Join us on January 14 at 12:30pm Pacific Time for our first online Ziegler Lecture of 2025. Focusing on the theme of ‘dissent’, CENES welcomes Dr. Roy from the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Title: “The Use of Knowledge Discourses on India for Nazi Political Goals”
Abstract: Dr. Roy’s monograph engages with the little-researched fact that from the beginning of Nazi rule in 1933, different German institutions became interested in disseminating propaganda for the new ‘Reich’ in India. From 1938, as war between Germany and Britain appeared inevitable, the Nazi government began strategically expressing sympathy for the Indian anti-colonial movement. Such efforts gained momentum after the Indian anti-colonialist leader Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Berlin in 1941, seeking Germany’s help to liberate India. Together with Bose, various organs of the Nazi government became involved in conducting virulent anti-British and pro-German propaganda aimed at Indians. This entailed acquiring knowledge of India’s past as well as present. Dr. Roy’s work examines four German organizations which deployed various kinds of knowledge of India for fulfilling Germany`s propaganda objectives.
These ventures were sustained by a number of German academics, as well as some Indian anti-colonial intellectuals living in Germany. The focus of my book is on these knowledge providers and propagandists as well as on the knowledge discourses used by them within the framework of the four organizations under review.
About the Speaker
Dr. Baijayanti Roy is a lecturer and researcher at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She received her PhD from the same university. Her dissertation has been published as a monograph titled “The making of a Gentleman Nazi: Albert Speer’s Politics of History in the Federal Republic of Germany” (2016). She has published and spoken on different subjects including Nazi Germany, Hindu nationalism and the history of German Indology. Her forthcoming monograph, “The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the Third Reich” will be published by Oxford University Press in September 2024.
How to Attend
This lecture will be hosted online over Zoom on January 14, 2025, at 12:30pm Pacific Time. Please register here in advance for this meeting.
