Is there anything like an ‘Idea of Asia’? In the context of our own nation, the phrase ‘Idea of India’ is often used to bolster or bash the conception of a principle that supposedly unifies its myriad diversities. For many Indians, it is secularism ─ equal respect for all faiths and a constitutionally guaranteed non-discriminatory and non-theocratic state. Some are now challenging this with a majoritarian project to redefine our nationhood, which, if it succeeds, will surely turn India into a Hindu Pakistan. Either way, the emphasis here is on a mega-idea that is believed to keep the nation united and give it a distinctive identity.
Is there a similar principle at work in Asia? The national, racial, religious, cultural, linguistic and political diversities of Asia are well known. But is there an ‘Idea of Asia’ that unites the continent, the world’s largest, and gives it its unique identity? Even a cursory survey of Asia in the 21st century would show that no such unifying idea exists. Instead, today’s Asia presents a picture of disunity, with many longstanding disputes and even some conflicts.
Nevertheless, there was a time not long ago ─ indeed, just a century ago ─ when intra-Asian solidarity had reached its peak. Many leading lights of Asia not only imagined it to be one, but also strove to institutionalise that oneness in some form or the other. They included prominent political leaders, poets, artists and educators from countries as diverse as India, China, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Turkey, just to name a few. Indeed, undivided India itself played a leading role in the construction of an Asian imagination. Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazarul Islam, Aurobindo, Subhas Chandra Bose, Rashbehari Bose, M.N. Roy, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, M.K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Biju Patnaik…the list of Indians who saw India’s destiny within the larger destiny of Asia, and the still larger global destiny, is long.
A fascinating new book by the renowned Harvard historian Sugata Bose, Asia After Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century, explores the theme of Asian unity. This theme rose to great prominence in the age of anti-colonial struggles in the first half of the 20th century. It remained influential for some time later in the form of attempts to forge pan-Asian cooperation when Asian countries began to gain independence. Two notable examples of such efforts are the Inter-Asian Relations Conference held in New Delhi in March-April, 1947 and the Asian-African Conference in Bandung (Indonesia) in April 1955.
The theme of Bose’s book calls for a serious discussion for several reasons. Asia in the early 20th century and early 21st century are poles apart. Narrow nationalism in all the major countries in Asia has led to the fragmentation of the continent. Many rivalries ─ India vs Pakistan, India vs China, China vs Japan, North Korea vs South Korea, to name a few ─ and the continuing violence in West Asia have erased the spirit of solidarity in the continent.
Dream of an ‘Asiatic Federation’
Asia before the era of European colonialism was the most prosperous continent in the world. Quoting from the British economist Angus Maddison’s celebrated book Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, Bose writes: “In 1820, China and India contributed approximately 50 percent of the world’s GDP. By 1913, that share had fallen to about 18 percent.” Colonial subjugation and pillage helped Europe grow rich, and pushed Asia into poverty, indignity and despair. The resultant struggles for freedom form the context for Bose’s book.
In the course of these struggles, an idea took shape that may seem unbelievable today. Pan-Asianism ─ Bose prefers to call it “Asian universalism” ─ became a running thread in creative imaginings and political actions across the continent. Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das, who presided over the Gaya session of the Indian National Congress in 1922, said in his speech that he envisioned “the participation of India in the great Asiatic Federation”. Subhas Chandra Bose, in a radio address from China on November 20, 1943, said, “I am seized and inspired by the idea of a Pan-Asian Federation” based on India-China solidarity.
Sugata Bose
Asia After Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century
Harvard University Press, 2024
Aung San, who led Myanmar’s anti-British struggle for independence ─ his daughter is the country’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Su Kyi, now under house arrest ─ also evoked the same vision of “a pan-Asiatic federation” when he welcomed Sarat Chandra Bose (Subhas Chandra Bose’s brother) to Burma in 1946. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, a Ceylonese statesman who later became his country’s prime minister, said in 1947 (at the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi) that he hoped for “a federation of free and equal Asian countries”.
Li Dizao, a co-founder of the Communist Party of China and a mentor of Mao Zedong, “allowed himself to entertain the possibility of a United States of Asia”. Sun Yat-sen, a highly respected Chinese statesman who became the provisional first president of the Republic of China in 1911, was a strong votary of ‘Greater Asianism’. He was an ardent admirer of Tagore. As against the western practice of “Rule of Might”, Sun’s Asianism was based on the moral principle of the ‘Rule of Right’, which sought “a civilisation of peace and equality and the emancipation of all races”. In contrast, European civilisation, according to Sun, had become “the cult of force, with aéroplanes, bombs, and cannons as its outstanding features” that had been “repeatedly deployed by the Western peoples to oppress Asia”.
Today, China-Japan political relations are deeply strained. But there was a time at the beginning of the 20th century when many Chinese reformers stressed the need to emulate Japan. One of them was Kang Youwei (“China’s Rammohun Roy”). “We and the Japanese are like lips and teeth,” Kang wrote. He along with Liang Qichao, an influential Chinese intellectual, republished a book On the Great Eastern Federation by Tarui Tokichi, a Japanese ideologue of pan-Asianism. Tarui proposed that Japan and Korea could unite on an equal basis to form a country of Daito (Great East) and both could work together in common defence against the West. Thereafter, the union could help China and others to join the grand federation; “In this way we shall be able to defend ourselves from mistreatment by foreigners.”
In his own book Datong shu (Book on the Great Community), Kang reinterpreted classical Confucianism to advocate “abolishing state boundaries and evolving from division to unity”. This, Bose writes, was Kang’s “vision of an Asian federation, which would be a stepping stone to global harmony”.
How is Asia different from Europe? Gandhi answered it best
The need to distinguish Asia from Europe had gripped great minds all across the continent. Writing in Bande Mataram, the English newspaper he edited in Calcutta, Swadeshi leader Aurobindo Ghose argued that, whereas European democracy emphasised “the rights of man”, Asiatic democracy based itself on “the dharma of humanity”. Aurobindo “came out in support of his compatriot Bipin Chandra Pal’s vision of ‘the possibility of China and Japan overthrowing European civilisation”. India’s freedom, he asserted, was “necessary to the unity of Asia”.
He elaborated the continent’s role in world history by viewing Asia as “the custodian of the world’s peace of mind, the physician of the maladies which Europe generates”. Aurobindo, Bose writes, “saw the calm, contemplative, self-possessed ‘spirit of Asia’ taking ‘possession of Europe’s discoveries’ and ‘correcting ‘its exaggerations, its aberrations by the intuition, the spiritual light that she alone can turn upon world.’”
Then there is Ceylonese art philosopher Anand Coomaraswamy, who propounded “his grand theory on Asian art that ‘envisioned a great cultural region connecting India with Southeast and East Asia’”. He explored the deeper message of modern Indian art and placed it within “a monumental interregional terrain of ancient Asian cosmopolitanism”.
Sugata Bose.
The great Japanese art critic Okakura Tanshin, who first visited India in 1901, began his book The Ideals of the East with the sentence “Asia is one.” Sister Nivedita, a revered disciple of Swami Vivekananda, wrote an introduction to the book, in which she said, “Asia, the Great Mother, is forever One.” Bose calls Irish-born Nivedita “a quintessential swadeshi internationalist” who “would play a key role in linking Indian nationalism with Asian universalism”.
Like Aurobindo, Okakura delved into the question: What distinguishes the East from the West? In his book, Okakura identified the “broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal” as “the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race”. This, according to him, enabled “them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the Particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.”
Mahatma Gandhi too spoke forcefully about Asia being the cradle of the prophets of all the major religions of the world. Speaking at the closing session of the Inter-Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi on April 2, 1947, he said: “The first of these wise men was Zoroaster. He belonged to the East. He was followed by Buddha who belonged to the East ─ India. Who followed Buddha? Jesus, who came from the East. Before Jesus was Moses who belonged to Palestine, though he was born in Egypt. And after Jesus came Mohamed. I omit my reference to Krishna and Rama and other lights. I do not call them lesser lights but they are less known to the West, unknown to the literary world. All the same, I don’t know a single person in the world to match these men of Asia. And then what happened? Christianity became disfigured, when it went to the West. I am sorry to have to say that, but that is my reading. I won’t take you any further through this.”
“What I want you to understand,” Gandhi told the delegates from 28 countries, “is that the message of the East, the message of Asia, is not to be learnt through European spectacles, not by imitating the tinsel of the West, the gun-powder of the West, the atom bomb of the West. If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of ‘Love’, it must be a message of ‘Truth’. There must be a conquest…”
Statue of Mahatma Gandhi, Malpe, Karnataka. Photo: The Wire
One of the delegates asked Gandhi, “Do you believe in one world?” He answered: “Of course, I believe in one world. And how can I possibly do otherwise, when I become an inheritor of the message of love that these great un-conquerable teachers left for us? You can redeliver that message now, in this age of democracy, in the age of awakening of the poorest of the poor, you can redeliver this message with the greatest emphasis.”
“Then,” Gandhi continued, “you will complete the conquest of the whole of the West, not through vengeance because you have been exploited, and in the exploitation, of course, I want to include Africa. And I hope that when next you meet in India, by that time there aren’t any exploited nations on the Earth. I am so sanguine that if all of you put your hearts together, not merely your heads, but hearts together and understand the secret of the messages of all these wise men of the East have left to us, and if we really become, deserve, are worthy of that great message, then you will easily understand that the conquest of the West will be completed and that conquest will be loved by the West itself. West is today pining for wisdom. West today is in despair of multiplication of atom bombs, because a multiplication of atom bombs means utter destruction, not merely of the West, but it will be a destruction of the world, as if the prophecy of the Bible is going to be fulfilled and there is to be a perfect deluge. Heaven forbid that there be that deluge, and through man’s wrongs against himself. It is up to you to deliver the whole world, not merely Asia but deliver the whole world from that wickedness, from that sin. That is the precious heritage your teachers, my teachers, have left to us.”
Bose has quoted only a few lines from Gandhi’s speech, and thereby done inadequate justice to what is undoubtedly one of the most important expositions of the idea of Asia. Strangely, he has also left out another seminal thought of Gandhi’s, which has great significance for India-China relations and Asia’s future. In a letter of June 14,1942 to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek (who had met him in Calcutta in February 1942), he wrote: “I long for the day when a free India and a free China will co-operate together in friendship and brotherhood for their own good and for the good of Asia and the world.”
When ideas and revolutionaries criss-crossed the continent
In their quest for freedom and in their heroic struggles against oppressive European rulers, many Asian revolutionaries criss-crossed the continent and found support and asylum in distant lands on the continent. Some of the best pages in Bose’s book (in the chapter ‘In Search of Young Asia’) are devoted to telling this thrilling story. Thus, Lala Lajpat Rai, Rashbehari Bose, M.N. Roy and Tarkanath Das sought shelter in Japan, and so did Sun Yat-sen and others from China. After Japan’s dramatic victory over Russia in 1905, Tokyo became a magnet, drawing in a steady stream of Asian students.
“In April, 1907, young Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Vietnamese and Filipinos formed an Asian Solidarity Association in Tokyo. This association paid special attention to the unity and independence of China and India, which together could raise ‘a protective shield over Asia’.” One of the heroes of this association was Jose Rizal, the greatest icon of the Filipinos’ struggle for freedom from Spanish rule. He was publicly executed by a firing squad in Manila at the young age of 35. “The martyr Jose Rizal was adopted as the unifying symbol for the lost countries of Asia from Western imperialist domination.”
The book deserves praise for highlighting the incredible work Benoy Kumar Sarkar, one of the most energetic and globe-trotting Indian intellectuals who travelled extensively in Japan and China in the early part of the last century. To Japan, Sarkar wrote in his travelogue, “went the credit of being the deekshadata (giver of initiation) and shikshaguru (mentor) of ‘young India, young China, young Afghanistan, young Iran and young Egypt’.” Also: “In its heart and mind Japan is a part of Asia ─ it has only imported some scraps of iron from Eur-America.”
Sarkar regarded China to be India’s “masir bari” ─ home of the mother’s sister. He wanted many Indians to journey across the continent and discover India’s bond with Asia ─ “The Egyptians, the Chinese, the Iranians were all beckoning India, saying, ‘Brother Hindustani, Asia is yours.’”
What is the foundation of “Asiatic consciousness”? Bose quotes Sarkar’s persuasive answer to this question. Sarkar spelled out a “three-fold basis of Asiatic Unity”. First, there is a living faith in an eternal order regulating a balance in the universe among human beings and nature. Second, there is a shared “conception of Pluralism”. Third, there is “the spirit of toleration or the conception of ‘peace and goodwill to all mankind’.”
Today it has become commonplace to acknowledge the decline of the West and the rise of Asia, a theme that Fareed Zakaria elaborated in his 2008 bestseller The Post-American World and the Rise of the Rest. But how many know that Sarkar had prophesied this a century ago? Here was his prediction about what Asian nations would achieve after gaining freedom and modernising themselves: “Having acquired new knowledge, the people of Asia will again stride the world as human beings within the twentieth century. The way in which ‘Prachyamanab’ (human beings of the east) excelled in secular life by productively engaging with the interplay of ‘bishwashakti’ (world forces) until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicated they will regain that high status from the twenty-first century.” (Emphasis added)
Tagore: A poet of Asia and a poet for Asia
No discussion on Asia’s unity ─ indeed, global unity ─ can be complete without listening to the timeless thoughts of Rabindranath Tagore. Bose does full justice to Tagore’s centrality to this theme. From Persia to Russia (Vladimir Lenin famously affirmed that Russia belongs to Asia, and the same is being reaffirmed now by Vladimir Putin), from Japan to China, the poet tirelessly travelled to large parts of the continent, everywhere spreading his message of peace, harmony and brotherhood.
“Age after age in Asia,” Tagore told a large crowd in Shanghai in 1924, “great dreamers have made the world sweet with the showers of their love. Asia is again waiting for such dreamers to come and carry on the work not only of fighting, not of profit making, but of establishing bonds of spiritual relationship.”
Tagore’s three visits to China left a deep imprint on him. In turn, he left an abiding impression on Chinese people. Liang Qichao, the foremost reformist scholar of China in the first two decades of the 20th century, praised Tagore as a visitor who came from a country that was “our nearest and dearest brother ─ India.” Welcoming him at a reception in Peking, Liang said effusively: “Ha ha! Our old brother, affectionate and missing, for more than a thousand years, is now coming to call on his little brother.”
The third decade of the last century was a time when some dogmatic Chinese intellectuals, “fresh converts to a new religion called communism”, were busy rejecting their own country’s past in a hurry to embrace western modernity. A few of them opposed Tagore’s visit on the ground that the Indian poet was an “upholder of ancient civilizational values that were anachronistic and best discarded in modern times”.
Nevertheless, Tagore himself clearly understood both China’s civilizational greatness and its potential for spectacular national rejuvenation after it cast off the yoke of imperialism and feudalism. Hence, in Hong Kong, he made a prophecy about the future balance of power in the world. “The nations which now own the world’s resources,” he contended, “fear the rise of China, and wish to postpone the day of that rise.” This prophecy is now coming true in the twenty-first century, with the US trying its best to contain China and halt its rise.
A portrait of Rabindranath Tagore. Credit: Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Tagore was equally impressed by Japan. However, he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its imitation of Europe in the use of violence. Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 shattered the idea of Asia as never before. The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing, in which Japanese soldiers killed over 40,000 Chinese citizens and raped thousands of Chinese women, remains one of the worst war crimes in human history. This provoked Tagore to tell the Japanese: “I have deep love for your as people, but when as a nation you have your dealings with other nations you can also be deceptive, cruel and efficient in handling those methods in which western nations show such mastery.” Bose tells us that Tagore urged his hosts to exorcise the demon called Nation in the interest of peace. Sun Yat-sen would deliver much the same message on his trip to Japan six months later.
The Nanjing Massacre had also shocked another admirer of Japan ─ Subhas Chandra Bose, who, like Tagore, was a strong champion of Asian solidarity. Writing in the Modern Review, before he became president of the Indian National Congress in 1938, acknowledged that Japan had “done great things for herself and for Asia”. But, he lamented, could not Japan’s aims be achieved “without Imperialism, without dismembering the Chinese Republic, without humiliating another proud, cultured and ancient race?” “Standing at the threshold of a new era,” he wrote, “let India resolve to aspire after national self-fulfilment in every direction ─ but not at the expense of other nations and not through the bloody path of self-aggrandizement and imperialism.”
Soon after this, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose took the initiative to send a medical mission to China as a mark of solidarity with the Chinese people. Five Indian doctors went “as ambassadors of service, goodwill and love”. One of them, Dr Dwarakanath Kotnis, died in December 1942 while serving Chinese soldiers. He remains an eternal symbol of India-China friendship.
Gandhi himself was so deeply committed to Asian unity and peace in Asia that, in a statement in 1942 he said that “if India were free he would have gone on a mission to bring peace between China and Japan.”
Narrow nationalism has killed the ‘Idea of Asia’
Sadly, the feelings of mutual affinity and solidarity between India and China did not endure after India gained independence in 1947 and China had its communist revolution in 1949. If Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 greatly undermined Asian unity, China’s war of aggression on India in 1962 produced the same debilitating outcome. More than six decades later, the border dispute between the two Asian neighbours, which triggered the war, remains unresolved.
Mention must be made of two other cataclysmic events that showed the failure of the ‘Idea of Asia’. One was India’s bloody partition in 1947 with the creation of Pakistan. It resulted in the killing of nearly 1.5 million people, and led to the largest cross-border migration of people in human history. The second was the partition of Pakistan itself in 1971, and the liberation of Bangladesh. This too was accompanied by large-scale atrocities by the Pakistani army, including rape of thousands of Bengali women in East Pakistan.
Bose rightly attributes post-colonial frictions among Asian countries to their inability to rise above the European construct of “nation-states” with their exclusive sovereignties. The limitations of the Westphalian concept of a “nation-state”, especially its propensity to create jingoism, were well-understood by many Asian thinkers. Tagore’s long essay ‘On Nationalism’ is a severe indictment of this concept.
To buttress his argument, Bose Carlos Romulo, a respected Filipino diplomat, who said at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955: “The nation no longer suffices. Western European man today is paying the terrible price for preserving too long the narrow and inadequate instrument of the nation state…We of Asia and Africa have to try to avoid repeating all of Europe’s historic errors. We have to have the imagination and courage to put ourselves in the forefront of the attempt to create a 20th-century world based on the true interdependence of peoples.” Quoting Tagore, Romulo contended that “History had already passed from the nation … to the region, the continent, the world.” It is a world “not divided into fragments by narrow domestic walls”.
Bose’s book does not offer an in-depth analysis of the alternatives to the concept of the nation-state, which has now firmly taken root all over the world, including in Asia. Nevertheless, it makes one important point. “In reenvisioning the idea of Asia for what many anticipate will be an Asian century, it is necessary to take a normative and ethical position on the side of the generous universalism against the hubris of an arrogant imperialism and narrow nationalism. The most sophisticated Asian intellectuals of the last two centuries aspired to keep that lofty goal in their sights.”
For all its astonishing research and outstanding scholarship, Bose’s book suffers from two shortcomings. It is uncritical in its praise for “Islamic universalism”. To be true to its name, any variety of universalism has to be all-inclusive ─ and not exclusive. Islamic universalism, as propounded by many Muslim thinkers and practiced by Muslim political leaders, is limited to the adherents of Islam. For this reason, it tends to be divisive and separatist, a fact proved by the Muslim League’s demand for India’s partition on the basis of the toxic “Two-Nations Theory” and the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim nation in 1947. Bose has failed to show how “Islamic universalism” promoted pan-Asian unity to any significant degree in the last century.
Second, Bose is excessively harsh on Nehru. True, India’s first prime minister committed some grievous mistakes, especially in handling the border dispute with China that culminated in India’s defeat in the 1962 war. However, it is wrong to pin the entire blame for the conflict on Nehru, and absolve China’s betrayal and aggressiveness.
Asia’s lessons for itself and the world in the 21st century
To summarise, what are Asia’s lessons for itself and the world in the 21st century, as highlighted in Bose’s book? Briefly, there are four.
1) From exclusive to shared sovereignty: The idea of an ‘Asian Federation’ envisioned by many leaders of the anti-colonial struggles in the last century was surely “an idealist utopia”. Nevertheless, blind acceptance of the western model of “nation-state” has not helped either Asia or the rest of the world. Asia will have to devise innovative ways of international cooperation and dispute resolution based on a new concept of shared sovereignty. For example, the India-Pakistan and India-China border disputes, as also the maritime disputes in the South China Sea, can never be satisfactorily resolved without some degree of sharing of sovereignties in contested regions.
2) From militarism to peace: ‘Europe before Asia’ pushed humanity into the fire of two horrific world wars in the last century. In the last para of the book, Bose asks a crucial question: “Can Asia after Europe save itself and the world from such a calamitous fate?” Gandhi, Tagore, Sun Yat-sen, Jose Rizal and other leading lights of Asia in the last century had warned against the imitation of the “Rule of Might” practiced by the West. Today, sadly, no major Asian country has resisted the temptation of taking to the path of arms race. This has to be resolutely opposed.
3) From Asianism to universalism: Globalisation is progressing inexorably in the 21st century. Growing inter-connectedness and inter-dependence among nations and peoples cannot be rolled back. No nation, no region and no continent can think of its destiny in isolation. Indeed, all great votaries of Asian solidarity in the last century were simultaneously strong internationalists. Therefore, Asia as the largest continent has to take the lead in enhancing both intra-Asian and global cooperation for the wellbeing and progress of the entire humanity without any kind of discrimination. Larger and richer countries have to bear greater responsibility in forging such cooperation, even by forgoing some of their self-interest.
4) Revival of Asia’s civilisational wisdom: The ‘Idea of Asia’ has not become obsolete. Asia’s identity as the cradle of all major religions, and many ancient civilisations, can never become outdated. The challenge before Asia is how it can resurrect its rich civilisational wisdom and values ─ love vs hatred, sharing vs greed, cooperation vs confrontation, respect for pluralism vs claims of supremacy, care for Mother Nature vs its reckless exploitation, peace vs violence ─ to reshape its politics, economics and social relations, and thereby show the way to the rest of the world.
Sudheendra Kulkarni served as an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and is the founder of the ‘Forum for a New South Asia – Powered by India-Pakistan-China Cooperation’. He is also the founder of Gandhi-Mandela Centre for India-Africa Friendship. He is the author of Music of the Spinning Wheel: Mahatma Gandhi’s Manifesto for the Internet Age. He tweets @SudheenKulkarni.
