Introduction to the Modern Spirit of Asia / 《亚洲的现代灵性》之 导论 (original) (raw)
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Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (c.1905-1940)
Asianisms, that is, discourses and ideologies claiming that Asia can be defined and understood as a homogenous space with shared and clearly defined characteristics, have become the subject of increased scholarly attention over the last two decades. The focal points of interest, however, are generally East Asian varieties of regionalism. That “the cult of Asianism” has played an important role on the Indian subcontinent, too—as is evident from the quote above—is less understood. Aside from two descriptive monographs dating back to the 1970s, there has been relatively little scholarly engagement with this phenomenon. In this article, we would like to offer an overview of several distinct concepts of Asia and pan-Asian designs, which featured prominently in both political and civil society debates in India during the struggle for Independence. Considering the abundance of initiatives for Asian unification, and, in a more abstract sense, discourses on Asian identity, what follows here is necessarily a selection of discourses, three of which will be subjected to critical analysis, with the following questions in mind: (Online publication January 05 2012)
Modernity on Trial: nationhood and nationalism in South Asia
“Modernity” is one of the most ambiguous words in social science lexicon. The term is often used as if there exists a common understanding of its meaning. The present era is termed as the modern era underlining the assumption that every existing object, idea or institution is either modern or striving to acquire modern characteristics. One such idea is nationality/nationalism with the nation as its manifestation. Nation-building experiences in South Asia force one to question the conceptual validity of the concept of the modern nation-state. Nation-building experiences in South Asia show that the contemporary idea of modernity, nationality and nationhood are primarily constructs grounded in ideas that are deeply rooted in the historical experiences of Western Europe and North America. These are largely incompatible with South Asian socio-cultural and political space. This chapter explores how the concept of a ‘modern nation-state’ did not fit into the South Asian reality. In fact, the creation of “modern” territorially demarcated and “nationally” organized states resulted in communal politics in South Asia. The essay further interrogates whether the concept of nation-state is an appropriate one in the South Asian context
Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2013
The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.
Major essay s3410129 Modern Asia (1)
During 18th century, thanks to industrialized revolution, many countries in the West became superior in military powers and economic development. At the same time, some countries such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America still had to suffer from a deepening poverty and increasing unrest as being colonizing and stereotyped from the West. This connects to the point made by Zakaria (2008) that for hundred years after fifteen century when the West achieved the stage of industrialization, urbanization and modernization, the rests were still sunk into poverty and backward farming and rural style. Moreover, according to Said 1994, the West portrayed the Eastern countries as exoticness but backward civilization. Under shadow of the Western countries, several independent countries decided to follow and learn from their path to develop sufficient and well-being lives for their citizens. When it comes to the real life, Schramm, Lerner, Pye, Ithiel De Sola Pool and Rostow argued that the development process involves the unidirectional transformation from traditionalism to modernization and finally reaches Wetern status. However, in my opinion, there are three solid reasons to support that we do not need to adopt all Western values to become “Modern.” Therefore I think that modernization is not synonymous westernization by analyzing the case study of Japan and other cultural text of other Asian countries.
Geopolitics, 2010
Contrary to the view of some observers who insist that the Cold War was of limited or no relevance to the transition from colonies to nation-states after 1945 we argue that the geopolitics of the Cold War played a crucial role in shaping the character and direction of the trajectories of nation-states in Asia, if not the erstwhile Third World as a whole. More particularly, the geopolitics of the Cold War provided the crucial backdrop for the rise and fall of developmental nationalism, while the post–Cold War era has set the scene for an array of cultural nationalisms. These issues are explored with a particular focus on India. The case of India makes clear that it is impossible to separate the emergence of new nation-states and their success or failure after 1945 from the geopolitics of the Cold War. It will also make clear that the shifting geopolitics of the end of the Cold War reinforced the demise of developmental nationalism. Since the late 1980s, the problems facing the nation-states of the former Third World, are being played out in a geo-political context, which includes an important shift from developmental nationalisms to cultural nationalisms, while the nation-state system itself is sliding deeper into crisis against the backdrop of the global framework of ‘genuinely existing’ liberal capitalism and the changing geopolitics of the early twenty-first century.
Introduction: Methods in China-India Studies
International Journal of Asian Studies, 2022
Amid growing interest in studying China and India together, this special issue, “Methods in China-India Studies,” seeks to open a conversation on the relevance, approaches, and stakes of China-India research. Why should we pair China and India together, how can we best do so, and to what ends? In this introduction to the issue, the editors first discuss the rationales commonly evoked as justification for studying China and India together. The first section articulates shared intellectual commitments as lending a coherence to China-India studies, and as providing a common ground and point of departure for scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The second section outlines a history of the China-India pairing from the first century CE to the end of the twentieth century, with a focus on how a range of historical actors paired China and India under shifting political circumstances and with differing objectives. This section also offers an assessment of the methodological approaches recent scholarship has extended to studying each of these periods. As a whole, this introduction reflects on the unique challenges and opportunities of conducting China-India research, and outlines some of the contributions the China and India conceptual pairing can make to other fields of study. Special issue edited by Adhira Mangalagiri and Tansen Sen
Workshop/Spring School Asia and Europe: «Nationalism(s) - Past & Present
Zurich University, 2021
The workshop "Nationalism(s) - past and present" organized by the Doctoral Program Asia & Europe deals with mechanisms of nationalism, especially in the European-Indian context. Starting from the long 19th century up to the 21st century, nationalist views, movements and mechanisms between the former British Crown Colony and the European metropolis will be discussed and analyzed within an interdisciplinary framework. The main question will be, how the idea of the national between empire and (independent) India and possibly other colonies was used by different actors for their own political purposes. The (historical) approach will help to investigate how colonial and imperialist patterns, religious conflicts and gender issues are connected to nationalist mindsets, interactions and power structures.
The recent debates within and beyond Marxism around empire and imperialism focus on deterritorialization but fail to see non-Western states as anything other than collaborators or victims. Highlighting the importance of centre-periphery relations within the territorially bounded political space of nation-state, the paper puts forward a new concept of Postcolonial Informal Empire (PIE) to characterize the emerging powers of China and India. The greatest paradox of PIEs is that a postcolonial impulse -- to critically appropriate Western ideas and technologies such as sovereignty, nationalism, and the free market to build the multinational state and combine it with an affirmation of stories of historical greatness and long existing pre-Westernized civilizational-national cultures -- enables the political entities to consolidate and discipline their borderlands and reduce diverse people inhabiting there into culturally different but politically subservient subjects. It is predominantly a nationalist politics, and not economic calculability or financial interests, which shape PIEs’ centre-borderlands relations.
China-India Studies: Emergence, Development, and State of the Field
Journal of Asian Studies, 2021
This essay traces the development of China-India studies from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in order to take stock of the field, which has witnessed a surge in publication over the past two decades. The assessment presented here weaves the main shifts in China-India political relations with the emergence of various strands of China-India scholarship, since the two aspects often intersect. The major lacuna in the field, this essay argues, is a framework needed to analyze the complex connections and the pertinent comparisons between China and India. It contends that research on China-India topics should ideally attempt to combine comparative and connective frameworks with analyses that transcend geographic, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries to address this lacuna.