ARTICLES
The Netherlands India Association (NIA) celebrates its 70th Anniversary in 2021.
NIA started in 1951 in Leiden, a historic town in The Netherlands and it has come a long way since then. In this jubilee year, the Executive Board of NIA considers it a great pleasure and privilege to draw attention to the manifold contributions made by prominent members of the wider Indo-Dutch community in this country to enhance and strengthen relations between the people of the Netherlands and India. Without the contributions of these people who selflessly worked in the areas of academia, business and particularly culture, NIA would not be where it is today.
The contributions made by these distinguished persons to the wider Indo-Dutch community are high-lighted with a write-up of their personal narratives and published on the special Articles page on the website and the Facebook page of NIA.
Sit back and enjoy the tales of the relationship and friendship between the peoples of India and the Netherlands in the past seven decades.
Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya – Historian of Indian Coffee House, specialist in Bengali culture Background I taught myself Dutch in Calcutta and came to the Netherlands to study the archives of the Dutch East India Company in the late 1980s. Upon my return to India, I worked at the National Library of India in Calcutta and taught at Vidyasagar University, West-Bengal. While in the Netherlands, I had met Dr. Victor van Bijlert who was then busy with his research on Buddhist epistemology. He kept on visiting India, and later we got married in 1992. Since I came to the Netherlands in 1993 to live here, I have taught briefly at the universities in Leiden and Rotterdam, but from the beginning, I have mostly been associated as a researcher with institutions like International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden) and International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam). In between, we were in Calcutta from 2000 to 2003 when I taught at Rabindra Bharati University for a year. Since 2011, I work at Gӧttingen University in Germany as a senior research fellow, and I have been commuting between the two countries since. Association, interest and activities related to the Netherlands India Association Mrs. Marianne Oort, ...
