This paper focuses on the representations of colonial India in Korean newspapers and magazines between 1920 to 1940 during the Japanese colonial period. Assuming that the representation or perception of the other is constructed historically and is a k...
This paper focuses on the representations of colonial India in Korean newspapers and magazines between 1920 to 1940 during the Japanese colonial period. Assuming that the representation or perception of the other is constructed historically and is a kind of projection, I argue that the society, culture and people of India appeared recurrently in the newspapers and magazines of Korea at the time as an instrument articulating the vacillating desires and despair of Koreans colonized under the Japanese.
In this period, two seemingly contradictory forms of perceptions and receptions of Koreans to Indian society, culture and people were seen in operation. The articles and writings about India written by colonial Koreans at large tended to stress not only the historical analogies between Korea and India as oppressed and weak under colonial domination but also the cultural distances and dissimilarities of India with Korea.
Korea's close identification with India made the colonial authority in both countries appear problematic and unnatural, thus implied the illegitimacy of foreign rule. It also availed to construct India in different perspectives, supplementing and subverting in nature to the western views on India. In contrast, Koreans representation of Indian society, culture and people as inferior other or orientalization of India made to burgeon a kind of reproduction of western orientalism and a beginning of Eurocentrism in Korea.