Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T16:15:43.799Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Indians and Others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2021

Claude Markovits
Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
Get access

Summary

I look at Indians as guests in foreign lands and as hosts at home and the people they have met abroad or at home. The sources are mostly travel and sojourn narratives by Indians and their guests or hosts. They reveal a pattern often marked by a degree of misunderstanding that sometimes resulted in open hostility. I present a record of the main episodes of anti-Indian violence in the twentieth century, but I also focus on instances of cultural fusion and rapprochement. I contrast the capacity of most Indians for linguistic adaptation, and their propensity to jettison their own languages, with their fierce attachment to their religions and their strong reticence vis-à-vis métissage with other non-Europeans, an intriguing pattern that often resulted in a degree of alienation from other populations. As to relations with Europeans in India, I show them to be also marked by a degree of mutual hostility, easily explicable by the racist attitudes deployed by most of those Europeans. Indian xenophobia remained nevertheless on a limited scale, as hostility among different groups of India’s population was a much more massive phenomenon.

Type
Chapter
Information
India and the World
A History of Connections, c. 1750–2000
, pp. 180 - 214
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×