About

As a student, Nico Nobel became friends with an Indian boy studying at Cambridge University. This friend invited him to tour India after finishing his studies, and he accepted. In 1958 he completed a 7 month tour through India by car, nearly covering the entire country. Having made a number of new friends, he returned often for short visits. As a result, Nobel regards India as a second home, and himself as “half-Dutch and half-Indian”.

During his many stays, Nobel saw not only attractive areas of the country but also the misery in which a large portion of the population still lives. These are conditions of life that, fortunately, no longer exist in Western society. Nobel was inspired to make a difference, and began organizing charitable activities in India after his retirement. With some money of his own he founded a Charitable Trust that, after a few years, also received support from CORDAID, a large, semi-public charitable organization in the Netherlands as well as from Dutch and Indian Rotary Clubs. From 1998 to 2005, the Trust financially supported several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for charitable work to help prostitutes and their children, HIV-AIDS wards, leprosy colonies, orphanages, cataract operations for the blind, and many other important causes.

An active participant in Europe’s dialogue with India, Ludwig Pesch received the Cross of the Order of Merit conferred by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany “for his outstanding contribution to cultural relations with India”, and the Rabindranath Tagore Cultural Award (Kulturpreis) of the Indo-German Society (DIG) “in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the spread of knowledge about India’s spirit and life”.

His publications include a critically acclaimed reference work, The Oxford Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music (“the most thorough study of Carnatic music” according to historian of religions and musicologist Guy L. Beck), and articles for journals and exhibition catalogues. Find his publications on www.worldcat.org. Also visit his educational website www.aiume.org:

We design site-specific activities that enrich the lives of children, young people and adults: melodious music and captivating rhythms in which to immerse ourselves joyfully and spontaneously; with self-confidence yet always together.

Elisabeth den Otter was an active member of groups involved in indigenous peoples: Work Group Southamerican Indians and Netherlands Center for Indigenous Peoples.

From 1988 till 2003 she was Curator of the Department of Ethnomusicology of the Tropenmuseum (Royal Tropical Institute) Amsterdam. In 1996 she curated a major exhibition on puppets in Asia and Africa, where puppets and shadow figures from Andra Pradesh, Orissa, Kerala and Rajasthan were shown. In 2003, she attended a large puppet festival in New Delhi, organized by the Sangeet Natak Akademi, where 35 groups from different states performed, usually accompanied by live music. An exhibition showed many puppets and shadow figures.

I am particularly interested in Illustrated books and book illustrations, both for their artistic aspects and for the role they played in creating images of other worlds and other peoples: the “visual impression” of certain political, religious and cultural ideas. And also in the dissemination of visual knowledge of the flora, fauna and geology of newly discovered territories.

Mieke Beumer worked at the University Library of Amsterdam as

• Cataloguer of Visual resources & Non-Book materials (Centre for Documentation of Social Movements);
•  Subject Specialist for Art and Art History / Library Information Specialist;
•  Coordinator of Exhibitions; and
•  Adjunct Curator of the Artis Library, Special Collections.