Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I look at Czech Orientalist discourse on India. Focusing on the work of the Indologist and diplomat Otakar Pertold I explore whether that discourse was only self-referential and directed inward, or there was a nexus between representation of India interests in India.

Paper long abstract:

Specific Orientalisms of peoples in the Central and Eastern Europe provide an important terrain to study the discursive practices of constructing East and West.

While the Saidian presentation of Orientalism pertains largely to the Great Britain and France, several studies of German Orientalism point out its specificity, namely its inward direction. Czech imagination about the Orient was largely derived from German sources but at the same time contributed to Czech opposition to the German cultural hegemony. That discursive strategy, sometimes termed self-orientalisation, construed affinity of Czechs with nations of the East. It was indeed directed inward to the domestic population.

However, the central question I pose is whether Czech Orientalist perceptions of India were only self-referential and directed inward, or there was a nexus between representation of India and commercial as well as political interests in India. And if so, than to what extent and through which channels it was conceived and made effective?

As a case study of an Indo-Czech entanglement over which such a possibility will be explored is the life and work of Otakar Pertold (1884-1965), professor of Indology, Comparative Religion, and Ethnology in Prague, the author of the first Czech textbook of Hindustani (1930) and also the first Czechoslovak Consul General to Bombay (1920-1923). His combined role of a scholar, a populariser, and a diplomat, who was in charge of political as well as economic affairs, makes for a particularly suitable case for a study of knowledge/power in the context of Czech Orientalism.