Intellectual History of German Indology in the late 20th Century

The discipline of Indology has played a crucial role in facilitating an interaction and encounter with India in the German-speaking region. The nature of this interaction for the German side was for the longest time textual in nature and also untouched by the socio-political reality of contemporary India. Modern Indian Studies as a discipline is a much recent phenomenon. Anil Bhatti has pointed out that German scholarship on India in the 19th century served as a location for negotiating a German nation state as well as a compensatory colonialism in lieu of the real colonial rule (see Anil Bhatti). Indology not only served epistemological purposes in the European academic context, but also ontological purposes outside Europe. The later especially can be observed by the end of the 19th century in the way Indians like Vivekananda, who “turned” to the “West” for understanding the nature of the Indian Self. Recent studies on German orientalism inform us that it was embedded in the colonial power dynamics, but at the same time warn us against drawing a one-sided picture of the relation between Germans and Indians (see Susanne L. Marchand).  Moreover within the Indology in the German-speaking region in particular and western Indology in general one would have to distinguish between figures with various ideological affiliations. For example in the wake of the Second Comintern in 1920 the Soviet Indology set a different tone as compared to other indological departments in Europe.

Given the history of Indology, how does someone like Günther Dietz Sontheimer, an important German Indologist of the second half of the 20th century, defy the norms of the discipline? Sontheimer turned away from classical Sanskrit texts to look instead at folk and oral literature in the 1970s and 1980s through actual fieldwork. Though trained in the traditional Sanskrit-centric or text-centric “armchair” indology, Sontheimer, at the risk of criticism from his co-indologists, created a world of intellectual affiliations with Indians (see Leela Gandhi),  which were unusual for his time. I am keen to understand, whether and how Sontheimer is dealing with the ethnographic approach he used in Indology without falling into the trap of the ethnographic gaze. Wilhelm Halbfass, another important figure of more or less the same era, took the approach of comparative philosophy, to develop a model of philosophical dialogue between Europe and India. Halbfass was trained in Philosophy and Indology in Germany, but moved to the American academics. Though Indology as a discipline in Germany remained distant from critical trends like Said’s Orientalism that undermined the Western academic discourse on the Non-Western World for a long time, Halbfass emerges as an interesting figure, because intellectually he is located both in the German as well as American academics. He is one of the important critiques of Edward Said’s Orientalism from within the context of Indology. In the course of my research I wish to locate more such intellectual figures like Halbfass and Sontheimer in the disciplinary history of Indology. My work is conceptualized as intellectual history of these figures, by looking at their biographies, but also theoretical groundings, which eventually help them cross the disciplinary boundaries and redefine the discipline.