Introduction

In the context of postwar Europe, Germany was long an exception (Decker and Hartleb 2006). Unlike in neighbouring France, Austria, Denmark, or Poland, for example, in Germany, until fairly recently, populist parties and movements did not play a major role. Only with the emergence of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) did populism become a significant political force in German politics. Founded on 6 February 2013, the party only narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament in the September 2013 federal elections. Within the next 12 months, it successfully contested the elections for the European parliament and in the East German states of Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia.

The AfD's first leader, Bernd Lucke, was a professor of economics who pursued a neoliberal political agenda and advocated for Germany to leave the Eurozone. While the economic policies of Lucke and other AfD founders attracted many followers in the wake of the Greek sovereign debt crisis, the AfD's meteoric rise between 2013 and 2019 was largely due to its ability to gain the support of voters dissatisfied with official attempts to value cultural diversity and with Germany's asylum and immigration policies, particularly the Merkel government's decision in 2015 to not close Germany's borders and to admit more than a million asylum seekers over a two-year period. In the 2017 federal elections, the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the votes and became the third-largest party in the Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament. Although immigration did not feature prominently in the next federal election campaign, in September 2021 the AfD was largely able to consolidate its position; in Saxony and Thuringia, it finished ahead of all other parties.

In terms of its elected representatives, its members, and its voters, the AfD has included and appealed to a wide range of people, from social conservatives at one end of the spectrum to sympathizers of the New Right at the other. The AfD's heterogeneity has been a strength because it has broadened the party's appeal, but it has also been a weakness because the AfD has always been riven by factional conflicts.

As mentioned in the earlier chapters, Camille's evolution as a Christian priest and a scholar of Indian traditions and his knowledge were shaped at the Calcutta School of Indology – an umbrella institution, which made a genuine, rational and scientific approach to explore, examine and explain Indology to its members, to the wider Indian scholarly community and to the entire world. One must recognise the fundamental ethos of the Calcutta School of Indology as reflected in Camille's body of work. Not only did he produce some of the most extraordinary works on ancient and medieval Indian literature, philosophy and theology, but he also undertook the herculean and exceptional campaign to indigenise Christian sacred texts, philosophy and theology for ordinary Indians.

Camille's most renowned contribution to the field of Indology is his study of the Ramkatha; his doctoral thesis was turned into a celebrated book titled Ramkatha: Utpatti Aur Vikas. Right from its publication, this book was considered a tour de force, and as Dineshwar Prasad argues, Camille's work on the Ramkatha is the first of its kind that ‘compiled the narrative from various Indian and foreign sources and analysed each and every fact and meaning of it through a systematic, scientific and conclusive research’ (D. Prasad 2002, p. 22). Camille explored the Ramayana literature beyond Sanskrit and Hindi and studied ‘Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Kashmiri and Sinhalese’ versions of the story (D. Verma 1950, p. 6). The renowned Hindi littérateur Dhirendra Verma1 called this book an ‘encyclopaedia of the Ramkatha narrative’ that includes ‘the Rama-Story found abroad and in this connection information available from Tibet, Khotan, Indonesia, Indo- China [Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam], Siam [Thailand], Burma [Myanmar]’ (ibid.). The details and scholarly analysis highlight that ‘its range is simply astounding and kaleidoscopic’ (ibid.).

Camille's book is a testament to the broad sphere of Indian civilisational influence around South-East Asia based on the popularity of the Ramkatha. The story of Rama (Ramkatha) remained his lifelong passion, and apart from revising this book, he also wrote several research essays in Hindi, English, French and Flemish on this theme.

A switch was flicked, and a hologram, 8 metres long and 2 metres wide, appeared. Under the impressive India Gate of New Delhi, on 23 January 2022, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, inaugurated a hologram monument of the politician and military leader Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) (ABP News 2022). The statue celebrates the controversial, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic Bose for his defiance of the British during the independence struggles in the 1930s and 1940s. It fits with the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) agenda to show that ‘the history of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved the country’ (Times of India 2021). Modi's party seeks to challenge a supposedly ‘elitist’ and ‘colonial’ narrative of Indian history (Khan et al. 2017; Zachariah 2020). The BJP finds examples in ‘heroes’ such as Bose, uses DNA to claim a link between contemporary Hindus and India's first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and treats ancient Hindu scripture as fact and not myth (Chapter 5; Jain and Lasseter 2018).

Sixteen thousand kilometres away from New Delhi, a different populist ‘politics of history’ unfolded over the past two decades. Evo Morales, the leader of the left-wing populist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and the first indigenous president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, promoted a policy of anti-imperialist and anti-neoliberal ‘cultural and democratic revolution’ to inaugurate a ‘new phase of history’ after colonialism (Morales 2006). By performing highly mediatized political ceremonies at indigenous heritage sites such as his alternative ‘spiritual’ inauguration at the Tiwanaku site, by celebrating figures such as eighteenth-century indigenous rebel Túpac Katari (c. 1750–1781), and by using indigenous notions such as pachakuti (the future in the past), Morales attempted to ‘decolonize’ Bolivian history (Dangl 2019; García Jerez and Müller 2015). Grand symbolic gestures were familiar to Morales, too. On 21 June 2014, his government installed a counterclockwise running timepiece on the Congress building of La Paz. Symbolizing that Bolivians must ‘undo their history’ and challenge colonial standards, this ‘clock of the south’ invited them to ‘think creatively and disobey Western norms’ (BBC News 2014). Although the MAS started out along ethno-populist lines and was dominated by Quechua-speaking indigenous people, it never defined this indigeneity in strict exclusivist terms.

Introduction

In Neamat Imam's 2015 novel The Black Coat, the reader follows the path of a former Bangladesh Liberation War journalist and his charge, a rural migrant adept at impersonating Sheikh Mujibur Rahman amidst the raging famine of 1974. Imam takes stock of the populist potential of Sheikh Mujib by portraying him as both the exalted leader and every Bengali. In effect, he has no features as he subsumes the whole people.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the leader of the Bangladesh Awami League (AL), the principal national liberation party during Bangladesh's independence struggle and currently still the country's ruling faction. With the end of British colonialism in the subcontinent and the partition of India in 1947, the eastern part of Bengal became East Pakistan, a province geographically separated from its West Pakistan counterpart. The Pakistan period is often remembered in Bangladesh as the second period of colonial rule. Mujib became the leading figure not only within the AL but for the entire independence struggle, which eventually culminated in the 1971 Liberation War. Although imprisoned for nearly the entire war, he became known as the Father of the Nation and was attributed the honorific title ‘Bangabandhu’ (Friend of Bengal) by his followers.

After independence, Mujib was lauded as the country's first president and later prime minister. However, unable to resolve the high levels of internal conflict and graft in the early years after independence, and following a devastating famine in 1974, Mujib saw his attraction and that of his party erode. In 1975, Mujib moved towards a one-party model to maintain control over his crumbling polity and to control AL greed more directly. Before his plan could be fully executed, he – and his whole family, apart from his daughters, Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana – were killed in a coup attempt in August 1975 (Ali 2010: 55–113).

The relationship between sacrifice and violence took a spectacular turn with the advent of the People's War, which lasted from 1996 to 2006. The struggle was led by the Maoist party of Nepal, at the heart of which developed a true mystique around the concept of violence. Blood sacrifice, bali dān, became the iconic symbol of the revolution. From the very start, it expressed both individual commitment and the movement as a whole. It differs in this respect from sacralisation of violence after the fact which can be found in other contexts, such as the use of the term ‘holocaust’ to designate the Nazis’ Final Solution, or the titles of martyr conferred after the end of hostilities in communist China. With the outbreak of the People's War in Nepal, violence was considered sacred from the very beginning, and commitment became the expression of its most venerable form, that of sacrifice. This attribution of holy meaning to violence happened as the war was being fought and then, just as quickly as it appeared, faded away with the ending of the war. The People's War was declared on 13 February 1996 by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), at that time still only a small group, and ended a decade later, on 21 November 2006 with the signing of a peace agreement, in the manner of the great wars of yesteryear. By starting and ending so decisively, the People's War parenthetically takes on the form of sacrifice as defined by Hubert and Mauss, with its formalised ‘entrance’ and ‘exit’. Much like sacrifice, this war was detached from ordinary time and its inherent violence modified the experience of its duration. The staccato rhythm of attacks removed any comforting structure from daily life. This kind of suspense and uncertainty, which imbue the animal sacrifice with its proper meaning at the moment of the consecration, become generalised in the People's War. In one fell swoop, terror spread across the entire territory, in a sort of sacrificial invasion, from the more targeted dread of blood sacrifice.

The idea that war is a vast sacrifice is nothing new in the Hindu world, but it is not merely a rhetorical equivalence.

Parvez's samiti had seemed for much of my time with the jhupri group little more than a harmless side act to his role as a boro bhai. I knew that at least ostensibly the samiti was a savings group, where each of the seventy labourers deposited 10 taka daily, which he in principle would keep safe for them. I was aware, however, that Rubel, who had similarly run a samiti in the past, had been known to have in fact kept most of the capital. It was also clear that Parvez, unlike Rubel, did not own rickshaw vans apart from his own and did not hence receive income from renting them, nor did he work during the night, instead monitoring activities by the side and fielding questions from the labourers. I sensed then that Parvez was perhaps living on the samiti funds day to day. At times the money given to him was portrayed by the labourers less as a savings system and more as a tribute. When asked why they gave to the samiti, younger labourers in particular would often reply along the lines of: ‘He is our boro bhai, that's why we give it.’ The way it was spoken of was as chanda, with the complexity this word entails. The samiti then seemed to stand alongside the other ways Parvez earned: money from rounding up the boys to attend rallies, some from more dangerous acts of political violence, some from a short-lived syndicate, some from the thieving of vegetable sacks and some from the labourers themselves.

What then also appeared clear was that while larger bodies such as the Van Workers’ Union were intertwined with party politics, whatever this samiti was, it appeared far less meaningful politically than the rallies the group attended or the bombings they orchestrated. A common portrayal of similar societies in academic literature1 is furthermore as mutual aid associations understood within a ‘development’ paradigm, seen as a way of overcoming short-term horizons or mobilising groups in a ‘civic’ manner to better negotiate with the state.

Introduction

German philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reacted with much interest and even enthusiasm to the growth of knowledge about Indian intellectual history at that time. Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schlegel praised India as the cradle of human culture, and Indian thinkers were dealt with in contemporary histories of philosophy. Philosopher and philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt participated in this intellectual development. He was proficient in Sanskrit, knowledgeable about Indian culture, and keen to share his knowledge with his contemporaries. His publication of two commendatory articles about the Bhagavadgita can be seen as the apex of the positive reception of Indian philosophy in Germany.

The positive attitude towards Indian thought changed at some point in history. It seems to be the influence of G. W. F. Hegel, in particular, that led to a negative evaluation or, more often, to a disinterest in Indian literature and thought that is typical for German philosophers since the second half of the nineteenth century. Hegel expressed his position concisely in his critical review of Humboldt's two positive articles about the Gita. Basically, he denies that the Gita – or any other ancient Indian text – deserves to be included in the scope of philosophy. The dispute between Humboldt and Hegel was a crucial turning point for the evaluation of Indian thought in Germany and, thereby, for the future development of philosophy as a discipline. It is thus no exaggeration when Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra state that ‘the reception of the Gita was critical to philosophical developments taking place in Germany’.

In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, the question of whether there are philosophical texts and debates that are not ‘footnotes to Plato’ – as Alfred North Whitehead poignantly defined Western philosophy – is of eminent concern. Although the question still does not receive the attention it deserves, there is nowadays an ongoing debate about non-Western philosophy. The controversy between Humboldt and Hegel is an important contribution to this debate for two reasons. First, it is a very early dispute that defined the contours of later discussions. Second, in contrast to many contemporary debates about non-Western thought, Humboldt and Hegel argue explicitly and elaborately about the question of whether such thought should be understood as philosophy.

University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has achieved regional and national prominence in the US for its remarkable success preparing African American students in the STEM fields. The success is the result of the institution’s approach to innovation - framing challenges as researchable questions and testing to see which strategies work and replicating them. It has fostered a culture of curiosity and mutual support that makes the pursuit of excellence an ongoing collective effort.