The study of colonialism has gone through many phases as the world itself has changed since the Second World War. Beginning in the 1960s, non-western cultures and lands were researched largely in isolation in ‘area studies’ departments. One negative outcome was a failure to appreciate the interdependence between various regions of the world. Almost single-handedly, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) ushered in a new era of scholarship on colonial lands. Following his lead, scholars began to give increased attention to the relationship between Europe and its former colonies, often with the aim of explaining the subtle and inconspicuous strategies of European domination of ‘the East’. This approach was challenged, however, in at least two significant ways in the 1980s and 1990s. First, the notion of a monolithic European perception of colonized lands was questioned, and second, the Eurocentrism inherent in the study of Europe’s views of the non-West was interrogated.
Beginning in the 1980s, scholars began to think critically about the claim that there was only one dynamic of encounter between Europe and the non-West, namely that of intellectual exchange solely as a means of colonial domination. In a search for other forms of encounter, researchers grew interested in the unique qualities of Orientalist scholarship in countries with no colonies in South Asia. For example, Wilhelm Halbfass in Indien und Europa (1981) asserted that the German relationship with South Asia allowed more room for communication and understanding because of the absence of colonial interests. In France in the 1990s, theories of transferts culturels (Marc Espagne) drew on the insight of Hans-Georg Gadamer that cross-cultural encounters can also be seen as moments of sincere dialogue, not only as events of misappropriation or domination. These debates have left open questions about how cultural and intellectual exchange should be understood, particularly ! in the imperial context. Whether the lack of formal colonial bonds to South Asia allowed for moments of dialogue and communication between Central Europeans and South Asians, is a question still without an adequate response. As we shall see, however, a satisfactory answer can only be achieved from a transnational perspective.
The attempt to attain such a new perspective from which to understand cultural encounter drove a second historiographic shift after Said. Scholars began to interrogate eurocentric points of view, turning rather to the recovery of the perspectives of colonized peoples. Colonial peripheries came to be seen less as passive territories acted upon by the metropole, and more as regions that also affected life at the imperial center. The work of the ‘Cambridge school’ and of the Subaltern collective, for example, focused on the exchange between Europeans and South Asians, although with often contradicting results. In another strand of scholarship, economic and political historians in the 1990s began to emphasize the international context in which colonialism operated. The lone axis of dependency of a periphery on a center—for example, India’s subjection to the domination of British capital and culture—was placed within a world context of economic and political interdependen! ce. This trend of portraying colonial encounters within the context of a world-system led eventually to transnational approaches at the end of the 1990s, in which the restrictive perspective of the nation-state was challenged. However, scholars also sounded a cautionary note in the early twenty-first century against global perspectives that obfuscate the significance of regional ties, for example, between India and its neighbors across the Indian Ocean rim. Thanks to these various interventions, South Asian history was no longer limited to the categories of ‘India,’ ‘Pakistan,’ or ‘Britain’; and the historical realities that transcended these labels came into view. Jürgen Osterhammel, commenting on this shift in history writing in Geschichtswissenschaft jenseits des Nationalstaats (2001), pointed out that history should be understood less as the events that occurred within a nation’s boundaries, and more as a constellation of interdependent political, economic, cultural and intellectual relations both within and between regions around the world
From this transnational perspective, it is possible to see colonial subjects engaging in an intellectual and cultural network in Europe that spread beyond the bounds of Britain and to picture Europeans encountering South Asia within an international context. There is now a critical mass of scholars in South Asia, Europe and America who are working on the transnational interactions of South Asia with Central Europe, with regards to how these interactions operated within the larger context of European imperialism. It is no longer taken for granted that Britain, India and Pakistan were exclusively related, and that the history of South Asia is wrapped up solely with the workings of the imperial metropole. And as 'Europe' has been relativized and decentered in postcolonial scholarship, it has become possible to disaggregate the term 'Europe' itself, and to differentiate cross-currents and contradictions within European he! genomic encounters with the world. An exciting moment has arrived for us to bring together intellectual and social historians to break down in an emphatic way the nation-state approach to understanding the interaction between Europe and South Asia.
This conference therefore considers the similarities and differences of the dynamics of encounter between South Asia and a variety of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, broadly conceived: France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the former Czechoslovakia and Russia. But instead of considering binary relationships between particular European nations and South Asia as has been done in the past, the conference presenters will consider how a constellation of transnational political and intellectual connections, both internal to Europe and between Europe and South Asia, constituted the dynamics under study. So, for example, some papers will consider Czech views of South Asia in relation to the Czech experience of Soviet Imperialism; the experiences of Indian revolutionaries traveling between Berlin and Moscow in search of support against British imperialism; the interactions between French civilians and Indian soldiers in the context of First World War; the development of Ru! ssian Orientalism in the nineteenth century as related to its self-conscious place outside Western Europe; and the relationship of Indian anti-colonialism with Fascism in the 1930s in the context of the tension between Britain and Nazi Germany. In addition to paper presenters, a number of leading scholars in the study of the global exchange of ideas, including C.A. Bayly, Homi Bhabha, Sugata Bose, Gita Dharampal-Frick, Ayesha Jalal and Emma Rothschild, will participate as chairs and discussants for the various sessions of the conference.
By considering interactions between South Asia and Central and Eastern Europe within a rich transnational context, this conference will point out ways outside the center/periphery or East/West dichotomy to better understand the exchange of ideas and culture between these regions. As Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria suggest in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus (2002), the notion of a West set up against a non-West is ready to be broken down. Imperialism is better understood as a system of interactions affecting both South Asia and Europe, than as a unidirectional operation of a center upon its peripheries. And although the interactions between Europe and South Asia may not have occurred on equal footing and the logic of imperialism certainly conditioned the possibilities for encounter between these regions, there were still unintended consequences of mutually-affecting intellectual and cultural exchange that must be better understood. Conference participants will thus search for the limits of any ‘emancipatory’ encounters that occurred between South Asians and Central Europeans, but also uncover the degree to which imperialist commitments existed even where there were no formal colonial ties.