Date: January, 30 – 31, 2015.

Organised by:

Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja, Universität Göttingen, Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS)
Dr. Heike Liebau, Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) Berlin
Prof. Dr. Michael Mann, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften (IAAW)

Programme:

Friday, 30.01.2015

09.30 – 09.45	Michael Mann, Berlin Opening
9.45 – 10.30	Ravi Ahuja, Göttingen Introducing MIDA
10.30 – 12.30	Panel 1 – Moderation: Ravi Ahuja
10.30 – 11.15	Lydia Hauth, Leipzig [P] A German Researcher in India – Egon von Eickstedt‚s Collection at the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony
11.15 – 11.45	Coffee Break
11.30 – 12.30	Jahnavi Phalkey, London [P]
12.30 – 15.00	Panel 2 – Moderation: Martin Christof-Füchsle
12.30 – 13.15	Adam Jones, Leipzig [R]
14.15 – 15.00	Armin Grünbacher, Birmingham [P] German Conservatives, India and the Hallstein Doctrine. A document from the Chancellery
15.00 – 17.00	Panel 3 – Moderation: Anandita Bajpai
15.00 – 15.45	Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Berlin [P] Archival Sources on the Hanoverian Regiments in India: The Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv in Hanover
15.45 – 16.15	Coffee Break
16.15 – 17.00	Vandana Joshi, Berlin [P] Between Erasure and Remembrance: Shreds from the Kriegsalltag of South Asian Faujis (Sipahis) in Stammlagern, Arbeitskommandos, Lazaretten and Graves (1939–45)
17.00 – 18.30	Panel 4 – Moderation: Anandita Bajpai
17.00 – 17.45	Joachim Oesterheld, Berlin [R]
17.45 – 18.30	Georg Metzig (Regensburg) [P] Alltag und Mission. Deutschsprachige Jesuiten im portugiesischen Weltreich (1616–1773)

Saturday, 31.01.2015

9.00 – 10.30	Panel 5 – Moderation: Anna Sailer
9.00 – 9.45	Mrinalini Sebastian, Philadelphia [P] The Other Story of Indology: European Missionaries and the Global Journeys of Vernacular Knowledge
9.45 – 10.30	Diethelm Weidemann, Berlin [R]
10.30 – 11.00	Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.30	Panel 6 – Moderation: Heike Liebau
11.00 – 11.45	Keyvan Djahangiri, Berlin [P] ‘Centres of Calculation’ or Dead End? Early Modern Material on ‘India’ in German Archives
11.45 – 12.30	Britta Klosterberg, Halle [P] Die Quellen zur Dänisch-Halleschen Mission im Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen
12.30 – 13.30	Lunch Break
13.30 – 15.30	Panel 7 – Moderation: Michael Mann
13.30 – 14.15	Ajay Bharadwaj, Raghavendra Rao Karkala Vasudevaiah and Anne Murphy, Vancouver [P] Early films/images in and about India: The German Lens
14.15 – 15.30	Debjani Bhattacharyya, Philadephia [P] The Influence of German Town Planning in British India: Tracing the Heritage of Lex Adikes
15.30 – 16.00	Coffee Break
16.00 – 17.00	Panel 8 – Moderation Heike Liebau
17.00 – 17.15	Frank Drauschke, Berlin [R]
17.15 – 18.00	Heike Liebau, Berlin Round table discussion: Where do we go from here?

Abstracts:

Lydia Hauth

Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (SES) / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD))

A German Researcher in India – Egon von Eickstedt’s Collection at the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony

In 1926 Egon von Eickstedt, a German physical anthropologist, was sent out on a 2 years expedition to India by the Museum of Ethnography, Leipzig and the State Research Institute for Ethnology in Leipzig in order to reconstruct the history of early settlement in South Asia. During the expedition he collected anthropological data and ethnographic objects and systematically documented the visited communities with his camera.

This collection – consisting of circa 11,000 photographs, about 2,000 objects, publications and 7 diaries which were written by the researcher during his journey – is in the possession of the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony (SES). The major part of the objects and photographs were collected during the researcher’s visit at different indigenous communities in India.

Whereas the objects and publications have always been in the possession of the SES, v. Eickstedt’s photographs and diaries had been declared lost after World War II and were only discovered after the death of the researcher. In the year 2003 the photographs and diaries were handed over to the SES to be preserved and published. After more than half a decade the collection is joined by now and available for further research.

Some of the material has already been published by scholars and a number of small projects were conducted on the basis of the collection. The long term aim is to make the collection digitally accessible to researchers and other audiences.
The photographs along with the collected ethnographic objects, diaries and publications provide insights into v. Eickstedt’s scholarship and the way anthropological knowledge was gathered in the early twentieth century. V. Eickstedt’s methodology is certainly outdated and ethically highly controversial but despite this, the collection is an extremely valuable source for researchers as well as for indigenous people themselves to reconstruct history, early relations and the process of Hinduization. Together with similar collections such as Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (SOAS, University of London), and William Archer (MAA, Cambridge University) the v. Eickstedt collection is one of the most comprehensive documentation of indigenous communities in India. It further presents unique material on the encounter of Europe with India.

Armin Grünbacher

Dept. of History, University of Birmingham, UK

German Conservatives, India and the Hallstein Doctrine. A document from the Chancellery

As a leading country of the Non-Aligned Movement, India was very eager, in particular during the 1960s, not to be pulled under the influence of either East or West but to remain neutral in the wrangle of the Cold War. For this reason it is somewhat astonishing that India remained on West Germany‘s side in regard to the ‘German Question‘, and officially accepted Adenauer’s claim of sole representation and did not recognise the GDR as a sovereign state.

In the files of the Federal Chancellery at the Bundesarchiv Koblenz, a report can be found, written in January 1960 by Klaus Mehnert, a conservative journalist broadcaster and foreign policy commentator on a meeting he had with the Permanent Undersecretary of the Indian Foreign Office, S. Dutt. Mehnert describes parts of the one-hour meeting, in which Dutt spoke to him ’…as an Indian, not part of the Government…’ about the contradictions of Bonn’s policy in regards to the GDR and hinted at India’s growing inclination to recognise the GDR.

The discussion and in particular Mehnert’s reply to Dutt provides an important indication of how, just three years after Yugoslavia had recognised the GDR, Adenauer and influential West German conservatives tried to sustain the claim for sole representation, in particular in regards to developing countries.

Using files from the Chancellery, the archives of the Auswärtiges Amt and the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW) (as well as some documents from the Thyssen-Krupp archive) this paper combines a diplomatic and economic history approach to explain Mehnert’s and Adenauer’s position vis-a-vis India’s considerations to recognise the GDR and the consequences such a move would have had for Bonn’s foreign policy.

Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi

Heidelberg

Archival Sources on the Hanoverian Regiments in India: The Niedersächsisches
Landesarchiv in Hanover

In 1782 two regiments of the army of Hanover were sent to India to help the East India Company in the Second Anglo-Mysore War. The troops, consisting of 2000 soldiers, were the largest organized group of Germans who came to India in the eighteenth century. They took part in one major battle and various expeditions. After the war they served mainly as garrison troops until 1791, when they began to be sent home. While my recent work on the Hanoverian regiments focused on their publications, which included travel books and magazine articles, it also made use of archival materials. Although the India Office Records holds important sources on the organization and recruitment of these regiments, by far the most important sources are those held by the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv in Hanover. This is especially the case for sources on the administration of the regiments that would supply invaluable information for military and social historians. What this archive lacks, on the other hand, is more personal sources such as private letters and diaries, the kind of sources found in relative abundance for the almost contemporary expedition of German auxiliary troops to North America. My talk will discuss the holdings and the gaps of the archive and reflects where more personal sources could be located.

Vandana Joshi

Seminar für Südasien-Studien, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin

Between Erasure and Remembrance: Shreds from the Kriegsalltag of South Asian Faujis
(Sipahis) in Stammlagers, Arbeitskommandos, Lazaretts and Graves (1939–45)

My paper is based on the holdings of the International Tracing Service Archive which comprises approximately 30 million documents on the incarceration of foreigners and minorities in concentration camps, ghettos and Gestapo prisons, on forced labour and displaced persons. The determining factor in this round of my archival visit was the Allied Order of December 6, 1945, which instructed all local and district authorities in Germany to conduct exhaustive searches for all documents and information concerning military and civilian persons belonging to the United Kingdom since 1939 and to submit their findings immediately to the command of their respective occupation forces. This order generated enormous evidence for the history of institutional remembrance. The collection has brought into light fresh evidence that has so far not been utilised to evaluate the presence of South Asians during WWII and will fundamentally alter our understanding of their everyday life in the Third Reich.

The evidence deals with the ascertaining, counting, registration, and at times exhumation of graves. It contains lists of civilians and prisoners of war-dead or alive- from a host of Stalags and Arbeitskommandos, sick bays and residential areas. An overwhelming majority among the dead comprised South Asian Faujis who left the shores of their land to fight the war. A fraction of them served the Wehrmacht as a part of the Indian Legion and it is largely their presence which has been noted in historical accounts so far. The death records of these anonymous Faujis demonstrate that they were contemptuously dumped in the backyards of towns such as Ansbach, Fuessen, Neustadt, Bischoefgruen, Berchtesgaden, Garmisch, Regensburg, Lauterhofen, Westertimke, Santhofen, Herborn, Darmstadt, Bremervoerde, while a tiny minority secured a place in the local Friedhofs . In any event, their mortal remains lay in ditches in a foreign land that denied them any right to rituals of mourning and death that soldiers conventionally deserve. I also found sketchy records from mental hospitals, sanatoriums, sick bays, and hospitals which some of them visited before dying. A significant number of Faujis worked in Stalags and Arbeitskommandos as slave labour slogging 8 hours a day, 6 days a week until their liberation in mid 1945.

The evidence that I have been able to unearth so far speaks volumes for the silence, gloom, neglect, condescension, depression, and persecution that enveloped the everyday life of the South Asian Fauji in WWII. Inherent in the nature of this knowledge generation was an element of compulsion ‘from above’ to report the dead, alive or missing persons, which per se denies the historian any possibility of finding subjective experiences of these soldiers. There are no testimonies, no letters, no effects, no last wishes, let alone diaries and other ego documents in these holdings. There are no stories of human contact, compassion and empathy from ‘the other universe’, inhabited by ordinary Germans not very far from these sites. And yet they have left behind enough tangible traces of their workaday from several sites of work and death. I hope to share some unspoken words from these sites with my listeners in the MIDA conference.

Gregor M. Metzig

Institut für Geschichte der Universität Regensburg

Alltag und Mission. Deutschsprachige Jesuiten im portugiesischen Weltreich (1616–1773)

Kaum eine andere Gemeinschaft hat die Geschichte der katholischen Mission weltweit so nachhaltig geprägt wie die 1540 offiziell gegründete Societas Jesu (SJ). Neuere Studien legen nahe, dass das globale Engagement des Jesuitenordens jedoch mehr als bislang angenommen durch die individuelle Prägung seiner Mitglieder und der spezifischen Kräfteverhältnisse an ihrem Wirkungsort bestimmt wurde. Am Beispiel der aus der Assistentia Germaniae stammenden Ordensangehörigen im portugiesischen Patronatsbereich (padroado real) soll eine Alltagsgeschichte der Jesuiten geschrieben werden. Sie zeigt in akteurszentrierter Perspektive die Schwierigkeiten und Lernprozesse der Missionare im transkontinentalen Vergleich zwischen den beiden luso-amerikanischen Jesuitenprovinzen im Estado do Brasil und in Maranhão sowie den verstreuten portugiesischen Besitzungen rund um den Indischen Ozean.

Obwohl der Ordensgründer Ignatius von Loyola (1491–1556) bereits 1542 die erste überseeische Jesuitenprovinz in Indien etabliert hatte, spielten aus Mitteleuropa stammende Missionare dort erst seit dem 17. Jahrhundert eine nennenswerte Rolle. Der Vortrag rückt dennoch bewusst diese Minderheit innerhalb der Gesellschaft Jesu in den Mittelpunkt der Betrachtung. Der Grund hierfür liegt keinesfalls in irgendeiner national begründeten Präferenz, sondern in ihrer besonderen Relevanz im Hinblick auf die zentrale Fragestellung des Projekts: einer Alltagsgeschichte der Jesuiten in Übersee. Denn anders als etwa ihre portugiesischen Mitbrüder verfügten die Mitteleuropäer als Ausländer zwangsläufig über eine andere Perspektive auf das Leben in den portugiesischen Territorien. So durchliefen sie in den meisten Fällen eine mehrfache Differenzerfahrung, zunächst bei der Einreise in Portugal und der Erlernung der dortigen Landessprache, dann während der häufig nur oberflächlich erfolgten Integration in die lusophone Kolonialgesellschaft und schließlich beim Kontakt mit den indigenen Kulturen. Welche besonderen Verhaltensmuster legten die Jesuiten gegenüber den verschiedenen Bevölkerungsgruppen in den Kolonien an den Tag und wie gestaltete sich die Wahrnehmung des Fremden im transkontinentalen Vergleich? Die regional überlieferte Korrespondenz der deutschsprachigen Missionare mit ihren zu Hause gebliebenen Mitbrüdern und Angehörigen in den verschiedenen Landes- und Familienarchiven beziehungsweise im Archiv der Deutschen Provinz SJ in München oder im Archiv der Norddeutschen Provinz SJ (München, ehemals: Köln) birgt hierfür ein bislang noch kaum erschlossenes Quellenpotential. Hinzu kommt die offizielle Berichterstattung der Ordensvertreter an ihre Vorgesetzten sowie nicht zuletzt die von ihnen selbst verfassten Schriften und Traktate. Mit ihnen erreichten die Missionare ein weit über die katholische Stammleserschaft hinausreichendes Publikum und trugen damit wesentlich zum Wandel des vorhandenen Weltbildes im Zeitalter der Aufklärung bei.

Mrinalini Sebastian

The Other Story of Indology: European Missionaries and the Global Journeys of Vernacular Knowledge

German-speaking scholars have played an important role in creating and sustaining interest in the field of Indological Studies. During the 19th century, at the peak of German interest in India-related material, antiquity and Sanskrit were the themes that dominated scholarship in the field of Indology. This paper will try to make a case for another story of Indology, which is less Sanskrit-oriented, and less obsessed with the notion of antiquity. This other story of Indology begins in the early modern period when European Catholic and Protestant missionaries came to the Indian sub-continent mainly in order to evangelize and spread the message of Christ, but were drawn into unanticipated negotiations with their immediate contexts, resulting in knowledge exchange, knowledge interpretation, and knowledge mediation. This other story of Indology is less about a pan-Indian culture but more about vernacular knowledge, that is, knowledge that is native to a specific region of the subcontinent. The missionary-mediated circulation of vernacular knowledge shaped several fields of inquiry in multi-directional ways. One such field is the arena of botanical studies, and another, that of linguistics and language studies.

This paper will track the way European traders and missionaries engaged South Indian practical and textual knowledge about the medicinal use of local plants, and sought to make this knowledge available to Europe through a network of individuals, institutions and publications. For example, the beginnings of the fascination for the medicinal plants of South India can be found in a very early document called Viridarium Orientale, put together by a Discalced Carmelite Monk called Matthew of St Joseph (1612–1691) during the second half of the 17th century. Matthew of St Joseph then became an important collaborator of the high-ranking Dutch East India Company (VOC) officer Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein (1636–1691) and Reede’s team of co-workers (that included a local Ezhava doctor, Itty Achudem, and three Pandits, Dutch botanists, illustrators, and local helpers) in the early stages of the publication of the magnificent 12-volume illustrated book called Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (1678–1703). This book not only influenced botanists such as Carl von Linnaeus (1707–1778), but also the Protestant missionaries from Halle.

It is the objective of this paper to track the global circulation of indigenous botanical knowledge, and to follow its unanticipated journeys from South India to Europe; from Europe back to India; from the past to the present. Many of these journeys were facilitated by the scholarly work of the Germanophone missionaries. Its return was enabled by scholars and pedagogues who worked in the field of Botany. In fact, tracking the circulation of vernacular knowledge could help us get at the genealogy of another textbook by another missionary at another time, Glimpses into the Life of Indian Plants: An Elementary Indian Botany (Mangalore 1908), by the Basel Mission missionary Immanuel Pfleiderer (1872–1949).

The paper hopes to present this case study of missionary-mediated intellectual interventions in the field of Botany in order to suggest that writing a connected history of the forays of the missionaries into various branches of vernacular knowledge, could offer us fascinating insights into the mutually dependent networks of contacts, connections, and communications established during the early modern period. I am particularly interested in understanding the intellectual genealogy of the 19th century Basel Mission scholarmissionaries in this world wide web of connections and networks.

Keyvan Djahangiri

Seminar für Südasien-Studien, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin

‘Centres of Calculation’ or Dead End? Early Modern Material on ‘India’ in German Archives

By using the example of the Francke Foundation’s India Mission Archive in Halle SaxonyAnhalt), my paper deals in two separate but interdependent sections with the thematic of Modern India in German Archives (MIDA). The first addresses a number of hypothetical questions on ‘India’ as the topic of information and knowledge (1). I will demonstrate in the second part methods and perspectives of German archival studies on ‘India’ (2). The paper’s overall intention is to contribute to the discussions on how opportunities and future trends may be set and utilised on MIDA’s long-term research aspect.

1 German Archives may indeed unfold research potential in order to revisit western Indology, which has been hitherto dominated by British-related academia. In compliance with Bruno Latour’s ‘Centres of Calculation’, I refer both to unpublished and edited early modern archival material from the Francke Foundation to discuss the following emerging questions.[1] Do we witness German-speaking ‘Centres of Calculation’ in Halle, where information is accumulated, circulated and managed on ‘India’, and if so, how? Do these Centres constantly (re-)produce imagined, transmitted, and materialized topics of knowledge? Or are we rather confronted with standardisation procedures of information that led to a static and instructive dead end of knowledge?

2 Having set these problems forth for further discussions, I would like to present a few aspects of my own research on working on ‘India’ in German archives. This also includes the operating experience with the online search engine of the Francke Foundation’s Archive. The search engine not only helps to localise the archival material, but also enhances – through the interconnection of names, dates, proveniences, and keywords – the epistemological approach of Digital Humanities. This might be useful for MIDA’s agenda of representing and disseminating the history of Indo-German entanglements.

[1] The ‘Centres of Calculation’ is a centre-periphery-oriented concept by the French sociologist Bruno Latour on how documents are managed as network-generated ‘immutable and combinable mobiles’ and which explores their part on the production of knowledge; vid. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 215–257, esp. 227.

Britta Klosterberg

Studienzentrum August Hermann Francke, Halle

Die Quellen zur Dänisch-Halleschen Mission im Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen

Die im Jahr 1706 begründete Dänisch-Hallesche Mission ist die erste organisierte Missionsunternehmung in der protestantischen Kirchengeschichte. Der überwiegende Teil der Quellen wird heute im Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle aufbewahrt. Seit 2006 befindet sich auch das ursprünglich von den Missionaren in Tranquebar angelegte, Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts vom Evangelisch Lutherischen Missionswerk in Leipzig übernommene Archiv als Depositum in den Franckeschen Stiftungen. Der Überlieferungszeitraum erstreckt sich vom frühen 18. Jahrhundert bis in das erste Drittel des 19. Jahrhunderts. Der Umfang des Gesamtbestands beträgt mehr als 34 000 Dokumente. Diese Dokumente sind im Rahmen eines DFG-Projekts formal und inhaltlich erschlossen und auf der Website der Franckeschen Stiftungen in einer deutschen und in einer englischen Fassung zugänglich. Im Rahmen der Missionsarbeit gelangten auch Manuskripte in Tamil und Telugu nach Halle. Ein Großteil dieser Manuskripte befindet sich in der Palmblatthandschriftensammlung des Archivs. Der Katalog der Tamil-Manuskripte kann ebenfalls über die Website aufgerufen werden; ein Katalog der Manuskripte in Telugu ist in Vorbereitung. Diese Quellen werden ergänzt durch die Bestände in der Bibliothek der Franckeschen Stiftungen. Darunter zählen die sog. „Halleschen Berichte“, die erste protestantische Missionszeitschrift, die digital aufbereitet und in einer Datenbank erschlossen worden ist und wiederum Verweise auf die Quellen aus dem Archiv enthält.

In dem Vortrag sollen die Bestände, ihre Erschließung und Präsentation auf der Website der Franckeschen Stiftungen vorgestellt sowie neue Recherchemöglichkeiten durch das im Aufbau befindliche „Francke-Portal“ aufgezeigt werden. Zugleich sollen Desiderata für die weitere, vertiefte Erschließung und Erforschung der Bestände zur Dänisch-Halleschen Mission bzw. Dänisch-Englisch-Halleschen Mission benannt und zur Diskussion gestellt werden.

Ajay Bharadwaj, Anne Murphy, Raghavendra Rao Karkala Vasudevaiah

Department of Asian Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Ajay Bhardwaj (documentary filmmaker and Ph.D. student, University of British Columbia);
Anne Murphy (Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of British
Columbia); and Raghavendra Rao K.V. (visual artist and faculty, Srishti School of Art, Design,
and Technology)

„Early films/images in and about India: The German Lens“

In the 1920s, as Carl-Erdmann Schonfeld has noted, there were many Germans interested in India: this was indeed the period of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Films such as Osten’s series of films on India („The Light of India“ (1926), „Shiraz“ (1928), and „Throw of Dice“ (1929)) and Richard Eichberg’s „The Indian Tomb“ (1938) and „The Tiger of Eschnapur“ (1938), and others, demonstrate the German cinematic interest in India, ethnographic as well as narrative (and commercial). German production knowledge, equipment, and skill in turn profoundly impacted the early years of Indian film production.

What is hidden in the German archives of footage and information about such film projects?What would it mean to examine such early filmic representations of/in/about India, and relocate our understanding of the engagement of Europe with India from a broader perspective, outside of the lens of direct colonial domination that has characterized British knowledge of India, as Sheldon Pollock has already suggested (1993; see further discussion in Adluri 2011 and Halbfass 1988).

The goal of our engagement with the German archives along these lines is to produce scholarly knowledge, but also–as far as possible–forms of cultural production, through filmic and artistic practice, incorporating both film and still images in an understanding of the German „eye“ in the imagination of India.

Debjani Bhattacharyya

Department of History and Politics, Drexel University, Philadelphia

The Influence of German Town Planning in British India: Tracing the Heritage of Lex Adikes

This paper will explore the global circulation of Lex Adikes, a law developed by Dr. Franz Adikes as mayor of Frankfurt (1890–1912), [2] translated into English for the first time by a British civil servant in Bombay Mr. E. G. Turner. This translation was necessary for framing land-distribution laws during early infrastructural ventures in suburban planning beginning, first, in 1909 with the Bombay Improvement Trust and, later, with the Calcutta Improvement Trust from1911. Valued for its cost- effectiveness in negotiating private property, public utility and eminent domain issues, the Lex Adikes was successfully implemented in these cities, as a way to circumvent the more cumbersome and expensive options detailed in the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. Adikes’ phrase, ‘[t]he foreseen needs of the near future,’ became a central principle in structuring town “development,” marking, for the first time, the calculation of future cost-benefits in municipal economic thinking in British India and the unfurling of a developmental regime.[3]

The circulation of knowledge between Germany and Britain’s eastern colony is hardly unknown, although insufficiently documented. While recent works have begun to chart the circuits of medical and technological information, entanglements of political ideas and knotted intellectual histories, much less has been researched about the transfers of bureaucratic knowledge at the level of municipalities between town-planners in Germany, British officials in the presidency towns, and Indian urbanists. This paper, growing out of my book manuscript on the history of urban housing and the property market in colonial Calcutta, will attempt to map the translation of German town-planning ideas into 20th century municipal reorganization of the suburbs of Calcutta.

The presence of German knowledge within municipal ventures can be attested to by the easy availability of German texts on town plans, municipal laws, Prussian zoning laws, as well as translations, such as B. W. Kissan’s, I.C.S Report on Town-planning Enactments in Germany, in the early 20th century library records of the Calcutta Municipal Library. In this paper I will delve into British Engineer E. P. Richards’ first comprehensive town planning report for Calcutta published in 1914, which has been read as the first systematic attempt to translate colonial town-planning ideas to Calcutta (Dutta 2013, Harris and Lewis, 2014). As my paper will demonstrate, Richards’ report did not only build upon English town planning laws, but much more on German sources. Going beyond England, he compares Calcutta to other European cities, as a means of foregrounding the possible benefits of following German zoning, housing and land distribution laws and stressing the importance of applying Lex Adikes in Calcutta, which E. G. Turner was successfully applying in Bombay.

To conclude, my paper’s historical excavation into the contact zones of bureaucratic knowledge systems about town planning in British India and Germany seeks to achieve two things: First, it shifts the focus away from epidemiology and sanitarian drives born out of the Oxbridge world of moral Christianity and Natural Theology of William Paley that has been one of the organizing lens to view town planning ventures in colonial Calcutta (Chattopadhyay, 2005; Pande 2010; Datta, 2013). Second, these sources offer a glimpse into a world of shared knowledge systems within municipal administration, something that has been also noted in early British forest conservation policies. By turning to these exchanges I hope to trace a parallel but non-colonial genealogy of the 20th-century developmental state, and the role played by German municipal ideas in shaping some of the practices of modern bureaucratic state formation in India.

[2] Also known as Gesetz betr. die Umlegung von Grundstücken in Frankfurt a. M, 1899.

[3] This phrase has been attributed to Dr. Franz Adikes in both Bombay and Calcutta Improvement Trust Reports, however I am yet to verify it.

Eröffnungsworkshop 30.–31. Januar 2015 (Programm und Abstracts)