Age of Entanglement

Title: Age of Entanglement – German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire

Author: Kris Manjapra

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2014 (First)

ISBN: 9780674725140

Pages: 442

 

After a brief period of fraternization with the Indians, the British assumed a haughty attitude as their power consolidated in India. From the types of William Jones who learned Sanskrit and observed its proximity to European languages, it took only half a century to the Macaulays who believed that the entire classical books of India can’t fill a decent shelf in a European library. British interest in the study of India’s epistemology thus declined in inverse proportion to their grip on India as a colonial subject. The flowering of Enlightenment in Europe set up norms of universalism with a Western European perspective in which Britain played a large part due to its vast colonial outposts scattered across the globe. Germany was split into many mutually contending states at this time and had no foreign colonies. German intellectuals resented their fatherland’s position and sought to develop an Asian/Aryan connection in cultural legacy that could challenge the British. Intellectual give and take occurred between German scholars and their counterparts in India, China and Persia. This book covers the period from 1880 to 1945, when the Second World War remoulded Germany in a brand new setting. It studies the interactions, which is indicated in a stronger sense with the word ‘entanglement’ on many fields from religion, literature, politics, art and even cinema. In this period, many German and Indian intellectuals operated within shared horizons of nationalist and anti-Anglocentric politics. Kris Manjapra is a professor of history at Tufts University and has mixed African and Indian parentage.

 

The origin of German academicians’ engagement with India began soon after its opening up by British orientalists with their pioneering work on comparative philology. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, German Indologists revealed north India, in addition to ancient Greece, to be an origin point of world civilisations. In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel maintained that Sanskrit was not only within the same language family as Greek, but was the original language out of which Greek emerged. German scholars had a flair for Sanskrit as seen in the likes of Max Muller, but it must be remembered that they applied European social norms to evaluate and interpret ancient India’s societal interactions. However, the author fails to mention this crucial fact.

 

Manjapra clearly describes the upward tilt of the balance in favour of Germany by the middle of the century. After the Macaulay years in the 1830s, the British institutional commitment to orientalist scholarship was largely discontinued. Most renowned Sanskritists in mid-nineteenth century were to be found in German universities. Works of German intellectuals also involved transfer and eventual loss of precious artifacts as far as India was concerned. George Buhler obtained manuscripts from temples, monasteries or royal libraries of princely states. He added it to government collections and sent them to European universities and libraries for research. It was the time at which the area of contact widened. Not only philological or linguistic concepts, but the teams extended their surveys to ethnography and natural geography of India. In the early stages, there was a partnership between British and German scholars based on the Universalist signs of Empire, Enlightenment and Europeanness. These began to disintegrate and fall apart during the imperial competition after the unification of the German state in 1871. The partners thereby became rivals.

 

Germany did not fare well in the colonial race, so they supported anti-colonial struggle in British colonies as part of the power game in Europe. Indian nationalism surged with the partition of Bengal in 1905. In the years leading up to World War I, Germany was portrayed in Indian nationalist press as the chief geopolitical opponent of Britain and the country that could challenge its world power. Many Indians were trained in warfare and supplied with ammunition to instigate attacks against the British. At the same time, Germans in the early twentieth century used Indian Asianness in order to make themselves stand out against the old aspirational norm of ‘the European’ embodied in the image of the English gentleman. Whatever may be the pretensions, German policy towards India was self-centred on its interests in Europe. With the stabilization of German economy by mid-1920s, it integrated into European systems with British support. In this context, the Germans cooperated with British requests to expel anti-British colonial activists in Berlin. Consequently, German police suppressed the activity of Indian revolutionaries. They were also lured by British promises of providing German producers easy access to Indian markets.

 

Though the book is silent on the rise of Aryan consciousness in Germany, it observes that the popularization of orientalism created a context in which the image of the ‘Aryan’ could be used for vastly different ends by different kinds of popular and academic writers. The growing interwar field of Aryan studies generated intellectual authority for Nazi rule. The fancifulness of many of the claims made by Aryanists was the very mark of their new paradigm. Obviously, a few Indian scholars would have helped the Germans navigate the murky depths of ancient knowledge. The author terms these nationalist scholars ‘small individuals trying to defend a myth of their greatness’. The book includes several chapters of the entanglement in various fields such as politics, linguistics, science and technology, cinema, life sciences and other topics. Meghnad Saha and C V Raman were two prominent scientists among them. The most high-profile visit was in 1910 by the Crown Prince Wilhelm who visited Calcutta and met leaders of the Bengali revolutionary movement and even promised financial and artillery support for the Indian resistance movement.

 

The author does not give much attention to the growth of Nazism and its symbolic linkage to Indian icons like the Swastika. This carelessness extends to the military links to revolutionaries and Khilafat volunteers. He remarks that during World War I, the German foreign office recruited expatriate, high-profile Hindu revolutionaries to join the German war effort as propaganda consultants. This contingent of radical anti-colonial activists and ex-POWs formed the kernel of a significant Indian community in Berlin after 1918. The biographies of many major Indian nationalist figures of midcentury bear the watermark of German diaspora. Hitler, on the other hand, abhorred Indian nationalists and called them ‘fakirs’ and ‘travelling jugglers’ in Mein Kampf. With his ascent, prominent Indians were placed under house arrest and Nazis cracked down on Indian institutions. It is only in the crisis of World War II that the Nazi regime revised its India policy and decided to support Subhas Bose to destabilize Britain. During the Nazi era, Germany became less and less a terrain for actual Indian scholarly activity and more a remembered land for major work in the Kaiserreich and Weimar periods.

 

Muslim scholars were also part of the entanglement, who contributed mainly on economic thought rather than linguistics, culture or science. Aligarh faculties routinely studied in Germany for higher qualifications. Many of them returned to India for a bright career in varied fields. The book discusses three scholars who essentially shared the same outlook on all nationalist or political issues but whose trajectories diverged later in life. Zakir Husain was the wonder boy of Aligarh who enrolled for his PhD in Germany. His dissertation encapsulates all that the left-liberal-Islamist historians have been forcing down the throats of pliable students in Indian classrooms all these years. Husain argued that modern economic life of India started only with the arrival of the Mughals. Muslim rule broke the social stagnancy of Hindu village society by establishing a strong political centre and challenging local Brahmin authoritarianism (p.166). Other notables like Abdul Jabbar Kheiri and his brother Sattar Kheiri imitated these arguments for their own purposes. It is to be kept in mind that the Kheiri brothers had demanded partition of India to create an Islamic state in 1917 itself. Eventually, they ended up as the most vocal proponents of the call for Pakistan but lived on in India. The irony is that Zakir Husain went on to become the President of India!

 

Though the author is of Indian descent, his outlook is thoroughly Western and he has no idea of the ground reality of Indian intellectual movements. Apparently, he has learnt that caste rivalry is common in India and attributes this as the cause of all intellectual conflicts he comes across. The tussle between Meghnad Saha and C V Raman over the latter’s transformation of the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru into a centre for theoretical physics was a purely professional one, but Manjapra claims the animosity was due to Saha being from a lower caste and Raman a Brahmin. Likewise, all his arguments are only half-baked and based on preconceived western notions. The author seems to have no grasp over the actual facts. The book is really a burden for ordinary readers with its tiresome diction and poor structure. The book looks more like a doctoral thesis than reading material for laypeople.

 

The book is recommended only to very serious readers.

 

Rating: 2 Star