ABSTRACT
This book is devoted to the Indian discourse about the Jews, who constitute one of the country’s tiniest minorities, and about Judaism, a religion which most would not immediately associate with the subcontinent. What was specific about the otherness of the Jews with respect to India? In considering this question it may be helpful to turn to the typology of the ‘other’ offered by Todorov (1992) in his study of the conquest of America. He divided the category of the ‘other’ into three broad groups: the ‘other’ in oneself, the ‘other’ who is ‘interior’ to society (like ‘women for men, the rich for the poor, the mad for the “normal”’) or ‘exterior’ to it. This latter type of the ‘other’, whom Todorov also defines as ‘remote’, represents ‘another society which will be near or far away, depending on the case: beings which everything links to me on the cultural, moral, historical plane; or else unknown quantities, outsiders whose language and customs I do not understand’ (Todorov 1992: 3). I would suggest that in India, Jews could be described as both an ‘interior other’, the ‘other’ which was part and parcel of Indian society, and an ‘exterior’ or ‘remote other’, which belonged to a different environment. Jews are present on the subcontinent and their tiny community forms a part of the Indian population, although the paucity of the Jews in India means that only a limited number of Indians have ever had a chance to get acquainted with them in India itself. However, India’s encounter with the ‘West’ introduced its population to more sources of knowledge about the Jews and Judaism. Vis-à-vis the Indians, Jews could be even described as ‘doubly remote’, as they were often known to Indians via a ‘secondary source’ (e.g., the Bible brought by Christian missionaries, European fiction, etc.) and not as a result of a direct contact.
