Kris Manjapra: Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2014

Review Article by Jyoti Sabharwal (GRS, University of Delhi) Kris Manjapra: Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2014. In eleven chapters divided into two parts, Kris Manjapara Professor for History, at Tufts University, with intellectual elegance and precision reconstructs Indo-German intellectual, imperial, cultural and geopolitical entanglements of the past two centuries till the years after World War II. The nature of exchanges between autochthon Germans and also German speakers with Indians, is broadly divided into three sections- the early phase, roughly 1815 to 1880, when according to the author, German scholarly and scientific institutions or individuals too, lent support to the British colonial institutions; the second phase lasting till 1945 marked by intense entanglements between Indian and German speaking thinkers where the former wanted to overthrow the British Empire in India and the latter the anglocentric order; and finally the post 1945 years marked by the geopolitics of the Cold War and the emergence of the “Third World”. His main hypotheses rests on the teleological premise of Enlightenment ideas and their link to those of empire and the creation of a Eurocentric, or more precisely an anglocentric world order, which gets challenged through a bevy of intellectual networks across regions and ethnicities in the post-Enlightenment period. Using textual references from H. Stuart Hughes, Isaiah Berlin, David Lindenberg and Michel Foucault among others, the author posits that post- enlightenment developments in scholarly production at the end of the nineteenth century challenged, “often in practice if not in theme the great signifiers of nineteenth – century Western universalism: Europe, Enlightenment, and Empire.”(Manjapra p.9). The Indo- German entanglements, which form the premise of this research are located within the paradigm of the widening networks of white and coloured thinkers across regions, during this period. The four chapters of the first part of the book underpin the aforesaid position by tracing the nature of the encounters between German speakers and Indians within the dominant colonial apparatus of the British Empire. Germany’s industrial backwardness and political fragmentation are presented as prime factors for the creation of “bonds of German nationalists with the heroic civilizational discourses of British world power as a means to claim distinction for Germans as the most profound knowers of the East.”(Manjapra P.19) This section traces how, till the late nineteenth century, the scholarship of German Speaking Europeans on subjects ranging from history, comparative philology, geology, botany, education, town-planning, forestry and archaeology was applied to uphold the British colonial apparatus in India. While Friedrich Creuzer, Chair in Philology and Ancient History at Heidelberg in his Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker(1810-1812) made north India the place of origin for ancient myths of Asian and European civilizations; Georg Bühler, Lorenz Kielhorn, and Martin Haugh all associated with the Elphinstone College in Bombay, became the most important palaeographers and bibliographers in India. Georg Bühler enriched the holdings of the imperial libraries while the Bavarian brothers, Robert, Hermann, and Adolf Schlagintweit, under the aegis of the India Office brought out the voluminous Results of a Scientific Mission to India and High Asia(1861) and the Budapest born Aurel Stein published in 1892, the most extensive and scholarly rendering of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir) into English translation. Similarly, The Linguistic Survey of India, the Geological Survey of India in the 1860s and 1870s as well as Botanical Survey of India in 1864 relied heavily on German expertise. The well-known contributions of German Orientalists from Franz Bopp, Max Müller to Moritz Winternitz among others were of world spanning intellectual authority, and were directly or indirectly used to build up intellectual institutions in India and for British overseas expansion. Thus, a German Model in the colonial administration is drawn up, where “German -speakers felt a sense of distinction as intellectual contributors to an enlightened British empire.” (Manjapra p.23). However, the late nineteenth century is marked by a change in this relationship, when German scholars distanced themselves from the British and established connections with Indian nationalists. Fields of intellectual collaboration: Divided into seven chapters, the second part of the book is devoted to delineate the nature of these complex new found affinities of Indian nationalist scholars and reformers with Germans in the context of geo-political, economic and socio-cultural developments in Weltpolitik in the first half of the twentieth century. The shift in the perception of the West as anglocentric by the Bengal Renaissance thinkers to Britain becoming the symbol of oppression and economic domination by radical anticolonialists like Lala Hardayal and Virendranath Chattopadhaya besides several others, is reflected in the shifts taking place in the disparate fields of intellectual collaborations between Indians and Germans in the post enlightenment period. While Indian indologists envisioned a Germanic home the Germanophile Ashutosh Mukerjee was captivated by the Humboldtian model of the research university associated with professionalization of research, freedom to choose one’s research topics and Lehrfreiheit, the autonomy of the teacher to teach topics of their choice.” The Humboldtian model of the research university fascinated svadeśi thinkers, especially as it seemed to encourage scholarly radicalism and academic renown.”(P.48) Manjapra, through exhaustive research in intellectual history shows how quantum physics, economics, Marxist Theory, Psychoanalyses and Expressionist art forms became major fields of collaboration between the Indians and Germans to challenge British hegemony. If Meghnad Saha from East Bengal, went to work with Walther Nernst in Berlin and publicized there his “…original formulation of a new ionization equation for atomic particles that constitute the plasma around stars”(P.112-113), the Nobel Prize laureate, C.V. Raman tried to emulate the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin while he was director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, through several exchange programmes. Here the author should have avoided the rather infelicitous use of social signifiers for Meghnad Saha as “…low caste Hindu scientist…”(p.112) and “Brahmin physicist”(p.113) for C.V.Raman. In the field of economics Romesh Chunder Dutt, M.G. Ranade, D.R.Gadgil, Radhakamal Mukerjee and Zakir Husain to name just a few along with their German Speaking counterparts like Karl Knies, Bernard Harms, Bruno Hildebrandt sought alternatives to Adam Smith’s economics, especially after the Great War. Marxist epistemology was another arena of discourse antithetical to liberalism, in which uniform visions of the empire and Europe were vehemently critiqued. People like Rajani Kant Das and Ram Manohar Lohia found ideological partners in German Marxists and M.N. Roy played an important role in establishing the base of the Communist Party of India in Berlin. In the arena of geopolitics, German and Indian folk historians engaged in the “…Volksgeschichte and Shantiniketan projects, put geopolitical thinkers such as Karl Haushofer and Benoy Kumar Sarkar into discussion in Berlin, and entangled political scientists Taraknath Das and Franz Thierfelder at the Deutsche Akademie in Munich.”(P.191) Psychoanalysis too created space for interaction between German and Indians. On the basis of studies of the theories of Karl Herring, Carl Stumpf and Sigmund Freud, Girindrashekhar Bose and other Indians were able to break free from the constraints of British colonial Science to construct a modern Indian psyche and attain intellectual authority for Indians outside the imperial sphere. The last field of encounters traced in the book is that of Artistic expression. It spans from Stella Kramisch’s theories about Indian art that originated at the Shanti Niketan School of Art, Himanshu Rai and Franz Osten’s collaborations at Bombay Talkies to the exotic India Films of German directors like Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch to just name a few. Here the details of collaborations of exiles from Hitler fascism would have added in underlining the complexity of the Indo-German alliances, where India a British colony became the place of exile. Conspicuous for instance is the contribution of the Prague born, German speaking exile Willy Haas as script writer, to the cinematic success of movies of Bhavnani Studios in Bombay of the 1940s and Alex Aronson’s association with Rabindranath Tagore, at Shantineketan as a lecturer of English . Though the criticism of Enlightenment from the position of post colonial historiography may not be acceptable from contrary positions on the subject yet this erudite work from the preserve of post colonial intellectual history is a welcome addition to the prevailing discourse on Indo- German encounters. In India particularly, this work provides a fresh insight into interdisciplinary perspectives from the social sciences, going beyond the prevailing focus on the philosophical and literary moorings of Indo-German discourse analyses. .

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