Mainstream WeeklyBOOK REVIEW
Asianism and the Fall of Empire: India’s Road to Freedom
by Mithi Mukherjee
HarperCollins India
Pages: 283; Price: Rs 799
The unprecedented non-violent mass movement led by Mahatma Gandhi led to India’s freedom from British colonial rule, right? Yes and no. Yes, because the statement is true; no, because the assertion is not the whole truth.
Offering a new global perspective on modern Indian history, historian Mithi Mukherjee covers new ground by identifying Asianism as the primary driving force behind the successful independence movement involving millions.
That pan-Asian solidarity that appealed to Indian nationalist leaders is known. And so is the role played, at one stage, by Japan in spurring India’s freedom movement. Mukherjee’s success lies in joining the numerous dots that straddled the nationalist movement, both peaceful and the violent.
According to Mukherjee, it was as Asians that Indians rediscovered their identity as they strove to free themselves from British rule. Indeed, Indians placed Asianism – a marker of Asian identity – where one would have expected to find nationalism.
One of the first prominent Indians to raise the banner of Asian unity was none other than Swami Vivekananda. India, the monk argued, was in complete continuity with the rest of Asia. It was left to Chittaranjan Das of the Congress who first articulated the idea of an Asian Cultural Federation.
It was Japan’s historic military victory over Russia in 1905 that marked not only a new era in world history but dramatically changed the Asians’ own perception in relation to European empires.
The Japanese war triumph shattered the aura of European invincibility in Asia – an idea that had until then helped Britain and other European colonial powers to hold on to their subjects in the Asian continent.
It was of course a coincidence that the first mass movement against British rule in India began in 1905 – the year of Japan’s victory — over Bengal’s partition on religious lines. Mahatma Gandhi launched his mass movement called Satyagraha in 1906.
Mukherjee says that dominant scholarship on Pan-Asianism has focussed almost exclusively on Japan and China as its primary sites and dismissed Indian Asianism as marginal to the larger story.
The path-breaking book under review contends that it was precisely India’s centrality to the British maritime empire in Asia that provoked the rise of a discourse of Asianism earlier than in any other country.
Unlike in Japan, where Asianism emerged as a major national concern in the 1930s, its history in India went back to the 1860s.
In India, Asianism became the foundation of a discourse of resistance for India’s most important thinkers and leaders and eventually shaped India’s freedom movement.
The idea got a boost when British Dominions and the United States made it clear that Asians had no right to immigrate to and settle in their regions, even for work.
Asians were dubbed “lower races”. This insult gave a fillip to anti-colonial movements across Asia.
In fact, the economic boycott of British goods in India drew inspiration from a similar Chinese boycott of American goods, demonstrating similar anti-colonial strategies.
Bengali revolutionary Barindra Ghose taught the history of the Russo-Japanese war to recruits of the revolutionary Anushilan Samiti group. Indian nationalists, revolutionaries included, made Japan a hub for their pro-independence activities.
Rabindranath Tagore remained until the end of his life one of the most committed proponents of the idea of a common Asian culture.
It was also his immigrant experience of racist humiliation and exclusion as an Asian in South Africa that made Mahatma Gandhi turn completely against the British Empire.
Mukherjee insists that the massacre of Indians at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar was a deliberate and calculated colonial response to the rise of transnational Asianism.
“Indian anti-colonialists understood that if India and other colonized nations in Asia were to become sovereign, they could only do so by forming translational alliances in Asia to collectively resist European imperialism,” Mukherjee writes.
Asianism went on to play a critical role both in Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India movement and in Subhas Chandra Bose’s anti-colonial war against the colonial state.
Ultimately, the two trajectories of civilizational Asianism and geo-political Asianism converged to bring about the end of the British rule in India.
Of course, the story had its ups and downs. Japan, for example, dismayed Indians and Asians with its brutal conduct towards fellow Asians during World War II while the Russian revolution brought a new wave of hope across Asia and Africa.
Mukherjee, however, says that while pan-Asian solidarity played a key role in the Indian independence movement, the country’s free government did not share the civilizational discourse of Asianism.
By the 1970s, for a variety of reasons, the “voice of Asia” which Vivekananda, Tagore, Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose among others had envisioned as a counter to imperial power politics fell silent.
And soon, the very idea of Asianism slipped into oblivion.
(Review author: M R Narayan Swamy)