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Baijayanti Roy, "The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I am Deepacharya, a PhD student in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And today I'm joined by Dr. Bojoyanthi Roy to discuss her fascinating and deeply researched book, the Nazi Study of India and Indian Knowledge Providers and Propagandists and the Third Reich. Published by Oxford University Press, the book offers the first systematic examination of how the knowledge of India was mobilized, traded and weaponized by the Nazi state. Dr. Roy explicitly challenges the long held myth that German endology remained a pure or objective science during the Third Reich. Instead, she shows how scholars and India experts entered into a resource exchange with the regime, offering their specialized linguistic and cultural expertise as intellectual capital in return for career advancement, funding and prestige. Dr. Roy, it is a pleasure to have you here.
- [02:05]
C
Thank you so much and also for this very kind introduction to me and to my book. And I'm looking forward to your questions.
- [02:13]
B
Thank you. So we will head right away. What I first wanted to know from you is you mentioned in your acknowledgement section, and that is the first thing that I read in a book that you come from a family of renowned historians in India, including your father. But you've described your journey in German academia as lonely and arduous. So could you start by telling us what it was like for you as an outsider, to step into the German archives and tackle such a sensitive part of their history. To that end, like, how did you end up with this book subject?
- [02:47]
C
Purely by chance, you know, in India I read a lot about the Third Reich during my teenage years because my father was really interested in it. He had all those books by Shirer, by Alan Bullock and all, all that set of British historians on Hitler and the Third Reich. And as a teenager I read them. My father was a very famous scholar of medieval India, but this was his interest. So afterwards I studied history at Presidency College and then Calcutta University. And during my Masters my focus was modern European history, which also had a lot of emphasis on Modern Germany, 1871-1945. And then I really dreamt, you know, it was a very stupid dream, but I dreamt of doing a PhD on Nazi Germany from Germany. But of course I knew at that point that, that that was never going to happen because it was just too far fetched. But it's just by a stroke of luck that I ended up in Germany. I was a journalist in India. Then I got married and my husband got this job in Germany. We came to Germany, we shifted places. We had two children and I mean only after we came to a place near Frankfurt and my kids were somewhat old, one was six and the other was three, I decided, no, I have to go for this. I mean, I have to have a PhD on Nazi Germany. Then I read something on Albert Speer. I had read Albert Baer's memoirs as a master student. Of course my father had the English translation and it was very impressive. Here was this repentant Nazi. And then I read in the German Spiegel, Der Spiegel that it wasn't at all what he presented and I wanted to do a PhD on him. So I took my two and a half year old son and met the sitting German professor at the University of Frankfurt. And she of course was quite taken aback. She wasn't prepared to see this Indian housewife with her little baby son entering her office and saying, I want to do a PhD on Speer. But then she relented. I mean, she said, okay, you write an essay on Speyer and then I see and then you have to pass this Latin exam translating Julius Caesar's text from Latin to German. So I cleared all that and then I started. I don't think my supervisor took me very seriously. She was kind, but she thought that oh, this Indian housewife will lose her interest midway. It was not till I submitted my thesis she could really. She couldn't believe it that I really submitted this thesis. And while I was doing this thesis, I got interested in the connections between Nazi Germany and India. There was, of course, the iconic Subhas Chandra Bose. As somebody who grew up in Calcutta, you know, Bose is revered like a God. You know that as well as I do. But there were also these Indologists who had studied Sanskrit. And then I chanced upon this article by Sheldon Pollock, which I also mentioned in the introduction, and that set me off. Why has nobody worked on this? I mean, this looks so fascinating. Then I wanted to do this. But then I started hitting brick walls. My guide had retired the. The professor who came in her place. He said, you can't do this. This is too difficult for you. You are not cut out for this. And there were so many versions of that that I heard from so many professors. Then again, through a very roundabout route involving the American number of American scholars and the famous Sanskrit scholar Patrick Olivela, that I landed up at Professor Moritz Epler's department. And he was kind enough. He said, okay, I'll give you. I mean, I'll help you. So we worked very hard for this research grant, German research foundations grant, which is very difficult to get, but we were very lucky. That's how this project came about. And out of the project, the book materialized.
- [07:10]
B
Oh, that's excellent to hear. Yeah. As a German history student myself, I absolutely relate with you about the kind of conversations that we need to be a part of and experiences that we have in the archives and investment in academia. So thank you so much for that fantastic answer. What I want to delve into now is about your project and about the book and the theoretical underpinning that your book has. And you mentioned how your entire project originally focused, despite being focused on Indology, you chose the broader term knowledge of India. So I want to know why was it important for you to move beyond just academic study of Sanskrit to look at how India was underst by the Nazi state as a whole?
- [08:00]
C
Very good question. This is because I realized that the uses of India that the Nazis had were primarily for modern India and the knowledge of Indian anti colonialism. So this was not Sanskrit. Of course, these people who worked for the Nazis were Sanskrit scholars, and that gave them a certain prestige and that enhanced their credibility as, you know, brilliant scholars of India. But it was in the sphere of modern India that the Nazis needed this knowledge. That's why I changed it to knowledge of India, because indology generally means. It still means ancient India and Sanskrit, mostly Sanskrit and mostly Ancient Indian literary cultures.
- [08:47]
B
Well, that's great to know. I like the nuance there. And as someone who's not really familiar with what the historiography on the Indian subcontext looks, it's very good to know your rationale behind it. The second thing that I wanted to know about was you use a very interesting framework for this book called Resource Exchange for our audience. In simple terms, could you talk more about how did academics and Nazi politicians trade with one another? What did the scholars give the state and what did they get in return? And what kind of a relationship this was like? Was there a tension? If you had to characterize this relationship, how would you do? So.
- [09:31]
C
To answer the last part of the question, this was certainly a very complicated equation. There were many things that went into it because for one, the Nazi regime, I mean, contrary to popular belief, the Nazi regime was a polycracy. There was not really a systematic administration, one policy on India or something. There were competing power centers who wanted to grab all the power that that was related to knowledge of India. So they had competing academics, competing Indologists. There were these fundings and positions. For example, there was one position within the Foreign Office and only a very trusted Indologist could get it. So there were these questions of competing power centers, the German power centers, and how each Indologist could measure up to, you know, could prove himself worthy of the resources that were, you know, out there. And secondly, I use Mitchell Asch, this Austrian intellectual historian's theoretical premise that politics and Wissenschaft as resources for each other. I mean, I found that very useful because here the resources are not just financial, that plays a great role. Yes, but there were other kinds of resources which were at stake, like prestige, like power within a certain organization. And to these academics, that kind of resources, those played a big role. And finally there was also the question of physical survival. Towards the end of the war, as I show in the fourth chapter, there were people, people who were given, given sinecures as interpreters with the Indian legion so that they don't have to fight at the front, especially at the Russian front, which was a. Which was an absolute disaster where people were getting killed by the hundreds and thousands every day. So it was also at, in the end, it was also a question of physical survival. So that was the kind of resource exchange. These, the scholars gave the German state their knowledge or, or they tried to present that they had knowledge on modern India, which they actually didn't, was all theoretical, mostly theoretical, but they convinced the German state that they had knowledge of a unique knowledge of modern India and its anti colonialism. They wrote propaganda texts and whatnot, what have you. And in return, they had all these things. Position, power, prestige, money, physical survival. In very simple terms, this is it.
- [12:27]
B
Oh, that's fascinating to know. This is a part of history which I, as a history student myself, or as I would guess most of our audience, would not be familiar with this intersecting transnational history and exchange of ideas and knowledge about India. And you do a brilliant job into bringing this up to the fore. So thank you so much for that. Your research took you to archives like in Germany, England, and also in India you mentioned, and you had to look at official Nazi documents alongside British colonial surveillance records. So how did you handle this? Unscrupulous surveillance reports. Like, how do you, as a historian yourself, how do you tell the truth when your sources come from spies or clandestine networks?
- [13:15]
C
This is indeed a very difficult question. As I have written in the book, you have to take all these surveillance reports with a pinch of salt because as many historians have written, the British were very anxious. And these British spies were also, you know, in their own way, they were playing up these anxieties to prove their own importance to the colonial administration. So you had to be very careful with these reports. But there were cases where it was pretty evident that they were onto something. You know, there were other kinds of circumstantial evidence. There were writings. I mean, I relied a lot on what these Indologists in question wrote and published. And if you compare the publications with the surveillance reports, then you have a certain, you know, you arrive at a certain truth. But also, as I have written, there are cases where you just have to rely on your instinct and hope that, you know, it is. It is something akin to the truth. After all, as we know that no history is. This is a foreign country, past is a foreign country, and we can't really know 100% about it. So you have to. Yeah.
- [14:32]
B
Yes. I love your allusion to past as a foreign country, as we all know. So let's look at the India Institute in Munchen. You mentioned how it started as a cultural organization, but after 1933, it changed gears. I'm wondering, to that end, how did the Nazis use things like Hindu revivalism or the idea of a common Aryan connection to win over Indians?
- [14:59]
C
Yeah. I have also published another article on this, how they use the Nazis use different religions prevalent in India, not just Hinduism, but Buddhism and to a certain extent Islam, to win over different groups of Indians. But as far as the Indian Institute was concerned, it was never completely apolitical it started in the 1920s with this hidden anti British agenda. It was started by Karl Haushofer, this German professor of geography at the University of Munich, who was rabidly anti British because the British had defeated Germans in the First World War and had slapped the Treaty of Versailles on it. And with Househofer there was Taraknath Das, who was of course a militant Indian anti colonialist, you know, living as a political exile in Europe. So there was this anti British thing already there. And this was encouraged by the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, which was also, I mean, it was also their way of getting back at England and it was also their way of, you know, promoting this, the no German, what you call it, it's sort of soft power. So without being directly critical of the British, they had this anti colonial agenda. But then after 1933, the major change was that the anti colonial agenda took a back seat. Then it was all how great Germany was and how great the Nazi, whatever the Nazi resuscitation of Germany was and how Germany was finding its glory. And then this entire Aryan thing came up. The India Institute started providing platforms to God men and to certain kind of ethnologists and anthropologists from India who were talking about Aryan culture and the Aryan race and how vestiges of Aryan culture had still remained in India. The Hindu revivalists like the Arya Samaj, who believed that or who promoted that India was originally Aryan and it had now degenerated and Arya Samaj was trying to regenerate the lost Aryan virtues. That kind of stuff was now given abroad. Platform, platform by the India Institute. So that's how we see that there were these series of people visiting Munich and they're talking about Aryan glory. And this culminated in Walter Worst, Walter Wurst's advertisement for this essay. Competition for Indian students. The common uses of Swastika in India and Germany. I mean, that's very blatantly propagandist. And that happened just before the war in 1939. So. But after, as the war started, the Aryan thing again took a backseat and anti colonialism returned because that suited the German policy at that time to encourage the Indians to fight the British.
- [18:17]
B
That's ex. That's fascinating. Yeah, that's the story that really stood out to me. And I really like how you paired four case studies up with each other because that all these four stories spoke to one another and give us a very coherent version of what, what was happening between India and Germany at this point and how important a role Britain played in all this.
- [18:39]
C
Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you find it useful. But as I, as I, I think I wrote it now, I've already forgotten what I've written. That British Empire is this, this ominously watchful entity which is, which casts its shadow on all these exchanges.
- [18:58]
B
Yes. So let's now just address the elephant in the room. That is the history of Subhash Chandra Bose. You focus on the special department India, the Sri that was set up specifically for his mission. I'm wondering how did scholars like Ludwig Alstorf help the Nazi government manage Bose's anti colonial goals so they wouldn't clash with German interests?
- [19:23]
C
Well, there were some similarities between Bose's anti colonial aspirations and the German propaganda. We must remember that whatever Germany said after, after the beginning of the war or after Ribbentrop became the foreign minister in 1938, all these, you know, encouragements for Indian anti colonialism, they were mostly propagandistic. So for them Bose was a godsend. He was like this mascot who had just fell into their hands that there was this militant anti colonialist who wanted Germany's help to liberate India and the German government could show the world that here we are helping this militant anti colonialist Indian. Actually Hitler of course refused to declare, you know, Bose's Free India center as a, as an independent government of in exile. So Bose did not get all the help that he wanted. But I mean he could be used very well for the German propaganda. And Alstorf comes in. Alstorf is in some ways an apparatus. He does whatever is required of him, him and he loves to cling to have his say in the Zander Farakt Indian. He basically gets people to write all these books about India's anti colonialism and so on. And he basically echoes what the German propaganda policy wants him to echo. He doesn't really have his great independent thoughts because I have the feeling that he's not really interested in it. He's just interested in the end goal. So Bose, I read these reports, these post war confessions, if you call it post war accounts by people like Nambiar and Mukundra Vyas who were part of Bose's Free India Center. They said that Bose did not like Alstor, but Alstov was just too powerful and they had to come up with a sort of coordinated propaganda strategy.
- [21:41]
B
So one of the most striking parts of the book is the Tiger Legion, the Indian prisoners of war who volunteered to fight for Germany under the Waffen ss. If I'm not mistaken, you mentioned a magazine they produced called Bhaiband I'm wondering what was in this magazine. Like how were German scholars using Indian religious symbols to induct these soldiers? Were there specific tactics that we are talking about if they converge in any way with the propaganda that was being showed to Waffen SS soldiers or SS soldiers in general or the Wehrmacht? As we know that there are different magazines that are being fed to these different groups of soldiers in different ways. So what were some of these tactics? What constituted these magazines?
- [22:31]
C
Actually Bhaiband was basically. I mean it belonged to the spectrum of Soldat and Zeitung, the magazines for soldiers that the Wehrmacht used to publish. They had a very strong propaganda team with very streamlined propaganda strategy for the Wehrmacht soldiers. And where Bhaiban differs from the general Wehrmacht propaganda is of course it was customized for, I mean tailored towards the Indian soldiers. And that happened with other similar magazines which were meant for other foreign units. Indian Legion started out as a part of the Wehrmacht. It was called Indisha Infantry Legion 900 pulses Indian Infantry Legion 950 or the Tiger Legion because of the badge, their armband showing a leaping tiger. Only 1944 they were almost forced to join the Waffen SS like all the other foreign army units. The Indian soldiers were not at all keen to do so. But they had to, they had. At that point they had no, no other choice. So one part of Bhaiban you can make out is basically the general. It's echoing the general propaganda that is meted out to all the Wehrmacht soldiers. For example, news of the war. News of the war is basically fake news of the war. It's just highlighting bits and pieces where the German army makes just a few advancements and it's kind of. It's either airbrushing, not mentioning or not, not taking, not projecting seriously the huge losses that were being made by the German army on different fronts. And there was of course the direct glorification of Hitler. I suspect I haven't checked the other Soldat in Zeitungen, the soldiers magazines but I suspect that would be common to many other such magazines. This thing about how great Hitler was and how he built up the great Reich and so on and so forth. And this part, what really was different in India specific was these religious things. And there you can see the orientalist training, the orientalist mind working, you know, for. I mean I found Edward Said's contentions quite useful in looking at these. Said says at one point that religious, I mean for many Westerners non religious oriental is not a real oriental. So these people, the people who are producing the magazine, these German scholars They take it that all these soldiers are extremely religious. They follow their religious precepts to the end and that's how they end up by propagating things like oh, the lives of the Sikh gurus. And you should follow this, you should not become westernized. Or you know, there's this thing about Holi, how you play Holi with the what, the blood of your enemies. I mean, sounds very much like Bollywood. But I don't know how they got to this propaganda, but this is how they used these different kinds of propaganda, religious based propaganda, because they thought that would be specially effective.
- [26:13]
B
As someone who works with propaganda himself, I'm really interested in knowing the like it's great to know the textual strategies and the themes that these kind of newspapers or popular media covered. And it's fascinating absolutely to know that about, know more about the content of these newspapers. So we all know how the Nazis had a strict racial hierarchy and yet you mentioned they often spoke of Indians as Aryan cousins. I'm wondering how did the scholars you studied reconcile this Nazi belief in white supremacy with their respect for ancient Indian Aryan culture? Like did they ever see Indians as equals or at least give a hint of certain of this narrative in this propaganda or was it always a superior to inferior relationship?
- [27:03]
C
It was always certainly a very superior to inferior relationship. I mean one reason why German Indologists started studying India from the 19th century was that they thought, I mean they wanted to construe that the white skinned Aryans who invaded India and supposedly conquered the dark skinned Aborigine were the forefathers of modern Germans. And they were the ones who set up this, who started this glorious Aryan culture. They wrote the Vedas, they wrote Bhagavad Gita, they wrote the Mahabharata, whatever you, you name it, all the Sanskrit classics were actually written by these great, you know, real Aryan, Teutonic, Nordic, Teutonic ancestors of modern Germans. So for them Indians were basically fallen Aryans. I mean there is Alfred Rosenberg, the great Nazi dialogue and head of the occupied Soviet Empire, head of the occupied Eastern territories who wrote in his book Dermitos Tes 160 Yahunda, the myth of the 20th century that modern Indians have lost all their Aryan traits. They are not really Aryans because what happened was the superior white skinned Aryans at one point started intermingling with the dark skinned aboriginals and the product of that is the modern Indian who have very little Aryan traits. Look what they have brought up. They have, they could have been able to produce only a tired Gandhi, Gandhi and that's exactly what most of these people, most of these indologists think. Even when they have to make propaganda encouraging the Indian anti colonialism. I mean they, they obviously they can't express these thoughts then but you know, their attitude is totally quite supercilious, quite derogatory. And even somebody like Jakob Wilhelm Hauer who was a little more liberal than the others in this way, he, he thought oh, there's a lot of Aryan culture still left in India. Even he is very paternalistic. So at best they are paternalistic and at worst they are very supercilious. Look, I mean Ludwig Alsdorf did not allow Indians to publish books on Indian anti colonialism because he just rejected them. Mostly because he thought they were not up to the standard of the Germans. We don't know whether that's true. We don't have the original manuscripts. But isn't it funny that all the four Indians were considered to be inferior even though they have worked for other Nazi institutes and with great success. So you can see there's a lot of racial stereotyping, superciliousness and so on working and Aryan philosophy, I mean this theory about Aryanism is there. They are not, they don't talk about Arianism so directly when it comes to India propaganda. And Walter Wost actually uses it when he calls for this essay on swastika, but that's about it.
- [30:30]
B
That's actually a great foray to what I thought of asking after this. You mentioned the superior to inferior relationship, this prevalence of racial stereotypes and always this at best paternalistic attitude that was being meted out to Indians. I'm wondering what about the Indian students and intellectuals living in, at this particular historical moment of 1930 in Germany? I mean do you study their accounts or did they feel safe or were they constantly under pressure to prove their usefulness to the Nazi state to avoid being targeted by racial laws? If you imagine a bottom up perspective of these granular lives of these students and intellectuals, what did that look like?
- [31:13]
C
That would be actually the topic of my next project. I'm planning a project on these people, some of these people who actually ended up working for Bose in his Free India Center. These people's lives should be studied because the focus has been so overwhelmingly on both all these other lives, these anti colonial lives who have very interesting life stories, they get, get completely, you know, submerged. So to answer your question, in Berlin there was a sizable student community who were also anti colonialists. Some of them were actually quite leftist or left oriented during the 1920s under Chakto Vidandana Chaktopadhai the interesting thing is a lot of these people suddenly become Pro Nazi after 1933. They just change track and the Nazi regime just accepts them. And this is what I find totally fascinating because I mean when you study Nazism the one thing that you know you study first is that their ideological hatred towards all forms of leftist politics. Everything was Bolshevism, everything was communism and they, the first concentration camps were built to incarcerate and probably kill the communists in Dachau or so on. So having knowing this it is fascinating to see that the Nazi regime is also very pragmatic when it comes to these Indians who start providing them knowledge. From 1933 onwards some of these people start writing for this Nazi mouthpiece. The Nazi regime is very accommodating. And then in the 1940s, I mean when Bo started his free India center all these communists, I mean real card holding communists from France land up in Free India center and they are given a lot of, of space to express their opinions. There you have this person called Banerjee giving a very Marxist, very leftist critique of the Bengal famine. And that's published, that's his report is accepted. And I've also published an article on this magazine called Azad Hind Free India. It was bilingual English and German which was practically, I mean the entire magazine was composed by some of these communists. And there they are given a lot of freedom to express their leftist opinions. This is also because I read in a secret report that the Nazi regime came to know that Soviet Union had a special place in India in the sense that Indians had this soft heart or whatever you call it. I mean Indians had a lot of respect for Soviet Union, a lot of Indians. And the Nazi regime realized that it wouldn't do to write anything that you know that, that challenges this, this view of the Indians. So that could be one reason why the Nazi regime pragmatically allows them to do this. And there are these students in Munich who have a more difficult time. The ones who come with scholarships provided by the Indian Institute. After 1933 they are subjected to a lot of racism and they protest. And then people like Taraknath Das start writing in the Indian journals like Modern Review that it is the fault of the students that they get harassed by the Nazis because these people are leftists. He says don't be, I mean don't indulge in leftist politics, just admire Germany then you won't be harmed. This kind of thing. So there were different, the differences in.
- [35:12]
B
The students experiences oh, that's fantastic to know. I mean it's. Everything about this book has been so new and so fresh in my mind.
- [35:23]
C
Thank you.
- [35:24]
B
So it's, it's something that I haven't read before and I believe that this is the only book that exists on this topic. So kudos to you.
- [35:31]
C
No, no, no, I don't think so. I mean, other people have worked. I mean, I think, I mean there are some German books which have not been either translated in English or they have not found the response that they should have found in India. So there are predecessors and thankfully they have done a lot of work and I'm grateful to them. I cannot say that all this is what I discovered and nobody has been there before.
- [36:03]
B
Well, that's very humble of you as a historian. But yeah, this is something. As a reader myself, this was very new to me and so, yeah, credit where it's due. So we are heading towards the end. You argue that teaching positions for Indian languages in Berlin often became rewards for scholars who provided politically useful information. So I'm wondering in this regard, was there really no such thing as an objective, objective India expert in Nazi Germany?
- [36:35]
C
I mean, depends on what you mean by an India expert. For example, there's this gentleman who was a trade union leader, Franz Joseph, Fort Wengler. I mean he went to India in the 1920s, met Gandhi and was, he was quite very impressed with Gandhi. I mean if you look at some of his works, they are quite objective. They describe the situation of Indian laborers, the Indian poor and so on. He also has this arianthrope in mind. He talks a bit about, I mean, he has this romantic idea of, oh, India is this land of romantic Hinduism and so on. But he also gives a very sober, very realistic and also quite scientific portrait of what, how the, the poor and the laborers, the agricultural people, they fare in India. So you could call him that. And as for the Sanskrit specialists, they were actually pretty good in their own fields. For example, Ludwig Alstorf worked, he wrote these really pathbreaking stuff on Jain literature, you know, and he also worked on Apa Brahmsa, this the corrupted form of German which is used in Pali and Prakrit. I mean he did really path breaking stuff on them. So some of these people were really serious scholars when it came to their own areas of expertise. It's only when it came to Nazi propaganda then that they used their talents for, you know, dubious political ways.
- [38:14]
B
So, or even.
- [38:15]
C
Sorry, I, I want to say, say this, it has to be said, Herman Beitan, one of these people who, who teaches Tamil at the Oriental Seminar and so on and so forth in my third chapter. So he is still regarded as a reputed scholar of Tamil. His Tamil textbooks are, I believe, still used. I mean he was a very serious scholar of Tamil. But he also wrote this book called who was Adolf Hitler? In Tamil and it was full of glorifying Hitler and comparing it, I mean to Tamil sages or whoever. I mean it appealed to Tamil cultural nationalism. So these people were often good scholars in their own fields, but they became, yeah, political agents when it came to Nazi propaganda.
- [39:06]
B
That's exciting what happened after the war because I know you mentioned you write about a process of group exoneration where many of these scholars like Alsdorf were able to return to their university chair positions. So how did they manage to like separate their academic careers from their Nazi past so successfully? Or was there a sense of betrayal in the academic community when these facts started coming to light? Or is there still a resistance to talking about this?
- [39:36]
C
Unfortunately there's still some resistance in talking about this. I mean Professor Rappley and I organized this workshop at the University of Frankfurt in 19, sorry, 2021. And the results were published in a magazine called Indology and Iranism. And it drew a certain amount of backlash. I mean there are people who are still not ready to face this aspect of their disciplines past. But as for this group exoneration, this is actually, this was actually a fairly widespread practice in Nazi Germany when I was doing my PhD. A lot of it was how Albert Speer managed to, you know, manipulate his own life story and come up with this image of being a good repentant Nazi and how he was helped in this by architects who were his colleagues, his juniors, whoever, and by historians who also wanted to. Nationalist minded historians who wanted to have some redeeming features from the Nazi era. And the same thing happens in case of the Indologists. And I believe more or less this was common to most professions in, in West Germany. I don't know about East Germany, I've never looked at East Germany, so I can only talk about West Germany. In Alstor's case, it's absolutely fascinating to see how all these academics at the University of Munster are so keen to have him that they actually refuse. This Jewish Indologist called Walter Rubin who escaped to Turkey during the Nazi period, he was a full professor, unlike Alstor who was not a full professor during the Nazi period. So Ruben comes back, applies at the University of Munster and he's turned down with a flimsy excuse so that Alstor can come back. And the same people who wrote in 1933 that to the Education Department that Alstor is a great politically committed, national socialist minded person and started writing to the education department after 1945 that Alstor is a great democrat. It was also a way to whitewash their own pasts. So they were all in this together.
- [42:07]
B
Finally, Dr. Roy, if there is one lesson we should take away from this book regarding the relationship between academic knowledge and political power, what would it be according to you?
- [42:19]
C
I mean this is an age old question, right? I mean you can see it all around you. You can see it in India, you can see it in Germany. I mean this, this issue will never be resolved. Especially in the humanities where we really need funding. We are totally dependent on some kind of, you know, state support or financial support. It's not we. What we do is not so directly commercial. We can't just go into private industry and produce value free knowledge, not with the kind of work that we do. So it makes us all vulnerable to the dominant state ideology. State power you call it. It's there. I'm sorry, it's not a very optimistic message, but that's how I see it.
- [43:07]
B
Well, thank you so much, Dr. Bhojo Ananti Roy for joining us on the New Books Network. It is fascinating the kind of work that you're doing and the book was a great read and I hope that it'll be a wonderful podcast for our audience who are waiting for this to come out.
- [43:25]
C
Thank you so much. I'm really honored.
- [43:28]
B
So the book is the Nazi study of India and Indian Anti Colonialism. You've been listening to the New Books Network. I am Deep Acharya and we'll see you next time.
- [43:42]
D
Sam.