Based on years of research in libraries and archives in England, Germany, India and Switzerland, this book offers a new interpretation of global migration from the early nineteenth until the early twentieth century. Rather than focusing upon the mass transatlantic migration or the movement of Britons towards British colonies, it examines the elite German migrants who progressed to India, especially missionaries, scholars and scientists, businessmen and travellers. The story told here questions, for the first time, the concept of Europeans in India. Previous scholarship has ignored any national variations in the presence of white people in India, viewing them either as part of a ruling elite or, more recently, white subalterns. The German elites undermine these conceptions. They developed into distinct groups before 1914, especially in the missionary compound, but faced marginalisation and expulsion during the First World War.

Providing a comprehensive survey of cutting edge scholarship in the field of German--Indian and South Asian Studies, the book looks at the history of German--Indian relations in the spheres of culture, politics, and intellectual life. Combining transnational, post-colonial, and comparative approaches, it includes the entire twentieth century, from the First World War and Weimar Republic to the Third Reich and Cold War era. The book first examines the ways in which nineteenth-century "Indomania" figured in the creation of both German national identity and modern German scholarship on the Orient, and it illustrates how German encounters with India in the Imperial era alternately destabilized and reinforced the orientalist, capitalist, and nationalist underpinnings of German modernity. Contributors discuss the full range of German responses to India, and South Asian perceptions of Germany against the backdrop of war and socio-political revolution, as well as the Third Reich's ambivalent perceptions of India in the context of racism, religion, and occultism. The book concludes by exploring German--Indian relations in the era of decolonization and the Cold War. Employing a diverse array of interdisciplinary approaches to understanding German--Indian encounters over the past two centuries, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Germany, India, Europe, and Asia, as well as history, political science, anthropology, philosophy, comparative literature, and religious studies.

Age of Entanglement explores patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of a diverse collection of individuals from South Asia and Central Europe who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another’s worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism towards a new critical approach, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Bauhaus to Calcutta, and Girindrasekhar Bose began a correspondence with Sigmund Freud. Rabindranath Tagore traveled to Germany to recruit scholars for a new Indian university, and the actor Himanshu Rai hired director Franz Osten to help establish movie studios in Bombay. These interactions, Manjapra argues, evinced shared responses to the cultural and political hegemony of the British empire. Germans and Indians hoped to find in one another the tools needed to disrupt an Anglocentric world order. As Manjapra demonstrates, transnational intellectual encounters are not inherently progressive. From Orientalism and Aryanism to socialism and scientism, German–Indian entanglements were neither necessarily liberal nor conventionally cosmopolitan, often characterized as much by manipulation as by cooperation. Age of Entanglement underscores the connections between German and Indian intellectual history, revealing the characteristics of a global age when the distance separating Europe and Asia seemed, temporarily, to disappear.

Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf, is a perennial bestseller in India, with even street-side bookstalls prominently displaying stacks of it. The name 'Hitler' -- anathema almost everywhere else in the world -- is tossed about casually in the Indian subcontinent, not infrequently invoked in praise. Many Indians still harbour the notion that the Fuhrer was a friend of the Indian people and had extended wholehearted support to their freedom struggle. To journalist Vaibhav Purandare, this clearly suggested that Indians continued to be largely unaware of the German dictator's views on India, in spite of the fact that they are unambiguously expressed in his own writings. This lacuna spurred him on to delve into the archives -- in Germany, India and elsewhere. The result of Purandare's research is this comprehensive and painstaking portrait and analysis of Hitler's outlook on India and its people, his opinion of their struggle against the British Raj, and his take on Indian history, culture and civilisation. Also within these pages are surprising details of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's entanglement with the Reich, the experience of other Indians living in Nazi Germany, the mission that Hitler sent to the Himalayas in search of 'pure-blood Aryans', and a number of other little-known historical nuggets. Accessible and rich in detail, Hitler and India is the very first examination of what India meant to a figure who, perplexingly, remains quite alive in the country.

August Wilhelm Schlegel proclaimed that “[i]f the regeneration of the human species started in the East, Germany must be considered the Orient of Europe.” How can this remarkable identification of Germany with the subjugated oriental ‘other’ be explained? In The Orient of Europe, Nicholas A. Germana explores how German thinkers, especially those associated with the Early Romantic movement, set India up as an “ideal mirror,” in which they could perceive the image of the Germany they longed for – a nation whose greatness lay not in political and military power, but in the realm of culture and the spirit. Such an image was especially important during the years of French occupation and the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. The ‘mythical image’ of India, however, underwent profound changes in the decades after 1815. The end of the Wars of Liberation and the onset of the Restoration era, led to the decline of the romantic image of India. As statist visions of German unity rose in prominence, especially in Prussia, this image of the connection between Germany and ancient India took on a new complexion. Politically volatile romantic “Indomania” gave way to a new, more acceptable, ideology – the ideology of Wissenschaft. In this book, which engages with the most recent scholarship in the rapidly emerging field of German Orientalism, Germana challenges traditional Saidian Orientalist readings of German intellectual engagement with Indian thought and literature. German romantic and humanist fascination with India, he argues, is best understood within the context of debates about the nature of ‘Germany’ and ‘Germanness’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than in connection with nascent German “colonial fantasies.”

He has presented more than a dozen papers at academic conferences in North America, Europe, and South Asia, including Harvard University, Humboldt University, Heidelberg University's South Asia Institute, and the Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi, India.