<au>Douglas T. McGetchin</>
<at>Indo-German Connections, Critical and Hermeneutical, in the First World War</>
<@@@>
The questions that Edward Said raised in Orientalism are still unresolved regarding the German
interest in India. Said himself mostly excluded German Orientalism from his critique of the
British and French intellectual project of domination over the Middle East. As the Indo-German
connection was not burdened directly by German colonialism of India, one can argue that Said
does not apply to Indo-German contacts, or at least, as Fred Dallmayr does, that Said’s
formulation itself is an “essentializing construct” based on a selective examination of historical
evidence.1 Others such as Ronald Inden, Kamakshi Murti, and Kaushik Bagchi argue that Said
applies very well to the German interest in India, and that Germans adapted themselves to
European colonialism, which explains some of their attitudes toward India.2 Susanne Zantop
even theorizes that it was the lack of colonies during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
Centuries that created a greater desire for them in Germany.3 Wilhelm Halbfass, most known in
his India and Europe for promoting the hermeneutical interpretation, actually eventually made
arguments between these poles, pointing out that Germany “is very much part of Europe,
inseparable from its European context,” including both its hermeneutical and colonial projects.4
Bradley Herling in an article in this issue of The Comparatist discusses the two main approaches
scholars have taken regarding cultural interaction: critical consciousness or hermeneutical
consciousness, or in other words, a Saidian focus on power differentials and exploitation versus a
Gadamerian emphasis on shared dialogue.5 If these are the twin poles of colonial interaction, one
can certainly see them within Indo-German connections during the First World War. Dialogue
was very apparent in the active courting of Indian revolutionaries by Germans. As Modris
Ecksteins argues, Germany was a revolutionary force in the world at the time, supporting
revolutionaries in Ireland and Russia, and I would add India.6 Yet the Germans were deeply
conflicted, and their attitude toward revolutionaries also reflected a counter-current of
domination, when Germans found themselves adhering to the colonial attitudes of their
otherwise wartime enemies in Europe, the British. This alignment makes sense in terms of the
patterns of belief in the superiority of European civilization, religion, and race, attitudes that
stretched back well into at least the nineteenth Century.
Following, Ricoeur scholars such as Herling are today seeking the fusion of these two
points of view, the critical and the hermeneutical. An examination of Indo-German relations
around the First World War provides a promising venue for such a dialectical synthesis of these
viewpoints, a “site of inquiry” as Herling suggests, for an analysis that transcends the more
materialist concerns of the Saidian critique of Orientalism and the intellectualist focus of
Halbfass’s hermeneutical approach.7 It is important that one examine the context around the
formation of these views. As Herling points out, “hermeneutics and ‘critical consciousness’
come together when we identify the genealogical critique of our categories, including the antiOrientalist critique, with a foregrounding of the prejudices that have come down to us from
within our tradition.”8 A step toward finding this synthesis is the examination of the structures of
knowledge about the other, just what the arguments and ideas Germans and Indians each held.
Usually scholars look at one approach or the other, trying to dispel its opposite. Yet these views
really are two sides of one coin of cultural interaction and (mis)perception. After all, at least a
century before Germans decided to work with Indians to undermine the British during the First
World War, Germans also made arguments for an especially close Indo-German connection, and
pursued actions that helped to establish one. A small circle of cultivated Germans revered
ancient Indian texts and the admiring influence was mutual.9
This article argues for a complexity in the German view, arguing that during the first few
decades of the twentieth century, a tension between critical and hermeneutical consciousnesses
existed within Germany about South Asia. From the 1890s, German colonial and naval
aspirations encroached upon British dominion and vied with Germans’ Romantic view of
Indians, as both European powers then had overseas colonies. Accordingly, some Germans, such
as the former German naval officer Graf Ernst zu Reventlow and the Indologist Helmuth von
Glasenapp, viewed Indians with a hermeneutical sympathy, wanting to invoke friendship with
Indians to cause the overthrow of their British overlords. Yet there was also a Saidian powerorientation here as well, as Indian independence also opened the possibility that the Germans
could take their British overlords’ place as the dominant world power. Accordingly, German
arguments concerning South Asians took on a more colonial or racist viewpoint. Ironically, even
as the First World War raged, many Germans, such as Baron von Oppenheim from the Foreign
Office (Auswaertiges Amt), could not escape the Eurocentric solidarity alongside the British
against the Indians and other colonial peoples.
Another important perspective to incorporate within this analysis of the Indo-German
relationship is that of the colonized subjects, the Indians. Complicating the position of the
colonizers (or would-be colonizers) and the divide between critical and hermeneutical
consciousness is that of the subaltern, which also incorporates these two perspectives or
consciousnesses. While these Indians were not colonizers themselves, they were conflicted about
working with the Germans. Indian revolutionaries had a large ambition to gain independence
from British rule, but were unable to accomplish this goal during the war, mostly because of
active and effective British counter-measures. The Berlin India Committee founded in 1915 by
Virendranath “Chatto” Chattopadhyaya, the work of Har Dayal in Turkey, and the Indo-German
expedition to Afghanistan to set up an Indian government in exile under Mahendra Pratap
indicate the varying approaches to the campaign for independence. Despite the many difficulties
and shortfalls during the war, there were successful aspects of this wartime Indo-German
collaboration. Germans and Indians working together aided the international cause of resistance
against the British and raised sympathies abroad for the Indian independence movement.10 Thus
both Indians and Germans articulated revolutionary positions that contributed to the Indian
independence effort against the British. While not immediately successful in overthrowing the
British, their efforts did have an impact, as one can see in several postwar literary works
including Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters (1940) and W. Somerset Maugham’s
Ashenden, Or: The British Agent (1941).
Germans involved with the Berlin India Committee exhibited both a critical and
hermeneutical consciousness. Those showing more of a critical cast included their advisor and
supervisor Baron von Oppenheim and his associates Ernst Jaeckh, H. K. Regendanz, and Herbert
Mueller, all of the German Foreign Office; Karl Bleibtreu, and, from Heidelberg, Dr. Wilhelm
Mertens and Professor Salomon, who had been instrumental in collecting Indians from
throughout Germany. Other Germans associated with the Berlin India Committee, “the supreme
general staff of the Indian revolution” included Otto von Wesendonck of the German Foreign
Office, a former missionary in India called Graetsch, the Director General of the Persian Carpet
Society Heinrich Jacoby, businessman and honorary German Consul at Karachi Ernst
Neuenhofer, Arabic scholar Miss Ruth Bike, and the Professor of Indology at the Universities of
Königsberg and Tübingen Helmuth von Glasenapp, who was most attuned to hermeneutical
interactions.11 Other related wartime organizations involving Indians in Germany included the
Bund der Freunde Indiens, founded on February 21, 1918.12 The Nachrichtenstelle für den
Orient (Information Service for the Orient) was led by Dr. Max Adrian Simon Baron von
Oppenheim (1860–1946), who held a doctorate in jurisprudence from Goettingen, had studied in
Islamic countries, was known as an archaeologist and founded the Deutsches Orient-Institut after
the war.13
One can see a tension between the critical and the hermeneutical positions in First World
War Indo-German activity in Baron von Oppenheim’s Muslim plan, which developed from prewar relations with the Ottoman Empire and sought a pan-Islamic uprising against the British
through the preaching of a Jihad from the Caliph in Constantinople. On the eve of the First
World War, Kaiser Wilhelm was eager to use Islam against the British, as he told his advisors.
“Our consuls in Turkey and India, agents, etc., must get a conflagration going throughout the
whole Mohammedan world against this hated, unscrupulous, dishonest nation of shopkeepers—
since if we are going to bleed to death, England must at least lose India.”14 A rumor circulated
that the Kaiser had declared himself a protector of Muslims, secretly converted to Islam, and
even had made an undercover pilgrimage to Mecca, yielding him a new Muslim name of “‘Haji’
Wilhelm Mohammed.”15 The German plan included using this affinity to Muslims to foment
revolution in British India and to spread anti-British propaganda. The improvisational nature of
these plans goes to show the lack of any deep Indo-Germanic diplomatic or affinitive ties among
the German diplomatic and military elites. Official Germany was not logistically, ideologically,
or politically prepared to work with illegal, underground non-European colonized groups, and
their rapid attempt to do so in order to hurt the British could not compete with the wellestablished counter-espionage network the British had in place to root out sedition.
Established Indian revolutionaries recognized a Saidian critical consciousness among the
Germans that replicated the colonial motivations of the British. They responded with a wariness
that presented a challenge to Indo-German revolutionary plans. For example, the Punjabi leader
Lajpat Rai, who stayed in the United States, “refused to join the [Berlin] Committee on the
principle of not taking foreign help for India’s struggle for freedom and not using violent means
for it.”16 Rai specifically did not trust the motivation of the Germans, whom he believed “would
grab India and would suck the life blood out of her, even more mercilessly than the English had
done.”17 The only revolutionaries initially available to the Germans were students studying in
Germany when the war started. The leader of the group of Indians in Berlin was Virendranath
“Chatto” Chattopadhyaya, who had just started studying as a doctoral student in philosophy in
Halle after arriving in Germany in April 1914.18 Chatto was a veteran of the revolutionary India
House in London and a friend of the imprisoned nationalist leader Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
(1883–1966). The German Indologist Helmuth von Glasenapp (1891–1963), who worked with
Indians in Germany during the war, wrote later that Chatto was “the most personable and reliable
of the Indians.”19 Chatto’s importance was also indicated by the serious effort the British Secret
Service made to assassinate or capture him until 1931, when he left Germany for the Soviet
Union.20 Chatto founded the Berlin India Committee with another radical student studying in
Halle, Abinash Bhattacharya (1883–1967), who wrote Bartaman Rananiti (The Modern Art of
War) and had founded in 1906 a revolutionary paper in Calcutta, Jugantar.21 On the Committee
were some fifty other Indian students in Berlin, the south Indian Champakraman Pillai who had
founded the Pro-India Committee in Zurich in 1912, and Dr. J. C. Dasgupta in Basel,
Switzerland.22 By the middle of 1916 there were branch offices in Zurich (Dasgupta),
Amsterdam (Champak Raman Pillai), and Stockholm (where Chatto moved from Berlin).23
One of the stumbling blocks for the success of Indo-German projects in the east were
conflicts between the representative of the Berlin India Committee in Constantinople, Har Dayal,
and other revolutionary leaders there that reflected fissures within the Indian community as well
as subaltern resistance to a German affinity for British colonialism. Har Dayal’s personal
background was different from the Bengalis who ran the Berlin Committee, which explains why
he largely stayed away in Switzerland.24 Har Dayal, with a strong record of revolutionary activity
arrived in the United States in 1911, went to Berkeley, California and founded there the Ghadr
[or Ghadar] (Rebellion) newspaper and the Yugantar Ashram [New Era Hermitage] to promote
revolution in India. On March 26, 1914 authorities arrested him as an undesirable alien, but he
jumped bail and went to Switzerland.25 In Constantinople, Har Dayal had a “two-fold objective:
propaganda among the Indians living in Turkey and Persia, and the establishment of a
revolutionary centre at Kabul with German cooperation.”26 The work there fell apart over
differences between religious factions among the Indian revolutionaries. “Arrogant and
insensitive beyond belief, he named the Committee’s Constantinople office ‘Bureau du Parti
National Hindou’ [Office of the Hindu National Party],” in a Muslim city and an office tasked
with spreading jihad throughout the Muslim world.27 One of the Indian Muslim leaders in
Constantinople, Kheiri, traveled to Berlin to complain to the Foreign Office about Dayal’s Hindu
zealotry. His pro-Muslim protest had resonance with Baron von Oppenheim, who backed the
Muslim faction within the revolutionary movement. Oppenheim’s leadership style was
authoritarian and he was keen to keep all Indian efforts tightly tied to German war aims.28 These
protests did little good for the cause of Indian independence, as the Berlin Indians showed
allegiance to Hindu interests and “were suspicious of anyone outside their own group; which in
turn made others suspicious and mistrustful of the Berlin Indians.”29 Har Dayal also blamed the
Germans for not being willing to spend enough, for not trusting Indians, or his own initiatives.30
The crisis about this split in leadership in Constantinople threatened the entire movement: “The
Har Dayal issue brought the whole future of Indo-German cooperation into question both among
Indians and at the AA [Foreign Office],” and on November 20, 1916, the Berlin India Committee
discontinued its operations in Turkey.31 It is worth noting how well the British strategy of
“divide and conquer” was working here—they successfully had Hindus and Muslims fighting
each other even when they were purportedly on the same side.32
Like the efforts from Constantinople, incidents inside India of planned resistance and
revolt were unsuccessful. Because the war in Europe drained India of British garrison troops,
revolutionaries had hoped the thinned British forces would be susceptible to surprise attack,
followed by a mass uprising.33 Bengal rebels increased bombings and armed robberies during the
war, but there was no region within India for a base. 34 Indian loyalty to Britain was a decisive
stumbling block. The Defense of India Act of 1915 provided additional countermeasures the
British needed to counteract Indo-German efforts aiming to sway the sixty-six million Muslims,
a fifth of the population of British India.35 None of the efforts to give help from abroad was
enough to foster a critical mass of revolt within India. Indian revolutionaries coordinating with
Germans living in Bangkok made a bid to establish Siam as a base of operations just to the east
of Burma, but their efforts backfired, inducing Siam to declare war on Germany and impounding
nine German merchant ships there.36 Ghadr revolutionaries from North America sent Indian expatriots to support revolutionary activities against the British. Their ship got as far as Calcutta,
where the British armed police met them, killing twenty-two Ghadrs and jailing eight thousand.37
The Ghadrs also made unsuccessful efforts to smuggle weapons into India with the help of the
military attaché and future German chancellor Franz von Papen and the German consul in San
Francisco, Franz Bopp.38
The German interest in Indians during the First World War had as its most obvious
component the Saidian power relationship. Hermeneutical understanding was less important in
this context than the relationship of power between colonizers and colonized. Yet unlike the
European-Middle Easterner adversarial dynamic Edward Said documents, both Indians and
Germans were fixated on the anti-colonial struggle of prying British control away from the
Indian subcontinent. Thus the German interest in helping Indian independence was linked
directly to a mutual enemy, the British. Just before the war, in his widely read Germany and the
Next War (1912), the German general Friedrich von Bernhardi recommended using Muslim
unrest against the British, anticipating the wartime goals of Indian revolutionaries and their
German backers. “England intensely fears every Pan-Islamic movement ... so far, in accordance
with the principle of divide et impera (divide and conquer), [England] has attempted to play off
the Mohammedan against the Hindu population.... The co-operation of these elements might
create a very grave danger, capable of shaking the foundations of England’s high position in the
world.39 Translated into English, Indian revolutionaries celebrated this book as a hopeful sign of
German help in their struggle. Har Dayal met with the German consul, Franz Bopp, on
December 31, 1913 in San Francisco, where they read selections from Bernhardi.40 In 1910 Har
Dayal wrote that Berlin was “the capital of the country which at present is most hostile in spirit
to England.”41
In addition to these connections involving geopolitics, there are other examples of
German writings that reveal the tension between a hermeneutical Indo-German cause and the
promotion of European colonial rule. An example from the pre-war period was Hans Heinz
Ewers’ Indien und Ich [India and I] (1911), an entertaining travelogue about Indian temples and
cultural sites.42 It also expressed views of the British rule in India, and Ewers claimed he was “no
friend of England,” or “perfidious Albion.”43 He described British India as a “powder keg,”
ready for revolution, filled with spies working with the Japanese, eager to see European power
smashed.44 He criticized the lack of press freedom in India, pointing out the contrast with the
metropole of Britain itself, and stated, “Every educated Englishman in India knows today, that
for India the democratic principle and self-rule does not exist, that here only one is in place:
benevolent despotism.”45 Despite Ewers’ criticism of the British rule, he also exhibited some
admiration. He pointed out that the four major modern cities of India—Bombay, Calcutta,
Madras, and Colombo—all showed strong European influence and had a lack of Indian history
behind them. Calcutta, for example, had only 5000 Europeans, including the Viceroy, living
among a million Indians, yet the city had “30 Protestant and eight Catholic churches and not a
single Hindu temple.”46
There are several examples of books during the war that expressed the German desire for
hermeneutical cultural exchange. A. K. Viator’s Deutschlands Anteil an Indiens Schicksal (1918)
[Germany’s Part in India’s Fate] argued: “While England crushes the Indian people with the
iron boot of the conqueror and forces them into the yoke of their domination, Germany on the
other hand seeks only the politics of spiritual conquest.”47 Another short book that emerged late
in the war embodied important anti-British messages promoted by Germans and Indians. Count
Ernst zu Reventlow (1869–1943) was a former German naval officer, journalist, and freelance
writer, and author of Indien: Seine Bedeutung Für Grossbritannien, Deutschland Und Die
Zukunft Der Welt [India: Its Meaning for Great Britain, Germany, and the Future of the World]
(1917).48 Many of Reventlow’s points echoed arguments Chatto was making in Sweden with his
propaganda efforts, inspired in part by the Bolsheviks in Russia.49 The critiques of British rule in
India included their militarism, excessive extraction of wealth and the resulting poverty they
spread, and discrimination against Indians regarding education, political office, and civil
liberties.50 Reventlow cited the British Socialist anti-Imperialist critic of Empire, Henry M.
Hyndman in India’s Bankruptcy, when he argued that India was becoming weaker under British
rule: “The British Rule in India has only one goal, namely, year by year and day by day to
squeeze the Indian people and land like a lemon and thereby to enrich Great Britain.”51 This
argument was significant, as Indian nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Romesh Chunder
Dutt had also made it in the late nineteenth century.52 Another argument that had resonance was
the poor British record fighting starvation. Reventlow maintained that famine increased steadily
under the British. “In the last thirty years of the 18th century three famines took place, in the first
half of the 19th century these numbers rose by a factor of four, namely to twelve famines, and in
the second half of the 19th centuries, 1854 to 1908, again nearly threefold the previous figure,
namely to thirty-five famines. While in the last few years millions are ravished by famine every
year.”53
Reventlow’s other arguments about labor and race, however, faced compromise by
German attitudes that fell in line with those of the British. Reventlow argued that the English
system of exploitation was not limited to the subcontinent, describing the British practice of
indentured labor that sent Indians to British colonies in West Africa, Mauritius, Guiana, and the
West Indies as a new form of slavery. “Indian people must perform forced labor for free far away
through indentured service. In all parts of the British Empire, where there is a need for labor, a
corresponding mass of Indians are transported there and transplanted.”54 Reventlow neglected to
mention the German complicity in this exploitative system, as before the war German colonial
administrators had tried to import Indian labor, and were only unable to do so because the British
did not cooperate.55 One can see here the tension within the German position, poised between
liberator and colonizer, hermeneutical and critical consciousness.
Reventlow’s criticism of the British racist attitudes in India likewise struck a chord, but
one with which Germans could also relate, thus compromising the point.
<ext>The Indian is to the Briton “colored,” despised, like he fundamentally despises all
relatives of the white race who are not Anglo-Saxon.... On trains there are carriages
designated “for Europeans only,” and the public restrooms have signs “European
Gentlemen,”, while the others are allotted for Indians with “men” and “women.” In the
many clubs in the cities of British India only a few native Indians are allowed access. 56
</ext>
The problem with making these accurate anti-racist accusations was Germans shared these same
prejudices, and had for decades. As Kaushik Bagchi argues, German Indologist Richard Garbe
when he visited India in the 1880s felt more at home with the British than Indians.57 The
Germans generally found the Eurocentric racial prejudices they shared with the British more
useful as propaganda than any anti-racist message. For example, Germans discounted the British
contribution to the Allied war effort by depicting the forces of British colonies and dominions as
the welter of fierce but small cubs surrounding the imperial lion.58 Germans disparaged Indians
as “coloured Englishmen.”59 They also attacked the Allied practice of employing “savage” native
troops in Europe. In a paper published in 1915 on “the Violation of peoples’ rights by England
and France in using troops of colour in the European theatre of war,” the German government
blamed Allied colonial troops for war atrocities. Claiming that their native opponents took war
trophies of severed heads, fingers, and ears, they asserted that the “Hindus accomplish their
infamies with sharpened daggers.”60 The Indian Corps on the Western Front in France did
introduce tribal fighting practices from fighting on the mountainous frontier of India. The 39th
Garwhal Rifles launched a nighttime trench raid on the night of November 9–10, 1914 near
Ypres, a “savage” practice that both the “civilized” British and Germans copied and applied
widely thereafter.61
While the Germans were accurate in their accusations of racism against the British, the
British themselves were conflicted about using Indian troops in Europe, but military necessity
forced them to do so. Racism had influenced the British not to use Indian troops in the 1899–
1902 Boer war in South Africa. In the First World War, former Commander in Chief in India
Lord Roberts opposed the use of Indian troops in Europe, while the British king and Viceroy
Lord Hardinge favored it, in part for the positive effect in India. The British ended up sending
infantry divisions from Lahore and Meerut to France in August, 1914, and during the first year of
the war, almost a third of the British Forces on the Western Front were Indians.62
Given these racial tensions, how exactly can one characterize the wartime Indo-German
relationship? Was there more than a relationship of convenience against a common English foe?
A mutual enemy in the British certainly was an important element shaping the Indo-German
connection during the war years. In the early days of the war, while German forces were still
moving during their invasion of France, the German Foreign Office did not pursue Indo-German
contacts with much alacrity, but after their defeat at the Marne before Paris in 1914 and the
ensuing stalemate as the war devolved into static trench warfare, the Germans were willing to
pursue other paths to achieving the elusive victory.63 There were strategic benefits for working
with Indians. German support of India was a way to counter the Allied accusations of the
German occupation of Belgium, as the British were equally oppressing Indians.64
Despite the strategic Indo-German connection through Great Britain as a mutual enemy in the
war, Germans had to overcome significant ideological obstacles to work with Indian
revolutionaries. “The burden of the whole social-political tradition of Imperial Germany stood in
its way. The political education of the Indian nationalists ran counter to that of the official
Germans.”65 Many Germans, especially those within the Kaiser’s government, raised in a
monarchial, authoritarian system, opposed democracy and maintained a deeply held animosity to
Western liberalism. The assassinations and bombings carried out by Indian revolutionaries
before the war served to create a gulf between them and a conservative German government
deeply fearful of the rise to power of the socialists, who in 1912 achieved a majority in the
Reichstag.66 The pre-war Germans tended to ignore Indian nationalism, condemning the British
for raising hopes among their subject peoples with their liberalism on one hand, and then not
crushing them with the other when the Indian demands rose.67 As Barooah points out, “Germans
in India, and particularly the official ones, had no sympathy for the Indian nationalists and even
less for those with a revolutionary bent.”68 These attitudes of “official Germans” extended to
some German academics as well. Berlin professor Georg Wegener visited India in 1898, 1906,
and 1910 and met Surendranath Banerjea, who expressed his surprise about “so many
uneducated and even stupid Britons ruling India.” Wegener related this story in a lecture before
the Geographical Society of Berlin in July 1911, reflecting that Banerjea “had not understood at
all that not the intellectual but the moral qualities of the British and the ethics and will power of
the white man, all of which an Indian lacks, are the reasons for this rule.... India is that part of the
earth where the supremacy of the white race over the coloured is most evident.”69 But the
Germans and Indians were willing to set aside all these ideological differences for the sake of
winning the war against the British and launching a successful revolution in India for
independence.70
To cooperate with the Indians, Germans also had to overcome their great admiration for
the British. From 1884, Germans had followed the British lead in maintaining an overseas
empire, and with the development of Admiral Tirpitz’s high seas fleet, the Kaiser and the
military and industrial elites in Germany were seeking their own imperial “place in the sun” as a
global power. Hans Zache of the Kolonialinstitut of Hamburg viewed the British in India as a
model for the German rule of their own colonies.71 Many military experts liked British rule in
India, such as Count Hans von Königsmarck on the German General Staff who “after several
visits to the East [starting in 1892] turned into an enthusiastic admirer of the British method of
ruling the Asiatic people.”72 Thus the Indo-German connection during the First World War
appears firmly locked in the Saidian frame of reference. Yet the hermeneutical consciousness,
while less salient, also was present and had a longer history of formation in Germany.
Germany’s heritage of Sanskrit scholarship was well known for revering Indian culture,
or at least ancient Indian or “Aryan” culture as it contributed to German nationalism.73 How did
Eurocentric, colonial German views fit in with the longer affinity of Indo-German contacts,
stretching back at least to the Romantic era at the end of the eighteenth Century? The tensions
within German attitudes toward India have to do with the differences between the “official
Germans” of diplomatic and military circles and Germans who were influenced by the strain of
India culture intensely studied by German scholars. On the one hand, as Barooah points out,
<ext>educated Indians never got any sympathy for their political aspirations from the
official Germans throughout the pre-War period.... The German diplomats in India being
down-to-earth practical men of business had nothing to do with ancient Indian history
and culture. One does not find in their reports a mention of Indology and its impact in
Germany ... [and] many ... found some of the Hindu customs simply revolting.74 </ext>
Nevertheless, emphasizing this cultural connection could have helped to bridge the gap
between the two regions. In his 1917 booklet, Reventlow made reference to a rich Indo-German
cultural connection: “The everlasting treasures [Schätze] of Indian mythology, philosophy, and
literature which had done so infinitely much for the German philosophy and worldview, and
indeed had won from it a basic foundation myth, count as an incontestable document to the
Indian spirit.”75
It was thus fitting that several German Indologists exhibited a hermeneutical
consciousness even while they actively participated in their political duties of wartime
espionage, subversion, and intrigue. Helmuth von Glasenapp, who had just earned a Ph.D. in
1914 for “The Doctrine of Karma in Jain Philosophy,” worked with the Indians in Berlin during
the war.76 He also made contacts with Indians interned in Prisoner-of-War camps south of Berlin
in Wünsdorf und Zossen, which including some 4,000 Islamic prisoners from French and
English colonies in the Halbmondlager [Crescent Camp]. Von Glasenapp was involved in an
intense effort to spread pro-German propaganda among the prisoners. Part of these efforts
included supporting religious services by building a mosque, the first in Germany.77 Von
Glasenapp wrote about his literally hermeneutical wartime work: “My duties were very eclectic
... [to] daily read multiple newspapers.... I had specific Indological assignments ... to translate old
and new brochures into various languages.” He wrote political glosses for a quarterly magazine
Der neue Orient [The New Orient] using the pseudonym Anandavardhan Shastri, which he said
meant “der wonnemehrende Gelehrte,” or “the greatly blissful sage.”78 It is significant that this
German, in his efforts to mediate cultures, took an Indian name. Later in the war, when Chatto
moved his activities to Stockholm, even though other Germans kept their distance, von
Glasenapp traveled incognito under an alias to Sweden to do work for the Indians there.
<ext>It was not advisable, that I travel under my own name, because I was afraid that the
enemy could guess my plans, because my name through my articles in New Orient was
no longer unknown.... I therefore went as a Persian carpet company salesman to
Stockholm.... As a pseudonym I chose Herbert von Geldern [Funds] because the initials
[HvG] would then match those on my clothes.79 </ext>
Despite his precautions, a hotel waiter recognized von Glasenapp and greeted him using his real
name, blowing his cover: “As I heard later, it should be an unwritten law for agents, that they do
not eat or stay in the same hotel.” Nevertheless, despite this minor setback, von Glasenapp a.k.a.
Geldern was able to meet with Chattopadhyaya und Acharya in Stockholm.80 Von Glasenapp
was not the only German scholar working with the Indians; also active was the theology
professor Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) of the University of Göttingen, who after the war wrote
books on Indian and comparative religious topics, including mysticism and the Bhagavadgītā.81
Significantly, there was mutual dislike between Otto and von Oppenheim, who wanted
to keep Indian revolutionaries untainted with contact from the Foreign Office.82 The miscues
with Har Dayal in Constantinople cast doubts about Indo-German interaction, as Barooah argues:
<ext>The whole co-operation seemed to have been based on shaky foundations in the
first place. Indians in Berlin were not happy to work under the direction of Baron
Oppenheim.... There were many influential men outside who had their own schemes for
an Indian revolt and who met the Indians privately to this end. With one of these men,
Professor Rudolf Otto of Göttingen, who himself disliked Oppenheim, some of the
leading Indians had very good relations and they discussed their working problems with
him.83 </ext>
These German scholars sympathetic to the Indians could help bridge a cultural and
ideological gap between Germans and Indians, but the Indians brought their own aversions to
working with Europeans. Indians fighting for the British were critical of Europeans in letters
home, in particular, “the familiar relations between the sexes and the apparent emptiness and
superficiality of the Christian religion.”84 As a result of the deep Muslim concern that the British
were asking them to fight against the Turkish caliph, the Muslim League moved closer to the
Hindu nationalists by signing the Congress-League pact of 1916.85 This was a remarkable shift,
as there continued to be considerable tension in the Hindu-Muslim relationship among Indians.
The Muslim minority was afraid of having their needs ignored by the Hindu majority.86
Indians did not have false illusions about German benevolence. They knew that the
Germans could also be tyrannical overlords in India like the British. Thus the Indian attitude
toward the Indo-Germanic partnership reflected the tension Germans felt between their critical
role as colonial Europeans and the hermeneutical, cultural interest in India. The imperial rivalry
with Britain informed much of the German interaction with Indians. Oppenheim’s attitude
toward Rudolf Otto, discouraging him from interacting with Indians in Germany was
emblematic. If forced to choose, official critical interaction trumped cultural hermeneutics. Yet
there were positive interactions during the interwar period, such as the visit by Rabindranath
Tagore, for example. Barooah argues that
<ext>Germany’s attitude towards the Indian freedom movement during the War was not
a temporary one; it was to outlive the War and bring a broad and liberal understanding of
the subject in the Germany of the Weimar Republic. As a result, the popular Indian image
of Germany as a sympathetic country with respect for Indology remained intact ... the
Indian Muslims began to be treated in the inner context of Indian history rather than of
Pan-Islamism.87 </ext>
Thus the Indo-German contact during the First World War reflected an uneasy
relationship, on both sides. No major Indian independence figures sided with the Germans. The
minor figures who did, such as Chatto and Har Dayal, eventually distanced themselves from the
Germans so as to maintain their credibility as leaders. The Germans recognized this liability and
shrewdly stepped back into the shadows, being willing enough to let Chatto run his operations
from independent Sweden and not let the link to Berlin be so apparent. But there was a deeper
feeling of half-heartedness in the German support for Indian revolutionaries. Helping them
would aid victory in the war against Britain, if the plan to incite rebellion in India had worked.
Widespread rebellion in India would have presented the British with a difficult dilemma: either
to lose India or to withdraw troops from the Western Front and lose there. But the Germans’
hearts were more with the British as fellow Europeans than with the Indians. For Germans, free
India meant India free of the British, preferably with the Germans in charge, not free for Indians.
The Germans opposed the British out of political rivalry, not because they sympathized with
Indians. As monarchists fond of a militaristic order, the Prussian Junker elites certainly brokered
no sympathies whatsoever with the rabble mob, and even less so with the downtrodden natives in
a colony, as the Herero in Southwest Africa found out in the first decade of the twentieth
century. The Indo-German alliance during the First World War was mostly a marriage of
convenience. Despite this troubled relationship, there was surprisingly a rather strong IndoGerman connection in post-war fiction.
Instances of both the critical and hermeneutical consciousness among Germans and
Indians during the First World War can be found in the post-war Anglo-Indian literature about
the conflict, such as in Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters (1940) and W. Somerset
Maugham’s Ashenden (1941).88 Anand (1905–2004) did not participate in the war, although his
father Lall Chand Anand served as a Subedar in the seventeenth Dogras.89 Mulk Raj Anand was
active in the Indian independence struggle, which influenced the novel’s anti-British perspective,
as well as his portrayal of the Germans. Maugham (1874–1965), as a former participant in the
war, gave a British perspective in this story about wartime espionage. Anand depicts the Indian
colonial soldier, the sepoy, who is caught in a Saidian Orientalist dynamic, yet nevertheless
seeks hermeneutically to understand his colonial British masters and their enemy, the Germans.
In fact, it is through this sympathy with the Germans that the Indians overcome their
subservience to the British, both politically and conceptually. Maugham, although British and an
active participant in the war, also reveals elements of understanding and admiration, sentiments
that indicate a hermeneutical portrayal even of his opponent, and perhaps a transcendence of his
duty, even though he ends up following it.
The reader may have already noticed that notably absent in this article are examples from
German literature. We have examined various writings from von Glasenapp, Ewers, and
Reventlow, but no major literary figures. German literature about modern India in the decades
following the First World War is scarce, although it is much more prolific when focusing on
ancient India. Two postwar texts, for example, take place in ancient, not modern, India: Hermann
Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) is set in the time of the historical Buddha in the 6th century BCE
while Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India (1940) is in a timeless past.
This emphasis of German literary writers on ancient India reflected the historicist concerns of
German Indologists who studied India and made information about the Buddha and stories from
Indian epics available to the German reading public. This ancient focus also had to do with the
Romantic origins of German interest in India.90
What emerged in Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Across the Black Waters was a harsh view of
the British and a remarkably favorable representation of the Germans, considering the Indian
sepoys were engaged in a war against the Germans. The novel reveals the deeper war the Indians
were fighting, for self-respect against the “Sarkar”: the British government and the oppressive
weight of colonial inequality and its concomitant fear of the British “sahibs” [sirs, masters]. Next
to the relentless pressure of this anti-colonial struggle, even the horrors of trench warfare and the
danger of imminent death appeared as transient and relatively inconsequential. It was the British
who emerged as the real enemies of the Indian sepoys, not the Germans.
The British were grateful for the sepoys being there to fight, and there was some
camaraderie in the trenches between sepoys and Tommies, the British enlisted troops.91 But the
trench camaraderie gradually disappeared the further away they were from the front lines and
danger.92 Anand describes the strict separation between sepoy troops and British officers as a
“rigid caste system” that a French boy did not understand when he invited the Indian sepoy Lalu
to eat with the British, as “no Indian soldier could ever dare to aspire to such heights of dignity
as to sit down to table with British officers.”93 Only one of the British officers, Captain Owen,
was sympathetic: the exception that proved the general rule.94 Fear of officers extended to a
general fear of all Europeans. While bathing, the sepoys were surprised to have a lighthearted
exchange with local French women washing clothes nearby. The Indians were “usually so afraid
of the white folk that they could not make the slightest gesture which might be considered
disrespectful, self-effacing to the point of making themselves scarce, were now casual and
hearty, almost as if they were at home.”95 Sepoys were amazed to see a larger degree of equality
in Europe, where they received better treatment by the British than they did in India.96 Of the
Europeans the sepoys encountered, it was the British who had been to India who most regarded
sepoys as inferior.97 The British gave only pragmatic, grudging acknowledgement of the sepoys’
diverse religious faiths; when a Christian Bishop came to visit the unit, he preached mostly to the
British soldiers there, “giving up the [Indian] heathen for lost.”98
A particularly painful point of contention for the sepoys was the Sarkar’s strong
inhibitions against their romantic and sexual interactions with local French women. The sepoys
faced informal punishment through unwritten laws as well as by court martial if they were even
seen with European women.99 The French were less racist toward the African troops in their
army than the British were to Indians. The Africans could talk to French women, while sepoys
had to tread extremely warily.100 Likewise, the appreciative French were quite amicable to the
sepoys, calling them “brave, very brave” and thinking of them an “ancient and civilized people
with a great past culture behind them.”101 The interest of Lalu for European women extended to a
painting of a nude European woman by Ingres, “La Source,” as well as a fine, live young
woman, Marie, daughter of a friendly French family. But this friendliness caused Lalu anxiety
about reprisals against him by the British officers.102 Despite these dangers, the sepoys were
heartened to see how much the French liked them, especially the French women.103
Another way Anand highlighted the poor relations between British and Indians was to
ridicule the characters who remained loyal to the British. The old sepoy Daddy Dhanoo, was
loyal in a somnambulistic, extremely unflattering way. The root cause of his sad condition was
his fidelity to the British, which Anand equated to a disease. “This all-pervading sense of ‘Duty’
spread like an invisible cancer through his system, the cancer which had eaten through him, till
there was not much vitality left.”104 The old man only wanted to return to the homeland of India
to be buried properly, but instead died far away in a strange land, a “horrible and lonely death,”
drowned in a flooded trench.105 He did not die heroically or even get a proper burial, so his
comrade Lalu was stricken by thoughts of Dhanoo’s ghost haunting him.106 Dhanoo’s fulfilling
his duty to the British by fighting overseas prevented his proper burial, thus revealing an
underlying conflict between a sepoy’s duty to the British and duty to his own traditions, a tension
that was at the heart of the 1857 rebellion and subsequent resistance to the British until
independence in 1947. Anand illustrated how sepoys exhibited their loyalty unthinkingly. “They
were like conscripts, brutalized and willing to fight like trained bulls, but without a will of their
own, like soulless automatons.”107 Loyalty to the British left one feeble and meek. Santu, the
sepoy runner who brought food up to the troops in the trenches, “entertained the hope of
recognition of his services for months ... struggling hard to give satisfaction,” claiming, “Truly
the sahibs are wonderful.”108 Santu’s is reduced to a craven condition. “He had become a
frightened, abject creature ... wincing and stepping back all a tremble ... meekly,” doing his duty
for the British overlords.109
While ridiculing the loyalists, Anand portrayed many signs of resistance to the British
among the sepoys, who mocked the British behind their backs, displaying cynical attitudes and
resentment against orders.110 There were many minor criticisms of the British, including the
weak firepower of their supporting artillery, as the English guns were inferior to those of the
Germans.111 When he first entered the trenches, Lalu observed that British trenches were
haphazard, “shapeless and irregular.”112 Later, when a sepoy refused to fight, a higher-ranking
sepoy shot him to set an example.113 The sepoys critiqued the barracks army mentality,
lamenting that shined boots seemed to be more important than loyalty or courage.114 The war
itself provided even more important reasons than overzealous army discipline for the sepoys to
question their European colonial masters. The sepoys were losing respect for Europe, its claim to
superiority imploding under the massive destruction of the world war, leading sepoys to wonder
why participants, including their European colonial masters, were killing each other so
pointlessly.115
The novel reveals a curious lack of Indian sepoy animosity against the Germans. The
Germans merged fairly seamlessly with the many other enemies the sepoys fought for the
British, including tribesmen on the frontier of India, the Chinese, and even fellow Indians.116 The
only statements made against the Germans, such as the Kaiser was an “incarnation of the devil”
who had a “fiendish will to power,” appear in the text within quotation marks, suggesting that the
sepoys considered them only British propaganda slogans, and did not really believe them to be
true.117 The main character, Lalu, revealed the emptiness of these phrases for him. “The gap of
thousands of miles of sea and the rich experience of wonder cities had come between those
words and the present reality ... since he had really been eager to come to see Vilayat [Europe],
and not because of the loud speeches” of the pro-British Indian recruiters.118 The sepoys were
rather blasé about their German adversaries. “This was not a war for any of the religions of their
inheritance, nor for any ideal which could fire their blood and make their hair stand on end.
Ordered about by the Sarkar, they were as ready to thrust their bayonets into the bellies of the
Germans as they had been to disembowel the frontier tribesmen, or their own countrymen, for
the pound a month which the sahibs paid them.”119 At most, the sepoys were fighting for
mercenary reasons, for medals, awards and the cash reward they granted, not because they
believed in the British rule or bore a grudge against the Germans.120 The prevailing emotion the
sepoys had towards the Germans was curiosity, not fear.121 The sepoys’ affinity for the Germans
became more apparent when a German aircraft scattered leaflets in the trenches. A sepoy read
one of the papers aloud. “The Sheikh-Ul-Islam has proclaimed a holy war ... at Mecca against the
British, Russians and the French,” an effort joined by the Sultan of Turkey and the King of
Afghanistan, and to continue fighting, they “commit irreligion.”122 This line of argument was not
effective, as Dhayan Singh answered: “But we are Hindus.... What is the Sheikh of Mecca to
us?”123 Yet even for the Muslim sepoys, the German pronouncements did not persuade, as the
British were able to answer enemy Muslim leaders with their own proxies, the Hazrat Sherif of
Mecca and the Arabs.124 Answering who was instigating these leaflets, a sepoy explained to his
fellows regarding Chatto’s Berlin Committee that “The sahibs say that there are some scoundrels
from Hindustan on the German side, agitators who have run away from the clutches of the law at
home and prefer to work in the pay of the Kaiser than to go to the scaffold.”125 Rather than be
outraged, Dhayan Singh was “intrigued” and says, “I would like to embrace them.” Lalu asked,
“I wonder what the Germans are like to talk to?”126 The British clearly feared the effect of these
leaflets as they ordered their confiscation and forbade talking about them, as several sepoys had
deserted.127
Just as the sepoys felt a lack of animosity toward the Germans, the attitudes of the
Germans were largely favorable toward the Indians, although there was some mutual fear
between them. Germans feared the Indians for their fierce fighting skills, an image the British
consciously cultivated to intimidate their enemy. “The Germans ... think we are all Gurkhas [elite
troops from Nepal] with kukhries [curved fighting knives] in our mouths, savages who will creep
up to them, take them by surprise and kill them. And the Sarkar is treating you as the shock
troops for that reason.”128 Yet there were many indications of respect and even affection between
the Indians and the Germans. During an assault, a German spared Lalu’s life when the German
“had fixed his aim on him but hesitated and pulled the trigger only a little after Lalu”
disappeared from view.129 There were two particularly striking scenes of friendly exchanges
between sepoys and Germans in no-man’s-land between the trenches. The first was by the sepoy
Rustam, who when the Germans spotted him on patrol, he
<ext>salaamed [greeted] the Germans ... jumped into their trenches ... pointing to our
trenches he abused the Angrez sahibs [British] and made a sign as if he meant to cut the
throat of the whole Angrezi race. Whereupon the Germans were pleased and gave him
sweets and coffee ... he told them there were other traitors in the Hindustani Army and
got permission to go and bring them back with him. The Germans feasted him on meat
and wine, and allowed him to creep back.130 </ext>
The second communion scene took place during an unauthorized, spontaneous Christmas truce
where Sepoys and Germans met in no-man’s-land to exchange gifts and sweets.131 This
reconciliation and peaceful exchange among the Indian and German antagonists revealed their
underlying human commonality in a touching hermeneutical moment. It took the angry
intervention of the British officers to shut down the peaceful reunion of Aryan brothers. The
culmination of this friendly interaction occurred at the very end of the novel, when the Germans
captured the main character Lalu. Soldiers rarely surrendered, not only to avoid the grueling life
of a prisoner of war, but because they so often never had the chance as each side rarely gave
quarter in the ferociousness fighting of trench warfare, so Lalu’s survival suggests friendly
feeling between the adversaries.132 Considering the recruitment efforts in Halbmondlager in
Germany, it is conceivable that Lalu would certainly have been open to working for Chatto and
his Berlin Committee of Indians against the British.133
One can partially explain the depiction of sepoys carrying more resentment against the
British than against the Germans by considering when Anand wrote the novel, between January
1937 and December 1939, when the Indian Independence movement was not only well
established but the Congress took office in six provinces in a temporary power-sharing
agreement with the British.134 Anand published it in 1940, a year after the British unilaterally
declared war against Germany in 1939 on behalf of India without bothering to consult its Indian
leadership in the Indian National Congress, just as it had in the First World War. This time,
fewer Indians were willing to wait patiently and support the British in hopes of gaining rewards
for loyalty. In 1942, Indian politicians associated with the Congress resigned en masse and
supported the “Quit India” movement rather than serve the British. There was considerable
support for the former president of the Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose, who escaped to Nazi
Germany and then Japanese Burma, where he led an army of liberation against the British.135
Across the Black Waters represents the fruition of the anti-British agitation that Chatto and his
Berlin Committee sought to propagate. Its views parallel closely the attitudes and concerns of the
anti-British Indian revolutionaries during the First World War, which carried on to the later,
more widespread phases of the independence struggle.
Another explanation for the hostility of the sepoys against the British and the lack of
animosity against the Germans was the recruiting practices of the British in India. The ratio of
British to Indian troops in India declined from 1:2 to 1:6 because of the manpower drain of
shifting troops into Europe. Likewise, there were large recruiting drives in India, which shared
the burden of India contributing troops to the war.136 By the end of the First World War, 1.27
million Indians served, including almost 827,000 combatants, or approximately 10 percent of the
British Empire troops, of which 60,000 died.137 Indian troops fought on the Western Front in the
crucial early phase of the war in 1914–1915, before the Indian infantry withdrew in 1915 to fight
in other theaters such as in Egypt and Mesopotamia, leaving only a cavalry division, which did
not see much fighting.138
Just as one can see in Anand’s work the hermeneutical efforts of cross-cultural encounter
between Germans and Indians set against a critical Saidian context, the English writer W.
Somerset Maugham also provides a venue to examine these contesting dynamics. Maugham,
who worked as an agent in the British Secret Service during the war, engaged in a plot to lure
Chatto across the border between Switzerland and France to meet a woman.139 A fictionalized
version of this incident occurred in the “Giulia Lazzari” chapter in Maugham’s novel Ashenden,
where Chatto appeared as Chandra Lala from Berlin, “the most dangerous conspirator in or out
of India. He’s done more harm than all the rest of them put together. You know that there’s a
gang of these Indians in Berlin; well, he’s the brains of it.”140 This was an accurate description of
Chatto, yet Maugham also presented a fictional image of Chatto as an overweight “fanatic,” thus
conforming to Orientalist stereotypes of being “grotesque,” “fat,” a “greasy little nigger.”141
Despite these hurtful epitaphs, Maugham’s fictional alter-ego did sympathize with Lal/Chatto.
“That Indian fellow must be a rather remarkable chap.... One can’t help being impressed by a
man who had the courage to take on almost single-handed the whole British power in India....
He’s aiming at freedom for his country ... it looks as though he were justified in his actions.”142
The agent’s superior, “R,” dismissed these remarks as “very far-fetched and morbid” and advised
him, “I wouldn’t get sentimental about him if I were you. He’s nothing but a dangerous
criminal.”143
Like Anand, Maugham depicted anxieties about Indo-European sexual liaisons. The
agent “was surprised. For some reason he had expected her to be fair, perhaps from some notion
that an Oriental would be more likely to fall for a blonde.”144 Lazzari was an Italian prostitute in
this fictional story, but the actual woman involved was Miss Hilda Margaret Howsin of Reedness
Manor, Yorkshire, an English friend of Chatto from 1907.145 Maugham apparently was trying to
make the liaison less threatening to the British racial sensibilities. Not only was Chatto’s real
love interest during the war English, but before the war, when he was studying law in London,
from 1903 to 1909, Chatto lived together with an English woman as Mr. and Mrs. Chatterton.
When they separated, he courted Miss Reynolds, who supported him financially, so he had a
history of amorously crossing racial barriers.146
How did Maugham’s fictional account of the attempt to capture Chatto fit with what
actually happened? Maugham’s Ashenden was arguably a wish fulfillment about how events
could have turned out for the British. As it played out historically, there were intrigues, but the
British failed to snare the prize, to actually take Chatto. There had been a recent precedent before
the war; British intelligence services had successfully intrigued against Chatto’s revolutionary
friend Vinayak Savarkar in 1910. Savarkar had been safe in Paris, but ignoring advice, returned
to England and an arrest that led to almost three decades of prison and restricted movements.147
Likewise, with Maugham’s fictional attempt to capture Chatto, the account showed a masterful
control of Giulia Lazzari, the bait and love interest of Chatto’s analog, Chandra Lal.148 The agent
told Lazzari that she was “absolutely free” and left her in a hotel.149 Nevertheless, he had her
every move secretly watched, and made arrangements so she was unable to flee across the lake at
Lausanne to see her lover Chandra Lal, forcing him to come to her and into French custody. She
was psychologically tormented, not wanting to be the bait, yet otherwise she faced prison for
espionage. The agent threatened her and dictated a desperate letter for her to write to Lal.150 He
eventually arrived on the ferry, but just as he was apprehended, realizing his predicament, he
took poison.151 Thus one sees a fictional ending favorable for the British, but the reality of the
British ability to keep their thumb over the specter of Indian independence was less sanguine, at
least in the long run.
Perhaps the greatest legacy Indo-German cooperation during the First World War had
was on the Indian independence movement. “The young revolutionaries for the first time could
make India a live issue in international politics, and made large segments of world opinion aware
of India’s plight and sympathetic towards her aspirations. They also made valuable contacts with
the revolutionary leaders and political figures of other countries.”152 Chatto had moved to
Sweden and from the middle of 1917 his new base in Stockholm became the most important
center of Indian revolutionary activities in Europe for the rest of the war.153 European Central
Committee of Indian Nationalists, also known as the Indian National Committee in Sweden,
enjoyed covert financing and contact from Germany, as well as pro-German public sympathy.
Still, in contact with European socialists and Bolsheviks, they gained new freedom to go further
in their propaganda than the Germans were willing to go while in Berlin.154 Indian
revolutionaries had articulated arguments against British rule, juggled internal
communal/religious disagreements, gained practice negotiating with another European colonial
power, Germany, and struggled against the British counterintelligence forces. After this, even if
they had not won their struggles, they had at least emerged as partners with the Germans. If
young, relatively inexperienced revolutionary student leaders could do this with Germany, then
the future looked bright for the independence struggle with Britain.
The attitude of Germans toward Indians during the First World War reflected both
hermeneutic efforts to bridge cultural divides, alongside a colonial power dynamic that
conformed to a Saidian perspective. Germans both reached out to the Indians and also assumed
the superior attitude of the British colonists they were seeking to displace. Indian revolutionaries,
while willing to accept the help of Germans in their fight for Indian independence, also
maintained the well-founded suspicion that if the Germans did remove the British from their
control of India, these same Germans would have tried to usurp their place as European colonial
sahibs. These tensions within the Indo-German relationship are also reflected in Anglo-Indian
literature about the First World War. Both Anand and Maugham reveal similar affinities and
animosities between the British and Indians. Ultimately both Germans and English conflated into
a single European “other” for Indians who wanted independence from colonial rule and were
willing to manipulate animosity between Europeans for their own purposes. Yet among these
Europeans existed some willing to make the hermeneutical leap of understanding beyond a
purely Saidian power-political frame. It is this tension between these viewpoints that makes this
period a fruitful site of connection for transcending the Saidian/Hermeneutical divide.
<#><aff>Florida Atlantic University</>
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<bmh>End Notes</>
<en>1 Please note that the approach toward the literature and material examined in this article is
that of an historian. See Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism 117–18. Said argued, “Yet what German
Orientalism had in common with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism was a kind of
intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture” (Orientalism 19). Raymond
Schwab argues that a European “universalism” allowed scholars throughout Europe to become
comfortably “integrated in the scholarly elites” of other European countries (The Oriental
Renaissance 87). Said himself dismissed those who criticized him for not including German
Orientalism; (“Orientalism Reconsidered” 346). Some also distinguish between the late
eighteenth-century British study of India under Hastings and Jones and the later Anglicism of
Macaulay, arguing that the Hastings type of Orientalism was not the kind Said condemns (see
Kopf, “Hermeneutics versus History” 194). Pollock argues that German Orientalism was
directed inward toward Europe, not toward Asia (Pollock, “Indology, Power, and the Case of
Germany” 305).
2
Inden, Imagining India. Murti, India: The Seductive and Seduced "Other" of German
Orientalism. Bagchi, “An Orientalist in the Orient: Richard Garbe’s Indian Journey, 1885–
1886.”
3
Zantop, Colonial Fantasies 7.
4
Halbfass, “Special Comments” 241. Also worthy of mention alongside Halbfass is Todd
Kontje, German Orientalisms 2–9.
5
Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology” 63.
6
Eksteins, Rites of Spring 169.
7
Halbfass, India and Europe xi.
8
Herling’s comments here follow his consideration of the following point made Richard
King: “It is necessary to combine Gadamer’s insights into the ‘historical situatedness’ of the
interpreter with an awareness of the ideological elements at play in both text and interpreter.
Gadamer’s redemption of prejudice suggests that the interpreter, rather than suppressing his or
her biases and agenda in the pursuit of scholarly neutrality, should, on the contrary, bring such
prejudices to the fore. Such an approach involves an attitude of critical reflexivity toward one’s
work” (King 80).
9
For Germany, see McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, Orientalism. Indian reformers such
as Dayanand Sarasvati had used translations of ancient Indian texts including the Rig Veda by
Max Müller to influence Indian society (see Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins 107).
10
There are many works on the issue of Indian nationalists during the First World War,
and most include Indian interaction with Germans, such as Barooah, Chatto: The Life and Times
of an Indian Anti-Imperialist in Europe and Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905–1922, in
the Background of International Developments. There are also collections of primary sources,
such as Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905–1927: Select Documents as well as memoirs
of participants and documents, including Franz von Papen, Memoirs. An example of work from
the British perspective is that of Hopkirk, a former officer in colonial British troops (King’s
African Rifles), who in Like Hidden Fire emphases intrigue and espionage in his analysis of
Indo-German “intrigues” in Central Asia. He describes Vinayak Savarkar, director of the prewar
India House in London, as the “evil genius behind these nefarious activities” (44). Approaches to
the issue of Indo-Germanic connections during the First World War have ironically tended to
neglect the German and Indian point of view. As Barooah, author of two works examining the
Indo-German official connections, points out, scholars have largely “not studied the role of these
freedom fighters in the round, and German archival sources … Indo-German co-operation, have
almost wholly been ignored” (Chatto 3). The Indo-German connection has been studied, but
focus has been on the intellectual connections, such as by Halbfass in India and Europe. A recent
corrective, although focused mostly on the Near East rather than South Asian connection to
Germany, is Gottfried Hagen, “German Heralds of Holy War: Orientalists and Applied Oriental
Studies.”
285.
11
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad...Background 95.
12
Deutsch-Indischen Gesellschaft, Indien in Berlin 12; Leifer, India and the Germans
13
Barooah, Chatto 55n15, 60n107. When Oppenheim was in Turkey, Dr. Eugen
Mittwoch, Professor of Arabic at Berlin University, stood in as acting director (Bose, Indian
Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 94).
14
Night of July 30–31, 1914 (Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times 352). Germans had
been building a Berlin to Baghdad railroad, which they could use to transport Central Powers
troops into the Middle East and closer to India (Joll and Martel, The Origins of the First World
War 236–41). As part of their Orient policy, German officials contributed to the agitation by
Indian Muslims, who were concerned about being dominated by the Hindu majority (Barooah,
Chatto 36).
15
Hopkirk, Like Hidden Fire 4.
16
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 210n144.
17
Barooah, Chatto 88–89.
18
Barooah, Chatto 29, 40; Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 84.
19
“Der wohl sympathischste und zuverlässigste von den Indern war Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya” (Helmuth von Glasenapp, Meine Lebensreise: Menschen, Länder Und Dinge,
Die Ich Sah 76).
20
Chatto died September 2, 1937 in Stalin’s purges for being a member of the German
Communist Party, outlawed in his own country, as well as being a follower of Lenin and a
protégé of Stalin’s rival, Sergey Kirov. Barooah, Chatto 314, 324.
21
Barooah, Chatto 56n30.
22
The students included Abder Rahman, A. Siddiqui, Mansur Ahmed, Maharaj Narain
Kaul, Dr. M. Prabhakar, and Hormusji Kersasp (Barooah, Chatto 43).
23
Barooah, Chatto 95.
24
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 96.
25
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 61.
26
Barooah, Chatto 46.
27
Barooah, Chatto 69.
28
Barooah, India 211.
29
Barooah, Chatto 69.
30
Barooah, Chatto 46. He singled out Dr. Weber and Wassmuss in particular.
31
Barooah, Chatto 48, 74.
32
The German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers noted the degree to which the British depended
on Indian religious, social, and political divisions to maintain their rule in India (Hanns Heinz
Ewers, Indien und Ich 75). Sir Charles Wood, the Secretary of State for India following the
“Mutiny”/Rebellion of 1857, reorganized the Indian regiments to emphasize their differences:
“‘If one regiment mutinies I should like to have the next so alien that it would fire into it.’ Within
regiments he would have every variety of race, caste, and religion, thereby countering
‘fraternising and combining among the troops.’ He explicitly acknowledged that ‘as regards
Armies and Regiments in India, I am for “Divide et impera’” (Washbrook, “India, 1818–1860:
The Two Faces of Colonialism” 428).
33
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 168.
34
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 224-5. The British retaliated by
arresting the leadership, including Bhai Parma Nand, a professor of the Arya Samaj college in
Lahore. The British also censored newspapers and confined to their villages prominent leaders
such as the pan-Islamic Ali brothers (Collett, Butcher of Amritsar 140).
35
Marston and Sundaram, A Military History of India and South Asia 82. “Though some
of the soldiers, especially Pathans, joined the revolutionaries and even took part in some of the
missions to distant lands, the response on the whole was unsatisfactory” (Bose, Indian
Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 94). The Punjab provided more recruits than any other
Indian province, forming half of the Indian army (Collett, Butcher of Amritsar 136).
36
Barooah, Chatto 81.
37
Fraser, “Germany and Indian Revolution” 260.
38
Fraser, “Germany and Indian Revolution” 261–63. The first Sanskrit professor
appointed to the University of Berlin in 1821 was also named Franz Bopp. Through his
connections with the Krupp arms company representative Hans Tauscher, by December, 1914,
von Papen was able to secure 8,080 rifles, 2,400 carbines, 410 repeating rifles, and four million
rounds of ammunition, in addition to 500 revolvers, 250 Mauser pistols, and 100,000 cartridges.
They sent the arms out of United States waters on the schooner Annie Larsen to rendezvous at
the Mexican island of Socorro to transfer onto the Maverick, an oil tanker. However, the two
ships were unable to make contact, so the Maverick set sail for Java without the weapons while
the Annie Larsen returned to Seattle in the United States, where the U.S. government impounded
it (Barooah, Chatto 77).
39
von Bernhardi and Powles, Germany and the Next War 93–94. See also 138: “in view
of the great excitement in the Moslem world, the position of the English is precarious.”
40
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 83; Hopkirk, Like Hidden Fire 50–
41
In Bande Mataram. Barooah, India 184.
42
Poley, “Everything is India: Hanns Heinz Ewers, Indology and Women.”
43
Ewers, Indien und Ich 73.
44
Ewers, Indien und Ich 73–74.
45
“Jeder gebildete Engländer in Indien weiß heute, daß für Indien das demokratische
51.
Prinzip und die Selbstverwaltung ein Unding ist, daß hier nur eines am Platze ist: wohlwollender
Despotismus” (Ewers, Indien und Ich 79–80). The same could be said about Ewer’s native
German monarchy at the time.
46
Ewers, Indien und Ich 127–28. Ewers also wrote about a meal he had in Simla as a
guest of the British Viceroy, where the Viceroy Lord Minto pressed him to write favorable
impressions of British India in his guestbook, and Ewers complied for the sake of the BritishGerman diplomatic relationship (136–37).
47
“Während England mit dem ehernen Schritt des Eroberers das indische Volk niedertrat
und in das Joch seiner Herrschaft zwang, Deutschland auch Indien gegenüber stets nur geistige
Eroberungspolitik getrieben” (Quoted in Ganeshan, Das Indienbild deutscher Dichter um 1900
53).
48
Reventlow, Indien: Seine Bedeutung für Grossbritannien, Deutschland und die Zukunft
der Welt.
49
All efforts to create revolt in India had failed by the end of 1916, yet the German
government did not want to give up on the Berlin Indian Committee, in part because of how it
would look abroad. At the same time, the Indians did not want to appear as mere puppets of the
Germans and thought they should develop a degree of independence to maintain their
revolutionary efforts (Barooah, Chatto 100). Three significant pamphlets Chatto produced in
Sweden were: Opinions of English Socialist Leaders on British Rule in India, The International
Socialist Congress: Speeches and Resolutions on India, and Some American Opinions on British
Rule in India (Barooah, Chatto 117–18).
50
Barooah, Chatto 118–19.
51
Reventlow, Indien 42.
52
Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia 81; Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule
in India.
53
Reventlow, Indien 55. For Indian famines, see Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts 25-31.
54
Reventlow, Indien 49. On the South Asian Diaspora, see David Northrup, “Migration
from Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.”
55
Barooah, India 153.
56
Reventlow, Indien 62.
57
Bagchi, “An Orientalist” 301-5.
58
John Frank Williams, Corporal Hitler and the Great War 1914–1918: The List
Regiment 88. German propaganda mobilized hatred against all the Allied powers, but reserved
special rancor for British forces, as Ernst Lissauer’s “Hassgesang gegen England” (Song of Hate
against England) indicated. Germans resented what they viewed as England’s voluntarily
denying Germany’s “place in the sun” by joining Germany’s struggle against France and Russia.
The Germans developed a dialectic of Händler und Helden: British materialistic “shopkeepers”
against German “heroes” (Frederick George Thomas Bridgham, The First World War as a Clash
of Cultures 82; Peter Jelavich, “German Culture in the Great War” 32; David Welch, Germany,
Propaganda, and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission 59; Eksteins, Rites of Spring 67–
68, 200–01.
59
Williams, Corporal Hitler 88.
60
Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18, Understanding the Great War
151–52.
61
John Keegan, The First World War 182. The Germans also accused the Indian troops
of drinking the blood of their victims (Eksteins, Rites of Spring 235).
62
Marston and Sundaram, A Military History 75. The troops suffered the cold winter of
1914–1915, and the British withdrew these infantry divisions in 1915, leaving a cavalry corps
(Omissi, Indian Voices 10).
63
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 85.
64
Fraser, “Germany and Indian Revolution” 260.
65
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 217.
66
Barooah, Chatto 36; Joll and Martel, The Origins 140–44.
67
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 129, 146.
68
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 163.
69
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 135–36. These attitudes George Orwell
represents in Burmese Days embodied in Lieutenant Verrell.
70
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 218.
71
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 150.
72
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 151.
73
It has been well documented, as Fraser argues, that “Germany's other link with India
was scholarly, and here she had a justifiably renowned reputation. In the early nineteenth century
Franz Bopp and the brothers Friedrich and Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel had pioneered the
new subject of Indology, which later in the century found its most distinguished exponent in
Friedrich Max Müller. Their work made Indian philosophy widely appreciated among scholars
and artists—Schopenhauer, in particular, confessed his reverence for the teachings of the
Upanishads.” Yet Fraser, who cites Leifer, India and the Germans, overemphasizes the
important point that “none of this was relevant to the mundane matter of fomenting revolution”
(Fraser, “Germany and Indian Revolution” 259). Much work on the Indo-German cultural and
intellectual connection has been done since the 1970s. The growing literature on this cultural
connection include: Figueira, Translating the Orient; Halbfass, India and Europe; Herling, The
German Gita: Hermeneutics and Discipline in the German Reception of Indian Thought;
McGetchin, Park, and SarDesai, eds., Sanskrit and ‘Orientalism’; and Indra Sengupta, From
Salon to Discipline. Max Müller was distinguished, but the value of his scholarship has declined
under attacks by William Dwight Whitney. See Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science
of Language and McGetchin, “The Whitney-Müller Conflict and Indo-German Connections.”
74
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 143.
75
Reventlow, Indien 58.
76
Valentina Stache-Rosen, German Indologists: Biographies of Scholars in Indian
Studies Writing in German; with a Summary on Indology in German Speaking Countries 232–
34. There is nothing about his role in the First World War in Stache-Rosen’s brief biography.
77
Günther and Rehmer, Inder, Indien und Berlin 58.
78
Glasenapp, Meine Lebensreise 72–73.
79
Glasenapp, Meine Lebensreise 86–88.
80
Glasenapp, Meine Lebensreise 87.
81
Otto, West-Östliche Mystik; Otto, Die Urgestalt Der Bhagavad-Gita; Otto, Bracey, and
Payne, Mysticism East and West; Otto and Foster, India's Religion of Grace and Christianity
Compared and Contrasted.
82
Barooah, Chatto 48.
83
Barooah, Chatto 198.
84
Leifer, India and the Germans 217.
85
Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund, A History of India 292.
86
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 218.
87
Barooah, India and the Official Germany 213.
88
Anand, Across the Black Waters; Maugham, Ashenden, or: The British Agent.
89
Anand, Black Waters 5 (dedication).
90
McGetchin, “Into the Centre of Sanskrit Study”198–200. This attitude shunning
modern Asia extended across other German academic orientalist fields (Marchand, German
Orientalism in the Age of Empire 87).
91
Anand, Black Waters 123, 100.
92
Anand, Black Waters 179, 227, 239, 280.
93
Anand, Black Waters 196. See also 17.
94
Anand, Black Waters 104, 192–94.
95
Anand, Black Waters 170. See also 179, 214.
96
Anand, Black Waters 29, 34.
97
Anand, Black Waters 211. Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West”: “East is
East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In other words, “The Englishmen east of
Suez became a very different person” (Zareer Masani, Indian Tales of the Raj 57).
98
Anand, Black Waters 279.
99
Anand, Black Waters 14, 17, 21, 38, 41, 179, 201, 202–03, 212–13, 214, 267–68.
100
Anand, Black Waters 83–84, 215.
101
Anand, Black Waters 181, 214.
102
Anand, Black Waters 189, 202–03. For the stark British fears of sepoy sex with
European women, see Omissi, Indian Voices 18. The general European fear of indigenous
sexuality especially directed against European women was known as the “Black Peril,” and
extended broadly to most non-Europeans (Margaret Strobel, White Women and the Second
British Empire). In the context of South Asia, this phenomenon appears perhaps most famously
in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).
103
Anand, Black Waters 75–76.
104
Anand, Black Waters 126.
105
Anand, Black Waters 138–40.
106
Anand, Black Waters 155, 143.
107
Anand, Black Waters 119.
108
Anand, Black Waters 236–37.
109
Anand, Black Waters 236–37.
110
Anand, Black Waters 158, 208, 212, 218, 219, 220, 233, 281.
111
Anand, Black Waters 133, 140.
112
Anand, Black Waters 99. These criticisms were accurate. “The British trenches were
wet, cold, smelly, and thoroughly squalid. Compared with the precise and thorough German
works, they were decidedly amateur, reflecting a complacency about the British genius for
improvisation” (Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory 43).
113
Anand, Black Waters 160–61.
114
Anand, Black Waters 208–09.
115
Anand, Black Waters 142, 177. See Adas, “Contested Hegemony”
116
Anand, Black Waters 119. Omissi, Indian Voices 10 on the expectation of the
European war to be like the frontier campaigns.
117
Anand, Black Waters 142.
118
Anand, Black Waters 142.
119
Anand, Black Waters 119. The Western front was like the frontier (Anand, Black
Waters 79, 115). A bayonet charge was useful on the frontier, but soldiers just got mown down
by machine guns on the Western Front (Anand, Black Waters 141).
120
Anand, Black Waters 187–88, 285–86. Actual letters home supported this view of
sepoys as mercenaries (Omissi, Indian Voices 11).
121
Anand, Black Waters 249.
122
Anand, Black Waters 244.
123
Anand, Black Waters 244.
124
Anand, Black Waters 284. The British were thus able to exploit the lack of “a unified
jurisdictional hierarchy in Islam,” according to Hagen, “German Heralds” 151–52.
125
Anand, Black Waters 245–46.
126
Anand, Black Waters 246.
127
Anand, Black Waters 284.
128
Anand, Black Waters 127.
129
Anand, Black Waters 162.
130
Anand, Black Waters 246.
131
Anand, Black Waters 274–75. Informal Christmas truces happened in some sectors of
the front during Christmas, 1914 (Eksteins, Rites of Spring 109–14).
132
Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18 84.
133
For the Muslim Prisoners of War in Germany, see Hagen, “German Heralds” 151.
British censored from letters home accounts of good treatment of prisoners by the Germans
(Omissi, Indian Voices 7).
134
Anand, Black Waters 5. Chandra, India’s Struggle for Independence 323.
135
Gordon, Brothers against the Raj 441–547, 615.
136
VanKoski, “The Indian Ex-soldier from the Eve of the First World War to
Independence and Partition” 130.
137
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, “India and the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission.” Totals differ depending on varying sources. There were 49,000 Indian deaths
according to Omissi, Indian Voices, 4. The total was 62,000 killed and 67,000 wounded
according to Sumner, The Indian Army 1914–1947 7.
138
Sumner, The Indian Army 16.
139
Sumner, The Indian Army 136–137. Donald Gullick was another one of the agents
involved in the case to trap Chatto.
140
Maugham, Ashenden 110. Barooah, Chatto 136.
141
Maugham, Ashenden 108, 112, 144.
142
Maugham, Ashenden 119.
143
Maugham, Ashenden 119
144
Maugham, Ashenden 122.
145
Maugham, Ashenden 136.
146
Barooah, Chatto 11.
147
Barooah, Chatto 26. He unsuccessfully tried a dramatic escape in Marseilles, and went
to prison until 1924, then was under restriction until 1937 (Hay, Sources of Indian Tradition
290). Bose argues Savarkar was in Paris for health reasons and returned to resolve a dispute
between followers over revolutionary tactics; Iyer favored terrorism, while Chattopadhyaya
wanted less radical activities (Bose, Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 29).
148
Maugham, Ashenden 111.
149
Maugham, Ashenden 127.
150
Maugham, Ashenden 141.
151
Maugham, Ashenden 144.
152
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 225.
153
Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad…Background 98.
154
Barooah, Chatto 105, 114, 212. </en>