Items

• De worgers van Kali (The stranglers of Kali)
  A translation of a 20th-century Dutch newspaper article on the thugs or stranglers-cum-robbers of India, originally published in 1968. It discusses thuggee as a violent form of worship of Kali, which was a downside of a religion where female deities were (and are still) worshipped.
• Obrázky z Bengálska (Pictures from Bengal)
  The text is a translation of excerpts from a work by the Czech scholar and writer Milada Ganguli, where she relates her experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943, during which she worked as a volunteer. Née Milada Sýkorová, the author left Czechoslovakia for India in 1939, accompanied by her Bengali husband, and passed away in Calcutta in 2000.
• Voyage dans l’Inde Anglaise (Journey into British India)
  A translation of excerpts from a late-19th-century French travelogue by the prolific writer J. J. E. Roy. The text relates his observations on religion, caste, and social life in different parts of India and among different groups, which he explicitly describes from a British point of view.
• Reizen in eenen Palaquin (Travels in a Palanquin)
  A translation of an excerpt from a Dutch 18th-century travel account by the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) clerk and merchant Jacob Haafner, an early critic of colonialism and celebrated travel writer in the early 19th century. The text contains his observations on the famine of 1782 that shook the Madras Presidency and, in Haafner’s eyes, illustrated the inhumanity and barbarism of the British in India.
• Letter by GIC (Ostend Company) Ambassador Jacques-André Cobbé to the Marquis de Prié, Hughli, 1 September 1723
  A translation of an early-18th-century letter written in French by a diplomat and emissary of the Ostend Company, a chartered trading company established under the auspices of the Holy Roman Empire in the Austrian Netherlands. The letter illustrates the dismissive attitude of its author towards the people he encountered in Bengal; behaving like a pompous general rather than a negotiator, Cobbé provoked a local conflict in which he lost his life.
• Excerpts from the manuscript diary of GIC (Ostend Company) Ambassador Jacques-André Cobbé, Bengal, 1723-1724
  A translation of excerpts from a diary written in French by J.-A. Cobbé, a diplomat and emissary of the Ostend Company, a chartered trading company established in the Austrian Netherlands. The translated excerpts from this unpublished manuscript focus on aspects of ‘heathen religion’, the deity Krishna, and the ‘faqirs’ encountered in India.