Jewish Exile in India (1933-1945)

Fascism in Europe, exile in India. This is a relatively unexplored area of cultural, historical and literary research. The history of emigration of anti-fascist writers, scholars and artists – most of whom were of Jewish and minority origins – from Central Europe, especially Germany, to North and South America and other parts of the Western world as well as the former Soviet Union is well documented. Work has also been carried out on exile in non-European centers like Shanghai. Less well known is the fact that during the period of fascist rule in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, a number of Central European emigrants moved to India. This emigration movement and the varied histories of the ?migr?s themselves have so far been largely neglected in the historiography of Central European Jewish and anti-fascist exile. This volume has emerged from contributions by Indian, German and Israeli scholars from a variety of disciplines. The papers were first presented at an interdisciplinary symposium jointly organized by Max Mueller Bhavan and the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in March 1995. Untapped sources from British, German and Indian archives have been analysed and interpreted by Joachim Oesterheld, Majid Hayat Siddiqi and Tilak Raj Sareen in order to examine the political and social parameters of this emigration movement. Agata Schindler, Anil Bhatti, Martin Kampchen and Johannes H. Voigt write on the lives, experiences and writings of ?migr?s Alex Aronsen, Willy Haas, Walter Kaufmann and Margarete Spiegel to bring out the cultural and social dimensions of this period. Reflections concerning the period by Indian writers like Anita Desai and Vishram Bedekar are dealt with by Rainer Lotz, Rekha Kamath and Rajendra Dengle and artist Krishen Khanna adds a personal memoire of Rudolf von Leyden to shed new light on this extraordinary political, cultural and social encounter.