“I’m coming from where you’re going – and it’s not worth going there.” Packaged as a parable, Charles Correa reports in his book The New Landscape of the mutual incomprehension separating Western hippies from prosperous Indians in the India of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippies, having left the material wealth of the West behind them, now wandering disheveled and barefoot through India's streets in search of life's deeper meaning. Their Asian counterparts, enjoying their newly acquired affluence with ostentatious pride, experienced the gazes of their interlocutors as a direct attack. Each signaled that the lifestyle chosen by the other – characterized respectively by supposed progress and the purported authenticity of a pre-modern way of life – was not worth the effort, that sadly, neither path promised fulfillment. “I’m coming from where you’re going – and it’s not worth going there.” By means of this apt formula, Correa – a long-time authority on Indian architecture – focuses the ambivalence of the process of modernization (cf. Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, archplus, no 185, November 2007, p. 58 ff.).

Encountering one another in this parable – albeit with the usual roles reversed – are the beneficiaries and the underdogs of modernization. This encounter demystifies the image of India that has prevailed in the West since the late 18th century, especially in the German speaking countries, one that has allowed India to serve as an intellectual projection surface. The myth of India – which flourished all the way from Romanticism and up to the dropout culture of the hippies – was sustained by a presumed holistic model of life, one that enlightened Europe believed it had rediscovered intact in ancient India. At the same time, this idealized India functioned to an extent as a critique of the rationalism of enlightened Europe, and of its concomitant loss of spirituality. Nearly all of the important thinkers and poets of German Romanticism (among them Goethe, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schopenhauer) perceived ancient Indian culture and its texts in this spirit. As demonstrated by Miksha Sinha, an Indian cultural studies expert, this preoccupation with an idealized India of antiquity also furnished a sense of self-certainty and served the construction of one's own cultural identity (p. 16 ff.). According to Peter Sloterdijk and Sinha, this “Asian Renaissance,” which was accompanied by an “Asianization of thought” (as pointedly formulated by Peter Sloterdijk; p. 14 f.), provides the key to a postcolonial, perspectival understanding of culture and identity, one that is today more important than ever before.

But what does India mean for us today? At the very latest with the commencement of accelerated globalization and liberalization and the economic policies of the early 1990s, the process of modernization that has preoccupied the Indian nation ever since the achievement of independence exactly 60 years ago has succeeded in dispelling this veil of mysticism, which has now been supplanted in the West by a very different image of India. The spiritual “wisdom” of this “promised land” (Hegel) has evolved into the (IT) “knowledge” of a globally competitive economic power. In their book Multi-National City, from which excerpts of the first German translation appear in this issue, Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi provide an account of India's steady development into an IT center, a development which must be viewed in the context of the nation's modernization as a whole. Rather than a-historically mystifying the recently proliferating globalization (which simply represents a further stage in the process of modernization), as many critics have done, these authors delineate the history of Indian modernity in a virtuosic arc: the mood of upheaval in the period following the achievement of independence, testified to by Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, along with many other public buildings and projects; the search for identity during the 1970s and 80s; and the socioeconomic impact of liberalization during the 1990s (p. 56 ff.).