Indian Nationalist Modernizers and the German Developmental State around 1900

Indian nationalist modernizers, ever since the late nineteenth century, believed Germany provided an unique model of developmentalism appropriate for India -- one that combined Wissenschaft, praxis and statecraft in order to modernize domestic society, but also to alter the world order.  During the German Wilhelmine period, the way academics, industrialists and bureaucrats seemed to combine and coordinate so as to restructure the society and alter the world order, was important not only to German national self-understanding, but also to the way foreign groups viewed Germany.  This paper considers the historical foundations of the relationship between German modernizing Wissenschaft and Indian nationalists in the period from ca. 1880 to 1920, with attention to the mediating role of the British colonial state. These connections mark the beginning of a long lineage of Indian nationalists turning to German models of modernization in a search for alternatives to the developmentalism of the British Empire.  In the decades of Germany’s ascent to world-power status, I focus on the central role of German Orientalists and textual scholars in articulating a notion of alternative modernization — one which became attractive to Indian nationalist modernizers.   In addition to the global circulation of Orientalist scholarship, the British Raj employed a large number of German scholars as librarians, teachers and archivists in its colleges and schools. This created a major channel for German modernization theory to flow into India. Germany came to be seen, often with concern, as model of successful nationalist developmentalism by the British colonial administration. I show how Friedrich List’s and Bruno Hildebrand’s economic thought came to influence Indian thinkers in the first decades of the twentieth century, and how the “national education” movement, which arose in India between 1905-1920, found its major reference point in German notions of Volksbildung.