Back‘It’s high time Tagore was rediscovered as a thinker’
Pankaj Mishra spoke on his new book, pan-Asianism and the importance of Tagore’s political thought
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Mumbai: Did Asian modernity begin with European colonialism? Did modern Asian identities begin to emerge only with the process of decolonization? The answers to both these questions are complicated by the fascinating narratives in author and journalist Pankaj Mishra’s new book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (Penguin India). Mishra tells the stories of a generation of thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, educated and working in Asia, but deeply engaged with European thought and culture. These had wide-ranging effects in countries from Turkey to Japan, and Mishra traces some of the intellectual and political journeys that activists and writers from these countries undertook as they grew ready to do battle with colonizing Western forces.
The three protagonists of From The Ruins, Iran’s Jamal al-din al-Afghani, China’s Lian Qichao and India’s Rabindranath Tagore, not only inspired and animated (often through contradiction and disagreement) to the continent’s anti-colonial movements, but were also internationalist visionaries, all too aware of the potential failures of brittle models of liberal democracy and nationalism. Mishra spoke to Mint about his book. Edited excerpts:
Tell us about how the shape of this book, with its central characters, emerged.
I don’t think of myself as a historian or scholar, and I certainly don’t feel any obligation to write a history book. I was interested in the journeys and the figures, open to the possibility of tracing other lives and events. I also think it was very important to appeal to the general reader. With that in mind, a lot of decisions were made for me. How could I miss someone like al-Afghani, who’s practically a character in a novel?
Liang was a more difficult choice, but he is such an iconic figure. His influence was immense on a generation of Chinese, and many other Asian intellectuals from Vietnam, Java and so on. His friendship with Tagore, which brought Tagore into the frame, allowed me to present a bit of Chinese intellectual history, and then kind of speed up the narrative, with Tagore’s appearance in China and from there on to the post-World War II period. So it was very much dictated by narrative.
What was researching the book like? You say that Jamal al-Afghani’s biography, for example, is full of holes.
It was difficult to get a sense of the personal life, so I had to completely give up on that possibility. But then I became more interested in what, for example, was happening in Istanbul at the time that he was (there). And that, I think, deepened the narrative. For a few pages, I could depart from his story and provide context for the evolution of his political ideas. That kind of sent me off, reading books I would never pick up. It had to be done, just to populate my own mind.
Your protagonists are important in the history of Asian decolonization. Do their pan-Asian ideas also connect them to post-colonialism, to non-aligned Asia, for example?
I think al-Afghani was hugely influential in a major event of the Cold War, the Islamic revolution, where (his) idea of Islam as political solidarity was taken up by a whole generation of left-wing Iranian intellectuals, mixed with the notion of Shiism as revolutionary theology. Orhan Pamuk, after reading this book, told me that he was immensely influential on a whole generation of left-wing Turkish activists and thinkers back in the 1970s and ’80s.
That’s his influence in specific countries. But these figures—al-Afghani, Liang, Tagore to a certain extent, as well as Liang’s mentor, Kang Yuwei—they always had in mind a larger political ideal than the nation state. Liang manifested a sense of Asian solidarity, publishing history books of various regions, moving from having thought for so long that China was the centre of the world, to realizing that China shares its fate with all these other countries, including India. All of that was very much resonant during, for example, that Bandung moment (the 1955 conference in which attending African and Asian nations declared their non-participation in the Cold War).
The problem is that the Cold War induced so many divisions within Asia and within the world, Asia was thrown back upon the notions of the nation state, and these older notions of transnational solidarity were shelved. Ritual invocations of it were made and still are being made. There’s a non-aligned summit in Teheran next week, where quite an impressive bunch of people, more than a 100 heads of state, will gather. But I think the ideas animating that are lost. We are all subscribing to the same economic model; the WTO (World Trade Organization) is much more important now as a political and economic entity.
How important was religion to this worldview, of something being more important than the nation state?
I think if there’s some common theme to be drawn from their relationships—of Liang’s with Confucianism or al-Afghani’s with Islam—it would be the shared concern with the ethics of modern life, and thinking that forms of modernity presented by the West carry within themselves no ethical underpinning. Obviously, they have the rule of law, but that’s not the same as having an ethical outlook.
Al-Afghani’s idea of Islam is mostly instrumental—he was not, as I say in the book, a particularly devout Muslim—but I think he was alert to the fact that Islam offered a moral vocabulary to most Muslims who were believers. Confucianism is an ethical and philosophical tradition Liang grew up in. We have to be aware that they were very different from the people who came after them, like Mao, or even Nehru. They were very much people with one foot planted in the old world, not educated in Western-style schools. Their sense of the advantages of the old order was much keener than that of the people who were critiquing them as unsuited for the modern world.
To some extent the fear that we “would be like beasts" if we embraced these Western notions has been realized; you have a system that basically sanctifies greed and the pursuit of the individual self, but you don’t have the rule of law either. You have a complete moral chaos in large parts of India or China. Those were the things they feared; that influenced how they thought of their traditions. That’s also why it’s a mistake to connect, for example, al-Afghani, to hardline Islamists.
So they were dexterous thinkers, but none of them were especially systematic. Did you choose them because they escaped the curse of becoming ideologues?
It’s an interesting point. So much of modern thinking is about certainties. The notion of coherence, the notion of internal consistency, system-building, these are all 19th century innovations, in many ways. Some have said these people were quite incoherent. What else would they be? They don’t have the luxury of sitting in the British Museum or a nice house in Edinburgh, looking at the world and commenting on it in perfect stability, not actually associated with any political movement. I’m thinking of both (Karl) Marx and Adam Smith in this context. These people were actually involved in political situations, they were responding to political situations.
Does that also divorce them from, for example, the leftist movements to come?
Exactly. The other thing that appealed to me about them is that they were both marginal and also full of ambivalencies. And often their ambiguity is more eloquent than (that of) the ideologues, who are pretty sure of what they want. Those are the people who know how the world is to be ordered, who cause a lot of suffering for their compatriots out of good intentions.
To answer your question in an extremely lengthy way: it is very much that reason I chose them. It is very much their being a first generation, full of these confusions and uncertainties, struggling through a whole thicket of new challenges, arriving not really at a solution, but kind of original ideas which they were happy to re-formulate if the situation changed, incarnating political tendencies, which would become more prominent later on.
In your closing chapters, where you tie up the post-war histories of many of the countries you’ve discussed, you leave Japan, which has been hugely significant in your book, out of the reckoning. Why?
Well, Japan was physically occupied by the United States for a long time and subjected to a lot of socio-economic engineering. Funnily enough, this started out with New Deal welfarism so the Americans suddenly became socialist; but the whole idea was to basically militarily neuter Japan for a long time. Then the Cold War starts, Japan becomes a very important ally, a lot of people implicated in war crimes are brought back into powerful positions, and the old alliances between Japanese businessmen and politicians are revived.
There is the official narrative of Japan, fully committed to the American security alliance in the Pacific, fully committed to being on the American side. But there’s a side of Japanese nationalism that still upholds pan-Asianism. Japan in the long term is becoming part of Asia again, rediscovering its geographical destiny, as it were. I could have gone into it, but there were far too many complicated facts.
It followed a different paradigm of post-colonialism?
Exactly. The fact that physical occupation by the Americans and them being made part of this American alliance, the Cold War alliance, has served to in a way obscure what was happening there, the anti-American passions that I’m sure you remember from Okinawa in 1995, when a US marine raped a Japanese woman and there were massive anti-American demonstrations. There’s always been a very powerful anti-Western, anti-American sentiment there, which populist politicians have been able to stoke. But because the mainstream parties had to remain committed to this alliance with the Americans, they haven’t been publicly critical of them.
Japan was also instrumental in the economic rise of countries like Taiwan and Singapore and Thailand, where the Japanese invested in the post-war period. So the older links to those economies were revived in a big way, and the Japanese model of state capitalism was adopted by countries all across South-East Asia. Japan became the sort of intellectual, ideological leader of these countries. So much of South-East Asia came into being as a result of Japan in the post-war period.
I think the problem with the book is that it speeds up towards the end and doesn’t really cover the post-War period because I thought, I need a whole book for this.
Salil Tripathi’s review of your book in Mint called it important not just to Asian readers, but also as a view into colonialism to Western readers. Which of these cultures did your ideal reader belong to?
I thought of a reader belonging to both, or having their upbringing in both Western political and intellectual cultures and also a place like India or China. A reader in India would not be familiar with the history of China to the extent (of knowing that) Tagore knew these Chinese figures, these Japanese figures. A reader in China or Japan might be quite unaware of these other figures in the rest of Asia. Al-Afghani, for instance, is known in Egypt only for what he did in Egypt, and in Iran for what he did in Iran.
I was the first guinea pig, as it were, as someone encountering this for the first time and going, ‘Why did I not know this?’
For the reader in the West, I think there’s a lot more new information. Imperial history of the kind we’ve become accustomed to in recent years rarely have an Asian or African name in them. The idea that a Western intellectual today should not know who China’s first modern intellectual was should strike us as scandalous. We actually know a lot about who the major intellectuals in England or America— political thinkers, leaders and activists—have been for the last 100 years. But even the average writer about China or India in the West doesn’t know that people have been thinking, in these countries, about their part of the world and what it represents. Liang went to America in 1903 and was brilliantly perceptive about what was happening there at that time, what economic imperialism actually meant, and was totally accurate. Four years later, Henry James goes to New York and doesn’t see any of these things.
So it may come as news to know that people have been travelling in their part of the world, commenting on their systems, their histories; that they also have been judged, in a sense.
How has a thinker like Tagore influenced your own work as a political writer?
Hugely. I mean partly because he wasn’t an ideologue or an expert. I work also as someone who had specific experiences of living in a village for long periods—Tagore’s time spent in the countryside was crucial to his worldview. He was rooted in specific experiences, very suspicious of abstractions, and that’s always been my model of the ideal thinker.
He completely rejects the moral prestige of terms like democracy; he saw through these prejudices of modernity, which acted as though the nation state and democracy were the only great achievements of humankind over centuries, as though people hadn’t co-existed and created viable political communities over long periods. At the same time, he was also someone who embraced the West and was very critical of the old knee-jerk anti-westernism, and of the model he found among Hindu nationalists in India. I do think he hasn’t been taken seriously enough. We know his poetry, his fiction, some of his speeches. But it’s high time he’s rediscovered as a thinker.
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