Organizer and Chair: Stewart Gordon, Independent Scholars of South Asia
British India Through the Eyes of a German Orientalist: Richard Garbe’s Indian Journey, 1885–86
Kaushik Bagchi, Goucher College
Richard Garbe (1857–1927), a leading German Indologist of his time and professor at the University of Tubingen, visited India in 1885. On his return, he published a detailed account of his trip, the Indian Travel Sketches.
Unlike his more famous contemporary, F. Max Mueller, Garbe thus actually encountered the Orient that he studied. And in contrast to Max Mueller, whose admiration for India never flagged, Garbe did not like the India he saw. While he had been attracted to the country by its "ancient culture and deep wisdom," Garbe’s journey turned out to be a very unpleasant experience.
My paper examines Garbe’s interaction with India and Indians in the colonial setting of British India. Although not a member of the ruling nation, Garbe quickly found himself on the side of his fellow Europeans in the racial and social divide of colonial society. While he diligently pursued his central task in India, which was to study with the pundits of Benares, his attitude became increasingly one of colonial contempt rather than the respect of a scholarly supplicant.
The India that he wished to see but did not find, Garbe presented in a novel called The Redemption of the Brahman, and in an eulogy on the emperor Akbar which he delivered in 1909. Using these sources, my paper examines Garbe’s difficult relationship with the culture he spent his entire life studying, and the way in which British colonialism intersected with the work and ideas of a scholar from another European country.
"From a Humanitarian Point of View I Could Become Barbarian": Jacob Haafner (1754–1809): An Anti-Colonialist with a Multi-Cultural Perspective
Paul van der Velde, University of Amsterdam
Haafner lived in India for thirteen years. His direct literary style and his adventurous life blended to make his travel accounts very popular in his day and his works remain appealing for the contemporary reader as well. His descriptions of everyday life bear witness to his sharp powers of observation and love of the indigenous cultures. These qualities prompted Haafner to wax highly critical of the colonial conditions existing then. Whereas his literary works were translated into other languages his ‘blasphemous’ essay on the uselessness of missionaries and missionary societies never was. It can be viewed as his intellectual testament. Why this book proved to be a shock to his contemporaries will be the topic of this paper.
Haafner’s essay provoked hysterious reactions and he was severely attacked for his ‘political incorrectness’ because as his point of departure he took the way of thinking and customs of the indigenous populations in order to show that attempts to convert them would be fruitless. This was completely unacceptable to his contemporaries because, by doing so, Haafner put the other civilization on equal footing with the Christian civilization.
The fundamental thought put forward by Haafner when he viewed the mission from the perspective of another way of thinking could never be understood by his Western contemporaries who as convinced Christians had severely limited intellectual horizons. The remark passed by the French translator of Haafner’s work that the latter was an original thinker was then as true as it is now: Haafner is a 19th-century precursor of multi-culturalism.
Medicine in Miracles: Points of Anxiety in an Expanding Healthcare Market, India from c. 1800 to 1950
Claudia Liebeskind, University of London
This paper proposes to chart the changing points of tension within the field of health and disease in northern India. The sources will be collections of miracle stories which came out of a sufi tradition with an educated clientele. The main players in the stories were, apart from the sufi saint, people suffering from illnesses as well as practitioners and students of different medical systems. The period under consideration is that from 1800 to 1950 when the healthcare market in India underwent considerable changes. In 1800 those afflicted by disease could choose between using folk medicine, going to a practitioner of one of the indigenous medical systems, Ayurveda and Unani medicine, or doing both. By the end of the period these two means of treatment were competing with biomedicine and homeopathy which had also become available to the Indian public.
An analysis of the miracle stories: (1) will show the types of diseases and epidemics prevalent at different times as well as the changing attitudes of people towards health and sickness; (2) will demonstrate the inroads made by biomedicine into the healthcare market but also illustrate the new anxieties which this system created for people; (3) will uncover the changes which had taken place within the indigenous medical systems as these professionalized in the twentieth century and, thus, gave rise to new stresses and tensions for their students and practitioners.
The Applicability of Western Social Movement Theories in a Social Movement of East Bengal
Afroza Anwary, Carleton College
From 1947 to 1956, a movement swept through East Bengal. This movement blossomed in 1952 and was a resurgent challenge with its roots in an earlier phase of the movement that originated in 1947 and which presumably ended in 1948. The movement was transformed into a movement of provincial autonomy after 1956 when the Constituent Assembly recognized Bengali as one of the national languages of Pakistan.
There are two primary objectives of this paper. The first objective is to broaden social movement theories that have arisen in well-developed capitalist and core democratic societies, by studying the dynamics of social movements in a peripheral authoritarian context. The second objective is to assess theoretically and empirically the role played by those activists who were most centrally involved in the construction of meaning and how participation in movement activities were affected by these emergent cultural products and the larger political forces outside of the movement.
This is a historical case study using five sets of data. Using qualitative research methods, I examined several questions: effects of values, beliefs, and emotional orientations of the movement’s intended audiences on various interpretive efforts by different activists to define certain issues as unjust or framing-counterframing-reframing efforts by the movement’s protagonists and antagonists; the construction of the movement’s collective identity; the role of the political environment in success/failure of the movement, and the key determinants of the differential outcomes of various frames. These were all answered in the context of changes across time.
Indian Federalism: Enter the Sub-state
David Stuligross, University of California, Berkeley
The world associates India’s Hindu nationalist BJP with the destruction of mosques and nuclear explosions. One of the party’s central planks in recent years, however, has been the creation of new states out of some of the existing larger states in India’s quasi-federation, and a proposal to create four such states has become the most controversial domestic political issue of the party’s first three months in power. As these four regions move one step closer to statehood, demands by other sub-regions for states of their own have become more strident. Many scholars have expressed concern that the trends of further administrative division and greater functional authority of states relative to the central government will combine to weaken Indian unity and threaten its development potential.
However, political interaction in modern India does not pit one institution against another for all time, or one group against another. First, for all the hue and cry, most states depend on the central government for developmental resources. Within the decentralization dynamic some states would prefer that authority be retained in Delhi, and states are bargaining with one another to further state-state cooperation. Second, sub-state autonomy movements direct their claims primarily against their state, not the central government. A greater number of smaller states, if new states are created, would decrease the ability of any of them to negotiate new authority transfers from the central government—particularly because the new states would have a history of rancor with some of the old ones and because the new states would be more than usually economically dependent on the central government. State governments might co-opt sub-state movements, but this would require a broadening of their current developmental visions to include very disparate social and economic groups.
I will explore these issues through a survey of autonomy movements in India with special attention to Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, which constitute two of the four states currently proposed.