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While most of the Germans who suffered expulsion during the First World War lived within British shores, the Royal Navy brought Germans from throughout the world to face incarceration in the their network of camp. This book offers a new interpretation of global migration from the early nineteenth until the early twentieth century. It examines the elite German migrants who progressed to India, especially missionaries, scholars and scientists, businessmen and travellers. The book investigates the reasons for the migration of Germans to India. An examination of the realities of German existence in India follows. It then examines the complex identities of the Germans in India in the century before the First World War. The role of the role of racism, orientalism and Christianity is discussed. The stereotypes that emerged from travelogues include: an admiration of Indian landscapes; contempt for Hinduism; criticism of the plight of women; and repulsion at cityscapes. The book moves to focus upon the transformation which took place as a result of this conflict, mirroring the plight of Germans in other parts of the world. The marginalisation which took place in 1920 closely mirrored the plight of the German communities throughout the British Empire. The unique aspect of the experience in India consisted of the birth of a national identity. Finally, the book places the experience of the Germans in India into four contexts: the global history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; German history; history of the British Empire in India; and Indian history.
Through the glass darkly Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta To the eighteenth- century European imagination the Indian landscape appeared wrought in darkness. The haunting depths of the subterranean caves, the sprawling shaded retreat of the banyan tree and the unspeakable terrors of the ‘Black Hole’ tragedy all conspired to paint an image of a land shrouded in mystery and horror. These indelible images of the darkened landscape recalled its wild, untamed character but, amongst the earliest images of an unseen land gradually emerging
subject.14 The four scenes below examine the drama of vision in its encounter with an unknown other to consider the desires driving this vision. Act 1: unveiling the Eastern bride The title vignette of The Oriental Portfolio (Figure 2.1), a lavishly produced manuscript from 1838, reproduces a motif that dramatised the act of seeing and had acquired much currency since the late eighteenth century. Two allegorical figures representing Literature and the Arts on the one side, and the goddess of war on the other, lift a veil to offer a view of the Indian landscape. Holding
Hinduism (especially in the case of missionaries); the position of women; and the prevalence of poverty and disease. However, many travelogues devoted positive attention to the Indian landscape, although descriptions of cityscapes often contained negative language focusing upon poverty and disease. While Germans may form part of the European elite in India, they distinguished themselves not simply from
pattern for future surveys. 5 At one level, therefore, Buchanan’s survey can be viewed as an imperial project. The accumulation of empirical material was the most determined attempt heretofore to know the Indian landscape and village life better to exercise economic and political authority. 6 Equally, and to an extent autonomously of imperial exigencies, the survey represented a new mode of
By the eighteenth century, empire was increasingly exhibited in Britain in visually arresting two-dimensional form. William Hodges, the artist on Captain Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, exhibited regularly at the Free Society of Artists and the Royal Academy. 22 Hodges subsequently travelled in India, exhibiting eight Indian landscapes at the Academy exhibition of 1786. 23 As the
, the unspeakable horrors of the Black Hole tragedy or the riddle of the laborious energies invested in its ‘gloomy’ caves. Edward Moor, frontispiece, Hindu Pantheon, 1810 Introduction 23 0.6 24 Empires of light Chapter 1 looks at how Elephanta emerged as a powerful cipher in this darkened landscape, haunting the imagination of viewers and leaving a lasting imprint on how the nation would be viewed, as caves served to define the Indian landscape in accounts as long lasting as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) or Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb (1959
pleasure and rarely showed his work, Ross learned a great deal from watching him, and attributed to this his first place, at the age of 16, in the Oxford and Cambridge local examinations for drawing, with his pencil copy of what he describes as ‘Raphael’s Torchbearer’. 14 As well as being a talented painter, Ross’s father was also a fan of Shakespeare and Byron, the latter of whom he considered a genius, often quoting him during mealtimes; a favourite passage (perhaps because its sentiment reminded him of the Indian landscapes of which he
Memories: ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ Today the memorial is just off a busy highway toll booth–a common site in the post-globalisation Indian landscape. Every New Year’s Day, the urban middle classes who need to use the highway remind each other to avoid the particular stretch that passes by the memorial. Their reason for doing so is that ‘ those
dominates the novels which use it as a setting and a sense of place imposes itself. This sense of place can become, of course, the tedium of the picturesque, but sensitive novelists respond to the power of the Indian landscape and the pervasive strength of the culture. Gore Vidal’s Kalki is an interesting example of this. The novel centres on the career of the holy man, a guru who may or may not be a