Baijayanti Roy’s The Nazi Study of India & Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the ‘Third Reich’ (2024) rightly claims to be the first monograph-length systematic study of the trajectory of Indology under National Socialism (Nazism).
However, this is an understatement, for it is much more than that. It is a ground-breaking piece of research with a wealth of information that sheds light on so many things that we were hardly aware of. The monograph is the outcome of a three-year-research-project titled ‘Indology in National Socialist Germany’ conducted at Goethe University with support from the German Research Foundation. The title of the book, different from that of the research project it is the product of, indicates that the research conducted from 2018 to 2021 acquired a much wider scope, going beyond Indology to include not just the Nazi study of ancient but modern India as well.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke wrote a biography of Savitri Devi Mukherjee née Maximiani Julia Portas (1905-1982), a Nazi spy, propagandist and a Holocaust denier, titled Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (1998). Marzia Casolari in her monograph In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Relationships between Indian Radical Nationalism, Italian Fascism and Nazism (2020) studied the connections between Marathi Hindu nationalism and fascism and explored contacts between fascists and Bengali nationalist circles. Vaibhav Purandare’s book Hitler and India: The untold story of his hatred for the country and its people (2021) presented a portrait and analysis of Hitler’s outlook on India and Indians, their culture and civilisation, and their struggle against the British colonial rule. However, Roy’s book is the first to focus on knowledge production on India in Nazi Germany and the propaganda the Nazis spread in India.
How the Nazis used the Bhagavad Gita
The 224-page-book focuses its attention on four organisations devoted to the dissemination of National Socialist ideology in India with the aim of influencing and inciting the Indians to rebel against the British. Divided into four chapters – excluding the introduction and the conclusion – with a chapter dedicated to each of those four organisations, the book probes how both scholars, including Indologists, as well as non-academic ‘India’ experts and some Indian anti-colonial intellectuals utilised “knowledge pertaining to India’s modern history and contemporary politics” for the fulfilment of “certain political goals of Nazi Germany”.
These are: the India Institute of the Deutsche Akademie (DA or German Academy), antecedent of the modern Goethe Institute, also known as Max Mueller Bhawan in India; The Sonderreferat Indien (SRI) or Special Department India (established in May 1941 under the auspices of the foreign ministry); The Oriental Seminar of Berlin (established in 1887) and its successors, the Ausland Hochschule or Academy for the Study of Foreign Countries (established in 1936), the faculty for the ‘Study of Foreign Countries’ (Auslandswissenschaftlichen Fakultat) at the University of Berlin and DAWI (Deutsches Auslandswissenschaftliches Institut), both established in 1940. And the final one is ‘Indian Legion’, also known as Tiger Legion, jointly formed by Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945) and the Wehrmacht (the German Armed Forces).
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
