Gandhi eagerly acknowledged the many benefits of Western modernity, such as civil liberties, the liberation of women and the rule of law. Yet he saw these as inadequate without a broader conception of spiritual freedom and social harmony. He was of course not alone. By the early twentieth century, modern Chinese and Muslim intellectuals like al-Afghani and Liang Qichao were also turning away from Europe’s universalist ideals of the Enlightenment – which they saw as a moral cover for unjust racial hierarchies – to seek strength and dignity in a revamped Islam and Confucianism. The same year that Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, Aurobindo Ghose sardonically wondered:
Is this then the end of the long march of human civilisation, his spiritual suicide, this quiet petrifaction of the soul into matter? Was the successful business-man that grand culmination of manhood toward which evolution was striving? After all, if the scientific view is correct, why not? An evolution that started with the protoplasm and flowered in the orang-utan and the chimpanzee, may well rest satisfied with having created hat, coat and trousers, the British Aristocrat, the American capitalist and the Parisian Apache. For these, I believe, are the chief triumphs of the European enlightenment to which we bow our heads.18
However, the terms of Gandhi’s critique, as set out in Hind Swaraj, were remarkably original. He claimed that modern civilization had introduced a whole new and deeply ominous conception of life, overturning all previous notions of politics, religion, ethics, science and economics. According to him, the Industrial Revolution, by turning human labour into a source of power, profit and capital, had made economic prosperity the central goal of politics, enthroning machinery over men and relegating religion and ethics to irrelevance. As Gandhi saw it, Western political philosophy obediently validated the world of industrial capitalism. If liberalism vindicated the preoccupation with economic growth at home, liberal imperialism abroad made British rule over India appear beneficial for Indians – a view many Indians themselves subscribed to. Europeans who saw civilization as their unique possession denigrated the traditional virtues of Indians – simplicity, patience, otherworldliness – as backwardness.
Gandhi never ceased trying to overturn these prejudices of Western modernity. Early in his political career, he began wearing the minimal garb of an Indian peasant and rejected all outward signs of being a modern intellectual or politician. True civilization, he insisted, was about moral self-knowledge and spiritual strength rather than bodily well-being, material comforts, or great art and architecture. He upheld the self-sufficient rural community over the heavily armed and centralized nation-state, cottage industries over big factories, and manual labour over machines. He also encouraged his political activists, satyagrahis, to feel empathy for their political opponents and to abjure violence against the British. For, whatever their claims to civilization, the British, too, were victims of the immemorial forces of human greed and violence that had received an unprecedented moral sanction in the political, scientific and economic systems of the modern world. Satyagraha might awaken in them, too, an awareness of the profound evil of industrial civilization.
Like Tagore, Gandhi opposed violence and rejected nationalism and its embodiment, the bureaucratic, institutionalized, militarized state – it was what in 1948 angered and provoked his assassin, a Hindu nationalist agitating for an aggressively armed, independent India. Both made national regeneration incumbent upon individual regeneration. Until it was cut short by Tagore’s death in 1941, the two pursued a rich conversation covering their disagreements as well as shared preoccupations. But in 1909 when he wrote Hind Swaraj, Gandhi was still an unknown figure outside South Africa; his book did not attract attention until a decade later. Tagore was by far the more famous and influential Indian.
Soon after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, Tagore had become an international literary celebrity and spokesperson for the East. This was a unique privilege for him in many ways in a world where few, if any, voices from Asia were heard. As Lu Xun pointed out in 1927, ‘Let us see which are the mute nations. Can we hear the voice of Egypt? Can we hear the voice of Annam and Korea? Except Tagore what other voice of India can we hear?’19 Tagore’s long white beard and intense gaze made him appear like some kind of prophet from the East. Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata recalled
the features and appearance of this sage-like poet, with his long bushy hair, long moustache and beard, standing tall in loose-flowing Indian garments, and with deep, piercing eyes. His white hair flowed softly down both sides of his forehead; the tufts of hair under the temples also were like two beards and linking up with the hair on his cheeks, continued into his beard, so that he gave an impression, to the boy that I was then, of some ancient Oriental wizard.20
Packed lecture-halls awaited Tagore around the world, from Japan to Argentina. President Herbert Hoover received him at the White House when he visited the United States in 1930, and the New York Times ran twenty-one reports on the Indian poet, including two interviews. This enthusiasm seems especially remarkable given the sort of prophecy from the East that Tagore would deliver to his Western hosts: that their modern civilization, built upon the cult of money and power, was inherently destructive and needed to be tempered by the spiritual wisdom of the East. But when, travelling in the East, he expressed his doubts about Western civilization and exhorted Asians not to abandon their traditional culture, he ran into fierce opposition.
By 1916 when he first arrived in Japan, Tagore had long been an admirer of the country. Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 had prompted him to write a verse contrasting the transmission of Buddhism from India to Japan with the need to learn new techniques from the Japanese:
Wearing saffron robes, the Masters of religion [dharma]
Went to your country to teach.
Today we come to your door as disciples,
To learn the teachings of action [karma].21
On his first visit, Tagore seemed assured of an audience for his advocacy of inter-Asian co-operation. Many important Japanese nationalists had dabbled in pan-Asianism. Kakuzo Okakura (1862 – 1913), one of Japan’s leading nationalist intellectuals, was already known to Tagore. He had begun his 1903 book, The Ideals of the East, with the resonant declaration that ‘Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilizations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas.’ Okakura claimed that, ‘Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics and Indian thought, all speak of a single Asiatic peace, in which there grew up a common life, bearing in different regions different characteristic blossoms, but nowhere capable of a hard and fast dividing line.’22
Okakura had been alerted to Japan’s cultural heritage by his American teacher Ernest Fenollosa, an art historian and philosopher who believed that it was Asia’s destiny to spiritualize the modern West. Just as Western Oriental scholarship about India informed Tagore’s views of Asia and the West, so did Fenollosa’s Japanophilia suffuse Okakura’s idealized notion of Asian unity. He had spent a year in India in 1901 – 2, staying for some of this time in the Tagore family’s mansion in Calcutta, where he drafted The Ideals of the East and influenced a host of Indian artists. Tagore subsequently received a stream of Japanese visitors sent by Okakura at his rural retreat in Santiniketan; and Okakura himself revisited India in 1911 on his way to Boston, where he was now a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts. Okakura was to become a major influence on such varied figures as Frank Lloyd Wright, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and even Martin Heidegger. In Tagore, however, he found a fellow traveller, someone also prone to uphold Asia’s oneness and investigate the moral claims of the West. ‘The guilty conscience of the West’, Okakura wrote, ‘has often conjured up the spectre of a Yellow Peril, let the tranquil gaze of the East turn itself on the White Disaster.’23 Tagore concurred, at least partly. Like Gandhi, both men proclaimed their Asianness by partly rejecting Western dress. Okakura dressed
in a dhoti while visiting the Ajanta caves in India; Tagore was to wear a Taoist hat in China. Both writers also sought to establish a cultural basis for Asia as a whole, stressing old maritime links, arts, and such shared legacies as Buddhism in India, China and Japan.
Advocating the essential oneness of humanity, Tagore once compared the two journeys of Buddhism and opium to the East:
When the Lord Buddha realised humanity in a grand synthesis of unity, his message went forth to China as a draught from the fountain of immortality. But when the modern empire-seeking merchant, moved by his greed, refused allegiance to this truth of unity, he had no qualms in sending to China the deadly opium poison.24
Again and again in his writings, Tagore returned to the metaphor of modern civilization as a machine: ‘The sole fulfillment of a machine is in achievement of result, which in its pursuit of success despises moral compunctions as foolishly out of place.’25 Japan, Tagore wrote, could further the ‘experiments … by which the East will change the aspects of modern civilization, infusing life in it where it is a machine, substituting the human heart for cold expediency’.
A more militant kind of Indian had made Japan his home before Tagore’s arrival in 1916. These Indians were part of the foreign communities that had flocked to Japan to learn the secrets of its modernization. Along with New York and London, Tokyo was part of an international network of ‘India Houses’, where activists and self-styled revolutionaries exiled from India gathered. An Indian Muslim, Maulavi Barkatullah (1854 – 1927), edited a magazine titled The Indian Sociologist from Tokyo. In 1910 he revived The Islamic Fraternity, the English monthly that Abdurreshid Ibrahim had set up, and which the Japanese, yielding to British requests, had closed down. Barkatullah turned it into an explicitly anti-British forum. He also wrote for the influential Japanese pan-Asianist thinker Okawa Shumei, who had begun to outline a Japanese version of the Monroe Doctrine for Asia (in 1946 he would be indicted by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal as the main civilian ideologue of Japanese expansionism).
The revolutionary strain of Bengali nationalism was also well represented in Japan by Rash Behari Bose (1886 – 1945), another Indian associate of Okawa Shumei. At the age of twenty-six, he threw a hand grenade at the then British viceroy as the latter ceremonially entered Delhi on the back of an elephant. He missed. Escaping India, he ended up in Japan in 1915, where he lived buoyed by the pan-Asianist sentiment and the financial assistance of many members of the Japanese elite until his death from natural causes in January 1945. When the hero of Indian revolutionaries, Lala Lajpat Rai, visited Japan in November 1915, Okawa and Bose organized a reception for him. Speaking on the occasion, Rai exhorted his hosts to work for the liberation of Asia. British pressure led to deportation orders being issued for Bose the next day, but the Indian nationalists and Okawa then successfully lobbied Toyama Mitsuru, the most influential of the pan-Asianists, to intervene on Bose’s behalf. kawa would write his first book on Indian nationalism after Tagore’s visit to Japan, selectively quoting the latter to support his contention that it was Japan’s ‘mission to unite and lead Asia’. In 1917, he would also encourage the Bengali revolutionary Taraknath Das to write a book claiming that conflict between the white and yellow races was inevitable.
But Tagore, like Gandhi, had little time for militant nationalists, and he was alarmed in 1916 to see a country that was then in the midst of an extraordinary growth of national self-confidence and imperialist expansion, and preparing, too, for more battles ahead with both old enemies and new friends. The previous year, 1915, Japan had annexed Chinese territories in Shandong. In 1905 Japan had declared Korea a protectorate, and in 1910 had forced it to surrender its sovereignty. The United States had supported Japan’s move then; Theodore Roosevelt was reported to have said, ‘I should like to see Japan have Korea.’26 But relations between Japan and the United States had been deteriorating since the 1890s, over the latter’s big move into the Pacific and its occupation of Hawaii. And American treatment of Japanese immigrants enraged nationalist Japanese like Tokutomi Soh.
Soh also worried that the First World War, which he saw as an internecine struggle between Western European powers for global dominance, would bring trouble to Japan’s neighbourhood, no matter who won. Japan had to move first in East Asia to forestall European and American influence there, he wrote, echoing Okuwa Shumei’s Asian Monroe Doctrine. Those pan-Asianists who were also ultra-nationalists were beginning to dream of an Asia liberated from its European masters and revitalized by Japan, and they saw Tagore as a likely collaborator in a pro-Japan freedom movement across Asia.
But Tagore was set to disappoint. He had developed some doubts about Japan’s progress well before he left India. ‘I am almost sure that Japan has her eyes on India,’ he wrote to an English friend in June 1915. ‘She is hungry – she is munching Korea, she has fastened her teeth upon China and it will be an evil day for India when Japan will have her opportunity.’27 His mood soured throughout the long journey that took him, tracing the route of his opium-trading grandfather, via Rangoon, Penang and Singapore. The polluting chimneys and lights and noise of these port cities made him inveigh against the ‘trade monster’ which ‘lacerates the world with its greed’.28 In Hong Kong, he was appalled to see a Sikh beating up a Chinese worker.
Watching Chinese labourers diligently at work in the port city, he made a canny prophecy about the future balance of power in international relations: ‘The nations which now own the world’s resources fear the rise of China, and wish to postpone the day of that rise.’29 But Tagore seemed to derive no comfort from the prospect of any country rising in the manner prescribed by the modern West. ‘The New Japan is only an imitation of the West,’ he declared at his official reception in Tokyo, which included the Japanese prime minister among other dignitaries. This did not go down well with his audience, for whom Japan was a powerful nation and budding empire, and India a pitiable European colony.
Tagore had received most of his impressions of the country from Okakura, but Japan had changed rapidly in the period between 1900 and 1916. In such books as The Awakening of Japan (1904) and The Book of Tea (1906), Okakura himself had begun to advocate a more assertive Japanese identity. ‘When will the West understand, or try to understand, the East?’ he had asked exasperatedly in The Book of Tea:
We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of our nervous organization!30
Tagore agreed with Okakura on most counts. Nevertheless, the vogue for patriotism depressed him. Writing his lectures on nationalism in the West, which he planned to deliver in the United States, Tagore concluded:
I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedoms by their governments … The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation, and emulate other machines in their collective worldliness.31
In a long letter home, Tagore mentioned caustically how the Japanese who dismissed his exhortations as the ‘poetry of a defeated people’ were ‘right’: ‘Japan had been taught in a modern school the lesson of how to become powerful. The schooling is done and she must enjoy the fruits of her lessons.’32
In China in 1924, torn apart by civil war and ravaged by warlords, Tagore’s invoking of Asia’s spiritual traditions was never likely to go down well. The May Fourth Movement had expanded since 1919. Returning from their studies in Berlin, Paris, London, New York and Moscow, young men introduced and discussed a range of ideas and theories. By general consensus, they
rejected their country’s Confucian traditions. As Chen Duxiu wrote, ‘I would much rather see the past culture of our nation disappear than see our race die out now because of its unfitness for living in the world.’33
For the May Fourth generation, the egalitarian ideals of the French and Russian revolutions and the scientific spirit underlying Western industrial power were self-evidently superior to an ossified Chinese culture that exalted tradition over innovation and kept China backward and weak. They wished China to become a strong and assertive nation using Western methods, and they admired such visitors as Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, whose belief in science and democracy seemed to lead the way to China’s redemption. In 1924, few of them were ready to listen to an apparently otherworldly poet from India hold forth on the problems of modern Western civilization and the virtues of old Asia.
In 1923, a debate erupted among Chinese intellectuals as soon as Tagore’s visit was announced. Radicals such as the novelist Mao Dun, who had once translated Tagore, worried about his likely deleterious effect on Chinese youth. ‘We are determined’, he wrote, ‘not to welcome the Tagore who loudly sings the praises of eastern civilization. Oppressed as we are by militarists from within the country and by the imperialists from without, this is no time for dreaming.’34 Tagore’s host, Liang Qichao, was already under attack from young radicals, who also kept up a barrage of insults against the romantic poet Xu Zhimo, Tagore’s interpreter in China.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 27
