Items

• On the Affinity and Difference between the Slavs and the Indians. Excerpts from O národních písních a pověstech plemen slovanských (On National Songs and Myths of Slavic Peoples)
  In these excerpts from O národních písních a pověstech plemen slovanských (On National Songs and Myths of Slavic Peoples, 1853), Ľudovít Štúr (1815–1856), who was one of the most important figures of the Slovak national revival, claims that the pantheistic worldview appears strongly in both Indian and Slavic traditions. According to him, Indian tradition seeks union with the divine through suppressing thought, desire, emotion, and even life itself, whereas Slavic legends emphasise courage, action, self-denial, and helping others. He thus sees a fundamental affinity and difference between the Slavs and the Indians.
• 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.
• Тамо амо по Истоку (Here and There Across the East)
  The translation consists of parts of a travelogue by the Serbian doctor and academic Milan Jovanović Morski, which discusses the similarities he sees between Brahmanical and Christian practices. After getting his degree in medicine in Leipzig in 1867, Morski travelled for some time as a cruise-ship doctor for the Austrian company “Lloyd” and wrote accounts of his visits to India, China, and other Asian countries.
• 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.
• ‘Op bezoek bij een Indisch Zamindar’ (‘Visiting an Indian Zamindar’)
  A Belgian newspaper article from the 1950s reporting a visit to an Indian zamindar or landowner. It is part of an extensive series of articles, published in a colonial newspaper and written by the author Aster Berkhof who would become well-known in the subsequent decades. Like the other articles, this piece reveals much about its author’s attitudes towards a society and culture foreign to him.