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An Orientalist in the Orient: Richard Garbe's Indian Journey, 1885–1886
Kaushik Bagchi
Goucher College
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In 1885, a German professor named Richard Garbe went on what we might call today a study abroad. He journeyed by ship to India, spent a year studying Sanskrit and Hindu philosophy at Benares, and wrote a journal on his experiences in the "Third World." Unlike traveling scholars today, he did not have immunizations against tropical diseases or bottled water, and neither could he be evacuated at short notice. He did go, though, with a strong sense of wonder and excitement, not knowing exactly what he would find or how he would manage in a new and difficult environment. He returned, as some travelers to non-Western societies still do, wiser, but also disillusioned with the "realities" of countries like India. |
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In this article, I study Garbe's experiences in India as described in his travel journal. I also examine a novel he wrote after his trip to India, a monograph on the Mughal emperor Akbar, and a few other writings. The focus of my discussion is colonial power and its different manifestations rather than Orientalist scholarship itself, and what I examine here therefore are mainly Garbe's nonprofessional (non-Orientalist) writings. |
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Garbe (1857–1927), a professor at the University of Tübingen, had earned his reputation through his scholarship on Indian philosophy, particularly his work on reconstructing the Bhagavad Gita in its original form. His year-long trip to India in 1885 was financed by the Prussian government through its Ministry of Culture and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Garbe kept a detailed record of his experiences in India, which he published in 1889 under the title Indian Travel Sketches.1 Garbe's travels and reactions to the East are especially interesting because he was one of a handful of nineteenth-century German Indologists (scholars of Indian culture and antiquity) who actually visited India. Another German scholar, Paul Deussen (1845–1919), a professor of philosophy and Indology at Kiel, traveled to India and Ceylon in the winter of 1892–93.2 The best known German Indologist of all time, Friedrich Max Mueller (1823–1900), is famous for never having set foot in the country that he studied and romanticized all his life. |
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While my discussion draws on the critique of Orientalism that has emerged since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, it is not intended to be yet another debunking of European scholarship on the Orient. Neither is it, as Wendy Doniger puts it, "flogging a dead white male Orientalist horse."3 I do not believe Garbe's academic and non-academic pronouncements on India and the East were wrong simply because they were spoken by a white man. My study also does not point to a clear linkage between Orientalist scholarship and European colonial power or hegemony. My thesis, rather, is that German Orientalism was more a reflection of European power than a contributing factor to its emergence and growth. |
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German Orientalism was not the focus of Said's initial critique, nor has it received as much attention as English or French Orientalism in subsequent studies. One obvious reason is the relative lack of German involvement in European colonialism. Since much of Said's critique was aimed at exposing the ties between Orientalist scholarship and colonial power, German Orientalism is not a natural candidate for Saidian-style scrutiny. But Said was aware of the absence of German Orientalism in his book, and tried to preempt critics by arguing that German Orientalism was not as important as French or English Orientalism.4 |
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