This chapter examines popular appeal to local Heimat as a site of political renewal in Cologne. It shows how democratically engaged localists advanced narratives of “Cologne democracy” and “openness to the world,” while replacing nationalist narrative of their region as a “Watch on the Rhine” with that of the Rhineland as a “bridge” to the West. Democratically engaged localists further argued that Heimat should be about promoting European unity and post-nationalist ideas of nation. Such groups constructed these narratives by pulling on useable local histories and reinventing local traditions. Such early democratic identifications, however, existed alongside major failures in democratic practice and frequent depictions of the Eastern bloc as an “anti-Heimat.” Emphasis on democratic local histories also aggravated failures to confront guilt for the Nazi past. Exclusion of newcomers also represented a significant challenge. More inclusively minded Cologners attempted to combat persistent exclusionary practices by arguing for “Cologne tolerance” as a local value and by insisting that a correctly understood Heimat concept should generate sympathy for the displaced.

The chapter analyzes the place of the German nation in politics and society, particularly nationalist activism and ethnic conflict between Germans, Poles, Danes, and French speakers.

A HIDDEN HISTORY OF BUDDHISM

There is a particular type of literature that sees empire as a nobler version of an Indiana Jones adventure. This literature suggests that British colonials were responsible for the ‘discovery’ and ‘return’ of India's Buddhist heritage. Charles Allen, for example, criticized Edward Said and scholars influenced by his important theoretical intervention Orientalism for failing to ask ‘where we would be without the Orientalists’. The orientalists, a particular breed of East India Company official-cum-adventurer-cum-scholars, ‘initiated the recovery of South Asia's lost past’ and ‘the European discovery of Buddhism and the subsequent resurgence of Buddhism in South Asia arose directly out of their activities’. British efforts to find, unearth, translate, collect and legislate around Buddhist material culture and India's built and literary heritage make for a fascinating story. However, to draw a direct line between British archaeology of Buddhist sites and the resurgence of Buddhism in modern South Asia as yet another instance of the great gifts of colonialism to India is to intentionally ignore the very considerable interventions, efforts, creativity and intellectual engagement of a range of Buddhists from not just the Indian subcontinent but further afield, from among Buddhist communities in Southeast and East Asia. It is one thing to dig up a site and write about it in an elite journal. It is quite another to undertake long and difficult pilgrimages in the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to bring these sites alive, as places of Buddhist worship and practice. This latter work was done by largely South, East and Southeast Asian Buddhists. If there is a story of the return of the Buddha, it is these actors who played the main role. And it is these actors whose efforts constitute what is clearly still a hidden history of modern Buddhism in India.

Not that the colonial context was unimportant, as mentioned earlier. The 19th-century transport revolution played a critical role in facilitating the movement of people at scale. Expanding shipping lines, the ever-growing railways, improved communications and dissemination of information about pilgrimage sites via print all contributed to an enormous expansion of pilgrimage, especially international pilgrimage, from the 1890s onwards. Mobility was at the heart of modern Asia's colonial history.

The chapter examines the crisis of the First World War, battlefield action, the war’s impact on patterns of domestic conflict, and the reasons for Germany’s defeat.

THE TIME OF DHARMAPALA AND VIVEKANANDA

Few people living at that time would have had an inkling as to the importance of Chicago's 1893 World Parliament of Religions in the history of modern South Asia. Every school student in India will have read in their history textbooks about the big event in Chicago more than a century ago that gave to Indian history the figure of Swami Vivekananda, considered by many to be the founder of modern Hinduism. And yet, neither was the parliament a very unique event—there had been many efforts at inter-faith dialogue—nor was the Columbia world exposition, a gigantic exhibition of colonial and industrial wares organized to commemorate the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Christopher Columbus 400 years earlier, the first of its kind. We can only guess that there was something fortuitous about the particular historical moment that allowed a struggling monk to gain fame and reputation that even he never expected, which in turn became the foundation for his subsequent renown and after-life in India.

By the 1870s and 1880s, the emerging professional middle class, or the bhadralok, in Bengal, the oldest British province in the Indian colony, found themselves caught between the ‘myths of improvement’ of the Bengal Renaissance and ‘nationalist deliverance’. The resulting ideological ferment led many members of the bhadralok to engage with, and fashion, new forms of public discourse, social respectability, aesthetics and morality, attendant gender and community norms, and, eventually, political mobilization. This powerful Indian, western-educated elite debated not only some of the most fashionable ideas and theories of the day like Darwinism, comparative religions and nationalism but also generated new ideas about Indian history, civilizations and social reform in a colonial milieu. In fact, as Tanika Sarkar argues, religion, family and community norms became sites of self-fashioning for the emerging intelligentsia. The bhadralok class comprised government servants, professionals, scholars, men of commerce and men of the arts, who constituted a self-appointed ‘native’ intelligentsia.

But the 1890s were an especially formative decade. The age of consent controversy had whipped up a public frenzy in Calcutta, which served as a foundation for future nationalist activity. Elsewhere, in north India, it was a decade of violent communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims as the cow protection movement gained ground.

The chapter surveys the nationalization of politics after 1890, particularly the impact of naval-building and its financial costs. It also analyzes the patterns of voting behavior.

The chapter examines conflicts between German expellee organizations and their critics about how the Heimat concept should be understood. It traces these conflicts through a study of annual expellee Heimat meetings – dynamic and often explosive events which involved personal reunion, cultural displays, political spectacles, children’s events, and medialized debates. Expellee leaders and their critics conflicted over whether Heimat should moderate or strengthen national sentiment. Loss of Heimat based on national ethnicity and redrawing of national borders underpinned more nationalist interpretations of Heimat in the expellee organizations. National politicization of expellee Heimat feeling, however, did not rely on personal intention to return to the East as some have argued. Nationally strident demands for a right to the Heimat in the East were also deeply bound up in recognition politics. Claims that expellee children had a right to Heimat in the East triggered further conflicts over the concept. Opponents of the expellee societies denounced their efforts to depict Heimat in the East as an ethnic inheritance and argued that personal experience of place was essential to the concept.