Europe and India : Collections, representations, projections, ^16th-18th centuries (4)

Nevertheless, attitudes could and did vary, with important consequences. The fourth lecture thus took a detailed look at the career and background of a single figure, the Scotsman James Fraser (1712-1754). Residing in western India for extended periods in the 1730s and 1740s, Fraser chose to apprentice with a number of Indian masters, and was thus introduced to the Indo-Persian culture of the time until he acquired a fairly good level of understanding of it. His knowledge of, and respect for, the "gentiles" (in particular the baniyās of Gujarat) was apparently much more limited. Thanks to these initiations, Fraser was able to collect a large corpus of texts and describe them clearly for European readers of the time. We could use a broad concept such as "empathy" to address a figure like Fraser, but this would no doubt be both inaccurate and overly sentimental. Instead, there is a clear awareness of the value and scholarly integrity of the intellectual traditions he encounters in Western India, even if these are neither identical nor even similar to those of his own native cultural environment.