Asymmetric Encounters: German-Indian Literary Entanglements across Modernisms

Chowdhury, Sneha; Chowdhury, Sneha

This panel builds on two important publications in the field of German-Indian intellectual and literary history that define the scholarly conversation it seeks to advance. Kris Manjapra's Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals Across Empire (2014) argues that German and Indian intellectuals between roughly 1880 and 1945 used each other as political instruments to dismantle the Anglocentric world order — Germans to challenge British European hegemony, Indians to break free from colonial subjection — not out of shared ideals but out of divergent and asymmetric necessities. More recently, the edited volume Nodes of Translation: Intellectual History between Modern India and Germany (2024), proposes translation as an under-utilized archival form for writing entangled Indo-German intellectual history, examining literary and philosophical translations between German and modern Indian languages from the late nineteenth century to around 1980. This panel takes up Manjapra's concept of entanglement, the idea that Germans and Indians engaged each other's literary and intellectual traditions for their own, often incommensurable, reasons and applies it specifically to the domain of modernist literature. It also extends the concerns of Nodes of Translation while moving beyond translation as the primary framework. The encounters examined here suggest that literary entanglement between German and Indian literatures operates through many more channels that a translation-centered framework, with its implicit assumption of a symmetrical movement between source and target, cannot fully account for. The four papers of 14 minutes each, enact this expanded understanding of literary entanglement across a range of Indian literary texts and modes of encounter.

Erney’s paper approaches the German-Indian literary relationship through its most contemporary form, reading Amit Chaudhuri's 2022 novel Sojourn as an instance of flânerie — aimless, reticent, resistant to over-explanation — that positions its Indian narrator within Berlin, one of Europe's great walking cities without resolving the mixed signals of welcome and exclusion that the city sends. Germany here is neither a source of influence nor a target of translation but a landscape that reveals something about the Indian writer's relationship to literary modernity itself.

The second paper by Khaund moves to Assamese fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, examining how German words, scientific vocabularies, and European train routes appear within Saurav Kumar Chaliha's semi-autobiographical short stories as sites of linguistic estrangement rather than cultural transfer. Chaliha's deliberate resistance to models of Anglophone influence — he rejected comparisons to Joyce — and his development of what he calls a minor aesthetic grounded in fragmentation and multilingual discontinuity makes him an exemplary figure for the panel's argument that entanglement operates through disorientation as much as through dialogue.

The third paper by Kulkarni turns to the Marathi stage, arguing that Vijay Tendulkar's adaptation Silence! The Court is in Session (1967) of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's's A Dangerous Game (1956) activates not one but two competing German theatrical traditions simultaneously — Brechtian Epic Theatre and Dürrenmatt's theory of the Grotesque — using their internal contradiction as a formal and ideological resource. This is asymmetric entanglement in its most concentrated form: a postcolonial playwright who refuses to inherit either tradition whole and instead puts them to work against each other.

The closing paper by Chowdhury reaches back to 1913 when publisher Kurt Wolff asked Rilke to translate Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali into German following Gide's French rendering. Rilke declined, sensing in Tagore's strophes a wave of foreignness he could not locate or strengthen from within. This refusal is a negative revelation: Rilke felt a striking familiarity with the strophes and yet simultaneously experienced an unlocatable strangeness, which he attributed to the English version he had encountered. This missed encounter is precisely where comparative literature becomes productive — bearing the potential to explore both what draws these two poets together and what separates them. One such site of comparison is divine praise: Rilke's praise is elegiac, racing against transience and the perishing of things; Tagore's is devotional, sustained through viraha, the Vaishnava pain of separation from the divine beloved. That the translation Rilke refused was eventually accomplished by Martin Kämpchen, who consciously steeped himself in Rilke's poetic idiom before translating directly from Bengali, adds a further twist: the encounter did happen, but posthumously and through an unexpected third figure.

The presentations will be followed by a 15-minute period of open discussion.

The panel brings together scholars representing a range of career stages, working across German studies, South Asian literary studies, and comparative literature, with expertise spanning Bengali, Assamese, Marathi and German literary traditions, reflecting the MLA's commitment to expanding the geographic and linguistic scope of literary inquiry.

19 Asymmetric Encounters: German-Indian Literary Entanglements across Modernisms: Calls for Papers