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.
• Delhi: The Last Capital of the Turkish Rulers
  Translation of a major Turkish journalist and politician’s report of his sojourn in Delhi.
• Brief aus Chochinchina (Letter from Cochin in India)
  A letter sent from Cochin in India, dated 1580, written by an anonymous author and addressed to a mr. Adelgais, probably Hans Adelgais, the factor of the famous Fugger company in Antwerp, Cologne, and later in Augsburg and Frankfurt. The letter relates the journey from Lisbon to India and discusses practical issues and aspects of a European trader’s life in India, but also makes claims about the local religion and customs.
• Im fernen Osten: Reisen des Grafen Béla Széchenyi in Indien, Japan, China, Tibet und Birma in den Jahren 1877-1880 (In the Far East: Count Béla Széchenyi's travels in India, Japan, China, Tibet, and Burma in the years 1877-1880)
  Description of an Austrio-Hungarian scientific mission under the leadership of Graf Béla Széchenyi in the 1870s, by steamship from Trieste to Bombay (and later onwards towards China and Japan) described and written by Gustav Kreitner based on his own observations, including his own illustrations/woodcuts. His description is focused on local life, particularly monuments and perceived ‘religions’.