Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arische Weltanschauung (München: Bruckman, 1905). All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. I would like to thank Susanne Myers for her support in substantially improving their accuracy and quality. Any remaining errors are mine. 2. For background on religious pilgrimages to the Ganges, see Gavin Flood, An Introduc- tion to Hinduism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially 212– 14, which deals briefly with the Ganges and the city of Varanasi (Benares); also Steven J. Rosen, Introduction to the World’s Major Religions: Hinduism, vol. 6 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006). 3. I will use the terms Kaiserreich, Second Reich, and Wilhelmine era interchangeably, all three of which refer to the period from the coronation of Wilhelm I in 1871 to the fall of the German Empire under Wilhelm II in 1918. 4. For the early fascination with India, see Bradley L. Herling, The German Gītā: Herme- neutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought, 1778–1831 (New York: Routledge, 2006); and Nicholas Germana, The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Still useful are several older works: Leslie A. Willson, A Mythical Image: The Ideal of India in German Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964); and Jean Sedlar’s India in the Mind of Germany: Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Their Times (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982). For a broader and more master- ful account of the European encounter and fascination with Asia during the eighteenth century, see Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (München: C. H. Beck, 1998); for the long nineteenth century and specifically the German context, see Suzanne Marchand’s pathbreaking German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5. Familiarly, the first Oriental Renaissance was originally so named by Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680– 1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Marchand, in German Orientalism, identifies a second Oriental Renaissance after 1850 that intensified post- 1880. 6. Marchand, German Orientalism, 297. Marchand describes the “furor orientalis,” as con- sisting of those academics from theology, classics, art history, and of course, Orientalistik, who vigorously championed “the claims of the Orient to historical, religious, philo- sophical, and/or artistic priority (and sometimes even superiority) over and against the dominant tendency to isolate and exalt ancient civilizations conventionally hailed as special, especially Greece and Israel” (215). The Indologist’s shifting view of Greece will become an important topic in Chapter 4 of this monograph. 202 Notes 7. Ibid., 298. Marchand insightfully points out that those cultures the Germans treated with high regard tended to be places in which Germany had no colonial interests, whereas concerning those areas where the opposite was the case, such as China and the “Islamic world,” German appraisals tended to be far more critical. On China, see George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qin- gdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 8. Marchand, German Orientalism, xxxiii. 9. Those intellectuals who engaged with India were indeed frequently credentialed Indologists, yet what I refer to as India experts includes a far broader set of thinkers than those holding chairs in Indology at German universities. Academics from a broad range of fields such as philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences also felt com- pelled to say something about India. Moreover, Protestant preachers speaking from the pulpit and publishing journal essays, Catholic Jesuit missionaries reporting from the confessional frontlines in India, and avant- garde religious innovators, in some cases with little or no credentialed knowledge of the Indian subcontinent, also contributed to Germany’s knowledge making about India. Because this group defies any specific categorization other than intellectual or thinker with an opinion about India, I use such terms as India expert, pundit, guru, or authority interchangeably, yet without intending to ascribe a definitive expertise; rather, simply, in this book an India expert designates anyone who felt obliged to join the discussion of India and found a pub- lished avenue to express it. 10. The term field for Bourdieu denotes an arena in which social agents contend for symbolic capital. That is, a field could be any sphere of interest from art, religion, class, science, or politics, where stakeholders seek to distinguish themselves. See Pierre Bour- dieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984): 466– 88. 11. For Said’s reasoning for Germany’s irrelevance for his work, see Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), especially 18– 19. 12. Dorothy Figueira, to cite just one critical example particularly relevant to my work here, argues in Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) that Said’s work is built on the fallacy that all discourse is political and thus reduces all academic work on the cultural Other to a calculated power grab: “The Orientalist’s scholarly frenzy was nothing but a deliberate attempt at cultural hegemony” (3). The critical literature on Said is now massive, but one might begin with Aijaz Ahmad’s essay, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992): 159– 220. 13. Marchand, German Orientalism, xxi (italics in original). 14. The term “thick description” derives from Clifford Geertz’s seminal essay, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1993): 87– 125. 15. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond Matthew Adam- son (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991): 73. See page 39 for a more detailed description of Bourdieu’s use of the term marketplace, which can be seen as any field of human interaction where symbolic capital becomes negotiated, evaluated, and ritualized into a set of established sociocultural practices. Bourdieu is not indebted to economic theory in any significant manner but does employ economic terminology to emphasize what might be termed the “transactive” nature—the give and take—of inter- personal and intercultural interaction. Notes 203 16. Ibid., 39. In the case of Saussure’s langue and Chomsky’s generative linguistics, Bourdieu bemoans that neither account for the fact that language always exists in and functions inseparably from the social domain. See especially 43– 44. 17. Ibid., 76 (italics in original). 18. Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 49. In reference to the Wilhelmine era, Steinmetz describes each of these three classes as “rooted in a different social source of status: the modern economic bourgeoisie, based in wealth and property; the nobility, based in titles and land; and the middle-class intelligentsia or Bildungsbürgertum, based in educational culture” (49). 19. For general background on the increasing German interest in “foreign” objects of culture, see James Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Andrew Zim- merman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethno- graphic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 20. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 113 (italics in original). 21. Ibid., 89. Habitus can be defined simply as a set of social practices and rewards. See Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 51. 22. An important predecessor to Bourdieu is Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process: Socioge- netic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), which traces historically the European habitus during the medieval era to dem- onstrate how individual psychological perceptions are molded by society. 23. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 106. 24. Ibid., 117 (italics in original). Bourdieu employs the term “institution,” in the sense to constitute— that is, to designate the parameters for selection, or distinction, in the social marketplace. In the case of education, for instance, Bourdieu explains “that one has only to assemble the different senses of instituer and of institutio to form an idea of an inaugu- ral act of constitution, of foundation, indeed of the invention which, through education, leads to durable dispositions, habits and usages” (123). 25. Ibid., 81. 26. Evidence for the continuing general interest in Prussian history is the recent book by Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600– 1947 (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 27. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Ger- many, 1770– 1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing

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