Europe and India : Collections, representations, projections, ^16th-18th centuries (6)

The sixth and final lecture turned the mirror the other way, to see how Europe was seen and conceived by Indians at the time. We reviewed a series of materials from the 16th^century , when the Portuguese were denounced by Muslim merchants in Kerala, to the end of the ^18th century, with the first accounts of travel to Europe written by Indo-Muslims such as Shaikh I'tisam al-Din or the famous Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. The authors of these accounts display the strange blend of fear and love (to use Partha Chatterjee's phrase) that was to characterize the political and cultural relations of the colonial era.