereld in ’t klein, of de spoedige reiziger)
  Translation of a chapter on India, or “the Land of the Great Moghul,” from an 18th-century Dutch-language compendium of the countries of the world. Drawing extensively on an English model published in the 1740s, the author aims to give a concise account of “everything useful, necessary and worth knowing” about all countries of the world. In this section, he shares with his readers what he considers worth knowing about the Indian Subcontinent and its people.
• Fleeting Images from India
  This is a Slovene diplomat-researcher’s account of the first impressions of India upon landing in Bombay in the 1930s. These chapters form part of the first secular, book-length, personal account of the subcontinent to be published by a Slovenian. Teeming with ‘facts’ and impressions related in rich, poetic language, the following excerpts reveal a mind at work that strives to make sense of things against all odds. The voice tends towards all-knowingness and the tone is a mixture of surprise, indignation, derision and, occasionally, admiration and joy.
• A Turkish Professor at Delhi Customs
  Translation of an excerpt from the Turkish-Cypriot sociologist and historian Niyazi Berkes’s “Letters from Asia,” which recounts his experiences in Delhi on the way to Aligarh Muslim University, where he was heading as a visiting professor.
• Delhi: The Last Capital of the Turkish Rulers
  Translation of a major Turkish journalist and politician’s report of his sojourn in Delhi.
• ‘Kunnen de Indiërs al lezen?’ (‘Can the Indians read yet?’)
  A translation of a Belgian newspaper article from the 1950s, which exemplifies problems in the European reporting about India from this era. Written by a well-known journalist and novelist, it is part of a series where he tells the readers about his experiences on a journey through the Subcontinent.