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Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and the Post-truth Condition

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Atri Majumder1 & Gyanabati Khuraijam2

1Research Scholar, Department of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, E-mail: atri.cal@gmail.com,https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2624-5703

2Assistant Professor, Department of Management, Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Agartala, E-mail: khgyan79@yahoo.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s2n3 

Abstract

The emergence of ‘post-truth’ has dramatically affected the contemporary socio-political discourses. The blurring of the distinctions between fact and fiction has become ostensible owing to the proliferation of social media and the pivotal role played by cyberspaces in creating volatile identities. The erosion of objectivity and the creation of a Baudrillardian ‘hyperreality’ have destabilized the position of truth irrevocably. The meteoric rise of far-right populist governments across the world with their jingoistic, xenophobic and parochial brand of politics, the erasure of subjective autonomy and invasion of privacy have pushed the world to the brink of moral anarchy, devoid of ethical values and veracity. Salman Rushdie’s latest work Quichotte (2019) is a postmodern rendering of Miguel De Cervantes’ picaresque novel Don Quixote. This paper attempts to critically analyse the novel vis-à-vis the ‘post-truth condition’. The evolution of the concept of truth is traced through the ideas of various philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard and other philosophers in order to ascertain the origin and theoretical implications of ‘post-truth’. Rushdie has foregrounded the contemporary socio-political issues like the impending catastrophic consequences of climate change, the prevalent opioid crisis and the precarious position of immigrants who are often victims of racist violence. He has characteristically employed magic realism and narrative pyrotechnics in the novel. The various intertextual references, allusions to popular culture, and autobiographical traces in Quichotteare also to be explored.

Keywords: post-truth, hyperreality, socio-political issues, magic realism, popular culture, intertextuality

Reading Hypertext as Cyborg: The Case of Patchwork Girl

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Jaya Sarkar

Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, BITS Pilani (Hyderabad Campus). ORCID: 0000-0001-6851-6976. Email: jaya1sarkar@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s2n2

 Abstract

This essay examines Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson to reveal how hypertext functions like the posthuman concept of the cyborg defined by Haraway as “a condensed image of bothimagination and material reality.” For the theoretical framework, I draw on Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti’s theories of Posthumanism and cyborg subjectivity, among other Postmodernist Feminist ideas of the body and visual culture. Using these theories, my essay will answer the central question that underlies how this new revisionist and interactive medium of storytelling parodies the traditional roles of the author and the reader. Interpreting a ‘cyborg’ hypertext requires a “cyborg reader,” not only because the reader shares a posthuman connection with the narrative in terms of involving their gestures through touch and click, but also because the hypertext forces the reader to adopt a gaze that is equally modular and fragmentary. My paper argues that just like the medium of hypertext itself, the author and the reader become a part of the cyborg subjectivity.

Keywords: Posthumanism, Cyborg, Hypertext, Haraway, Patchwork Girl, Frankenstein.

Technification of Knowledge and Knowledge as Technology: the University as the Verse to Come

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Samrat Sengupta

Assistant Professor and Head, Department of English, Sammilani Mahavidyalaya. Email: samrat19802003@yahoo.co.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s2n1

 Abstract:

In the very act of pronouncing the word Uni-Versity the uni- in university motivates the versity – the becoming of the verse as memory – as the act of foregrounding knowledge and its continuity in time – the ontology as well as epistemology of culture and society. But at the same time the uni- is in conflict with the verse making – the versity. This double gesture produces the space of the university as an impossible, contingent and precarious space of learning. So the outside of the university is connected – hyperlinked to its inside space. If the university is made into a decided space of providing information and skill then it ceases to be a university. The erosion of liberal humanist university gradually being overcome by technological skill based universities announces the end of university. This paper shall talk about the transformative potentialities of the verse – the possibilities of unexpected turn that cannot be overcome by any technification and enframing. I would discuss university as a dialectics of desire for unification on one hand and the dynamic creative potentiality on the other that ceaselessly challenges and overcomes that unitary impulse. The idea of the University here has been discussed through the critical theoretical interventions in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.

Keywords: Artifactuality, Stupidity, University, Information-Power, Enframing

The Confluence in the Contemporary Art World of Literature and Postmodern Visual Arts in Jeff Vande Zande’s Landscape with Fragmented Figures

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Smriti Thakur1 & Dinesh Babu P2

1Ph. D Research Scholar, Department of English, Central University of Punjab, E-mail: mriti.thakur7@gmail.com

2Assistant Professor of English, Centre for Classical and Modern Languages, School of Languages, Literature and Culture, Central University of Punjab, E-mail: dinesh.babu@cup.edu.in

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s1n4

Abstract

The American poet, novelist and editor, Jeff Vande Zande’s Landscape with Fragmented Figures (2009) is a novel that deals with the contemporary world of art, which brings forth the intricacies of the art forms such as collage, action paintings, and drop cloths that have established a crucial distance between the present and the past world of pre-modern art. As the novel revolves around the world of postmodern visual arts and brings this subject into the literary world, it necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, which not only brings the two different academic disciplines of arts together for a critical appreciation, but also creates a new aesthetic experience in the reader, wherein visual arts is seen through the lens of literature, which helps foreground the hidden patterns and motives behind the art work, and the literary work is appreciated with a greater knowledge and understanding of  the practices in and theories of the modern and postmodern art. By looking at the symbiotic relationship between visual art and literature through the novel, this study makes an attempt to contribute to the aesthetic appreciation of the engaging confluence of postmodern visual arts and literature in the contemporary world of art. By analysing the text, the study explores the phenomena that have reduced the difference between the original and copy in the contemporary art-world wherein the artist’s aesthetic sensibility seems to derive from other sources, and thus brings into critical discourse those factors that have determined the use of parody, pastiche, irony, and collage in contemporary art forms.

Keywords: Modern-art, Postmodern-art, Visual-arts, art-novel, Aesthetic sensibility, Symbiotic relationship, Parody, Pastiche, Irony, Art Culture.

Latin American Revolutionary Poetry and Songs

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208 views

Benjamín Valdivia

University of Guanajuato (Mexico). E-mail: valdivia@ugto.mx

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n4

Latin America has been defined as a land which has no other possibilities than its future. Since the historic times gave to this part of the world the fate of being oppressed, all its past was an expectancy of a self-consciousness in search of identity. ¿What are we if our language and traditions were sacked by cruel conquerors? We were, from there, a search for being ourselves.

In any place and time, protest expressions are a common way in the battling to attain power. In many forms, protest is linked to the arts, as they are privileged vehicle for making a stand in favor of a specific political position, or to support an opposition. Arts are, in this connection, used to be subsidiary for an ideology, a set of assumed principles, or a desideratum sustained by some social group. In the other side, arts are ambiguous, or abstract, and need some amount of interpretation. The hermeneutic process applied to arts must cover all gaps and suppositions to complete, almost always in a verbal way, the idea; or to precise with words any lack of sense. Direct declarations or obvious elements give place to pamphletary pieces, but artists accept these if they can establish with certainty a militant proposition. In that, poetry is the best way for a fusion of the abstract realm of musicality with the direct phrasing of politics. In that case, the result is a song, transmitting concepts, but with the empowering of sounds. Martial rhythms, or traditional schemes already adapted in the basis of culture, can be a good option for composers having this purpose.

In Latin America, protest is almost a way of life, due to political conflicts, war, invasion, and submission, are continuous experiences from past centuries to present. Some philosophers, as we established before, think Latin America as a world region having a serious search for identity, since each stage of its past seems to be a destruction of any possibility of feel the life as a normal property of human beings; and seems, too, an expulsion from its proper self. Because of this historical feeling of not belonging, Latin America has only one stage for self-recovery or redemption: the future. Colonial oppression is a principal item whenever we search for a definition appliable. But, at the same time, we recognize a constant trend inside the heart of Latin America: revolutionary expressions inviting to build a better future or claiming for a transformation in a self-affirming way. For all of this, one can understand why exists a variety of artistic Latin American expressions aligned in this profound path to build a better life. Its revolutionary songs and poetry intent to service for that…FULL TEXT PDF>>

In Defiance of the Pandemic – The Poetic Word

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Yes, I Mean Poetry, Now!

Albrecht Classen

University of Arizona. Email: aclassen@arizona.edu

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n3

Introduction

In a certain way, COVID-19 has forced the world to wake up again and to realize how little we are in control of our own existence. We have increasingly built a world of fantasy on the basis of science and medicine over the last decades or so, but one tiny virus has now brought that house of cards down in an incredibly short period of time, and no end is in sight while I am writing these lines (July 2020). We have been asleep for far too long, dreaming of a bright future in which everything would be possible without any costs to ourselves and the earth. But we live now in the Anthropocene, the new age in which the earth is slowly but certainly getting out of control because of the human impact, while we humans also face the horrifying reality that we are surrounded by an infinite number of viruses that could all become deadly for us.[i] How do we then live under those circumstances, and where do we find ourselves now that we are coming out of these dreams?[ii]

            Throughout the centuries, if not millennia, pandemics have raked humanity, taking a huge toll each time, but then people managed somehow to pick up their previous activities and kept living, deeply shaped by the tragedy, but still, living.[iii] However, there were the dead, thousands, if not millions. And the grief, the mourning, the personal suffering, the huge questions, WHY? And, WHAT IS THE PURPOSE of it all? Love or religion did not help to prevent anything, death came and cut down so many people, good ones and bad ones, old and young, men and women, all races, all genders; the grim reaper has never made a difference; it’s only the number that matters, the more the better, at least from death’s perspective. We could almost re-write human history as a history of suffering, of tears, or pain, and question the true nature of the creature we call homo sapiens. All founders of world religions have been deeply moved by this realization and have tried, more or less successfully, to come to terms with these almost quixotic questions. If we have to die anyway, why do we live?[iv] We only need to think of the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty-Years’ War, World War I and II, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan wars, the Biafra War, the Kosovo War, the civil war in Syria, the war between Saudi-Arabia and Yemen, and countless other conflicts, and could despair over the endless aggression and hostility in the name of this or that religion, ideology, political claims, or racist notion. It almost seems a miracle that humankind has not yet annihilated itself by now, especially in light of the nuclear threat since the Cold War, a threat that has not effectively been eliminated until today, irrespective of what poets might have said about it ever since the first explosion….FULL TEXT PDF>>

[i]. Michael B. A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010); Michael G. Cordingley, Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); the current literature on this topic is legion.

[ii]. David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Posthumanities, 50 (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Reinhold Münster, “The Anthropocene, Technology and Fictional Literature,” Humanities 9(3), 56 (2020); https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030056; Gregers Andersen, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

[iii]. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green. Medieval Globe (Kalamazoo: Arc Medieval Press, 2015); John Aberth, Plagues in World History. Exploring World History (Lanham, Boulder, et al.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Pest: Die Geschichte eines Menschheitstraumas, ed. Mischa Meier (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005);  Peter C. Doherty, Pandemics. What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[iv]. In the Middle High German verse narrative, “Der arme Heinrich,” by Hartmann von Aue (ca. 1190), the protagonist is destined to die a very early death because of leprosy. A medical doctor down in Salerno, Italy, has told him, however, that if a young nubile virgin were willing to die for him, then her blood could heal him. This is, of course, impossible, but at the end, when Heinrich is awaiting his death while staying with a farmer whom he had granted numerous privileges before, the man’s young daughter learns of this miracle cure and quickly volunteers to die for him so that he could live. Although her parents are horrified about this, she develops such rhetorical skills in justifying her decision that they have to give in, as much as it grieves them deeply. Heinrich also accepts her offer, but just before the doctor is then about to cut open her body to take out her heart, the protagonist peeks through a hole in the wall and suddenly realizes the terrible misdeed that he is about to commit via the doctor. Like in an epiphany, he recognizes the spiritual beauty within and the ugly nature of his body outside, so he forgoes the sacrifice, despite her vehement protests. Amazingly, he is then miraculously healed because God, the speculator cordis (the scrutinizer of the heart), has observed that Heinrich has healed spiritually, which makes it possible for him to return to the living completely recovered in body and mind.

               When the girl discusses her decision to sacrifice herself for Heinrich, she explains: “till now worldly desires that lead to hell have not touched me. Now I thank God that in my young days he has given me the good sense to scorn this fragile life completely. I intend to surrender myself into God’s power, pure as I am now. I fear that if I get old, the sweetness of the world will draw me underfoot, as it has drawn very many whom its sweetness has duped. Then I might well be denied to God. . . . Our life and our youth are mist and dust. Our stability trembles like a leaf. He is surely a misguided fool who likes to fill himself with smoke . . . who cannot grasp this and who pursues the world; for a silk cloth is spread over the fool dung before us. He whom the splendor seduces is born for hell and has lost nothing less than both soul and body.” The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. with commentary by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 225. I have argued before that the young woman actually symbolizes Heinrich’s soul, and only when he accepts his spiritual and material side as a holistic whole, can he live fully. Albrecht Classen, “Herz und Seele in Hartmanns von Aue “Der arme Heinrich.” Der mittelalterliche Dichter als Psychologe?,” Mediaevistik 14 (2003): 7-30; id., “Utopian Space in the Countryside: Love and Marriage Between a Knight and a Peasant Girl in Medieval German Literature. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, Anonymous, ‘Dis ist von dem Heselin,’ Walther von der Vogelweide, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Late-Medieval Popular Poetry,” Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen, with the collaboration of Christopher R. Clason. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 9 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 251-79.

Editorial Introduction

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 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n1

The Rupkatha International Open Conference 2020 is the first international conference that was organized by the Rupkatha journal initiative. It is the first open-access conference organized by  a Scopus indexed journal in the Humanities in India, and indicates a logical  trajectory to Rupkatha’s growing outreach in India and South Asia and indeed all over the world. The RIOC was also organized as a collaborative event with academic support of  Dr. Priyanka Tripathy of IIT, Patna and Dr. Swayam Prabha Satpathy of the Sikhsha and Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar. We should acknowledge that the collaborative help of the IIT Patna and Sikhsha and Anusandhan have contributed to give a new dimension to the event. The most significant achievement of the Rupkatha initiative has been the participation of hundreds, if not thousands of academicians, academic aspirants and doctoral or graduate and postgraduate level students from worldwide each one of them bringing in their fresh perspectives into the event, responding to the Call for Papers by writing, reflecting and involving a transition across interdisciplinary textuality of the arts, cultures, humanities issues, politics and the environment nto  the debate which nuanced and leveraged both cotinuig and fresh ideas in the academy today. The faculty from IIT Patna and Sikhsha o Anusandhan, along with lesser involvement of faculty from various institutions and Universities all over the world, contributed to the humongous task of the management of responses to the Call for Papers and then reviewing and selecting every possible presentation after critical inquiry and observations throught that are required aspects of any good blind peer review system.

The editors of Rupkatha and the reviewers on the Rupkatha board made it possible to complete the peer review process of close to two thousand extended paper proposals within an incredibly short period of time. The entire process was of course completed in the context of a rigorous online system that was also partially mandated by the restrictions imposed onour movements and interactivity that resulted from the penetration of the novel Corona virus and the worldwide pandemia that interrupted movement, forced people to work from their individual niches, cope with the stress of different and often-extraordinary environments of work and life. Yet, under the funding resources of Rupkatha, which is a essentially a free and open access provider, the collective social effort formed a perfect example of how the large community of academicians, students, social scientists and authors came together to synchronize efforts for hosting the three day international webinar. The fees collected for defraying expenses of platform charges and open-access web hosting of the conference has created the great financial opportunity which could be exploited to conduct the proceedings of the conference in a smooth and extremely professional manner and without any slightest glitch within the entire three day period of transmission involving participation and reception of the high tech Zoom powered webinar that went streaming from the geodesic of the Eastern part of India out across the whole world with its different time-zones. The Rupkatha webinar, hosted with the distributed entanglement of an extraordinarily large community of scholars in different geodesics afforded a most remarkable experience in communication across space and time. The process suggests in what future directions satellite mediated communication is likely to affect a discussion on a global or interterrestrial space and the possibilities already inherent within that system, the breaking of frontiers of time, the collusion of space, the ability to converge on expedient foci by people who are interested in similar issues in different affordances.

The Proceedings have been published on the 17th of October 2020 and launched again on a transnational scale with an event that befittingly seeks to mark the transition of Rupkatha as a conference portal, just as much as a online open-access journal. After a decade long experience of peer-reviewed publication Rupkatha has now successfully implemented rapid issue based conference proceedings publication, maintaining its mission of independent reviews and an elevated quality of academic research. The deliberations of speakers in the inaugural event has demonstrated the possibility of hosting the most important intellectual thinkers in the academy; their willingness to join the Rupkatha movement impels that specific community to sensitise itself around a context like that of Covid. There is no doubt in our minds that the quarantine imposed by Covid does not stand as an intermission. Abdul JanMohamed’s path-breaking inaugural speech has sensitised the post-Covid academia with the death threat that is always unconsciously imposed over an underpriviledged minority in every part of the world. The walls of segregation that separate individuals from individuals needed to be broken down, first intellectually and then physically. The wall contitutes the major persuasive symbolism of  inequity in the contemporary world. The fearlessness and vision of the human being contra death, disease, slavery and war, in a world which is cowered by death remains the abiding message of the RIOC 2020.  An additional feature of this great conference was the inclusion of the social sciences within the spectrum of the conference. Social science perspectives on the social dimensions of the contemporary world has provided this bridge for the humanities in the Rupkatha conference. Few events have actually succeeded in associating social science and language analysis to the humanistic objectives that are at the core of literary and cultural studies. The only way in which the humanist ethics continues to influence the academy is to show, somewhat in the sense of the early Cartesians of the sixteenth century, that the human interest defines any kind of investigation into the psyche and its evolving character in the collective consciousness that is affecting us. I wish to thank each and all for the collaborative effort which yielded the best fruits of the RIOC 2020 and the publications of the proceedings. The success of the effort shall be carried over to future events of Rupkatha.I end with a perorative call for any similar future discourse and Rupkatha’s promise to organize people around these interests.

Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay & Tarun Tapas Mukherjee

Online Yaoi Fanfiction and Explorations of Female Desire through Sexually Exploited Male Bodies

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603 views

Shweta Basu

Ph. D Research Scholar, Department of English, Jadavpur University. E-mail: bluezy08@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s1n3

Abstract

This essay will try to trace the phenomena of rape, dub-con (dubious consent), and non-con (non consent) as literary expressions of sexual violence which find their graphic and image-laden expression in anglophoneyaoi (fiction centred upon male homoerotic relationship (s) in the Japanese anime/manga context) fanfictions (fiction written by fans based on an extant work). Through my work, I try to delve into the question of consent and the rationale of such literary acts through fan ethnography. Also there is the fiction-based otherization of the authorial self as fanfiction is written purely for the pleasure (often masturbatory) of the author and the intended and implied audience (the yaoifanbase) who, while harboring and finding pleasure in such fantasies, do not subscribe to such notions in real life nor would they enjoy to be in such situations. The essay also deals with the question of how gay men are represented in such texts and their discomfort in such representations, where their bodies and sexuality are produced and consumed as tools of entertainment for women. These erotic texts exclusively cater to the female psychosexuality, as they are produced by and for women. Since in yaoi texts no involvement of the female body per se hence the pleasure is derived from a mental correlation. The fanbase of such work is also huge, centered around the rotten girls/fujoshi culture.

Keywords: rape, dub-con, non-con, yaoi, fanfiction, fan ethnography, pornography, aesthetic beauty, male homoerotic, derivative artworks.

Art in the Digital during and after Covid: Aura and Apparatus of Online Exhibitions

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520 views

João Pedro Amorim1 & Luís Teixeira2
1Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, CCD/CITAR, pamorim@porto.ucp.pt, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0267-1276

2Universidade Católica Portuguesa, School of Arts, CCD/CITAR, lteixeira@porto.ucp.pt, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1206-4576 

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s1n2

Abstract

The public health measures that were put in place to contain COVID-19 impacted the lives of people and institutions alike. For its global impact and transformation, the pandemic has the potential to be classified as a mega-event. Such radical events have become great opportunities to the testing of new technologies and forms of organisation, (Masi, 2016) that might in the future become prevalent. The impact of the pandemic was particularly felt in the contemporary art world, as the entire cultural activity was suspended. During this period, art institutions and collectives around the world reacted by adapting and providing alternative materials online. This paper aims at reflecting upon the challenges facing the exhibition of contemporary art online. Following Boris Groys’ (2016) actualisation of Walter Benjamin, we problematise how the digital reproduction of art affects the aura of an artwork. Proposing a critique of the apparatus of digital platforms, we analyse how the digital reproduces and enhances ideological structures that overpass the whole of society. For that purpose we analyse how four different organisations (an artist-run space, an art gallery, a museum and an art biennale) have migrated their activity to online platforms. The case-studies will allow a broad understanding of the different approaches available – with some radically taking advantage of the digital environment, and others merely digitising the role taken henceforth by printed catalogues.

Keywords: reproducibility of the work of art, Art in the Digital, Aura, Contemporary Art, apparatus

The Way of the Firang: Illustrating European Social Life and Customs in Mughal Miniatures (1580 CE -1628 CE)

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Soujit Das1  & Ila Gupta2

1Assistant Professor of History of Art, Government College of Art and Craft Calcutta, West Bengal, India.

2Retired Senior Professor, Department of Architecture and Planning & Joint Faculty, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India.

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s1n1

Abstract

During the sixteenth century, along with the rise of the Mughal Empire, the social landscape of India changed drastically with the advent of the European colonial powers. In 1580 CE, following the First Jesuit Mission to the Court of Emperor Akbar, a new cross-cultural dialogue was initiated that not only impacted the socio-economic and political fabric but also the artistic productions of the time. The growing presence of the European traders, ambassadors, soldiers, and missionaries in the Mughal world also lead to several curious narratives that were widely circulated. These tales also gave birth to cultural misconceptions as the Europeans on several occasions were seen as social evils. They were often collectively addressed as Firang/Farang or ‘Franks’ and were perceived as ‘strange and wonderful people’ or ‘ajaib-o-ghara’ib’. It was during the Mughal reign when for the first time in Indian visual culture, a conscious attempt was made to document the life and customs of the European people. This paper attempts to understand how the processes of cultural alienation and Occidentalism had influenced the representation of Europeans in Mughal miniatures. It also argues how Mughal artists innovate new iconographic schemes to represent and perpetuate a sense of the ‘other’. How artists used these identity markers to establish notions of morality as well as of Islamic cultural superiority. The select illustrations also attempt to elucidate how these representations of Europeans were culturally appropriated and contributed to the Mughal ‘fantasy excursions’.

Keywords: Firang, Mughal, miniatures, Occidentalism, cross-cultural encounters

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