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KAPITEL

1. "Homme de lettre"
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2. "Haas - der Weltbürger"
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3. Exilland Indien
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4. Zurück in Europa
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5. India - an 'ahistorical idea of history'
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6. Anhang
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Anil Bhatti:
Haas Willy (1891-1973)


India then represented to Haas, fundamentally an 'ahistorical idea of history' and its social changes were anti-political politics. India's crisis lies in the fact that two forces, two 'metaphysical' factors were attempting to reconcile these with the real world of historical and political action. One was the Gita and the other was Gandhi. But, as Haas pointed out, the philosophy propounded in the Gita, was the precursor to one of the bloodiest wars depicted and justified in world literature. Hindu-Muslim riots too co-existed with Gandhi in India's world. From Haas' point of view, which in this case follows the tradition of 'Orientalism', this co-existence ('sowohl-als auch' instead of 'entweder-oder') resulted from the metaphysical dissociation of action from volition.

In this context then the role of the Congress Party (and Gandhi, Haas wrote, was still its 'nominal leader') consisted simply in 'intro-ducing Western nationalism and political activism into the Indian social psyche, in covering the many historical and geological layers of India with yet another layer, a layer, which sociologically is identical with the poor and disgracefully underpaid class of the urban Indian intelligentsia.' (NR 88).

The attempt by the Congress to forge an essentially cult-oriented and particularistic community into a new nation was comparable to the efforts of the Jewish agency to take die Jews out of their geographic diaspora by creating a modern Israeli state. In both cases an essentially traditional people were being led into the 'promised land'(!) of a modern industrial state (NR 88). Wisely, Haas uses the prerogative of the essayist and refrains from any land of prognosis. Examples that Haas chose to depict this co-existence may have derived from his own social experiences: This modern Indian lady discusses Baudelaire, Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Huxley (obviously) and Hemingway with great intelligence. But she still dresses in the way her ancestors have been doing for centuries: in a saree, which however is the most graceful dress ever to adorn a completely feminine body. She is not only called Uma or Parvati or Sarasfati [sic], but she also looks like a dark mythological goddess. The furnishings in her house however resemble a sale in the department store Wertheim around 1910. No Greek dancer on a marble frieze can imitate a small Indian village girl who runs after her rolling bangles laughing and with hair flying. But her father is decked out in a random mixture of old American, English and Indian clothes like a clown in Circus Barnum. The dead are burnt near the holy Ganges with sandalwood, but the crematoriums are protected against the rain with horrible rusty asbestos sheets; the cremation, which often lasts for hours, reminds one with its atmosphere of complete indifference, of the roasting of a chicken on an open fire. Tradition means simultaneously everything and nothing to the Indian. (NR 87)

It is important to emphasize that in his numerous attempts to come to terms with a theory of India, Haas took great care to differentiate between the popular European prejudices concerning India and a philosophical understanding. Haas, for instance, did not fall prey to the widely prevalent myth of the lazy native, which, colonial writing had popularized. Instead, like many European liberal sympathizers with India he preferred to write: 'It is often said that the Indian is indolent and passive. That is not true. The Indians are one of the most diligent peoples on the face of the earth.' For Haas, the 'problem' lay elsewhere. And by placing it elsewhere he erected an insurmountable structure of demarcation. According to Hass: 'Time runs differently in India from what it does in Europe.' Or again: 'The Hindu is not a fatalist.' A remark that would be rare to find in popular literature on India. The Hindu, however, is not a fatalist 'in the sense in which a Mohammedan is one. Kismet and Karma are exact opposites.' (LW 292)

One of the interesting points resulting from this observation is the absorption by Haas of a theory of the Indian predilection for the abstract, which precludes modern art. In Haas' view, the whole movement of Western art was towards an aesthetics of relations between the fleeting moment and the permanent, and in capturing the transient you saw the infinite. India's movement was essentially the opposite: 'Indian art achieves its apotheosis not in a portrayal of the eternal through the fleeting moment, of the permanent through the transient, of God through nature, but in the opposite: change through the permanent, the (ever) changing through identity.' (Cf. nr 10, chapter 'notes and references')

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