In Shanghai and Hangzhou Tagore spoke to large gatherings of students. As always he cut an impressive figure in his robes and long white beard. He attended garden parties and music concerts, often accompanied by Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai. In Nanjing he met the reigning warlord and pleaded with him to cease fighting. The warlord served champagne to his guests, and assured Tagore he was fully in agreement with his message of peace. (A few months later, he launched an assault on the warlord of Zhejiang.)
Lecturing in Beijing, Tagore returned to his favourite theme:
The West is becoming demoralized through being the exploiter, through tasting of the fruits of exploitation. We must fight with our faith in the moral and spiritual power of men. We of the East have never reverenced death-dealing generals, nor lie-dealing diplomats, but spiritual leaders. Through them we shall be saved, or not at all. Physical power is not the strongest in the end … You are the most long lived race, because you have had centuries of wisdom nourished by your faith in goodness, not in mere strength.35
The Chinese radicals grew alarmed as Tagore praised Buddhism and Confucianism for nurturing a civilization ‘in its social life upon faith in the soul’. The Communist Party and Chen Duxiu had already decided to campaign against Tagore through its various magazines. Chen worried that Chinese youth were vulnerable to Tagore’s influence: ‘We warn them not to let themselves be Indianized. Unless, that is, they want their coffins to lie one day in a land under the heel of a colonial power, as India is.’36
The propaganda campaign seems to have worked. At one meeting in Hankou, Tagore had been greeted with the slogans, ‘Go back, slave from a lost country! We don’t want philosophy, we want materialism!’ The vociferous hecklers had to be physically restrained lest they assaulted him. But it was in Beijing, the centre of youthful Chinese radicalism, that Tagore faced organized hostility in the form of primed questioners and boos and heckles. At one of his meetings, where he attacked modern democracy itself, which he claimed benefited ‘only plutocrats in various disguises’, leaflets denouncing him were handed out.37 ‘We have had enough of the ancient Chinese civilization.’ They went on to attack Tagore’s hosts, Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai, who used ‘his talent to instill in Young China their conservative and reactionary tendencies’.38 The communist poet Qu Quibai summed up the general tone of Tagore’s reception in China when he wrote, ‘Thank you, Mr. Tagore, but we have already had too many Confuciuses and Menciuses in China.’39
In retrospect, Tagore, angrily recoiling from the main intellectual and political trends in Japan and China, seems to have misunderstood their context. He may have been too influenced by the Indian model, in which the British were in charge of military and political affairs, and the Indians could devote themselves to spiritual leadership. From the perspective of the Chinese and the Japanese, who had to build their nations from scratch, a people who did not worry about their political subjugation and spoke instead of spiritual liberation were indeed very ‘lost’.
At the same time, to see Tagore as an uncompromising foe of Western knowledge was to seriously misread his worldview. As late as 1921, he was writing disparagingly about Gandhi’s freedom movement to a friend: ‘Our present struggle to alienate our heart and mind from the West is an attempt at spiritual suicide.’40 Nor was Tagore an apolitical mystic from a lost country. He was more than alert to the Chinese sense of shame and humiliation. Passing through Hong Kong on his way to Japan in 1916, he had deplored the ‘religion of the slave’ that made a Sikh assault a Chinese labourer. Speaking of Indian collaborators with British imperialists, he lamented that ‘when the English went to snatch away Hong Kong from China, it was they who beat ‘China … they have taken upon [themselves] the responsibility of insulting China’.41 He felt the pain of the destruction of the Summer Palace no less keenly than Chinese nationalists, remembering ‘how the European imperialists had razed [it] to dust … how they had torn to pieces, burned, devastated and looted the age-old art objects. Such things would never be created in the world again.’
He followed the stalemate between England and Ireland, remarking that the former ‘is a python which refuses to disgorge this living creature which struggles to live its separate life’.42 Received by dignitaries during his visit to Persia and Iraq in 1932, he was not indifferent to the new form of warfare being tried out on hapless villagers:
the men, women and children done to death there meet their fate by a decree from the stratosphere of British imperialism – which finds it easy to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims. So dim and insignificant do those unskilled in the modern arts of killing appear to those who glory in such skill!43
Moreover, unlike the caricature of him among Chinese radicals, Tagore was ready, too, to appreciate new social and political experiments like the Russian Revolution. Years after Tagore left China Lu Xun acknowledged, ‘I did not see this clearly before, now I know that he is also an anti-imperialist.’44 His brother Zhou Zuoren denounced Tagore’s critics who ‘think they are scientific thinkers and Westernizers, but they lack the spirit of scepticism and toleration’. But in 1924 the young radicals had succeeded in popularizing their misperceptions; deeply shaken by the assaults on him, Tagore cancelled the rest of his lectures. In his last public appearance, he addressed the controversy caused by his visit. Young people, he conceded, are attracted by the West. But he worried that ‘the traffic of ideas’ was one way, leading to the ‘gambling den of commerce and politics, to the furious competition of suicide in the area of military lunacy’. Tagore insisted that ‘in order to save us from the anarchy of weak thought we must stand up today and judge the West’; ‘We must find our voice to be able to say to the West: “You may force your things into our homes, you may obstruct our prospects of life – but we judge you!”’45
Moving on to Japan from China in June 1924, Tagore had another opportunity to judge the West rather severely. After years of informal restrictions, the United States had finally banned Japanese immigration altogether, triggering one of the first waves of anti-Americanism that were to sweep across the country repeatedly for the next two decades. Tagore joined them in their sense of outrage over the American decision. Speaking to a large audience at the University of Tokyo, he claimed that ‘the materialistic civilization of the West, working hand in hand with its strong nationalism, has reached the heights of unreasonableness’.46 He said that on his previous trip the Japanese people had scorned his critique of nationalism, but it had been validated by the many urgent reflections worldwide on the catastrophe of the Great War. ‘Now after the war,’ he said, ‘do you not hear everywhere the denunciation of this spirit of the nation, this collective egoism of the people, which is universally hardening their hearts?’47
He spoke of those in the West who claim ‘sneeringly’ that ‘we in the East have no faith in Democracy’, and feel morally superior. ‘We who do not profess democracy,’ he asserted, ‘acknowledge our human obligations and have faith in our code of honour.’ ‘But,’ he asked, ‘are you also going to allow yourselves to be tempted by the contagion of this belief in your own hungry right of inborn superiority, bearing the false name of democracy?’48
Tagore may have been misled by the applause his words received. Japan by 1924 was a much more nationalistic country than the one he had first visited in 1916. (In fact, Tagore managed to misjudge the country’s mood on every visit except his very last in 1929, when at last he sensed it, and recoiled.) But on the whole, Tagore found the sober Japanese mood more to his taste on this second trip in 1924.
He met Toyama Mitsuru, the ultra-nationalist leader of the Black Dragons, who was dedicated to expanding Japan into the Asian mainland, and repeated his message of a spiritual revival spearheaded by Asia. Tagore had no idea that these Japanese proponents of pan-Asianism meant something far more aggressive. Passing through Japan on his way to Canada in 1929, he again spoke of the ‘hopes of Asia’, even as he warned that the Japanese ‘are following the Western mod
el’ and getting lost in the ‘mire of Western civilization’.
Returning to Japan later the same year, Tagore began to realize the full extent to which Japan was becoming an imperialist power on the ‘Western model’. Students from Korea described to him Japanese brutality in their country, and first-hand Chinese reports revealed to him Japan’s aggressive designs on what, in 1929, had become an almost prostrate country. Meeting Toyama Mitsuru on this occasion, Tagore launched into a furious tirade: ‘You have been infected by the virus of European imperialism.’ Toyoma tried to calm him down, but Tagore declared he would never visit Japan again. His resolve was hardened by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and then its extension into China proper in 1937: the early shots in the conquest of Asia – what Japanese militarists would soon call the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
When in 1935 an old Japanese friend of his, the poet Yonejiro Noguchi, wrote to ask him to endorse Japan’s war in China, since it was the means for ‘establishing a new great world in the Asiatic continent’, a war of ‘Asia for Asia’, Tagore replied to say that he thought Noguchi’s conception of Asia would be ‘raised on a tower of skulls’. ‘It is true,’ he added, ‘that there are no better standards prevalent anywhere else and the so-called civilized peoples of the West are proving equally barbarous.’49 But ‘if you refer me to them, I have nothing to say’. Noguchi persisted, pointing to the threat of communism in China. Tagore responded by ‘wishing the Japanese people, whom I love, not success, but remorse’.50
Thus ended the dream of a regenerated Asian spiritual civilization. Certainly ‘spirituality’ had proved too vague a word; it could readily indicate the warrior spirit of the samurai as well as the self-control of the Brahman. There was also something fuzzy about the notion that Asian countries were joined together by immemorial cultural links established by the export of Buddhism or Chinese culture from their origin countries to the furthest peripheries of Asia.
In 1938, nearing the end of his life, Tagore despaired: ‘We are a band of hapless people, where would we look up to? The days of staring at Japan are over.’51 Three years later, he was dead. His host in China, Liang Qichao, had passed away in 1929, still relatively young at fifty-six. Four years previously, Kang Youwei had died, and Liang had delivered the funeral oration, hailing his old mentor as the pioneer of reform. The Vietnamese Phan Boi Chau, nearly executed and then politically neutered by the French, died in the old imperial city of Hue in 1940. In their last decades, most of these early advocates of internal self-strengthening had become unsympathetic to the rise of hard-edged political ideologies, and politically isolated within their own countries. Elsewhere – in Egypt, Turkey and Iran – disenchanted Islamic modernists were being pushed aside by hard-line communists, nationalists and fundamentalists. In colleges, seminaries and official trade unions, as well as in secret societies and organizations across Asia (and in the coffee houses of Paris, Berlin and London) a new kind of militant nationalist and anti-imperialist was emerging. Many of these were the over-eager ‘schoolboys of the East’ that Tagore warned against in one of his last essays:
The carefully nurtured yet noxious plant of national egoism is shedding its seeds all over the world, making our callow schoolboys of the East rejoice because the harvest produced by these seeds – the harvest of antipathy with its endless cycle of self-renewal – bears a western name of high-sounding distinction. Great civilizations have flourished in the past in the East as well as the West because they produced food for the spirit of man for all time … These great civilizations were at last run to death by men of the type of our precocious schoolboys of modern times, smart and superficially critical, worshippers of self, shrewd bargainers in the market of profit and power, efficient in their handling of the ephemeral, who … eventually, driven by suicidal forces of passion, set their neighbours’ houses on fire and were themselves enveloped by flames.52
These may have seemed melodramatic words in 1938. But Tagore had remained preternaturally alert to, and fearful of, the violent hatreds still to be unleashed across Asia, beginning with the Japanese invasion of the Asian mainland. Addressing a dinner-party audience in New York in 1930 that included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Morgenthau and Sinclair Lewis, Tagore had conceded that ‘the age belongs to the West and humanity must be grateful to you for your science’. But, he added, ‘you have exploited those who are helpless and humiliated those who are unfortunate with this gift’.53 As events in the next decade would prove, liberation for many Asians would be synonymous with turning the tables and subjecting their Western masters to extreme humiliation. This extraordinary reversal would occur more quickly than anyone expected, and more brutally than Tagore feared. And Japan would be its principal agent.
SIX: ASIA REMADE
‘Comrade Anying, I have come to see you on behalf of the people of the motherland. Our country is strong now and its people enjoy good fortune. You may rest in peace.’
Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, addressing a stone statue of Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s favourite son, in October 2009, shortly after the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
THE STING IN THE TAIL: PAN-ASIANISM AND MILITARY DECOLONIZATION
Speaking to a full house at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1930, Rabindranath Tagore claimed that Americans ignored Britain’s domination of India, and worried about Japan only because the latter ‘was able to prove she would make herself as obnoxious as you can’.1 It was his final message to the West, greeted, according to the New York Times, by ‘considerable laughter and hand-clapping’.
Writing after the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, Kakuzo Okakura, too, had mocked ‘the average Westerner’, who ‘was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields.’2 Tagore was, of course, aware that Japan’s ‘obnoxiousness’ was itself a reaction to the nationalistic and imperialist West and its ‘unreasonableness’. The intellectual history of Tokutomi Soh, one of Japan’s most important journalists and publicists, richly illustrates his nation’s tragic political trajectory.
Born into a rich peasant family in 1863, Soh developed classically liberal notions of Japan’s progress, including the gradual emergence of a nation-building middle class that consisted of former peasants turned bourgeoisie like himself. Soh believed that freedom and democracy was indispensable for this new class of people attempting to make a strong nation. Greatly influenced by his readings in Western philosophy and literature, he even briefly converted to Christianity.
In the late 1880s his popular books argued that Japan could become wealthy and powerful through economic and industrial production. But during the high noon of Western imperialism in the 1890s, Soh began to discard his notions of democratic reformism. In particular, European insistence that Japan return some of its gains from its war with China in 1895 angered Soh. American immigration laws discriminating against Japanese workers in 1913 and 1920 further alienated Soh from his Western liberal inspirations. By the 1930s, he had settled, like many Japanese, into resentment of the West. He was furious when Japan’s incursions into Manchuria in the early 1930s provoked widespread condemnation from Europe and the United States. Western objections to Japan doing what Western imperialists had been doing for centuries struck him as deeply hypocritical.
‘Today’, he wrote in 1931, ‘is a time of domination by the white races … they think that the world is the private possession of the white races. They control other people’s lands, take their resources, turn them into manufactured goods which are then sent back and sold at high prices.’ And, he added, ‘the unbridled tyranny of the white races exists because there are no powerful people other than the white races. By breaking through this condition, we can make a positive contribution to all mankind.’ Commenting in 1933 on Japan’s decision to withdraw from the League of Nations, Soh wrote that ‘it teaches Europeans and Americans that the world is
not a place for them to monopolize, and it also shows Asians they can be free of domination by Europeans and Americans’.3
The pan-Asian and pan-Islamic activist Abdurreshid Ibrahim, now back in Tokyo after finding Atatiirk’s insular Turkey not to his taste, supported Soh, claiming that the League of Nations was a Western plot aimed at preventing Japan from liberating Asia. Working with the logic that Japan’s self-interest was also Asia’s, Soh had little trouble rationalizing Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937. Like many Japanese intellectuals at the time, he believed that Japan had to face down expansionist Soviet Communism in China. American oil embargoes, which threatened to cripple Japan’s economy, also fitted neatly into a pattern of unappeasable Western hostility. ‘Americans act,’ he suggested, ‘as if they are the highest authority for judging the rest of the world – their actions manifest the greatest arrogance.’4
Bogged down in China, and punitively encircled by Western powers, Japan could avoid collapse only by grabbing the commodities of the Asian mainland and Java. Writing on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Soh justified a pre-emptive strike: ‘Japan cannot sit idly by and be resigned to the fate of confinement while being strangled to death. It is entirely appropriate for us as a nation to act freely in order to live.’5 Commenting on the elaborate list of grievances Japan offered as a rationale for declaring war on Britain and the United States, Soh described the war as a just campaign of expulsion against an ‘immoral West led by a moral and magnanimous Japan’.
From the Ruins of Empire Page 28
