Entanglements of Translation: Psychology, Pedagogy, and Youth Reform in German and Urdu

The development of modern thought on social reform and political theory among South Asian Muslims has been studied either through the paradigm of "revivalism" (in the sphere of religion) or that of "separatism" (of a cultural and political identity) in existing historiography.¹ Moving beyond these frameworks, this article signals an alternative social vision pursued by Muslim intellectuals in the early to mid-twentieth century from colonial India who consciously and creatively engaged with German intellectual thought outside of the more proximate British colonial and English-language intellectual paradigm. This intellectual vision was envisaged, developed, and applied in the field of educational reform for creating a secular minority position as not only the bearer of old civilizational certainties and value, but also as modern pioneers equally conversant and ef ective in anticolonial politics, decolonizing education, and shaping the future of the modern nation-state as secular citizens. It is no coincidence that these cosmopolitan minority positions were forged in the vibrant intellectual exchanges in Weimar Berlin. It is to this entanglement of translation within an af ective intellectual history that this article turns its attention.

As an exemplary but understudied case, this article presents the scholarly project of the Indian nationalist Muslim and educationist Syed Abid Husain (1896–1978) and his intellectual apprenticeship and exchange with Eduard Spranger (1882–1963), the influential German educationist and philosopher under whose supervision Husain completed his doctoral dissertation on the critique of the educational theory of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) at the Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin, in 1926.² Husain was born in the Muslim princely state of Bhopal in central India, but traveled far and wide in his quest for knowledge through higher studies at Allahabad, Aligarh, Oxford, and Berlin and thus became a committed educationist and prolific translator with a transnational and multilingual cosmopolitan worldview, which he promoted at the Jamia Milia Islamia, the national university founded in 1920 by Indian nationalist Muslims in support of the anticolonial strug le against British rule.³ He translated books from English, Hindi, and German into Urdu for pedagogical and nationalist purposes. Notably, he was a close collaborator on Baba-e-Urdu (Father of Urdu), Moulvi Abdul Haq's translation project at the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu (Organization for the Advancement of Urdu) in Aurangabad.

This article focuses in particular on Husain's translational labors from German to Urdu to describe the genealogy and trajectory of an intellectual vision. Husain's life and intellectual work is important for various reasons. Following in the footsteps of the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who turned to the German intellectual tradition and completed his doctoral degree in 1908 under Fritz Hommel at Maximilian University, Munich, Husain was one of the pioneers among South Asian Muslim intellectuals who led the turn toward Germany and German thought in the 1920s. Husain's intellectual interests were drawn to the programmatic aspects of German social theory and reformist educational ideas avail able in early twentieth-century German intellectual culture, which were in contrast to trends in British twentieth-century liberalism.

Husain's presence in interwar Weimar Berlin put him in the thick of new developments in psychological theories of culture and social development, in particular educational reform. Husain was a prolific translator in four interconnected fields: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and literature, as a part of his interest in the theory and practice of education, especially of the youth in the project of nation building.⁴ Indeed, Husain's life experience and work in Germany and his continued engagement with German thought af erward remain crucial to any account of his contributions to educational theory and reformist-nationalist pedagogy.⁵ He translated Spranger's canonical text Psychologie des Jugendalters into Urdu as Nafsiyat-e-'unfuvan-e-shabab (Psychology of the Beginnings of Youth)⁶ and instantiated German reform pedagogy (Reformpädagogik) into the "New Education" (Na'i ta'lim) in India. The transformation of German Bildung (the almost untranslatable notion of self-becoming through education and cultural immersion) into the Urdu notions of knowledge acquisition and cultivation of character (ta'lim va tarbiyat) was crucial in...