Crouching tiger, rising mammoth
On February 9, 1904, Japan launched a surprise naval attack on the Russian fleet stationed at Port Arthur, China, leading to a war between the two countries. The hostilities would end on September 5, 1905, with the complete defeat of the Russian Empire and peace mediated by then US President Theodore Roosevelt. Several historians around the world recognise this as the first major defeat of a European power by an Asian country in the modern age. This convenient signpost also serves as a metaphorical premonition of the decline of the West and the cultural and economic rise of the East over the 20th century.
At the time of the Russo-japanese war, much of Asia was under the colonial sway of the European powers. Britain and France hungrily gobbled up large swathes of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War in 1918. But over the next half-century, most of these countries would be roiled by the independence movements, often violent, pushing out the colonial powers. As early as 1924, German diplomat Karl Haushofer wrote about the “Pacific Age”, which envisaged the growth of Japan, India, and China. After the meeting between Deng Xiaoping of China and then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1988, the 21st century came to be referred to as the “Asian Century” in the media.
Historian Sugata Bose in his new book, Asia After Europe, argues that the rise of Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries was not only an economic phenomenon but a result of “intellectual, cultural, and political conversations” across the continent. He attempts to narrate, as he explains, “the creative process of imagining Asia by tracking the intersecting journeys of Asian intellectuals and subalterns alike.” In the introductory chapter of the book, he argues that Pan-asianism, or “Asian universalism”, was an idea comparable to other internationalisms such as Leninism, pan-islamism or Buddhism. He finds in it another way of approaching 20th-century history, which has been mostly monopolised by narratives of anti-colonial nationalism.
To illustrate his argument, he chooses figures such as Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art critic Okakura Tenshin, who spent some time in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1903. On returning to Japan, Okakura sent two Japanese artists to India, one of whom, Taikan Yokoyama, taught the Japanese wash technique to Tagore’s nephew, Abaninindranath Tagore. Abaninindranath, in turn, used the technique to paint the iconic Bharat Mata image in 1905. “A Japanese rendering of that image on a giant silk scroll was paraded in procession in the streets of Calcutta to the accompaniment of Rabindranath Tagore’s freshly composed patriotic songs,” writes Dr Bose. “Indian nationalism had come to be fused with Asian universalism.”
In Tagore, whose songs have been adopted as national anthems by India and Bangladesh, Dr Bose finds a figure who combined a deep love for his homeland, a passionate anticolonial activism, as well as a “colour cosmopolitanism”
— “a powerful critic of worshipping the nation as god and was horrified by the crimes committed by modern nation-states.”
Dr Bose’s interest in cosmopolitanism as a panacea for a rabid nationalism, which excludes those it considers to be outgroups, develops from his previous scholarship. The Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University, Dr Bose published, in 2006, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, a wide-ranging study of the history of communities settled around the rim of the Indian Ocean from 1850 to 1950, the high noon of the British Empire. It is also in line with popular sides of history writing, such as “provincialising Europe” (to which he refers) and Global History. German historian Sebastian Conrad, a pioneer in this field, describes Global History in his ground-breaking survey of the discipline as a sort of histography that “takes the connectedness of the world as its point of departure”. It is in finding these connections that Dr Bose’s book succeeds.
However, one is tempted to imagine that some of Dr Bose’s research interests also trace their roots to his stint in the Lok Sabha. As a member of the Opposition from 2014 to 2019, he would have had a ringside view of the rise of Hindutva in the country during the first term of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A global academic, who studied in the UK and works in the US, Dr Bose would have found the rise of such an exclusivist nationalism as well as international competition between India and China eroding and belying the promise of an Asian century.
If the book begins with Okakura’s visit to Calcutta at the dawn of the 20th century, it ends with Dr Bose’s own visit to Peking University in Beijing in 2019, on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic. In trying to narrate multiple strands of the remarkable process through which Asia and Asians are reclaiming their centrality in the world, Dr Bose makes a compelling case for greater acceptance of the political, cultural, and economic diversity of the continent and their close interconnectedness.