German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges during the Kaiserreich by Perry Myers (review)

In Germany, wrote the Victorian Indologist Max Müller in India: What Can It Teach Us? (1892), “there is a vague charm connected with the name of India.” A scholar “who studies Sanskrit in Germany is supposed to be initiated in the deep and dark mysteries of ancient wisdom, and a man who has travelled in India … is listened to like another Marco Polo” (4). Perry Myers sets out to illuminate—perhaps demystify—something of that mysterious allure by tracing “German visions of India” from the 1870s to World War I. Like Müller, he is interested in the Indologists’ India: in the ways that German scholars construed India for themselves and one another. This chapter is one in a long history of German Indology reaching back to the Enlightenment and forward to the occult enchantment of Aryanism. Myers focuses on a handful of German men: Indologists like Leopold von Schroeder, Rudolf Seydel, Paul Deussen, and Hermann Oldenberg; missionaries in India; and theosophists like Franz Hartmann and Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden. The book, then, is concerned not so much with German ideas about late colonial India as with their attitudes toward the India of the Vedic texts and early Buddhism—the scholars’ India.

Myers traces a form of transposition linking Germany and India in prismatic relation. These intellectuals treated ancient India as a mirror for thinking about contemporary Germany; and Germany as the filter through which India is construed, or, indeed, obscured. Myers emphasizes how conditions in Germany determined Indological investigations, especially into early Buddhism. The scholars’ India turns out to be a map of Germany, its social divisions, its colonial fears and fantasies, its cultural and class anxieties. (No Indian, it seems, exerts the least influence or agency here.) Moving with the current of recent work on German orientalism, Myers rejects the monolithic sense of orientalist discourse attributed to Edward Said. Instead, citing Pierre Bourdieu, he introduces a sense of dynamism and conflict, a field of contestation in which Indologists negotiated for symbolic capital, legitimacy, and status. The heart of this competition was confessional, crystallizing in distinctions between Catholic and Protestant scholars during the Kulturkampf and after. Indology, especially as comparative religious studies, was shaped—or deformed—by confessional tensions bedeviling the new Reich.

Myers falls into some conceptual slippage here. Catholic or Protestant Indologists or missionaries are made at times simply to stand for German Catholics or Protestants as a whole, while Myers offers little analysis of what India meant for the broader German laity. Nor is it always clear why we should understand, for example, the missionary competition between confessions as being essentially about Germany—the Catholic missionary “vision of India” as “a manifestation of confessional nation building intended to reconstitute the degraded symbolic capital of Jesuit intellectuals in the Kaiserreich” (67). Other factors might have contributed to Catholic missionary thinking: a cosmopolitan rather than fundamentally German and national church, institutional Catholicism in India, or even Indian Catholics themselves. When Catholic missionaries lamented the decline of the Portuguese in India, were they really suggesting that, “by the same token, the outlook for a Protestant-influenced Germany … had to be bleak” (71)? Did the Protestant engagement with Buddhism mean, above all, “reconfiguring the identity construct of the Wilhelmine Protestant intellectual as the keeper of the key to life’s spiritual riddle” (103)? As for the squabbling between Catholic and Protestant missionaries in Bengal, it appears here so absolutely a kind of displaced Kulturkampf that it hardly seemed to have anything to do with India at all.

India itself seemed to matter little. Animating German “visions of India” was the specter of German crisis: of national identity and unity, of religion and spirit. “Spheres of national contention and cultural conflict … became intricately embedded in German visions of India” (5). But that sense of crisis is more often invoked than established, and the author never really...