MAKERS OF MODERN ASIA
Edited by Ramachandra Guha
Belknap/Harvard
$29.95
If Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's invocations of Asia are taken as some kind of pan-Asian commitment, his "eat grass" rhetoric must be treated as advocating vegetarianism. The British diplomat, Sir Morrice James (Lord Saint Brides), who was high commissioner to both India and Pakistan, called him "Lucifer" and a "flawed angel". Farzana Shaikh, his biographer, quotes both terms, but doesn't admit that Bhutto's Asianism was only an attempt to mobilise forces against the arch-enemy he called "Greater Bharat".
This is not the book's only flaw. China's rise hardly needs the imprimatur of even someone as eminent as Bertrand Russell. A century before Russell's visit to China, with which Ramachandra Guha introduces this misleadingly titled anthology, Napoleon famously called China "a sleeping giant" who would "move the world" when she awoke . A collection of the lives of eminent Asians would have raised no cavil, but the attempt to suggest a supra-national framework for 11 ultra-nationalists (10 male and a female) just doesn't work.
Despite reservations about Ms Shaikh, this is not a comment on the individual biographies. Potted history is always useful, and Srinath Raghavan on Indira Gandhi is informative, incisive and a pleasure to read. His essay could even be expanded into a full-scale biography to correct some of the factual errors in Katherine Frank's hugely acclaimed noveletteish gushing. But Mr Raghavan wisely doesn't present his account in terms of the "politics before economics" dictum that is advanced as the collection's raison d'être. In fact, Indira Gandhi used economics to further her political aims when initiating at Cancun, even before the July 1982 Washington visit Mr Raghavan mentions, what he calls "a long-overdue, if limited, rapprochement in US-India relations".
As the "Introduction" says, Lee Kuan Yew is the only subject still living, albeit frail and ailing. Otherwise, he might have objected to the heresy of being lumped with a bunch of "politics before economics" politicians. Mr Lee made no secret of his conviction that South Asia, especially India, lagged Southeast and East Asia precisely because politics enjoyed precedence over economics. He had some harsh things to say about P V Narasimha Rao, whom he had previously compared to Deng Xiaoping, for deservedly (as Mr Lee thought) losing the 1996 election by neglecting economics.
Mr Lee believes Manmohan Singh wouldn't have done so if Narasimha Rao hadn't thwarted him. But that's like the saying that the now defunct News of the World was the only newspaper in the world to abide by C P Scott's "news is sacred, comment is free" dictum because it carried no comment and the only news were law court reports of sex and violence cases. Michael Barr deals perceptively, if a trifle unfairly, with Mr Lee. Not everyone will agree Singapore is still sterile, soulless and racist "with little respect for ordinary human values, let alone human rights". Even if it is, that must have something to do with the character of the Chinese settlers who are in the overwhelming majority. There is nothing to suggest Goh Keng Swee, whom Mr Barr (like some others) appears to favour as the true author of the Singapore miracle, was markedly different.
In Sophie Quinn-Judge and Rana Mitter (taking two other contributors at random), Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong have found less censorious chroniclers. One can imagine the Great Helmsman chuckling over Mr Mitter saddling him with ultimate responsibility for Deng Xiaoping's revolution. It is tempting to go on for the life stories are interesting and enlightening even for those who don't agree with Carlyle that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men".
But so far as the land mass from the Mediterranean to the Pacific is concerned, Gandhi, for all his monumental stature in Indian eyes, is not especially relevant. Singapore's Straits Times newspaper didn't even include India in Asia until the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh reforms promised a profitable bilateral relationship. Many Japanese, Chinese and even Americans still incline to a similar chopsticks definition of Asia. Other concepts vary from Hegel's lands that had never known freedom to Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to Ananda Coomaraswamy's unity fragmented by centuries of colonialism. If the purpose were to present a pan-Asian panorama, Kemal Ataturk, Jose Rizal, Rabindranath Tagore, the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, Sun Yat Sen, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Meiji Emperor and his advisers, Mujibur Rahman, perhaps even Attila the Hun, might have been included. Some of them were makers of Asia in a more vital sense than politicians who served only their country.
The old "does Asia exist?" question cropped up again as late as 2012 when a Melbourne University professor, Antonia Finnane, responded to Michael Wesley's keynote address at an academic conference with "historically, Asia has served as a catch-all phrase for societies that were literate but not Christian: hence, its application to places from Turkey in the west to the Philippines in the east. It may be approaching its use-by date". The "Asian values" debate and the "Asian century" dream (it was already old when Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India) reflect the same controversy. A deeper unity does lie in some of the values listed in Confucius's analects (fluctuating though their fortunes have been) that are common to most Asian societies. But race is probably the strongest bond.
Although it's not politically correct to mention it, the brown, yellow and off-white nations cheered when Japan sank the Russian fleet in 1905. Colour remains the most visible manifestation of Asia's identity. No attempt is made here to justify the book's catchy title by analysing any of these factors or discuss how far they apply to the subjects.
Edited by Ramachandra Guha
Belknap/Harvard
$29.95
If Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's invocations of Asia are taken as some kind of pan-Asian commitment, his "eat grass" rhetoric must be treated as advocating vegetarianism. The British diplomat, Sir Morrice James (Lord Saint Brides), who was high commissioner to both India and Pakistan, called him "Lucifer" and a "flawed angel". Farzana Shaikh, his biographer, quotes both terms, but doesn't admit that Bhutto's Asianism was only an attempt to mobilise forces against the arch-enemy he called "Greater Bharat".
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This is not the book's only flaw. China's rise hardly needs the imprimatur of even someone as eminent as Bertrand Russell. A century before Russell's visit to China, with which Ramachandra Guha introduces this misleadingly titled anthology, Napoleon famously called China "a sleeping giant" who would "move the world" when she awoke . A collection of the lives of eminent Asians would have raised no cavil, but the attempt to suggest a supra-national framework for 11 ultra-nationalists (10 male and a female) just doesn't work.
Despite reservations about Ms Shaikh, this is not a comment on the individual biographies. Potted history is always useful, and Srinath Raghavan on Indira Gandhi is informative, incisive and a pleasure to read. His essay could even be expanded into a full-scale biography to correct some of the factual errors in Katherine Frank's hugely acclaimed noveletteish gushing. But Mr Raghavan wisely doesn't present his account in terms of the "politics before economics" dictum that is advanced as the collection's raison d'être. In fact, Indira Gandhi used economics to further her political aims when initiating at Cancun, even before the July 1982 Washington visit Mr Raghavan mentions, what he calls "a long-overdue, if limited, rapprochement in US-India relations".
As the "Introduction" says, Lee Kuan Yew is the only subject still living, albeit frail and ailing. Otherwise, he might have objected to the heresy of being lumped with a bunch of "politics before economics" politicians. Mr Lee made no secret of his conviction that South Asia, especially India, lagged Southeast and East Asia precisely because politics enjoyed precedence over economics. He had some harsh things to say about P V Narasimha Rao, whom he had previously compared to Deng Xiaoping, for deservedly (as Mr Lee thought) losing the 1996 election by neglecting economics.
Mr Lee believes Manmohan Singh wouldn't have done so if Narasimha Rao hadn't thwarted him. But that's like the saying that the now defunct News of the World was the only newspaper in the world to abide by C P Scott's "news is sacred, comment is free" dictum because it carried no comment and the only news were law court reports of sex and violence cases. Michael Barr deals perceptively, if a trifle unfairly, with Mr Lee. Not everyone will agree Singapore is still sterile, soulless and racist "with little respect for ordinary human values, let alone human rights". Even if it is, that must have something to do with the character of the Chinese settlers who are in the overwhelming majority. There is nothing to suggest Goh Keng Swee, whom Mr Barr (like some others) appears to favour as the true author of the Singapore miracle, was markedly different.
In Sophie Quinn-Judge and Rana Mitter (taking two other contributors at random), Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong have found less censorious chroniclers. One can imagine the Great Helmsman chuckling over Mr Mitter saddling him with ultimate responsibility for Deng Xiaoping's revolution. It is tempting to go on for the life stories are interesting and enlightening even for those who don't agree with Carlyle that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men".
But so far as the land mass from the Mediterranean to the Pacific is concerned, Gandhi, for all his monumental stature in Indian eyes, is not especially relevant. Singapore's Straits Times newspaper didn't even include India in Asia until the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh reforms promised a profitable bilateral relationship. Many Japanese, Chinese and even Americans still incline to a similar chopsticks definition of Asia. Other concepts vary from Hegel's lands that had never known freedom to Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere to Ananda Coomaraswamy's unity fragmented by centuries of colonialism. If the purpose were to present a pan-Asian panorama, Kemal Ataturk, Jose Rizal, Rabindranath Tagore, the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, Sun Yat Sen, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Meiji Emperor and his advisers, Mujibur Rahman, perhaps even Attila the Hun, might have been included. Some of them were makers of Asia in a more vital sense than politicians who served only their country.
The old "does Asia exist?" question cropped up again as late as 2012 when a Melbourne University professor, Antonia Finnane, responded to Michael Wesley's keynote address at an academic conference with "historically, Asia has served as a catch-all phrase for societies that were literate but not Christian: hence, its application to places from Turkey in the west to the Philippines in the east. It may be approaching its use-by date". The "Asian values" debate and the "Asian century" dream (it was already old when Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India) reflect the same controversy. A deeper unity does lie in some of the values listed in Confucius's analects (fluctuating though their fortunes have been) that are common to most Asian societies. But race is probably the strongest bond.
Although it's not politically correct to mention it, the brown, yellow and off-white nations cheered when Japan sank the Russian fleet in 1905. Colour remains the most visible manifestation of Asia's identity. No attempt is made here to justify the book's catchy title by analysing any of these factors or discuss how far they apply to the subjects.