SERIES INTRODUCTION
When we think of Germany, it is easy to think of engineering. Of machines, automobiles, manufacturing, architecture, industrial design, technology and precision.
And when India and Germany look towards each other today, these strengths understandably become bridges — for trade, innovation, sustainability, research, education and design.
But from the tribal world, another bridge comes into view. It is older. Quieter. And perhaps much less understood.
For generations, encounters between German-speaking missionaries, linguists, scholars and institutions and Adivasi communities in India contributed to the documentation of languages, stories, songs, beliefs, social worlds and systems of knowledge.
Some of that knowledge became dictionaries. Some became grammars and encyclopaedias. Some became collections of songs, stories and cultural descriptions. Some entered correspondence, missionary records and archives. And some travelled. From villages and landscapes in India into books, institutions and archives in Europe.
That leaves us with another possible way of thinking about India–Germany collaboration. Not only through what the two countries might make together. But through what they might remember together.
What knowledge travelled from Adivasi India to German-speaking Europe?
Who shared it?
Who translated it?
Who recorded it?
Who was named?
Who was not?
Where does this material live today?
And what might happen if contemporary Adivasi communities were able to encounter, interpret and respond to knowledge about themselves recorded generations ago?
Over the coming weeks, India × Germany: Encounters with Tribal Knowledge will begin exploring this lesser-known landscape.
We will follow people, communities, languages, books and archives. We will also encounter the complicated circumstances through which knowledge travelled: missionary encounters, colonial structures, translation, unequal relationships of representation — and relationships that sometimes endured across generations.
But this series is ultimately interested in the future. Because perhaps the next chapter of India–Germany collaboration need not only be about studying tribal India.
Perhaps it can begin with thinking with tribal India.
And perhaps archives created in the past can become meeting places for entirely new relationships in the future.
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01
A FORGOTTEN CHAPTER IN INDIA–GERMANY RELATIONS
What if one of the oldest bridges between India and Germany runs through Adivasi country?
India and Germany have many familiar stories to tell about each other.
Engineering.
Science.
Philosophy.
Language.
Industry.
Education.
Design.
But travel east from those familiar histories and another relationship begins to appear.
Its geography includes Chota Nagpur.
Its languages include Mundari and Kurukh.
Its protagonists include German missionaries and linguists — but also generations of Adivasi speakers, storytellers, teachers, translators and knowledge holders whose presence within the historical record is not always equally visible.
And its traces can still be found in books and archives more than a century later.
A German encounter with the Munda world
Johann Baptist Hoffmann was born in Germany in 1857.
He arrived in India as a young Jesuit and eventually worked extensively in Chota Nagpur. He became deeply engaged with Mundari language and Munda social life.
His published work included a Mundari Grammar in 1903 and later the monumental project that became the Encyclopaedia Mundarica.
The scale of that undertaking is remarkable. Language sits beside social organisation. Agriculture beside customary practices. Material culture beside land. Songs, beliefs, terminology and everyday life become part of an enormous attempt to document a world.
But there is another way of looking at an encyclopaedia.
No outsider simply arrives in a society and independently knows thousands of words, meanings, practices, stories and relationships. Knowledge must come from somewhere. Someone explains. Someone translates. Someone corrects. Someone tells the story. Someone knows the name of the plant. Someone understands the ritual. Someone remembers. And sometimes the archive remembers that person too.
Historical scholarship on Hoffmann’s work, for instance, identifies Menas Orea, a Munda convert, as an important collaborator in the project.
That small fact opens a very large question.
If the book carries the name of the scholar, where are the names of all the people through whom the knowledge became possible?
Another German encounter
Hoffmann was not alone.
Decades earlier, German Lutheran missionary Alfred Nottrott had worked among Munda communities in Chota Nagpur.
His publications included a grammar of what contemporary publications then called the “Kolh” language, writings involving Mundari songs, and translations into Mundari.
Once again we encounter language moving between worlds. Spoken words become written words. Songs become transcriptions. Stories become texts. Knowledge embedded within relationships, landscapes and communities becomes something capable of travelling far beyond them.
And then there is Kurukh
Another German missionary, Ferdinand Hahn, worked extensively with Kurukh, the language of the Oraon people.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, works bearing his name included a Kurukh Grammar, a Kurukh (Oraon)-English Dictionary and Kurukh Folk-lore.
In 1906, a German-language collection of Oraon stories, tales and songs was also published in Gütersloh.
Think about the journey contained within that sentence. A story exists within an Oraon community. Someone knows it. Someone tells it. Someone records or translates it. It moves into another language. It enters print. And a book containing knowledge from Chota Nagpur appears thousands of kilometres away in Germany.
What exactly travelled?
And whose knowledge was it?
The archive is larger than the famous names
These examples should not tempt us into replacing one conventional history with another. This is not a story about heroic European scholars “discovering” Adivasi cultures. Nor can every missionary, linguist, archive or historical encounter be treated as though it were the same.
Missionary work had religious objectives. European scholarship operated within particular intellectual traditions and within wider colonial structures.
Translation changes meaning.
Classification creates categories.
Documentation can preserve knowledge while simultaneously changing the conditions through which that knowledge is understood.
And behind published European names were often networks of people whose intellectual labour may have been recorded differently — or not recorded at all.
That is precisely why the archive deserves another look.
Germany is already looking again at its Indian archives
There is another reason this question matters now.
Since 2014, the long-term research project Modern India in German Archives – MIDA has been systematically identifying and making visible German archival holdings concerning modern India and German–Indian entanglements.
Its starting proposition is itself striking: German archives contain rich sources concerning Indian history whose research potential has not been sufficiently recognised.
MIDA has sought to make those holdings more discoverable through a growing digital resource and archival guide, while encouraging deeper cooperation between Indian and German researchers.
Its twelve-year project period concludes in October 2026. That raises an intriguing additional question.
Within this much larger German archive of India:
Where is the Adivasi archive?
Where are the records concerning Munda communities?
Oraon communities?
Santals?
Ho?
Other Adivasi peoples?
What languages appear?
What photographs?
What correspondence?
What objects?
What songs?
What descriptions of land, ecology, agriculture, healing, belief and social organisation?
And most importantly:
Who supplied the knowledge?
Following the journey rather than merely the object
Perhaps we need another way of reading these collections.
Instead of beginning with:
Who wrote this book?
we might ask:
Who made the knowledge inside this book possible?
Instead of only asking:
Which institution owns this record?
we might ask:
Where did the knowledge originate?
Instead of asking:
What does this archive tell us about Adivasi people?
we might also ask:
What would Adivasi people today say about this archive?
That changes the relationship completely.
The community ceases to be merely the historical subject of documentation. It becomes a contemporary interpreter of that documentation.
From archive to encounter
Imagine a Mundari word recorded more than a century ago in a European publication being read today by a young Munda speaker.
Imagine an old description of an agricultural practice being shown to the community from whose landscape it emerged.
Imagine a song returning as an archival transcription.
Imagine a historical photograph being encountered by descendants who recognise something the catalogue never knew.
Imagine the archive saying:
Unknown informant.
And the community answering:
Perhaps not unknown to us.
This does not automatically resolve questions of ownership, restitution, authorship or historical power.
But it creates something that archives alone cannot create.
A renewed relationship.
Another India–Germany bridge
India and Germany will continue collaborating through engineering, science, sustainability, technology, education and design.
They should.
But perhaps another bridge is waiting alongside them. A bridge made from words. Stories. Memory. Language. Archives. And relationships that began generations ago.
The next chapter does not have to reproduce the conditions under which the first chapter was written.
Instead of Germany studying tribal India, perhaps Germany and tribal India can begin asking questions of the archive together.
Not simply:
What did Germans learn about Adivasi India?
But:
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What did Adivasi India make it possible for Germany to know?
And what might we create together if that knowledge begins travelling in both directions?
AN EMERGING TDF INQUIRY
THE JOURNEY OF KNOWLEDGE: Adivasi Worlds Between India and Germany
Tribal Design Forum is undertaking preliminary research towards a possible India–Germany research and curatorial initiative exploring the historical journeys of Adivasi knowledge, languages and cultural documentation between India and German-speaking Europe. The project is currently at an exploratory stage.
TDF is beginning to map relevant people, publications, archives, collections and community perspectives, and to identify possible academic, archival and cultural partners in India and Germany.
The inquiry is interested not simply in locating historical material, but in reconstructing its journeys:
Community → knowledge holder → translator/intermediary → researcher/missionary → publication or collection → institution → archive → contemporary community encounter.
Where records identify Adivasi contributors, the project hopes to recover and foreground those names. Where they do not, the absence itself becomes part of the inquiry. Possible future outcomes may include a collaborative research project, digital knowledge resource, publication and/or curated exhibition.
No institutional partnership has yet been established or should be inferred.
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THE EMERGING QUESTION
What happens when communities encounter archives created about them generations ago?
And behind that question sit several others:
Who held the knowledge?
Who shared it?
Who recorded it?
Who translated it?
Who was named?
Who disappeared from the record?
Where did the knowledge travel?
Who holds it today?
And can an archive become not simply a record of an encounter that happened in the past, but the beginning of a more reciprocal relationship in the future?
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READINGS & STARTING POINTS
Johann Baptist Hoffmann
Mundari Grammar (Calcutta, 1903); subsequent Mundari linguistic works; and Encyclopaedia Mundarica, developed with collaborators and published substantially after Hoffmann’s death.
Alfred Nottrott
Grammatik der Kolh-Sprache (Gütersloh, 1882), alongside his other writings and translations relating to Mundari and the Gossner Mission in Chota Nagpur.
Ferdinand Hahn
Kurukh Grammar (Calcutta, 1900); Kurukh (Oraon)-English Dictionary (Calcutta, 1903); Kurukh Folk-lore (Calcutta, 1905); and Blicke in die Geisteswelt der heidnischen Kols (Gütersloh, 1906).
Modern India in German Archives (MIDA)
The DFG-supported long-term project involving the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at Göttingen, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, mapping German archival holdings relating to modern India and German–Indian entanglements.
Further scholarly direction
Research on missionary encounters, Adivasi agency, translation, colonial knowledge production, Indigenous intellectual history and source-community approaches to archives will be incorporated as this inquiry develops.
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RESEARCH NOTE & DISCLAIMER
This is an exploratory research and writing series rather than a completed historical survey.
Historical names, dates, publications and institutional relationships are checked against primary records and/or established scholarly sources wherever possible. Interpretations may evolve as additional archival and community evidence emerges.
Historical sources frequently use terminology for Adivasi peoples that is outdated, externally imposed or inappropriate today. Such terminology will be reproduced only when necessary to accurately identify or discuss historical records and does not represent TDF’s contemporary usage.
The presence of documentation in an archive does not by itself establish how knowledge was obtained, whether consent as understood today existed, or whether contributors were adequately acknowledged. Conversely, absence of a contributor’s name from a surviving publication does not establish the circumstances of their participation. Where evidence is unavailable, the series will identify the gap rather than infer an answer.
The series seeks neither to romanticise historical missionary scholarship nor to reduce complex encounters to a single colonial narrative. Its purpose is to investigate the production, movement, attribution and contemporary possibilities of knowledge.
Corrections, archival leads and perspectives from communities represented in these materials are welcome.
India × Germany: Encounters with Tribal Knowledge
A Tribal Design Forum research and writing series.