In Place of an Afterword: On Analyzing "Entanglements" in "Interesting Times"

The jailbreak from national containers continues to elate practitioners of historical research, including some specializing in South Asian or German history. This is reassuring at a time when career-conscious scholars increasingly join the bag age trains of a political right-wing nationalism that boasts vitality despite all announcements of its demise in the "globalizing" 1990s. But the "interesting times" (in a Hobsbawmian sense) we are living through presently also raise questions concerning the critical potential of the concepts that are used in the historiographical industry of container breaking. The trivializing flatness of the attribute global is acknowledged by many who use it "for the lack of a better term" and so is the fact that the prefix trans does not cancel out the essentialism of the terms it generally precedes.

Other formulations seem less problematic, neutral, even of technical sterility: two major publications on intellectual engagements between Germany and South Asia in the late nineteenth and early half of the twentieth century frame them as "transcultural encounters" or as an "age of entanglement."¹ The first, probably inadvertently, displays the disturbing ambivalences that occur when nation and culture get teamed up; the second evokes, like the equally popular metaphor of "networks," images of a two-dimensional and potentially unlimited connectivity that present, again probably inadvertently, the "interesting times" of the catastrophic early half of the twentieth century in an implausibly mellow light. This is not about nit-picking on other people's book titles—I am referring here to a "commonsensical" language to be found in many contemporary academic writings, including some of my own.

The point is rather that history, as a method of critical inquiry relevant to our own time, needs a less mechanical, more dialectical language that is able to present and analyze the role of far-flung "entanglements" (if we wish to keep the term) in dynamic, antagonistic, and sometimes even genocidal conflict. We need to understand how connectedness can both reflect and energize social and political tensions resulting in discharges of unprecedented violence—in other words: we need to explain the possibility of disruptive and toxic entanglements. Lack of articulation, in this regard, comes at a cost, both intellectually and politically. Today we pay, for instance, for the delayed and as yet insuf cient attempts of historians to reveal the appropriations and reinterpretations of both Italian fascist corporativism and German organicist-communitarian nativism (i.e., of "völkisch" ideologies) by diverse forces of the political Right across many parts of the world, including South Asia.² Such shortcomings have rendered discourses of "cultural authenticity" more plausible, which legitimize politics of authoritarianism and ethnic persecution, while helping liberal governments look the other way when antidemocratic regimes established (and establish) themselves in "new markets" outside Europe.

The preceding essays provide new and contradictory material as well as an unusual, decentering perspective on intellectual connections between India and Germany in the interwar period. This was, of course, a time of impending fundamental change in both countries—in Walter Benjamin's dramatic words, written when the German night was darkest, "a moment of danger."³ We may add, for the purpose of our own analysis, that this was therefore also a moment of unlikely connections with unpredictable consequences. Razak Khan and Heike Liebau introduce us to unusual protagonists of Indian-German "entanglements" in this dangerous period, to the brothers Abdul Jabbar Kheiri and Abdul Sattar Kheiri, and to Syed Abid Husain, respectively. They are, in the context of the existing historiography, unusual protagonists of intellectual exchange between the two countries, not least because they were Indian Muslims. Since the nineteenth century, German intellectual engagement with India had been largely filtered, of course, through prisms of the emerging discipline of Indology, which tended, at the time, to regard "Indian culture" (or "civilization") in its "essence" as largely synonymous with Brahminical culture. From the turn of the twentieth century, the exchanges of people and ideas between India and Germany diversified in several ways, but the historiography of the Indo-German "encounter" tends even today to privilege Brahminical ideas and highcaste Hindus in their...