Paper short abstract:

This paper sets out to map elements in ‘cultural exchange’ between India and Germany during the last 60 years with the objective of examining the flows of ideas, frameworks, initiatives, and people between two nation states, to explore cultural diplomacy as a site of challenge and negotiation

Paper long abstract:

The present project traces the contours of a relationship between two new nation states that began afresh as a diplomatic one in the early 1950s, sharpened particularly since India opened itself to the world through the path of economic liberalization in the early 1990s. Historically, this interaction saw significant changes with the division of Germany (and a separate axis in India's ties with the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German Democratic Republic). In the Indian context, the shift in cultural policy after the 1990s has meant a clear self-representation as a globalizing society on the world stage, signaling a self fashioning along state determined images of a cohesive and yet cosmopolitan cultural identity. The agents are different forms of visual culture open to public memory. In the German context, this becomes an avenue for a renewed engagement with this globalizing/globalised entity. What we see is a result finely shaped by self-projections of state cultural policy from both ends in a global context.

The aim of this study is to examine this flow of ideas and initiatives, the sharing of individual agents, and the often selective self projection on either side, in order to trace the travelling of ideas across political economies of culture. The central questions that direct this inquiry will be whether the imbalances in intercultural exchange and the transcultural flows of ideas have shifted, what global phenomena have made these shifts possible, and in what ways we can speak of the political economies of cultural policy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to chart the development of British cultural diplomacy in India over the period 1945 to 1960. It focuses on the establishment of the British Council in India and in particular on university relations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper proposes to chart the development of British cultural diplomacy in India over the period 1945 to 1960 as recorded in British archives.

The main agent for British cultural diplomacy was the British Council, which established itself in India at the time of independence. The British government's decision to release funds for this purpose was clearly motived by its desire to maintain and redefine cultural ties with the newly-independent nation as a means to prolong British influence. The Indian government was also receptive to the British Council's proposal and sought its help in developing and extending Indian education, science and technology.

The British Council's attitude towards its role in India was complex and sought to reconcile its dual mission of both promoting British interests and favouring mutual interchange. In India, as in Canada and Australia, it sought to encourage the establishment of an Indian 'sister' council with which it could work on developing two-way cultural exchange. Underneath the commitment to reciprocity, however, lay assumptions about the senior role which would be taken by the British Council in shaping educational and cultural relations within the Commonwealth. Furthermore, the Council worked in collaboration with organisations such as the Association of the Universities of the British Commonwealth whose origins lay in the period of empire. Hence attempts to foster university exchange also built on longstanding networks which would have to adapt to the end of empire.

Paper short abstract:

The American Baptist Mission and the Welsh Presbyterian Mission arrived in Northeast India propagating the message of Christ but religion soon became a 'civilizing mission' seeking to spread not merely the 'message of Christ' but also inculcating notions of piety, domestic space and gender.

Paper long abstract:

The reconfiguration of gender and gender relationships in colonial India was a key element of the Civilizing Mission. Historians and biographers have related the story of female missionaries taking new ideas about femininity, domesticity into the Zenana. Such civilizing agenda was posited as emancipatory in realizing the 'agency' of the Western women who attempted to 'rescue' the 'heathen' women from the oppressive 'native' indigenous patriarchies.

However, the encounter between female missionaries and women from tribal/indigenous societies in northeast India has remained relatively unexplored. American Baptists arrived in the Brahmaputra valley colonial Assam in the 1840s to work among caste Hindus and by the 1860s, the missionaries had ventured into the hills. Always aided by their wives, by the 1880s male missionaries were joined by single women missionaries.

Working among indigenous/tribal societies, missionary women were confronted with problems unknown to their colleagues serving in the plains. Instead of enticing women out of Zenanas and fighting child marriage, they were confronted with societies where gender relations were dictated by tribal customs. As opposed to fighting the 'social evils' of the Hindu and Muslims, they came into contact 'savage', 'barbarian', 'primitive' societies of the hills. Confronted with 'nakedness' of men and women, 'promiscuity' as they defined in sexual mores, and pre-marital sexuality they had to redefine morality, social norms and challenge customary laws to establish a Christian kingdom. This social reordering of morality transformed the 'traditional' norms of love, courtship, marriage and family.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the Goan historian, José Gerson da Cunha's editing of the Sahyādrikhaṇda purãṇa. Appropriating Orientalist tools in the pursuit of a pre-colonial caste agenda he sought to construct a genealogy that proved the disputed ancient, Aryan origins of his caste, the Saraswat Brahmans.

Paper long abstract:

A principal feature in the historiography of Orientalist knowledge is a tendency of binding varied Indian encounters with colonial knowledge as belonging ultimately to the Orientalist project, classifying Indian agents mainly as informants or collaborators. This paper focuses on the Goan historian José Gerson da Cunha (1844-1900), and his text edition of the Sahyādrikhaṇda purãṇa (1877), written to establish the disputed ancient, Aryan origins of Saraswat Brahmans, a sub-caste to which he belonged. Appropriating Orientalist tools in the pursuit of a pre-colonial caste agenda, it reproduced an "old" form of knowledge in a "new" way, adding a very novel layer to the landscape of colonial knowledge during this period. I describe da Cunha as a knowledge intermediary, whose epistemology and intellectual transactions with the Orientalist sphere was vastly different to that the majority of Indian interlocutors of his time.

da Cunha's enterprise shows that the intellectual agendas of Indian intermediaries did not only follow the grain set by the colonial pedagogical project. It proves that embedded within the wider space of colonial knowledge were supra-colonial spaces created by Indian intellectuals to pursue their own political or cultural agendas. These spaces offer us valuable insights into significant social and cultural trends circulating in Indian society, for example the debates surrounding the nature of Brahman identity, and the ways and channels in which these were negotiated and legitimated. In sum, this paper compounds the fact that colonial knowledge was dialogical and that Indians were not just passive actors or conduits of information fitted to the European framework.

Paper short abstract:

The paper traces the rhetoric of analogy between English and Hindustani in early colonial Hindustani grammars, in the context of orientalist philology and British Imperial attitudes, and speculates on the ways it reflects and inflects Imperial self-perception and notions of subcontinental modernity.

Paper long abstract:

Attempting to define a lingua franca for a polyvocal colony, the emergent English colonial state in late 18th- and early 19th-century India spurred a 'philologic-curricular revolution' of its own. The ensuing pursuit of linguistic knowledge entailed describing local vernaculars systematically, in the process (re)constructing them as suitably modern. Indigenous language-complexes would competitively aspire to identify under the sign of the 'modern,' and subsequently, the sign of the 'national.'

This paper attends to the earliest grammars that seek to render systematic the vernacular 'Hindustani.' Specifically, I will read the prefatory remarks of John Gilchrist's Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language (1796), Anti-Jargonist (1800), Oriental Linguist (1802), and Hindoostanee Philology (1810) to highlight the rhetoric of analogy deployed to uphold Hindustani as the desirable modern standard. I propose that a topos of kinship is forged between Hindustani and English, elaborated in terms of their genealogies, relationship with classical others, and hybrid natures. Pitching the two vernaculars as potential equals while maintaining the power gradient between them, I suggest, effectively fosters the idiom of a 'civil' and 'liberal' Empire even as it creates a template-space for a 'modern standard' native vernacular.

I read Gilchrist in the context of orientalist philology and British Imperial attitudes, to add nuance to the traffic of linguistic knowledge and the narrative of vernacular modernity in early colonial India. Broadly, I wish to speculate on the ways the language question reflected and inflected (a) Imperial self-perception in and through the colony; and (b) notions of subcontinental modernity.