5 The redemption of the Brahman Garbe and German interpreters of the Bhagavadgzta Vishwa P. Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee Introduction German Indologist engagement with India, as we have shown in a recent book, 1 tends overwhelmingly to be framed in terms of a critique of Brahmanism. 2 These criticisms range from accusing Brahmans 3 of arrogance and sophistry to corrupt- ing the morals of the Indians and keeping them in a state of permanent intellec- tual immaturity. 4 The reasons for a critique of Brahmanism, 5 and for the German obsession with Brahmans, require further inquiry. 6 So-called critical scholarship does not simply supersede traditional knowledge, but remains locked in a strug- gle with it. 7 Further, there is evidence that Indologists were replicating the same structures of power and discourse as they claimed to critique: Western Oriental- ist scholarship was not the alternative to Brahmanism (as Indologists claimed), but in fact its usurper and dispossessor. 8 Among the many sources for the German critique, the work of the Indologist Richard Karl von Garbe (1857–1927) offers a lucid example of German anti-Brahmanic sentiments. 9 Therefore, taking his 1894 roman à clef The Redemption of the Brahman 10 as our starting point, we shall trace German attitudes towards Brahmanism and see what these attitudes reveal about Indology and, beyond that, about the encounter between India and Germany itself. In search of the Orient On the death of his teacher, Rudolf von Roth, Garbe became the senior scholar of Sanskrit studies in Germany. Garbe had gained his PhD under Roth in 1876 and taught from 1878 to 1894 in Königberg. On Roth’s death in 1895, Garbe was appointed to his chair in Tübingen. One year prior to his appointment, he had published The Redemption of the Brahman. In this work, which drew on Garbe’s own encounters with Brahmans in Benares during a one-year study abroad, Garbe constructed a hyperbolic account unsparing in its criticism of Brahmanism. As this work is at the center of Garbe’s antipathy towards Brah- mans, it is worth tracing the events that led him step-for-step to this state. Like many Indologists of his age, Garbe’s encounter with India began through its Sanskrit texts. It was an encounter strangely mediated by European scholars: