Other Orientalisms analyses different forms of knowledge about India through the circulation of people, ideas, information, images and objects between Florence and Bombay through the last decades of the nineteenth century. During this period, Florence became a centre of studies on India, organizing and promoting exhibitions, museums, journals, and international conferences. Based on the relationship between two Indianists – the Italian Angelo de Gubernatis, professor of Sanskrit in Florence, and the Goan historian José Gerson da Cunha, doctor and historian in Bombay – this book reveals an India created in different places and manifested by multiple voices.

By being marginal to the main European colonial metropolis, the institutional, intellectual and visual experience of Florentine Orientalism enriches the debate on power and colonial knowledge that has been very much at the centre of the social sciences in the last decades.

Likewise, by exploring the intellectual world of Bombay in the second half of the nineteenth century, made up of people from a variety of cultural, national and religious backgrounds, this book contributes to the wider cultural history of colonial India.

By combining fascinating unpublished materials of this period, with a deep analysis embedded in contemporary historiographical approaches such as European and India encounters in a colonial context; the debate on “orientalism” initiated by Edward W. Said, or the global circulation of knowledge, people and objects, this books provides new insights into different fields.