Germanic Languages & Literatures‪.‬

Knowing India, Traveling India: Joseph Dahlmann's Indische Fahrten. Perry Myers, Albion College, Department of German, Foreign Languages, and Cultural Studies for Special Purposes, Albion, MI 49224 Joseph Dahlmann (1861-1930), a Jesuit father and noteworthy German Indologe, published numerous books and essays on Indian religious traditions and philosophy. Fluent in Sanskrit, possessing intimate knowledge of India's sacred texts, Dahlmann knows India. Yet, perhaps following the trend of increasing popularization of academic subject matter, Dahlmann desired to inspect the purported enormous transformations occurring in Asia at the turn-of-the-century. After his three-year excursion (1902-1905), which included India, Japan and China, Dahlmann published his travel account in 1908, Indische Fahrten, in which most of 2 volumes reports on India. In my presentation, I explore how Dahlmann's intimate knowledge of India's cultural heritage informs and conflicts with those impressions attained through travel--how Dahlmann puts the standards of his Enlightenment reason into practice. By emphasizing how Enlightenment reason plays out in this travel report I will examine how this enlightened German explorer/Wissenschaftler discovers the "real" India--how Dahlmann's assessment of India's present-day cultural conventions authorizes a kind of German "Oriental" discourse through his use of social science, thus disregarding Enlightenment dictates, arguing instead that even Dahlmann's application of "scientific" knowledge of the Orient is filtered by a colonialist consciousness.