Herat, Manel (2022) Europe through Indian Eyes: constructions of foreignness in Indian soldiers' letters. In: Language and Identity in Migration Contexts. Language, Migration, Identity (5). Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 185-206. ISBN 9781789978919
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
The chapter is based on a corpus of letters taken from the India Office records collections which contains extracts translated into English, of several hundred letters written by soldiers of the Indian Army serving in France and wounded in hospitals in England during the First World War. Using corpus linguistic methods, the nouns and adjectives used by Indian soldiers to construct the foreignness of Europe and Europeans are analysed on the basis of 200 extracts published in Omissi’s (1999) Indian Voices of the Great War by applying Edward Said’s (1978) notion of ‘orientalism’ in reverse to look at how Indian soldiers construct the ‘other’. This chapter examines the words used to describe exotic landscapes and exotic beings. The findings illustrate that the comparison of Europe with India leads to India
coming off badly and Europe coming off as a heavenly place with magical and kind beings.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Indian soldiers’ letters, migration, othering, foreignness, First World War |
| Faculty / Department: | Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Manel Herat |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Oct 2022 16:14 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Dec 2024 16:26 |
| URI: | https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3644 |
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