An ‘India of Europe’. Stanisław Szczepanowski (1846-1900) and Galician-Indian pararells in ‘The Misery of Galicia’

Abstract

Galicia was called by its 19^th-century contemporaries ‘an India of Europe’ as it was the poorest province of Habsburg Empire. This paper presents a global history of ideas and people that connects India’s colonial experience with Eastern Europe. Although different in size, both countries were ruled from the imperial centers that considered them as ‘backward’ and in a need of the ‘civilizing mission’. Vienna German-speaking center stigmatized Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Galicia periphery as ‘barbaric East’.

My aim is to show how some ideas of ‘development’, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarity’ produced by the British to India were transferred and appropriated into in Galicia. I will critically examine those ideas through the postcolonial prism. In this regard, I will demonstrate a Galician-Indian parallel in a biography and work of Stanisław Szczepanowski who held an ambivalent position that linked British colonial experience in India with attempts to ‘civilize’ Galicia.