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Fleeting Images from India This is a diplomat-researcher’s account of the first impressions of India upon landing in Bombay in the 1930s. This is a diplomat-researcher’s account of their 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.
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The Prologue of Long Nose the necromancer to the comedy ‘Dundo Maroje’ Long Nose’s Prologue serves as an introduction to the comedy ‘Uncle Maroje’ (Dundo Maroje) by the Dalmatian playwright Marin Držić (Marino Darsa), which was first put on stage at Dubrovnik in 1551. In the prologue India is imagined as a land of magic, that can only be reached through magic. At the same time it is depicted as an earthly paradise, a country of everlasting spring, in which no one ever suffers any hardship, and in which like in so many protosocialist utopias of its time, the words ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ are unknown. Everything is shared with everyone, and all people are equal. This perfect harmony of life is, however, thrown off balance by greedy magicians coming from outside and by the country’s women, who ask the former to bring to life the effigies they brought along. Thus carnivalesque chaos and fun, the essence of comedy, take hold of the earthly paradise.
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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.
