Voyage, Mission, Traduction. Les mécanismes de rencontre culturelle entre l'Inde et la Suisse (1870-1970)

By assuming that contacts and travels are modal points of contemporary history, my research proposes to examine some specific cases and itineraries of the Indo-Swiss encounter in the perspective of “connected history”. More specifically, the project focuses on a repertoire of social roles (traveller, missionary, go-between, etc.) from India as well as from Switzerland, as well as a corpus of major texts dealing with the direct and prolonged experience of “alterity”. These transcultural lives are described and analysed within and outside of “contact zones”. Well-known examples include the famous Swiss traveller Ella Maillart who spent five years in India, or the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore who came to Switzerland many times to meet Romain Rolland. In fact, transcultural biography refers to lives extended over different and distant cultural spaces, times, and patterns of practice. It is a question of redrawing these singular routes (missionaries or travellers) and highlighting mechanisms and cultural transfers resulting from their encounters with another cultural environment. The aim of such research is firstly the exploration of an unknown part of Swiss History. Secondly, it is question of being interested in the mechanisms observed in various examples of encounters.