Why a professor from Belgium was branded ‘anti-India’ after Delhi lecture on 18th-century Dutch text

Imagine: you are invited to a foreign university to teach about Nazi representations of the Jews. In a workshop, you analyse a pamphlet from 1933. You show that, while we are appalled at its contents today, similar stereotypes about Jews live on, so we must examine their hold on some people’s minds.

The next day a group of local professors accuse you of antisemitism. Acting as though the excerpts you quoted are your own words, they launch a campaign to brand you as “anti-Jewish”. You are banned from lecturing, investigated for antisemitism and denounced as an “anti-Jew”.

This is more or less what just happened to me. The institution was Delhi University, about a week ago. The workshop focused on European representations of India. The text was a Dutch children’s magazine from 1799 and I was cancelled for being “anti-India”.

How did I get here?

A quarter century ago I began studying under Professor SN Balagangadhara, who was developing a new research programme at Ghent University in Belgium. As a teacher, he introduced us to radical insights into our own European culture as also Indian culture. We learned how Europe’s accounts of India tell us more about Europe than they do about India. Standard stories about Hinduism and...

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