How cosmopolitan Asia came to life

[1]

By Pankaj Mishra [2]

Rs 699

The economist John Maynard Keynes, writing of the dangers of men with ideas, was echoing lessons long learnt by the West.

For, when Europe’s expanding colonial powers fell upon the ancient cultures of Asia, one of the first things they did was to annihilate the self-respect of entire subject nations.
In order to justify their oppression, colonial ideologues consciously propagated the notion of racial superiority and portrayed the ancient cultures of Asia as primitive and low on the social evolutionary ladder. It was this intellectual onslaught against the colonised people that proved to be the most effective means of demoralising and shackling entire societies.
Ironically, it was ideas that ultimately got the better of the colonialists.
As a series of events such as the Japanese naval victory over “white” Russia in 1905 made a number of thinking people across Asia sit up and take notice, a number of Asian intellectuals began to ponder about the Russian defeat and began challenging established European notions about racial superiority.
A new breed of intellectuals sprang up across Asia, united by ideas and cross-fertilised by each other.
It is this story of the rise of anti-colonial thought and its protagonists that form the subject of author Pankaj Mishra’s latest book, a fascinating study of intellectual resurgence in the colonised world and the challenge it eventually posed to the very foundations of colonialism.
The title of the book seems to suggest that this is yet another book about the rise of Asia and the decline of the West, a topic that has been hotly debated ever since Kishore Mahbubani published his famous book, The New Asian Hemisphere. But the author clarifies that his book is not really about all that.
“For me the rise of Asia means very little in the sense that if this rise means committing the same kinds of mistakes and disasters that attended the rise of the West then we should find it alarming rather than something to celebrate”, says Mishra in an interview to this newspaper.
“I stay away from that discourse because that is of the Western elite who are fearful about the rise of Asia and the threat it poses to their economic and military powers,” Mishra explains.
His intention in writing the book was entirely different.
Author Pankaj Mishra object, the author declares, “was to discover the hidden history of Asian ideas, intellectuals, writers and activists; to bring together these characters from very different settings and cultures in a larger context; and show how they challenged established Western ideas. The idea was to write a history of cosmopolitan Asia.”
The book does indeed bring together very strong and diverse characters, ranging from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani of Persia to Liang Qichao in China and Rabindranath Tagore in India.
There are other characters, some of them equally significant, but the author has chosen to focus on these three to narrate the fascinating history of the anti-colonial intellectual awakening in Asia.
What makes the book’s protagonists especially compelling are their attempts to understand events and developments far beyond the confines of their immediate preserves. These thinkers travelled far beyond their borders, exchanged ideas with each other and above all shared a common experience. While much of that history is lost, Mishra’s book attempts to resurrect the spirit of those times and the role of those intrepid intellectual explorers.
One of the book’s chief protagonists is Rabindranath Tagore, who had emerged as one of the bitterest critics of European colonialism. Tagore questioned the very basis of the white man’s notion of progress, as one quote from the book illustrates: “We have for over a century been dragged by the prosperous West behind its chariot, choked by the dust, deafened by the noise, humbled by our own helplessness, and overwhelmed by the speed. We agreed to acknowledge that this chariot was progress, and that progress was civilisation. If we ever ventured to ask ‘progress towards what, and… for whom?’ it was considered to be Oriental… [yet] of late, a voice has come to us bidding to take count not only of the scientific perfection of the chariot but of the depth of the ditches lying across its path.”
“I chose thinkers who were representative of those times and societies and whose travels across Asia allowed me, as the narrator of the book, to talk about the many differences within the countries they passed. Their lives offered very interesting threads
that could be tied together,” adds the author.
What makes the book fluid reading is Mishra’s powerful narrative style, something he had developed in his initial days of training as a novelist.
Like all good novelists, the author has developed powerful characters, strong storylines and a momentous plot spread across decades leading to the collapse of the colonial world order.
The result is a highly readable work of non-fiction, which as the author stresses was written for the lay reader.
Apart from the central narrative there is much in the book that would keep a reader entertained, especially the insightful observations about the colonialists.
Particularly hilarious are parts of the book that show how horrified the evolved societies of Asia were with the vigorous but uncivilised white men who had arrived on their shores.
The Chinese, for instance, were both disgusted and perplexed at the greed and intransigence of the British and wondered why they perpetually wanted to fight.
In Egypt, Muslims were appalled by the mocked hats of the French, “the European habit of peeing in public, and the use of toilet paper.”
At times, the book seems to almost delight in showing the colonialists at their barbarian best. But this, the author claims, was not his primary aim.
At the same time, the author avers it is not possible to be balanced about colonialism: “It was a system of systematic exploitation and the creation of a racial hierarchy where darker skinned people were denied their humanity. What is one to say about such a system?”