Introduction: Minor Cosmopolitanisms: Institutions, Intellectuals, and Ideas between India and Germany

The temporal focus of this special section is on the twentieth century and the interwar years (1918–39) in particular, as a heightened period of global engagement and interaction. The period was marked by political and cultural turbulence but also new connections and ideological formations that reached beyond the British Empire. The crucial role of South Asian Islam and Muslims from the subcontinent in shaping the intellectual and political understanding of Islam in Germany is the connecting thread of the essays included in this themed section.

As we have long known, India occupied a crucial space in the intellectual projects of the German Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, and its Orientalist visions, not to mention in the work of social-theoretical thinkers, most notably Karl Marx.¹ Indo-German histories have so far limited their focus to the Hindu bhadralok's (the "cultured" class) intellectual engagement with elite Germans in the metropolis.² Instead, the authors of the essays here argue that the "minority histories" of Muslims and Jews may allow us to rethink broader narratives of South Asian and German intellectual history, and to make a place for comparative Muslim-Jewish histories. These take on urgent signif cance as the "Muslim question" has become deeply contentious in India, even as it becomes increasingly central in the history and politics of Germany.³

Two scholarly interventions are instructive for our concerns about comparative minority histories here: Aamir Mufti's Enlightenment in the Colony and Faisal Devji's Muslim Zion. Both works bring together the issue of minority histories, of Jews, on the one hand, and Muslims, on the other.⁴ Mufti does so through a comparative literary approach, and Devji through intellectual history. Putting them in dialogue with each other, Mufti and Devji invite us to rethink the "Jewish question" in Germany and the "Muslim question" in South Asia in comparative ways in relation to the global emergence of the problematic of minority beginning in the interwar years. We follow this comparative approach about minority histories to understand Jewish and Muslim connected histories in Germany and India.

Indeed, South Asian Muslims engaged with the modern Jewish thought and intellectuals in Germany in the early twentieth century.⁵ Similarly, Jewish scholars in South Asia were among the pioneers of knowledge production about Islam and worked closely with South Asian Muslims and Indian Muslim institutions. Josef Horovitz at Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, and Leopold Weiss/Muhammad Asad at Islamia College, Lahore, are exemplary.⁶ Both were also associated with the journal Islamic Culture, published in princely Hyderabad. Muslim-Jewish connections were heightened in the period of the rise of fascism and the transit of European Jewish refugees to India.⁷ Gerda Philipsborn, a German-Jewish kindergarten teacher at Jamia, was a crucial fgure in the feld of education and close collaborator of secular nationalist Indian Muslims at Jamia Milia Islamia. These intellectual and af ective ties between minorities thus made for histories of what can be called "minor cosmopolitanisms," matched on the one side by Muslim intellectuals in Berlin and on the other by the presence of Jewish fgures in colonial India.⁸

We do not wish to reify South Asian Muslim and German Jewish actors around their minority, national, or religious identities alone. As these essays sug est, minority groups like Jews and Muslims did not simply promote their own subnational and confessional aspirations. Rather, they produced novel forms of cosmopolitanism and ideas of universalism in an age when majority populations were turning toward nationalist authoritarianism and fascism. These essays highlight the import of cosmopolitan projects even as these failed against the pressure of extreme nationalism and religious identitarianism.

Our focus on underexplored fgures also poses questions about the archive. While Indology, with its focus on textual studies of Sanskrit and ancient Indian history, dominated British and West German universities,⁹ the tilt toward scholarship on modern ties between India and Germany was already institutionalized in the East German academic context of Orientology in the 1960s. The Marxist "New Indology" moved beyond a focus on ancient India and Sanskrit, training a generation of scholars...