Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 8/2018, S. 79-109 © Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ISBN: 978-3-86004-337-0 New Education, Indophilia and Women’s Activism: Indo-German Entanglements, 1920s to 1940s ELIJA HORN
[email protected] KEYWORDS: NEW EDUCATION, ENCOUNTER, WOMEN MOVEMENT, INDOPHILIA, REFORMPÄDAGOGIK 79 1 Introduction In this paper, I examine Indo-German encounters in the field of international New Education during the 1920s until 1940s. My focus lies on how the Germans constructed India and Indians as different, i.e. as "the Other", and on the resulting power relations that materialised in those Indo-German encounters. The source material consists of published and unpublished writings by six German and Austrian female New Educationists who documented their time in India. Besides descriptions of how they experienced India, all of them addressed education and issues that were also discussed in the contemporary women’s movements. In my earlier research, I have concentrated on the question of how Orient- alism materialised within Indo-German encounters in the field of international New Education and concluded that no exchange of educational ideas on equal terms can be detected from the sources (Horn 2018). Focusing on Saidian Orientalism, the analysis of how power asymmetries between Europe and India were reproduced necessarily had to be the dominant perspective. Speaking of entanglements, however, enables to consider exchange without the prerequisite of equality—while not neglecting asymmetries: Within a common frame of reference—like the transnational sphere of international New Education at the beginning of the twentieth century1—the reciprocity of transfer processes that FOCUS brought about Orientalism comes into view (Pernau 2011: 56-60).