Belonging is a multifaceted concept. It goes beyond mere physical presence or legal status —it involves emotional attachment and a sense of acceptance and validation within a particular community or nation. What exactly does it mean to feel like one belongs? Is the sense of belonging tied to language, ethnicity, religion, caste, socioeconomic class, or perhaps food habits?
Furthermore, as societies evolve and undergo demographic shifts—through globalization, urbanization and migrations—how does the notion of belonging evolve? What roles do historical narratives, familial ties and personal experiences play?
The 8th Annual History for Peace Conference organized by the Seagull Foundation for the Arts and supported by the Goethe-Institut Kolkata will explore some of the diverse questions.
Goethe-Institut Kolkata is glad to invite Amir Theilhaber as the keynote speaker for the conference this year.
INDIAN CULTURE IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE AND ITS REMNANTS: A GERMAN TAKE AND CONTESTED BELONGING
The Indar Sabha by Agha Hassan Amanat from Lucknow was a genre setting theatre play of the 19th century, spreading after the repression of the 1857 rebellion to Calcutta and from there all across South Asia. Combining Persian, Urdu, Hindi and Arabic languages, poetic styles, and literary elements from the Hindu and Islamic canons, it was an emblematic theatre piece of India’s composite culture. Some saw in it a piece of anti-British resistance, others a decadent escape into a fairytale world. The German Orientalist Friedrich Rosen, house teacher at the British viceroy Lord Dufferin’s court in the 1880s, thought that he found in the Indar Sabha a theatre piece representative of the multi-layered modern Indian national spirit—a spirit from which India should muster its own organic development, rather than harking back to ancient Sanskrit drama or importing Shakespearean plays. This talk digs into these entanglements of British Imperialism, German Orientalism and Indian culture. How was belonging and the significance of what and who belongs framed in the age of empire, and how did this sow the seeds for a nationalist age? What remains from this age and where? And is any of it worth recovering from oblivion?
Amir Theilhaber is a post doc researcher at Bielefeld University’s Department of History, where he works on the history of the ethnological collection at the Lippisches Landesmuseum in nearby peripheral Detmold. Theilhaber completed his BA in International Affairs at Vesalius College – Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2006), his MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University Jerusalem (2009), and his PhD in History at the Technical University Berlin (2018). He’s the author of the book Friedrich Rosen. Orientalist Scholarship and International Politics (De Gruyter, 2020). During a fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. he has researched Orientalist knowledge circulation between the United States of America and Germany, and he taught seminars on the Aryan myth in different global contexts at the Center for Antisemitism Research at the TU Berlin and at the European Jewish Summer University in Hohenems.
