Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500 - 1800

Europe's India tracks the changing place of India in the European imagination over three centuries, by looking closely at a varied cast of actors and sites of interaction, from ports and coastal enclaves to inland courts. The opening of the Cape Route by Vasco da Gama in 1498 created a new set of conditions for dealings between Europe and India (and Asia more generally). In the decades that followed, many different Europeans - traders, military men, missionaries and others - came to India, and produced a set of images regarding the sub-continent that left a deep imprint on the European imagination. Initially, the Europeans were relatively minor actors on the fringes of India, but over time they came to occupy a situation of power, especially after about 1750. The particular strength of this book is its close examination of a number of individual agents, acting both within the European empires, and at their fringes. Though the central axis is that between Europe and India, this is equally a larger exercise in a global and connected history of the early modern world.--

When Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought. Europe's India tracks Europeans' changing ideas of India over the entire early modern period. Sanjay Subrahmanyam brings his expertise and erudition to bear in exploring the connection between European representations of India and the fascination with collecting Indian texts and objects that took root in the sixteenth century. European notions of India's history, geography, politics, and religion were strongly shaped by the manuscripts, paintings, and artifacts—both precious and prosaic—that found their way into Western hands. Subrahmanyam rejects the opposition between "true" knowledge of India and the self-serving fantasies of European Orientalists. Instead, he shows how knowledge must always be understood in relation to the concrete circumstances of its production. Europe's India is as much about how the East came to be understood by the West as it is about how India shaped Europe's ideas concerning art, language, religion, and commerce.

Introduction: Before and beyond "orientalism" -- On the Indo-Portuguese moment -- The question of "Indian religion" -- Of co-production: the case of James Fraser, 1730-50 -- The transition to colonial knowledge -- By way of conclusion: India's Europe