THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Prof Carola Lentz has an affinity for Rabindranath Tagore.
“Seemed like Tagore too had a special place for Germany. After winning the Nobel prize, he travelled to Germany several times to deliver lectures. I’m sure some in my family might have attended those lectures,” says Carole, who’s also the president of Goethe Institut.
Many Germans revere Tagore for his literature, poetry and art, she says. The social anthropologist, however, puts aside the popular belief here that Germany adores India for its Vedic past, the language of Sanskrit, and the love for yoga. “Maybe yoga in its modern, lifestyle avatar but never the spiritual one. Also, ayurveda, yes...it has takers,” she says.
She values India for the scope of plurality it has. The image she has of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata, where she found cultures crisscrossing with one another and existing together in a beautiful blend. “Plurality is the best policy for development,” says.
Looking at cultures and traditions closely comes naturally to Carola Lentz, who is a senior research professor at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. A Fulbright scholar at Harvard University and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, her research interests range from ethnicity, middle class in the Global South, to labour migration. Her pioneering work is on colonialism, land rights, and the politics of memory in Africa, its western side to be specific.
For her studies on the African continent, she was the first German to be given the coveted Melville J Herskovits Prize for her book on ‘Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa’.
Her ideas on cultural sensitivity are shaped by her findings from her African studies, the constitution of its people, and their cultures. The way life remains now in some parts of Africa is proof that the more accommodating a society is to new ideas and cultures, the better its road to the future will be.
“There is a tilt in African societies towards past culture and traditions, which is good in a way but has to be trodden carefully, as some of what is said to be a past culture could also be an invented or even a romanticised one. Yet beyond this, there is an opening up towards the globalised world, and such an exchange is what is fostering development in some parts of Africa. One of the ways a culture can be made accommodative is to allow education to shape the people who make up society,” she says.
Her keenness for an evolved cultural space that has room for alternative perspectives is what prompted her to take up office as the president of the Goethe Institut. Her short trip to India, which she found to be a rich storehouse of traditional diversity, has affirmed her faith in a template that allows inclusion of cultures, Carola feels.
“It is such a rich universe with diverse art, food culture....we consider India as country of plural traditions. I spoke to different kind of people and their different outlooks have a space here. That is what adds to the richness. And it is always beneficial for any country to accommodate plurality. I cherish my experience here,” she says.
As part of her tour, she was in Thiruvananthapuram too. In the duration of her visit, she unveiled the road ahead for the institute and spoke about how education and culture could join hands to prepare the ground for multiple identities to interact.
The tour is also to take forward Goethe Institute’s activities that focus on cultural exchanges as well as promote the teaching and learning of the German language, which is mandatory for anyone wishing to work in Germany. Knowledge of German is also the way to further the interest the Indian workforce shows in Germany as part of the bilateral tie-up between the two countries.
She hopes to firm up this cause before her term ends as the president of the institute, which remains a cultural exchange institution with a presence in 98 countries. Six of the 158 centres of the institute, are in India. “Goethe Institute offers a space for free exchange of info and opinions. In a way, it represents the multiplicity that is required in all societies.”
Carola hopes to return to India after her presidency term ends. Indians claim to know more about Max Mueller who never visited India. “But Germans, at least the intellectually tilted ones, know more of Tagore,” she says, affirming her decision to visit Kolkata again, all for the love of Tagore, reflecting her interest in literature, theatre, and the arts.