Abstract
Since Edward Saïd’s Orientalism, orientalist research has gained an unprecedented popularity in the academic world, provoking a great deal of books and articles, whose main goal is to re-examine the history of the European encounter with the rest of the world. Historians, anthropologists and literary critics even-handedly developed a new interest in transnational and intercultural relationships, and, in most of the cases, tried to bring into question the more conventional accounts of Europe’s presupposed centrality in world history. In regard to the history of modern Europe’s engagement with South Asia, a few scholars still share Leslie Willson’s belief that European perceptions of India were nothing more than ‘mythical images’ or fanciful projections, whereas the greater number of studies in this field, are indebted to Raymond Schwab’s conviction that India has been much more central to the constitution of Europe’s modernities than is generally believed. In many instances the often repeated but rarely proven thesis that one would need the ‘other’ to constitute one’s own identity serves thus as the principal epistemological frame in which South Asian ideas, practices or realities are supposed to be of paramount importance for the history of Europe’s political, philosophical or scientific development.
There has been another tendency in this ‘Indo-European’ field of research in recent decades, which it might not be superfluous to record. While all contributions whose aim it was to reassess one part of Europe’s past or another, necessarily have been historical in outlook and methodology, some clearly were more ‘theoretical’ in their orientation: in proving an abstract idea to be right, the complexity of texts and contexts was accordingly reduced. In regard to the critique of Sanskrit philology Richard Larivière brilliantly described this tendency as ‘distortionist’, and this label can well be used in a more general way in the sense that European ideas in regard to India are seen out of context and used in a way they were never intended. 1
Robert Cowan’s book—the published version of the doctoral dissertation he completed at the City University of New York—combines all these strands of recent research. His thesis that there might have been a German identification with India in the decades around 1800 builds upon Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance Orientale 2 and Leslie Willson’s A mythical image 3 (and many others), and, although his findings are based on a substantial number of primary and secondary sources, a close reading of his book clearly indicates it’s distortionist character.
Cowan focuses on those German thinkers he calls the ‘Indo-Germans’: Herder, Novalis, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (p. 8). In his opinion they all employed aspects of South Asian thought, art and literature ‘in their own quests to define themselves’ (p. 3). In the long history of European perceptions of India from antiquity to present times the so called ‘Indo-Germans’ represent a ‘heterogeneous line of thinkers’, who would bring together ‘Romanticism, nationalism and Indology’ (p. 4). Cowan claims that this ‘Indo-German identification spans more than two millennia’ (p. 7). It is not clear, however, how Herodotus’, Megasthenes’ and Philostratus’ views on India, which were prominently received well into the eighteenth century, would fit into this genealogy. That Cowan’s ‘Indo-Germans’ were more or less attracted by the newly discovered Sanskrit literature is beyond doubt, but does this automatically mean that they all focused on what Germany and India might have had in common? In default of a clear definition what ‘identification’ exactly means, would it not have been better to simply speak of the German fascination for many things Indian?
It remains unclear how Cowan manages to establish a line of Indo-German thinkers for who ‘India and Germany were profoundly linked by genealogy, culture and philosophy’ (p. 4), observing, at the same time, that this presupposed ‘identification’ finally did not take effect: Schelling rejected his ‘initial zealous praise of ancient Indian philosophy’ (p. 85); Friedrich Schlegel ‘took an adversarial stance against South Asian religions’ (p. 107); G.F.W. Hegel largely ‘rejected the Indo-German appeal’ and ‘continually denigrated Indian thought and culture as misguided’ (pp. 132, 140); and Nietzsche was ‘a sort of anti-Indo-German’ (p. 164). And somehow Friedrich Schlegel rejected the ‘Indo-German identification’ (p. 123), on the one hand, but nevertheless represents ‘the Indo-German par excellence’ (p. 188), on the other hand. In view of such internal contradictions, it seems quite clear that Cowan’s main thesis is to be taken with careful consideration.
The author emphasises in his introduction that the main focus of his analysis is ‘to understand the direct or oblique influence of Sanskrit literature’ (p. 3) in the work of the above-cited German thinkers between 1765 and 1885. One could easily accept Cowan’s assertions when it comes to presupposed ‘influences’ from one author or text to another, if he would demonstrate why Kant, for instance, ‘was of tremendous influence’ on Herder’s idea’s about India (p. 51) and if he would tell us why Herder’s perception of South Asia was less ‘influenced’ by, let’s say the accounts of Dow, Holwell, Sonnerat or the published accounts of French and German missionaries, whose lecture he highly recommended though to all who were interested in Indian religions. In the cases where the author encounters contradicting evidence which would speak for an analogy of German and South Asian ideas rather than for a presupposed Indian influence (as on p. 81 and p. 89 where he cites René Gérard 4 and on p. 89 and p. 99 where he cites Raymond Schwab who both contradict Cowan’s assertions) the author shows no sign of interest to explain why he draws other conclusions than the cited authors and on which grounds.
Cowan emphasises that ‘orientalism can only be understood as a set of personal attempts to appropriate foreign concepts’ (p. 2) and underscores how important it was for him ‘to understand ideas in their proper contexts, on their own terms, and to respect them’ (p. 191). Unfortunately, this praiseworthy attitude is not always to be found in the book. Does one not have to respect simple facts or basic elements of chronology when it comes to contextualise how Friedrich Schlegel for instance happened to be interested in India and subsequently was able to learn Sanskrit in Paris? It is true that Schlegel was perhaps the most protean thinker of the so-called ‘Indo-Germans’, but is this reason enough to take liberties with what Schlegel himself wrote in his letters, articles and books in regard to South Asia? For it was not the lecture of Sakuntala, 5 nor the influence of Friedrich Majer who stimulated his interest for India, as Cowan pretends in his book (p. 112) and I can think of no India-related text of Schlegel where he was about to search for ‘Eastern analogues to Western conceptions’ (p. 119).
The principal merit of Cowan’s book is to remind us that a better knowledge of Indo-German relations necessarily has to accord more importance to texts and contexts, except when we contend to make our cases without corresponding historical evidence. It may be more exciting to establish fanciful assumptions like ‘while Hitler was certainly not an incarnation Vishnu, he may in some depressing ways be seen as both the culmination and the betrayer of the Indo-German legacy’ (p. 180), than to assume the seemingly old fashioned historian’s craft. But as long as we hold on to the scientificness of our doing there is no other way.