Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire by Kris Manjapra

Abstract

Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 454 pp. $52.50 US (cloth). Age of Entanglement examines political and intellectual interactions between Germans and Indians between 1880 and 1945. More specifically, it examines way Indian and German intellectuals collaborated during this period to disrupt authority of British Empire, the alpha empire of nineteenth century (3). Manjapra argues that Indian and German intellectuals were united by their common opposition to British political and cultural hegemony, as manifested through three signifiers: Enlightenment, Europe, and (5). Manjapra offers a persuasive and lucid account of these interactions, especially regarding their motivating nationalisms. He is especially convincing on thesis that unprecedented scholarly and scientific collaborations between German and Indian intellectuals in Wilhelmine era were kept in their array by galvanic force of a third party: lodestone of British (3). However, Manjapra's thesis is less persuasive in its attempted identification of Europe and Enlightenment with British (3, 5, 7, 9, 36-37, and 54) and British with Empire itself (3-4, 5-6). Was Germany really world power at vanguard of projects for 'de-Europeanization from within' (5)? Was British exclusive or even main harbinger of Enlightenment universalism (7)? Manjapra's own research shows that German intellectuals were extremely conscious, indeed, jealous of their status as Europeans. German politicians and administrators pursued colonial projects in Africa and Oceania. When German intellectuals turned to India, it was not primarily out of an interest in Indian culture, but for an ersatz Aryan identity that would confirm their status as a white race, indeed, as whitest among European races. British institutions were not sole or even most forceful disseminators of the hegemonic Enlightenment broadcast (9). After Humboldtian educational reforms of 18091810, German universities firmly identified themselves with Enlightenment principles. The interactions between German Orientalists and native scholars also illustrate that German intellectuals viewed their contribution in Enlightenment terms. Not only did they see their scholarship as embodying principles of scientific Enlightenment and themselves as protagonists of Enlightenment but they were also conscious of bringing about a similar Enlightenment of Indian public (see Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, The Nay Science: A History of German Indology [New York, 2014], 103-08; 279, n. 556; 347-49; and 412-13). German Orientalists underway in India were extremely conscious of their European identity, seemingly becoming secure of it only here for first time. The Indienreise became an obligatory part of education of German Orientalists, necessary to affirm both their status as Europeans and necessity, value, and distinctiveness of generating an Enlightenment discourse about India. Part of problem lies in insufficient philosophical exploration of Enlightenment. Manjapra identifies Enlightenment science with three features; the search for rational universal laws that authoritatively categorized, arranged and ordered natural and human domains (8); the idea of 'rational' individual as observer, knower, and master of his or her environment (8); and positivistic subjectivism (10). Borrowing Foucault's concept of counter-sciences, he argues that collaborations between German and Indian intellectuals led to creation of post-Enlightenment counter-sciences that broke old unities apart into smaller and smaller fragments and rearranged [these] pieces into newly enchanted wholes (10). …