Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire

455 Pages·2014·2.292 MB·English

by  Manjapra, Kris

HARVARD HISTORICAL STUDIES • 183
Published under the auspices
of the Department of History
from the income of the
Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest
Robert Louis Stroock Fund
Henry Warren Torrey Fund

KRIS MANJAPRA
Age of Entanglement
German and Indian Intellectuals
across Empire
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland
2014
Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Manjapra, Kris, 1978–
Age of entanglement : German and Indian intellectuals across empire / Kris Manjapra.
pages cm. — (Harvard historical studies ; 183)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674-7 2514-0 (alk. paper)
1. India— Intellectual life— 19th century. 2. India— Intellectual life— 20th century.
3. Germany— Intellectual life— 19th century. 4. Germany— Intellectual life— 20th century.
5. Learning and scholarship— India—History—19th century. 6. Learning and scholarship—
India—History—20th century. 7. Learning and scholarship— Germany—History—
19th century. 8. Learning and scholarship— Germany—History—20th century.
9. India— Relations—Germany. 10. Germany— Relations—India. I. Title.
DS428.M36 2014
303.48'243054—dc23 2013012269
For my father
Krishnan Variath Manjapra

Contents
Note on Style and Transliteration ix
Introduction 1
I STAGES OF ENTANGLEMENT
1 German Servants of the British Raj 17
2 Indian Subjects beyond the British Empire 41
3 German Visions of an Asianate Eu rope 56
4 Indian Visions of a Germanic Home 88
II FIELDS OF ENCOUNTER
5 The Physical Cosmos 111
6 International Economies 143
7 Marxist Totality 171
8 Geocultural Wholes 191
9 The Psychoanalytic Universe 211
10 Worlds of Artistic Expression 238
11 A New Order 275
Epilogue 289
Notes 295
Glossary of Bengali and German Names and Keywords 391
Selected Bibliography 395
Ac know ledg ments 427
Index 431

Note on Style and Transliteration
In this text, historical fi gures are referred to by their full name or by their
last name, except in a few special cases in which there is a strong conven-
tion in place to use the fi rst name as the shortened form of identifi cation,
such as is the case with the Bengali personages Bankim (Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyaya), Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghosh), and Rabindranath (Rabin-
dranath Tagore). Also, when referring to Bengali book titles or quoting
from Bengali sources, the author has romanized Bengali words with dia-
critical marks using a standard system. Bengali-l anguage personal names
and place names have been transliterated without diacritics, using the
most familiar and conventional spellings. Hopefully this goes some way
toward balancing accuracy with readability. Unavoidably, variant spellings
of Bengali terms appear in the text, as the romanization systems used in
quoted sources sometimes differ from the one used by this book’s author.
To keep track of unfamiliar terms, please consult the glossary, which lists
Bengali names with a large number of English- language variants, as well as
important recurring Bengali and German keywords.