Organizer: Lynn Zastoupil, Rhodes College
Chair and Discussant: Wilhelm Halbfass, University of Pennsylvania
The German intellectual encounter with South Asia has been a subject of secondary importance in recent studies of Orientalism or colonial discourses. The lion's share of attention has been devoted to the experiences of seapowers, Great Britain, France, Holland and Portugal, all of which shared an imperialist agenda, had long, and intimate experience with the people and cultures of South Asia, and produced most of the leading Orientalist scholars of the modern period. When Germans are brought into the discussion, as in leading studies such as Edward Said's Orientalism or Ronald Inden's Imagining India, the common practice is to use a few leading examples (such as the early Romantics) to establish continuities between German and other European perceptions of South Asia. Thorough exploration of the rich and diverse nature of German intellectual interest in South Asia has thus been left largely to modern German scholars whose work is seldom read on this side of the Atlantic. The barrier of language and the fact that many German intellectuals were lacking in imperial motives or expectations have worked to keep Germans at the margins of most accounts of colonial discourses.
It is the purpose of this panel to help rectify this situation by addressing some of the distinctive features of the German encounter with South Asia. The panel rejects the assumption that Germans were mere junior partners in a pan-European attempt to impose politically useful representations on the cultures of South Asia. Each of the papers explores seldom discussed aspects of the German encounter with South Asia and each suggests that the interpretation of that encounter proposed by Said, Inden and others is problematic. Gita Dharampal-Frick and Lynn Zastoupil both challenge the idea that early modern German scholars and writers, themselves subjects of a fragmented nation and dominated by nearby foreign powers, can be simply lumped together with, say, the British and French Orientalists of the nineteenth century with their clear imperialist agendas. Dharampal-Frick and Zastoupil each argue that German intellectuals had their own agendas and often possessed sympathetic views of South Asian cultures threatened by European imperialism. Eugene Irschick also challenges the views of Said and Inden, arguing that the German missionaries in South India were participants in a dialogic process whereby Germans and Tamils influenced each other's conceptions of themselves and of the Other.
Gita Dharampal-Frick, University of Freiburg and Augsburg, Germany
Citing examples from an extensive and varied corpus of sources (comprising accounts by travelers, missionaries, humanist cosmographers and baroque encyclopaedists), the paper will examine the component elements of India's image(s) as projected by early modern German reports. Vastly neglected by historical scholarship, this documentation not only promises seminal insights into Western perceptions of India in the late pre-colonial period, but also, analyzed against the backdrop of more recent ideological research, serves as a counterfoil to elucidate conceptual shifts and normative disruptions in Western interpretations of South Asian culture. By delineating the "pre-enlightened" views of Indian society, its polity and religious practices as contained in this empirically oriented literature, the paper aims at a better understanding of this transitional period in the history of the Indo-European encounter, where exotic notions are interspersed with proto-ethnographic detail. Given that colonial motives are markedly absent in these German writings, the paper will explain the multiple functions and purposes (utopian, polemical, didactic, etc.) served by this "proto-indological" reportage. Last but not least, a key feature of these historical documents that will receive special attention is their implicit acknowledgment of the relative 'coevalness' existing between pre-industrial Germany/Europe and late pre-colonial India, a diagnosis which stands in stark contrast to later hegemonic conceptions and colonial attitudes.
Eugene Irschick, University of California, Berkeley
Until recently, the interaction between western missionaries and local individuals on the southeastern coast of South Asia has been considered entirely as a one way movement. The Christian missionaries are thought to have had important, if undesirable, effects on the local culture. In this paper, I will look at the interaction between early German-speaking missionaries and local individuals in and around the Tamil seaport of Tarakambadu or Tranquebar in the first third of the 18th century. I will argue that in this period, intense cultural activity operated in both directions. I will argue that even though the missionaries became more sure in what they considered to be a superior western culture as the century progressed, in this period many missionaries were extraordinarily vulnerable and admitted the superiority of local intellectual culture over that of the west. These kinds of comparisons were a result of missionary discoveries that in many ways local people in the south Tamil coast, though they were "heathens," were more pious than the missionaries' own compatriots in various territories which were later to become Germany.
Lynn Zastoupil, Rhodes College
J. G. Herder (1744-1803) has not fared well in critical scholarship on Orientalism. Edward Said and Ronald Inden both suggest that the German writer helped pave the way for later imperialist attitudes. This conclusion is based upon little familiarity with the nature of Herder's voluminous writings (the vast majority of which are available only in German editions) since Said and Inden both rely chiefly upon secondary sources about Herder's general ideas and intellectual achievement.
I challenge this interpretation by examining a wide range of Herder's writings. I concede the Orientalist nature of Herder's ideas about China as a stagnant civilization but argue that these must be seen in the context of Herder's famous revolt against the Enlightenment, whose leading figures held a positive image of a refined and well ordered Chinese civilization. Herder challenged this favorable view of China, both by advancing negative images of an ossified Chinese culture and by propagating a positive view of South Asia as a land where the intellectual virtues of Romanticism-natural simplicity, childlike wonder, spontaneity and liveliness of expression-already existed. Herder's well-known praise for Kalidasa's Sakuntala is central to his early Romantic critique of the refined culture of the Enlightenment. The South Asian dramatist further demonstrated to Herder the vitality brought to world literature by Volkdichter (other examples were Homer, Shakespeare and Ossian) who transformed the folk songs and sayings of their respective peoples into important works of literature.
Herder's revolt against the Enlightenment also led him to direct criticisms of the intellectual foundations of contemporary European imperialism. He rejected outright the Enlightenment theory of linear societal progress and the concomitant notion that Europeans had the most advanced civilization. He criticized the brutal nature of European statecraft and empires in Latin America and South Asia, and he questioned the commercial benefits that overseas possessions supposedly brought to Europeans. Herder warned as well against the manner in which knowledge of languages such as Persian and Arabic were being used as tools of empire. He deplored the role of missionaries in India and elsewhere, noting how they operated upon the false premise that non-Europeans should assimilate the culture of Europe. I conclude that a close examination of his diverse and fragmented writings indicates that in several important respects Herder anticipated the modern critique of Orientalism and colonial discourses.
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