Beyond Culture-Contact and Colonial Discourse: “Germanism” in Colonial Bengal

Summary

This essay will explore the presence of Germany as a key trope of Bengali nationalist discourse in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. It will problematize the exhaustiveness of a conventional spectrum of interpretation in the analysis of colonial intellectual history that has been defined at one extreme by the cultural violence of colonial interpellation and at the other by a hermeneutic conception of authentic intercultural encounter across the limits of great traditions. When Bengalis actually began to interact directly with Germans and German thought, it was an encounter whose parameters had already been deeply determined in the course of the preceding forty or fifty years. But I shall also argue that this appeal to the trope of Germany emerged from within a more complex, multilateral configuration in which “Germany” was itself a key figure of Victorian discourses in Britain itself.

The dominant tradition of locating South Asian cultural and intellectual history overwhelmingly within the directly colonial relationship has narrowed the scope of existing historiography. How, then, might we begin to think about India's location within a multilateral set of imaginary and practical relationships whose axes would seem to exceed the conventional colonizer/colonized binary? If one were to survey the political literature of high-colonial Bengal for explicit comparisons between India and other countries, France (especially the France of the various incarnations of republicanism), Italy (especially the Italy of Mazzini), Ireland (especially the Ireland of rural immiseration and Home Rule), Japan (especially for a decade or so after its victories over Russia in 1904–5), and (starting in the 1920s) the Soviet Union would certainly be found to feature prominently.