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Sugata Bose, "Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century" (Harvard UP, 2024)
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A
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C
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the podcast. Today I'm here with Sugata Bose, a historian at Harvard University, and we will be discussing his recent book Asia After Europe. Welcome Sugata.
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B
Good to be with you, Lukas.
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C
Thanks a lot for being here. I wanted to begin by the stakes that you open with in retrieving a variety of Asian universalisms. So there are a few ways you talk about this, and one of them is what you call colorful cosmopolitanism, which is an intriguing term. What is colorful cosmopolitanism as opposed to colorless cosmopolitanism and what's at stake here in the distinction?
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B
Well, there is a weighty intellectual tradition in Anglo American philosophy which assumes that cosmopolitanism by definition has to be colorless, that it ought to be derived from abstract reason. And patriotism, for example, may be seductive, but ultimately on the scale of values it ranks far more below this broad minded attitude of cosmopolitanism. Now the stakes are quite high because if we are trying to search for the circulation of ideas about cosmopolitanism from colonized Asia or Africa, then if we exclude cosmopolitanisms that are in some way entwined with anti colonialism or patriotism, then I think we are doing some violence to the idea of justice. And so that is the conceptual point, but I think there is some empirical substantiation that can also be offered. There were so many thinkers, intellectuals, political leaders and activists who believed that they were cosmopolitan, but also they nurtured a deep love for their homeland. They were opposed to Western colonial rule. And therefore I thought that there was a version of cosmopolitanism in Asia during the period that I was studying which could be usefully termed colorful cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitanism that did not shun patriotism but could not be reduced to narrow particularism just because there was a certain commitment to the anti colonial position.
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C
Before we go into some of the detail in this very rich book, I wanted to ask if you could reflect on nationalism in this light. So if we survey this rich history of Asianism in the 20th century, is there some key way we can distinguish between nationalism that moves towards this Cosmopolitanism and nationalism that has a much narrower kind of remit. Is there some key to understanding what makes these two kinds of nationalism different from each other?
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B
Yes, I think there are two kinds of distinctions that we need to bear in mind. First of all, I think we have to distinguish between what may be termed old style patriotism, a certain love for one's homeland, and modern nationalism. And so, for example, one of my exemplars, the poet Ravindranath Tagore or even his contemporary Muhammad Iqbal, were old style patriots. They loved the land from which they had arisen and so forth, but were prepared to transcend it. And what's more, they were actually deeply suspicious of modern nationalism, especially the brand of nationalism that they saw on full display in Europe and America, the kind of nationalism that led to the First World War, the carnage in Europe and elsewhere. So that's the first distinction that we need to keep in mind, that there is a kind of patriotism which is based on emotional affinity for the homeland, but also has a rational dimension to it, a commitment to certain principles of good governance in those lands. And then there's a second distinction that is also quite important and was absolutely vital for me in writing the book, Asia After Europe. And that is the distinction between a territorially bounded nationalism, a kind of nationalism that is state seeking, that is looking for power at the helm of, at the end of the day, even a highly centralized colonial state, and a kind of nationalism that has not just an extraterritorial, but as I have argued, a universalist dimension, a nationalism that exceeds the boundaries of the nation. So if we keep these two distinctions in mind, then I think we can have both a critical perspective on nationalism that can be narrow and selfish and arrogant, and yet see certain currents of anti colonial nationalism that were broad, that were seeking solidarities beyond the nation, if you will, across borders that had been drawn by the colonial powers in Asia.
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C
I want to introduce one more distinction into this conversation to ask the question of who the nation is for and also who Asia is for. So there is the nation of the elite and there is the nation of the ordinary people. And I think this is a tension that you also acknowledge in the book. And for example, I mean, I think, speaking of Tagore, I think of this very colorful example of how he discovers the ancient Indian ethics in Java. And kind of there is a pre existing of Asian connections here, not only cross regional, but also across the vernacular and the textual, across different social classes. So in trying to retrieve this idea of Asia, how do you try to overcome the way that there are these differences across. Not only across different parts of the continent, but across social classes. Many of. And of course, most people are not literate across most of this period.
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B
Yes, I think you are right to have noticed that I acknowledge the tension between what, for heuristic purposes, we might describe as elite conceptions of Asia and subaltern conceptions that are arising out of the high degree of mobility in the period that I have studied. And perhaps because I was in this particular book focusing on intellectual and cultural and political conversations across Asia, I may have slightly privileged the elite aspect of these interactions, but not entirely, because I was also looking for phases of material prosperity and poverty as a backdrop for these connections that were being forged. And of course, in an earlier incarnation, I was very much an agrarian historian looking at the peasantry and the flows of migration of not just capital, but also of labor across Asia. So I acknowledged the tension and therefore I was very careful to suggest that there were multiple visions of Asia. And while Tagore is a major figure in my cast of characters, he's actually not the only one. You mentioned his voyage to Java and in fact, to other parts of Southeast Asia as well in 1927. And, you know, of course, in some ways his main contacts were, you know, Dutch scholars. On the other hand, where I think he's different from other Indian intellectuals of that period, is that he was dead set against the idea of Indian colonization in Southeast Asia. So when he discovered the many versions of the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Java and Bali, but also, you know, other parts of Southeast Asia, he wanted to acknowledge that they were as original as any of the versions that may be found in India. And therefore he was acknowledging authorship of Southeast Asians, of Indian ethics. And of course, we have to recognize that what was going on in the early 20th century was a modern reinterpretation of ancient bonds, and that is what Tagore was engaged in. But you may have noticed that I also have a little bit of a critical perspective on Tagore, because I actually say that sometimes he fell into the trap of a rather easy west east dichotomy. And while he was far more sophisticated than. Than the votaries of Indian colonization of Southeast Asia, you know, perhaps there were other figures. For example, I tried to rescue Binoy Kumar Sharkar from relative oblivion and suggest that he had a better perspective on how to address this whole question of west and east, of Euro America and Asia on, shall we say, equal terms.
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C
One of the interesting movements that sits in between the West and east that makes it difficult to see a clear dichotomy is the world of Islam in this early 20th century period. And one of the most kind of novel connections that you draw on this book is that between Islamic universalism and Asian universalism in the early 20th century. So, you know, many people, whether in our popular imagination or in historical research, would think of these as separate stories. And that's how the story has been told most of the time. Why is it important to you to look at these multiple kinds of universalism together under this umbrella of Asia?
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B
Yes, you know, I make a big deal of this matter of multiple universalisms. And I wanted to make it clear to my readers that there were universalisms and universalisms and there were different kinds of or basis of solidarity beyond the nation that were sought by Asian anti colonial figures. And this becomes crystal clear in the early 20th century, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the 1920s, when anti colonial nationalism gets to be entangled with a form of Asian universalism which had been in evidence from the turn of the 20th century. But to my mind, if we look at the 1919-1922 period, it was a classic Islamic universalist moment in global history, in Asian history. And we don't actually quite emphasize how deeply Mahatma Gandhi's first nonviolent non cooperation movement was entangled with the Khilafat movement, with Islamic universalism. And Gandhi saw no contradiction of between his view of a territorially defined nationalism and an anti colonialism that built on Islamic solidarity. Then of course, there was another kind of internationalism or even universalism, you might say, in that period which was communist or Bolshevik internationalism. And there were, you know, fairly strong overlaps between all of these both in Central Asia and Southeast Asia. You know, there was a period when Islamic universalism and Asian universalism was entangled in Central Asia in the early 1920s. And another good example would be Southeast Asia. Think of Atan, Malacca. You know, there is communist internationalism there, there is a bit of Asian universalism. There is is this Islamic dimension as well. But in some ways we didn't really have to wait for the aftermath of the First World War for the importance of Islam as a thread binding the whole of Asia to become evident for some scholars and intellectuals. Now it is true that at the very beginning of the 20th century, if one looked at Asia and its connection with religious universalism, the Buddhist arc was emphasized. That's what you find in Okakura's classic book, the Ideals of the east, which came out in 1903. But I showed that when Vinay Sarkar went to China, he is much more emotionally stirred when he meets Chinese Muslims, even more than when he meets Chinese Buddhists. For him, the Buddhist connection between China and India is intellectual, somewhat rarefied. But he encounters Chinese Muslims and he writes in his Bengali travelogue, you know, the. The music that arose from my heartstrings was, you know, something almost, you know, heavenly. And of course all of this was tied to the fact that he was an anti colonial figure, deeply committed to Hindu Muslim unity and therefore he was prepared to see. He had traveled in Iran, in Egypt, of course he traveled also to Europe and America. And the argument that I was able to make there was that first of all, Islam was accepted as a deep connection binding together Asia. And secondly, there was something to be drawn upon for the politics of that period by acknowledging that the role of Islam. And I think it was important for me to do that because many historians have rather overplayed the Buddhist dimension, which I don't ignore. I would acknowledge that. But it's important to see the overlap between certain forms of Islamic and Asian universalisms.
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C
Experian One of the themes that cuts across these chapters that describe multiple universalisms is what something you mentioned already is the refusal to see the nation state as the paramount kind of endpoint of modern Asia. At the end of the book, I was just wondering the extent to which you would make that claim specifically about Asia, or whether Asia was really just a part of a colonized world or a non European world that shared this basic assumption about the limits of the Nishi State.
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B
Yes, I wouldn't limit this to Asia. I think there was in fact a deep suspicion of the nation state concept because it seemed to so replicate the centralized colonial state structures with their unitary ideology of sovereignty that had been constructed by most Euro American colonial powers in the period from, I would say 1860 onwards. You know, the era which my colleague Charlie Mayer described as the age of Territoriality. And so at the level of anti colonial political thought, there was a rejection of this particular form. And this rejection took on, you know, even more intensity when after 1919, the nation states seem to be accepted as the natural political unit of organization in international affairs. But anti colonial thinkers did not subscribe to that. What I would say is that there is a good amount of work on Africa, for example, if you think about Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper's work on post imperial possibilities, you know, in Euro Africa, Eurasia, you know, there are many spaces where this nation state idea is not really embraced and there were other possibilities that existed. I would also say that I've thought about space in history in different ways. As you know, I wrote a book now, 20 years ago. It came out 100 horizons on the Indian Ocean. And at that time I would often be asked that when you talk about this concept of an inter regional arena, does it necessarily have to be an oceanic space? And I would say that no, not necessarily. You know, I have written about the inter regional arena of the Indian Ocean and its specialized flows of capital, labor, skills, services, ideas, culture. But this could equally be an overland inter regional arena. So similarly, I would say that Asia for me is one space, a venue where you have the play of these ideas which are skeptical of the nation state model. But one could expand it to include oceanic spaces or the African continent, or indeed what we today call the global South. Even though in the later part of the book I introduce in some ways a tone of lament that some of the more creative ideas were lost during the post colonial transition and we fell for this nation state model in many instances.
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C
So I think this skepticism about the nation state is a lesson that many people have forgotten, both in the west, but also in Asia. This assumption that the postcolonial state is a territorial nation state is a very strong one. And I just wanted to ask about whether in writing this book, you came to review about when and why this lesson was forgotten almost completely.
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B
Yes, I think there were several historical moments that were important. So, for example, you know, after, you know, writing about these expansive ideas about Asia and Asian universalism that were clearly in evidence in the early decades of the 20th century. And I should just add that I don't see the political military event of 1905 as a starting point. I trace ideas of Asian universalism back to at least the 1880s. And then I point out that the intellectual and cultural conversations began before 1905. For example, Okakura came to India in December 1901 the painters Taycan and Hishita Shunzo came in 1903 and so forth. So that's just an aside, but I do point out that one important historical moment was Japan's nationalistic imperialism of the 1930s. And that undercut the idea of Asia in a very significant way. It showed that Asia was by no means immune from the virus of nationalist rivalries and so on, which so many Asian thinkers had been warning Asia against, you know, in their discourses. So that was one important moment. And of course, you know, as the, you know, scramble for power at the helm of colonial states gained intensity as we reached the climax of formal political decolonization, there was an element of contingency, and therefore there were political parties and political leaders who became perhaps more interested in grasping the instruments of state power from the hands of departing European and American colonial powers than implementing the more imaginative ideas that had called into question the nation state. This was not entirely inevitable. And there are historians who have of course written about post imperial possibilities in the sense of some kind of a connection between the metropole and the colony. But I am much more interested and have been in this book and in my current work as well, to see how internal differences were being negotiated even in huge countries like India and China. It was by no means inevitable that India would inherit the unitary center of the British Raj. It was by no means inevitable that China would become an authoritarian party state, as I showed that around 1920, even Mao Zedong was talking about 16 small Chinas coming together in a large China and so forth. So, and what I do also show is that some of the momentum of the questioning of the nation state model, thinking in terms of larger solidarity, such as Asian solidarity, they were still there in, let's say, the decade after Indian independence or the Chinese revolution. I write about the many informal exchanges that were taking place in that period. But gradually this sense that we actually have to think in terms of the sovereignty of the nation state with their hard borders, led us into European style conflicts. And some of the best and the most imaginative in Asian anti colonial thought got lost at that point.
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C
One of the post imperial possibilities that you highlight in the book is Asian federation. And I guess you just mentioned this pretty big caveat of Japanese imperialism, that kind of shadow throws a shadow over this entire period. You make a fairly striking claim that Asian federation in this period was fundamentally different than ideas of European federation, which were premised on racial superiority and exclusivity. But if we take the Japanese example in mind, and we also kind of look at how These ideas actually played out. I mean, how distinctive do you think Asian Federation really ends up being? And also, what should we make of it? Looking back from the 21st century?
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B
Yes. I mean, I was interested in tracing the idea of what in those days used to be called an Asiatic Federation. And of course, Japan's role and its vision, or at least one particular vision of a greater East Asia called Prosperity Sphere introduces some elements of great difficulty in thinking about the broader conceptions of an Asiatic Federation. But I would still say that ideas about an Asian Federation was premised upon the notion that there could be multiple races and multiple religions that could be brought together, not erasing their differences, but respecting those differences and accommodating them within a larger overarching unity. And that is why, you know, I also tried to decenter a little bit, you know, Japan as the fount of Asian universalism, I was trying to suggest. And it was not even just India and China. There were other places, even from Southeast Asia, that some of these ideas emerged. But of course, the iconic figures who talked about an Asiatic Federation were Deshabundra Chittaranjan Das in India. He was a fascinating figure who died rather early in 1925. But he was the first to articulate a clear vision of an Asiatic Federation when he was president of the Indian National Congress in 1922. And he also had a very sophisticated vision of a federal India that should replace the British Raj. And then, of course, there was Sunni at Sen of China, again, a man who died in the same year as Chittaranjandas in 1925. And so, you know, subsequent Asian leaders were constantly invoking Deshabundu Chittaranjanda Sunyatsen to some degree, Okakura as well. And Okakura could be interpreted in many different ways. He was interpreted in a certain way by Japanese nationalistic imperialists, but seen in a very different light, for example, by Ravindranath Tagore, who also had this conception of. Of a broad Asian unified, at least cultural ecumene, if not a political federation. And so I do think that. And this was something that crept into the title of the book Asia After Europe, because I wasn't just writing about Asia after the European colonial presence there. I was also trying to put forth a conceptual history of Asia that offered ideas somewhat different from European conceptions of reason, of national identity and so on. And therefore, ideas of an Asian federation had a texture that must be distinguished from, you know, the idea of Europe. And this was part of the creative imagination of Asians which stood against the European cartographic depictions of Asia. So I think there is a case to be made for that distinction. And it was alive even at the moment of formal decolonization. I write, for example, of Aung San talking about an Asian Federation in July 1946, when my grandfather Chandra Bose and my father, Shishir Kumar Bose went to visit Rangoon. And they were both again harking back to earlier ideas of an Asiatic Federation and saying that how important it was to keep that idea alive at this moment when Asia seemed to be on the cusp of formal political independence. And you see that reflected a little bit in an Asian relations conference in Delhi IN MARCH 47, IN Sarojini Naidu's evocation of the idea of Asian consciousness, the gold of Asian consciousness and so forth. And even though I also point out that even Bandung, I'm very careful not to romanticize Bandung because already by that time, you know, the statist idea had somehow muddied the more generous imaginaries of an Asian federation.
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C
There's an image I would like to bring up at this point which is a mural copy of Diego Rivera's the Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace, which you describe as adorning the conference hall in Beijing in 1952. So this kind of image of the nightmare and the dream, I would like to focus in on your title of the book Asia After Europe. And I think I might be more of a pessimist than you are about the kind of generative possibilities of the idea of Asia after Europe. But let's see. So let's talk a little bit about it. So I guess my concern, and I think this might track with how you see it too, but I'm not sure is so much of the motivation to formulate kind of Asian universalism in this period comes from an anti colonial response to European domination. So it seems like you raise a number of historical moments in which this kind of kind of post nationalist Asia was gradually forgotten. But I think one simple thing was also after European domination, there simply was a dissipation of energy and motivation to think in terms of Asia, that the concept just didn't have legs or life anymore after the foreign overlords went home. What do you think of that view?
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B
I think you have a point that formal colonial Euro American domination of Asia focused minds in a way that could not last into the period when political independence had been won. So I would concede that point. But just think about 1952. The Diego Rivera mural had been put up during a preparatory meeting and then you have this Asia Pacific Peace Conference in October of 1952, and, you know, look at, you know, what actually happened there. You know, there was, of course, a formal political conference. The British were very eager to see whether bringing up the Kashmir question would immediately divide India and Pakistan. It did not happen. You know, the Indian and Pakistani delegations came to an agreement. They were, of course, non official or semi official delegations there. And who was bringing them together? There was Guo Moruo, the Chinese intellectual, poet, communist leader. There was an African American labor leader, Louis Wheaton, who was reading out the Joint Declaration. But then, as I pointed out, quite apart from the formal talks that took place at the conference, there were many opportunities of informal interactions. And I write about how in that year, the great painter Maqbool Fida Hussein met the great Chinese painters Qi Baishi, whom he described as the Matisse of Asia and the Master of Lines. But then he also met. He went to the studio of Xu Beihong and saw his horses, and that was what inspired him to give more energy and vigor to his own horses. And who was this? Who were these people? You know, Qi Baishi had met Tagore on his visit to China in 1924. Xu Beihong had been in Shantiniketan in 1940. He had done portraits of Tagore and Gandhi. He had painted the Indian countryside, the beautiful Himalayas as seen from Darjeeling and so on. So these were the kinds of Asian conversations that were still, you know, taking place. There was, I would still say, a post colonial moment when ideas of Asian solidarity, closer Asian conversations in the domain of culture and literature and art, not just politics, had been very much alive. You will see on this question of optimism and pessimism, overall, you might say Asia After Europe is a bit of an optimistic book, at least insofar as it retrieves the some of these more generous Asian imaginaries from the earlier part of the 20th century. But, you know, I think that there is a note of pessimism that comes through in my late chapters. And that's because, I mean, for example, you know, I engage a bit with, you know, Wang Gong Wu's book Renewal, which had come out in 2013. And at that point, Wang Gang Bu was wondering, what kind of China is now rising? Will it be a kind of a nationalistic empire of the sort that replicates everything that was wrong with the European nation states in the age of imperialism? Or could it be something different? Could it in fact be a multinational republic? And I found it striking that he wrote about a range of intellectual figures. But one person whom he mentioned was Gu Hongming, who had this generous imaginary. And he said that in the early 21st century, Gu Hongming was having something of a revival in China. And who was this Guangming? When Vinayakumar Sharkar went to China in. In 1915, he met all of the major intellectuals there. He met Yan Fu, who had translated Adam Smith into Chinese. He met Wu Tingfeng, who was the diplomat who wrote about Chinese diplomacy in America. And he had met Gu Hong Minh. But then, you know, I was writing my book in the early 2000s. Maybe it would have been a more optimistic book if I had written it around 2013. But I did say that by the time I was writing and my book came out in 2024, the vision of a Gu Hongming had been overtaken by the thought of Xi Jinping. I acknowledged the reality that had unfolded particularly in the decade after 2013, 2014. Another reason for my pessimism, of course, was what had happened in India with coming to power of the forces of both religious majoritarianism and centralized authoritarianism in 2014. And I even decided to enter the sphere of parliamentary politics from academia in trying to, you know, resist that trend. But all of that is to say that I could see, you know, what the forces were that were in play which contributed to a certain note of pessimism in writing about the contemporary moment. But I still felt that the retrieval of the more imaginative ideas, the critiques of the nation state, the ways in which Asia could actually forge a different kind of a better future, was still important in talking about. So there was a normative element there as well, because I could see that we were at a very difficult moment, a crossroads of history and what I was suggesting, that we have many different kinds of inheritances from the past. We should reflect on which of these we should take on our journey into a very uncertain future.
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C
Both of the examples you just mentioned about China and India, I'm sure there could be others. One reflection on both of them is how easily ideas can be smothered by political power. And I guess that while we are speaking about reasons to be pessimistic, I guess an even more basic note of pessimism is about the relationship between ideas and institutions. Ideas of Asian universalism only could have sustainable reality if there are institutional forms to accompany these ideas. And there may be critiques of ideas of European Federation in this period. But there were ways to accommodate some of these ideas in institutional form, however imperfectly. Whereas a pessimistic view would Be that these ideas of Asian universalism were doomed to being fantasies in a historical archive. What do you say to that?
- [42:57]
B
Again, you have a point that however critical we might be of ideas of a European federation, because along with that came a notion of a fortress Europe and a certain kind of a European sense of superiority over the rest of the world, at least in the post Second World War period, that idea of Europe was given an institutional form. And while we might be critical of the bureaucratic nature of the way in which the European Union was governed from Brussels, and there, you know, have been reactions precisely against that kind of, you know, centralization of Europe, if you will, but still there were reasonable successes. How can we forget that France and Germany, which had fought two world wars against each other, were able to operate under the umbrella of this institution of the European Union. And yes, the idea of Asia or the forms of Asian universalism may have been very creative and innovative, but unfortunately in the post colonial era we were unable to give it the same degree of institutional form as Europe. But you know, I know the limits of Europe and I know the limits of, you know, the idea of Asia. I still remember arriving on a plane from London to Marseille and a plane from Algeria had arrived just before. And you know, all of the white passengers, including Americans, passed through the European Union line and I was behind about 300 Algerians who had just arrived. And again, of course there was some Afro Asian solidarity. My Algerian newly found friends realized that I was in a hurry to get to a conference and they allowed me to come forward in their line and I got through. But it was a glaring example of fortress Europe, a kind of Asia that we would really never want, that there needs to be flexible boundaries even around a large conception of Asia. But having said all of that, I would say that it's not as if there aren't any institutional forms. It's not quite an Asian union on the lines of a European Union. But there have been certain steps that were taken, particularly in the economic domain. Think of the Asian infrastructure, sort of bank that was sort of set up, I think quite important in building certain physical infrastructure connecting Asia once again. Then think about RCEP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which brings together the 10 ASEAN countries and also China and Japan and South Korea and Australia and New Zealand. It is actually the largest free trade bloc, I think bigger than the European Union. In fact, I felt that India made a mistake after being part of the negotiations for years on end not to join once it came into being, because India should be having closer ties with the economically dynamic regions of Southeast and East Asia, and especially in light of Donald Trump's tariffs, it seems to have been a missed opportunity. So I would simply say that there have been at least some tentative moves towards giving at least partial institutional expression. I think we were in a better place at the turn of the 21st century for the realization of some of these broader ideas about Asian connectivity and so on. It became more difficult in the last decade. But again, on the balance of optimism and pessimism, I would hate to fall back entirely into the pessimistic camp.
- [48:28]
C
So let me push you a little bit further into the optimism camp based on some of what you've already said. Economics, as you say, is very important, but there's no doubt that there is a core set of political ideas that run through Asia. In the earlier chapters of the book, in the Realm of Politics, you point out very rightly that there are reasons to be skeptical about invocations of Asia, because it's often been in the context of people like Lee Kuan Yew or Mahathir Muhammad who have invoked this continental idea for domestic political reasons to suppress critics. In the realm of politics, what do you see as some avenues to retrieve practically the ideas that you have described in historical terms?
- [49:28]
B
Look, I'm a historian, and so I had to take note of the fact that Asia as a whole was recovering the global position it had lost exactly 200 years ago. I was wanting to be very clear that there is nothing ancient about Asia's poverty, that it was in the 1810s and in the 1820s that Asia fell into poverty and the great economic divergence between Euro America and Asia took place. And it was very clear to me that by the 2020s that global imbalance was being reversed. Now, I was skeptical, as I have, and there are passages in the book which shows that, you know, while talking about the relative rise of Asia, I did not want to subscribe to this notion of Asian values. I did not just want to invert this scheme of values and virtues of Europe and Asia. In fact, one of the things that I was trying to do was perhaps, in Binaikumar Sharkar fashion, to say that we have to treat Europe and Asia on par in terms of our historical interpretation. If, in fact the divergence, both economic but also in terms of political power, is only about 200 years old, then we should not imagine that there is something that is intrinsically different about Asia and Africa. It is a matter of how modern history, the trajectory of modern history, has unfolded. And therefore, instead of talking about Asian values. Let us focus on what were the most creative and innovative ideas of the ways in which Asian connections could be forged. How was it done? What were the conversations that took place? And, of course, one of the disadvantage of the present moment is that throughout the first half of the 20th century, even into the 1950s, there was a lot that was happening in terms of ordinary people, citizens, civil society groups taking the lead in forging some of these Asian connections. We have become a little too statist. And one of the reasons for writing this book and hoping that it will have some kind of an impact is for intellectuals, artists, scholars, ordinary people, workers who migrate to work in Asian countries other than their own might begin to play a bigger role in fashioning, you know, what Asian connections should look like and not leave it just to the managers of the States. So, again, I mean, I'm an intellectual rather than somebody who can necessarily bring about that change, but I can simply suggest the ways in which we might go forward.
- [53:24]
C
Thank you for leaving us with that note of optimism. And I just have one more thing to ask you about. And in a way, I've been saving the best for the last because we've discussed all kinds of political, economic, social arrangements. But one thread that runs through the book is art and artists. And you just mentioned their possible role in the future as well. But, you know, for now, let's stick to the history. Why is art and the artists who make the art so fruitful and illuminating for the way we can understand what it meant and what it means for Asia to be Asia?
- [54:14]
B
Yes. I mean, it's. You know, I have always felt that we as historians ought to give equal opportunity to text, sort of interpret what's in the writing that we have in front of us. But we also need to acknowledge that there are sensory perceptions that are very important. It could be oral, it could be visual and so forth. And as I was exploring conversations of many kinds, political, literary, cultural and so on, it just struck me that these artistic conversations were so salient and that the conversations about art need to be given the prominence that they deserve. And also, of course, since I was writing a historical narrative, there were such wonderful stories. You know, I was trying to weave an Asian tapestry with all these kinds of threads. And, you know, just the story of Abunindranath Tagore taking off a huge European oil painting from the wall of his studio in order to make space for what he called an Asian work of art to be executed by Yokoyama Taikan was so, you know, compelling. And the theme that this Japanese artist chose. Was the love play of Radha and Krishna on a full moon night. And he did the painting. But he was unsatisfied. Until one day he found that these beautiful, you know, white shule flowers. Had blown across the room. And had landed on his canvas. And then he added these flowers and so on. And it was complete. And it was framed with the borders of a Baluchuri sari. And then put up on the wall of Abanindranath Tagore's painting. And, of course, the Japanese wash technique. Was learned by these Indian painters. Including Abanindranath from Taikan. And. And these days, an image which is very important in India. Is something that's called Bharat Mata, Mother India. It was initially called Mother Bengal Bongo Mata. And it is executed in the Japanese wash technique. And I think it was worth emphasizing. That this happened in 1905. The height of the Swadeshi movement. We see as privileging indigenous identity, Indigenous industry and so on. Yet the iconic image of the nation as mother in India. Had a bi deshi, or a foreign touch. It was a Japanese touch. And it really was, you know, worth, you know, emphasizing. And that's why I tend to write about Swadeshi internationalism. Rather than Swadeshi nationalism. And that was precisely the period when there were so many fascinating connections. That were forged that Across Asia. Beginning from that point. Well into most of the early decades of the 20th century. So, again, when Asia was trying to rediscover. Some of their earlier connections. There were big art exhibitions that were held, for example, even in Japan. In Fukuoka and in Tokyo. And I saw that the Fukuoka exhibition was organized under the sign of Okakura. Which was understandable. But the next one, the Tokyo one. Was organized under the sign of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Who was a Japanese scholar of Chinese sort of literature. And who, in fact, tried, in his famous Asia's method lecture in 1960. To rescue Asianism from the cloud it was under. As a result of Japanese nationalistic imperialism. And so it really does seem to me that this world of sensory expression. Especially in the visual arts. Can in fact, be a very powerful emotive influence. In making certain that Asian connections are, in fact, thought of in a different way. Than simply Asian nation states Negotiating their differences over where their borders should be and so forth. Because art has crossed many of these borders. And I have a sentence in my book about Xu Beihong visiting. Well, I have a section about Xu Beihong in India. But I have a section about Hussein in Xu Beihong's studio. And I say that, you know, art had vaulted across the Himalayas, so that is what art is capable of doing in enabling us to imagine a better Asia.
- [60:10]
C
Well, that's a wonderful place to end on. And thank you so much, among other things, for reminding us of the unexpected places where might find clues to the future. So thank you very much for being here with us.
- [60:24]
B
Thank you very much. Lukas. It was a real pleasure to have this wide ranging conversation with you.