The German Intellectual Quest For India

On the contribution of Matthias Christian Sprengel, 1746-1803, Friedrich von Schlegel, 1772-1829, and Friedrich Max Müller, 1823-1900, German Indologists, to Indological studies.

He has presented more than a dozen papers at academic conferences in North America, Europe, and South Asia, including Harvard University, Humboldt University, Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute, and the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi, India.

August Wilhelm Schlegel proclaimed that “[i]f the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany must be considered the Orient of Europe.” How can this remarkable identification of Germany with the subjugated oriental ‘other’ be explained? In The Orient of Europe, Nicholas A. Germana explores how German thinkers, especially those associated with the Early Romantic movement, set India up as an “ideal mirror,” in which they could perceive the image of the Germany they longed for – a nation whose greatness lay not in political and military power, but in the realm of culture and the spirit. Such an image was especially important during the years of French occupation and the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. The ‘mythical image’ of India, however, underwent profound changes in the decades after 1815. The end of the Wars of Liberation and the onset of the Restoration era, led to the decline of the romantic image of India. As statist visions of German unity rose in prominence, especially in Prussia, this image of the connection between Germany and ancient India took on a new complexion. Politically volatile romantic “Indomania” gave way to a new, more acceptable, ideology – the ideology of Wissenschaft. In this book, which engages with the most recent scholarship in the rapidly emerging field of German Orientalism, Germana challenges traditional Saidian Orientalist readings of German intellectual engagement with Indian thought and literature. German romantic and humanist fascination with India, he argues, is best understood within the context of debates about the nature of ‘Germany’ and ‘Germanness’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than in connection with nascent German “colonial fantasies.”

Anticolonial struggles of the interwar epoch were haunted by the question of how to construct an educational practice for all future citizens of postcolonial states. In what ways, vanguard intellectuals asked, would citizens from diverse subaltern situations be equally enabled to participate in a nonimperial society and world? In circumstances of cultural and social crisis imposed by colonialism, these vanguards sought to refashion modern structures and technologies of public education by actively relating them to residual indigenous collective forms. In Indigenous Vanguards, Ben Conisbee Baer provides a theoretical and historical account of literary engagements with structures and representations of public teaching and learning by cultural vanguards in the colonial world from the 1920s to the 1940s. He shows how modernizing educative projects existed in complex tension with impulses to indigenize national liberation movements, and how this tension manifests as a central aspect of modernist literary practice. Offering new readings of figures such as Alain Locke, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Baer discloses the limits and openings of modernist representations as they attempt to reach below the fissures of class that produce them. Establishing unexpected connections between languages and regions, Indigenous Vanguards is the first study of modernism and colonialism that encompasses the decisive way public education transformed modernist aesthetics and vanguard politics.

How did the Bhagavadgãtà first become an object of German philosophical and philological inquiry? How were its foundational concepts initially interpreted within German intellectual circles, and what does this episode in the history of cross-cultural encounter teach us about the status of comparative philosophy today? This book addresses these questions through a careful study of the figures who read, translated and interpreted the Bhagavadgãtà around the turn of the nineteenth century in Germany: J.G. Herder, F. Majer, F. Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, W. von Humboldt, and G.W.F. Hegel. Methodologically, the study attends to the intellectual contexts and prejudices that framed the early reception of the text. But it also delves deeper by investigating the way these frameworks inflected the construction of the Bhagavadgãtà and its foundational concepts through the scholarly acts of excerpting, anthologization, and translation. Overall, the project contributes to the pluralization of Western philosophy and its history while simultaneously arguing for a continued critical alertness in cross-cultural comparison of philosophical and religious worldviews.

This book explores the ways in which colonial administrators constructed knowledge about the society and culture of India and the processes through which that knowledge has shaped past and present Indian reality.

Max Müller is often referred to as the 'father of Religious Studies', having himself coined the term 'science of religion' (or religionswissenschaft) in 1873. It was he who encouraged the comparative study of myth and ritual, and it was he who introduced the oft-quoted dictum: 'He who knows one [religion], knows none'. Though a German-born and German-educated philologist, he spent the greater part of his career at Oxford, becoming one of the most famous of the Victorian arm-chair scholars. Müller wrote extensively on Indian philosophy and Vedic religion, translated major sections of the Vedas, the Upanisads, and all of the Dhammapada, yet never visited India. To be sure, his work bears the stamp of late Nineteenth-Century sensibilities, but as artifacts of Victorian era scholarship, Müller's essays are helpful in reconstructing and comprehending the intellectual concerns of this highly enlightened though highly imperialistic age.

A history of Kantian and post-Kantian thought and of a foundational stage of German orientalism.