Europäische Seeleute als koloniales Ordnungs- und Identitätsproblem im Kalkutta der 1860er Jahre

European Seamen as a Problem of Colonial Identity and Order in Calcutta of the 1860s The relationship between the wealthier part of British India’s white society and the infamous seaman ‘Jack Tar’ was ambiguous. In the eyes of the colonial administration the seamen’s alleged lack of discipline and ‘reckless and irrational ways’ brought them close to the ‘uncivilised natives’. This was a fact regarded as highly disturbing in a colonial setting based on the ideology of racial difference and — at least partly — informed by notions of a civilising mission supposedly entrusted to the British by providence. The problems arising from their presence in Indian seaport towns could not be easily solved by the ‘politics of making invisible’, as their labour was vital to the empire. Their position was therefore a highly ambivalent one, vacillating between inclusion and exclusion into the fold of ‘respectable’ white colonial society. In certain contexts and situations they were certainly seen as being part of the imperial establishment — though on the lowest ranks of the order of precedence — whereas in other constellations they were perceived as outright threat to this very establishment and hence subjected to processes of discursive ‘othering’ and practical disciplining

„The Cult of Asianism“:: Asiendiskurse in Indien zwischen Nationalismus und Internationalismus (ca. 1885–1955)

The article explores Asianist discourses that emerged in India from the late9th century through the first decade after independence. The first section gives a general overview of the various historical stages of the Indian involvement with Asia during the period under survey as expressed in the writings and speeches of leading intellectuals and politicians. The second section analyses in greater detail three of the most important discursive constructions of a pan-Asian identity from the interwar period: Rabindranath Tagore’s influential anti-modernist conception of ‘Asia as spiritual counter-Europe’; the powerful trope of Asia as ‘Greater India’, that gained particular popularity among Hindu nationalist outfits; and the pragmatic and modernist concept of Young Asia’, that posited a pan-Asian solidarity as a strategic device in the fight against Western imperialism. With the possible exception of the ‘Young Asia’ model, it is argued by way of conclusion, the Indian ‘cult of Asianism’ was clearly built on Western Orientalist stereotypes and had only limited potential to contribute to the intellectual decolonisation of India

Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905-1940)

Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That "the cult of Asianism” has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too—as is evident from the quote above—is less understood. Aside from two descriptive monographs dating back to the 1970s, there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with this phenomenon. In this article, we would like to offer an overview of several distinct concepts of Asia and pan-Asian designs, which featured prominently in both political and civil society debates in India during the struggle for Independence. Considering the abundance of initiatives for Asian unification, and, in a more abstract sense, discourses on Asian identity, what follows here is necessarily a selection of discourses, three of which will be subjected to critical analysis, with the following questions in mind: •What were the concrete motives of regional—in this case Indian—actors to appropriate the concept of Asianism? Is the popularity of supranational frames of reference solely to be explained as an affirmation of a distinctive identity vis-à-vis the imagined powerful West, or are there other motives to be found?•What were the results of these processes of appropriation, and how were these manifested politically and culturally?•What tensions resulted from the simultaneous existence of various nationalisms in Asia on the one hand and macro-nationalistic pan-Asianism on the other

Marrying Global History with South Asian History: Potential and Limits of Global Microhistory in a Regional Inflection

Der vorliegende Beitrag rekonstruiert zunächst die Genese grenzüberschreitender, „transnationaler“ und „globaler“ Geschichtsschreibung zu Südasien. Auf dieser Grundlage postuliert er einen spezifischen globalhistorischen Ansatz, welcher die in den area studies übliche dichte regional- und kulturspezifische Kontextualisierung nicht zugunsten einer möglichst umfassenden Makroperspektive opfert. Der zur Diskussion gestellte Ansatz erkennt vielmehr den Wert von Mikroperspektiven an und empfiehlt die fokussierte Analyse von einzelnen Akteuren, Organisationen oder Institutionen in ihren vielfältigen Verflechtungen als eine gangbare Methode, um regional grundierte Globalgeschichte zu schreiben. Anders als bei rein mikrohistorischen Zugriffen ist jedoch die multiskalare Erweiterung auf andere relevante Interaktionsräume ebenso unerlässlich. Je nach Themenstellung wird daher das Ausleuchten von regionalen, nationalen, imperialen oder globalen Kontexten erforderlich. Es ist insbesondere ihre Fähigkeit zum „Auszoomen“, die den größten Erkenntnisgewinn dieser globalen Mikrogeschichte verspricht. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines solchen Ansatzes werden abschließend mit einem Beispiel aus der aktuellen Forschung des Autors zu Dorfentwicklungsprogrammen des amerikanischen YMCA im Indien der Zwischenkriegszeit illustriert.After revisiting transnationally oriented historiography from within a regional South Asian ambit, this article makes a plea for a very specific take on global-history writing that promises to appeal especially to historians who have learned to value dense regional / cultural contextualisation through a training in “area studies”. The approach proposed here acknowledges the validity of micro-approaches in that it advocates the use of the focused analysis of individuals, organisations or institutions and an exploration of their multifarious entanglements and interactions. Yet, while the contextualisation in micro-spatial units is pivotal, a simultaneous awareness of broader contexts and connections as well as a consciousness of the existence and significance of wider analytical frames of analysis – such as the regional, the national or imperial and, of course, the global is equally important. In fact, it is precisely the ability to “zoom out,” to capture the influence of translocal factors on local processes that makes the proposed variety of “global micro-history” work. Potential and limits of the proposed approach are eventually illustrated with an example taken from the author’s work on village development programmes launched by the American YMCA in South Asia in the interwar period

Third-Stream Orientalism: J. N. Farquhar, the Indian YMCA's Literature Department, and the Representation of South Asian Cultures and Religions (ca. 1910–1940)

This article reconstructs the history of the Indian YMCA's Orientalist knowledge production in an attempt to capture a significant, if forgotten, transitional moment in the production and dissemination of scholarship on the religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The YMCA's three Orientalist book series examined here flourished from the 1910s to the 1930s and represent a kind of third-stream approach to the study of South Asia. Inspired by the Christian fulfillment theory, “Y Orientalism” was at pains to differentiate itself from older polemical missionary writings. It also distanced itself from the popular “spiritual Orientalism” advocated by the Theosophical Society and from the philologically inclined “academic Orientalism” pursued in the Sanskrit departments of Western universities. The interest of the series’ authors in the region's present and the multifarious facets of its “little traditions,” living languages, arts, and cultures, as well as their privileging of knowledge that was generated “in the field” rather than in distant Western libraries, was unusual. Arguably, it anticipated important elements of the “area studies” approach to the Indian subcontinent that became dominant in Anglophone academia after the Second World War.ISSN:1752-0401ISSN:0021-911

APARNA VAIDIK. Imperial Andamans: Colonial Encounter and Island History

ISSN:0002-8762ISSN:1937-523

Eradicating the 'Scourge of Drink' and the 'Un-pardonable Sin of Illegitimate Sexual Enjoyment': M.K. Gandhi as Anti-Vice Crusader

This essay highlights an oft‐neglected facet of M.K. Gandhi’s political work by scrutinizing the anti‐colonial icon’s extended engagement in campaigns against alcohol, narcotics, prostitution and a number of other ‘vices’ between 1906 and 1948. It argues that, while the Mahatma’s anti‐vice crusades definitely were part and parcel of his vision of ‘inner swaraj’ (or: self‐control) as a necessary precondition for national independence, they cannot be understood by situating them merely in narrow national or colonial contexts. As is demonstrated, Gandhi was constantly drawing on (and simultaneously contributing to) the ideological and methodological repertoire of a flourishing transnational, indeed, global, network of temperance and purity activists that had been in the building since the midnineteenth century and cut across a wide political, social and religious spectrum. Hence, a close analysis of Gandhi’s fight against intoxication and debauchery on the Indian subcontinent does not only shed new light on the formation of Indian massnationalism in early 20th century, it also enhances our knowledge of one of the first world‐spanning ‘advocacy groups’