Danish Colonialism in India: The Encounter with Indian Society and Culture 1620-1845 Project by Esther Fihl,
Centre for Comparative Cultural Studies, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen.
- The project is part of Galathea3
The Danish colony Tranquebar was established in 1620 on the southern Coromandel Coast in India as headquarter for the Danish expansion in Asia, parallel to and following the examples of especially the Dutch and English merchants.
During the following 225 years, the Danes built up a colonial town whose special lay-out and historical buildings are still found in Tranquebar today. The present historical-anthropological research project will focus on the life which took place in and around these buildings and which in many ways can be characterized as an Indo-Danish cultural encounter.
In much of the prevailing historical research, Danish colonialism in India is related primarily to the contemporary Danish or European context of expansion and to questions mainly on the profitability of the colonial trade and the relationship between the Danish and the other European colonial powers in India.
In contrast, and as a supplement to this perspective, this research project will be an investigation of Danish colonialism in South India from the perspectives of also the pre-colonial and colonial Tamil society and culture. I want to explore the local cosmological and practical implications of the activities of the Danish-Norwegian colonial administers, traders, and tax collectors who lived in Tranquebar in the buildings which are today subject of much attention both from Danish and Indian authorities and tourists who see Tranquebar as an unique historical site in India.
Broadly speaking, my research questions will be concentrated around the topic of what were the local socio-economic and cultural conditions for the establishment of Danish colonialism in India and next, what kind of local social and cultural processes of change were initiated in the area through the colonial activities? Who were the local social agents or players welcoming the foreign merchants, and why and which kind of cosmological and practical strategies did the Indians and the Danes/Norwegians, respectively, follow in the cultural encounter? How did they establish categories of “cultural otherness” of each other in this process and how did these perceptions influence daily life in the colony? Is it possible to locate paradigmatic shifts in the European/Danish representations of India from the beginning of the 17th century until the end of the Danish colonial adventure in India in 1845?
These last research questions also relate to the creation of scientific “knowledge” on India and what contributions colonial officers, doctors, and missionaries made to different subject areas of science from the 17th to the 19 century with their, sometimes rather systematic investigations of languages, society, culture, religion, medicine, and nature in South India. The Indo-Danish cultural encounter in Tranquebar represents an important element in analysing the cultural history of early modern knowledge with regards to the world outside Europe and can productively be applied to especially the theme of the Danish Halle mission in Tranquebar which meant a great deal to the European perception and explorations of India during the 18th century.
The historical site of Tranquebar is thus not only the host of some unique colonial buildings, but was in colonial times also the scene for a unique cultural encounter.
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