Indo-German Connections, Critical and Hermeneutical, in the First World War

The questions that Edward Said raised in Orientalism are still unresolved regarding the German interest in India. Said himself mostly excluded German Orientalism from his critique of the British and French intellectual project of domination over the Middle East. As the Indo-German connection was not burdened directly by German colonialism of India, one can argue that Said does not apply to Indo-German contacts, or at least, as Fred Dallmayr does, that Said’s formulation itself is an “essentializing construct” based on a selective examination of historical evidence.¹ Others such as Ronald Inden, Kamakshi Murti, and Kaushik Bagchi argue that Said applies very well to the German interest in India, and that Germans adapted themselves to European colonialism, which explains some of their attitudes toward India.² Susanne Zantop even theorizes that it was the lack of colonies during the eighteenth and early nineteenth Centuries that created a greater desire for them in Germany.³ Wilhelm Halbfass, most known in his India and Europe for promoting the hermeneutical interpretation, actually eventually made arguments between these poles, pointing out that Germany “is very much part of Europe, inseparable from its European context,” including both its hermeneutical and colonial projects.⁴ Bradley Herling in an article in this issue of The Comparatist discusses the two main approaches scholars have taken regarding cultural interaction: critical consciousness or hermeneutical consciousness, or in other words, a Saidian focus on power differentials and exploitation versus a Gadamerian emphasis on shared dialogue.⁵ If these are the twin poles of colonial interaction, one can certainly see them within Indo-German connections during the First World War. Dialogue was very apparent in the active courting of Indian revolutionaries by Germans. As Modris Ecksteins argues, Germany was a revolutionary force in the world at the time, supporting revolutionaries in Ireland and Russia, and I would add India.⁶ Yet the Germans were deeply conflicted, and their attitude toward revolutionaries also reflected a counter-current of domination, when Germans found themselves adhering to the colonial attitudes of their otherwise wartime enemies in Europe, the British. This alignment makes sense in terms of the patterns of belief in the superiority of European civilization, religion, and race, attitudes that stretched back well into at least the nineteenth Century.

Following, Ricoeur scholars such as Herling are today seeking the fusion of these two points of view, the critical and the hermeneutical. An examination of Indo-German relations around the First World War provides a promising venue for such a dialectical synthesis of these viewpoints, a “site of inquiry” as Herling suggests, for an analysis that transcends the more materialist concerns of the Saidian critique of Orientalism and the intellectualist focus of Halbfass’s hermeneutical approach.⁷ It is important that one examine the context around the formation of these views. As Herling points out, “hermeneutics and ‘critical consciousness’ come together when we identify the genealogical critique of our categories, including the anti-Orientalist critique, with a foregrounding of the prejudices that have come down to us from within our tradition.”⁸ A step toward finding this synthesis is the examination of the structures of knowledge about the other, just what the arguments and ideas Germans and Indians each held. Usually scholars look at one approach or the other, trying to dispel its opposite. Yet these views really are two sides of one coin of cultural interaction and (mis)perception. After all, at least a century before Germans decided to work with Indians to undermine the British during the First World War, Germans also made arguments for an especially close Indo-German connection, and pursued actions that helped to establish one. A small circle of cultivated Germans revered ancient Indian texts and the admiring influence was mutual.⁹

This article argues for a complexity in the German view, arguing that during the first few decades of the twentieth century, a tension between critical and hermeneutical consciousnesses existed within Germany about South Asia. From the 1890s, German colonial and naval aspirations encroached upon British dominion and vied with Germans’ Romantic view of Indians, as both European...