Religious Entanglements Between Germans and Indians, 1800–1945

Isabella Schwaderer, Gerdien Jonker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031403743
• eBook ISBN: 9783031403750
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Religion as a form of cultural expression constitutes a critical element in the relationship between Germany and India. The discovery of Indian traditions in Germany and re-interpretations of those traditions in India fueled not only new theological and philosophical explorations, but also extensive innovations in the fields of music, dance, bodily experience, and political intervention. Seeking to uncover the enfolding of colonial thought structures through presentations of the Self, while placing them in the context of global colonial value chains that connected the peripheries with the centre, this interdisciplinary volume addresses India through the lens of an entangled relationship. Adopting the position that the acceleration of communication, technical development, and colonisation locally triggered re-interpretations of the religious sphere, This volume takes a look at the period from 1800 to the end of National Socialism, tracing the strands of an Indo-Germanic religion inthe making as it goes along. A special emphasis is placed on the artistic expressions of religious experience including re-enactments of musical compositions and dance configurations, which were created to embody India in Germany.

This is an open access book.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘To Read in an Indian Way’ (Johann Gottfried Herder): Pre-Emergent Colonial Epistemologies in Indian–German Entanglements, Showcased in Protestant Theology c.1800
• 3. In Search of Purity: German-Speaking Vegetarians and the Lure of India (1833–1939)
• 4. The Indian Challenge: Indology and New Conceptions of Christianity as ‘Religion’ at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 5. Death and Transfiguration: Religion and Belonging in Felix Gotthelf’s Indian Opera Mahadeva (1910)
• 6. The Indian Parsifal: Revisiting Felix Gotthelf’s Forgotten Opera Mahadeva
• 7. Modernism in Disguise? Neglected Aspects of the So-Called Revival of a Classical Indian Dance Form
• 8. ‘The Priestess of Hindu Dance’: Leila Sokhey’s Repertoire and Its Reception in the Netherlands and Germany (1927–38)
• 9. Roaming Between East and West: In Search of Religious Ecstasy in the Interwar Period
• 10. Negotiating Germanness with Indian Religious History: Transfers of Academic Knowledge and Notions of völkisch Belief
• 11. Hakenkreuz, Swastika and Crescent: The Religious Factor in Nazi Cultural Politics Regarding India
• 12. Curating the Fragments of Local Modernities: The Menaka Digital Archive from the Perspective of Ongoing Research
• Back Matter