BY DR MADHAVI PETERS

Madhavi’s Address at a recent Tagore event in Bangalore: Beyond Westphalia: Tagore’s Search for an Alternative World Order in Asian Civilizations

In 1902, the Japanese intellectual Okakura Tenshin visited Calcutta to invite Swami Vivekananda to Japan for another Chicago-styled Parliament of Religions which Okakura had planned to organize with a “more specific inter-Asian focus”.

During the nine months that he stayed in Calcutta, he visited Jorasanko, the ancestral home of the Tagore family(the family to which the Indian Nobel Laureate Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore belonged).  It was at Jorasanko that he wrote these famous lines for his book,’ The Idea of Asia’.

“Asia is one,” he wrote:

The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal, which is the common thought-inheritance of every Asiatic race, enabling them to produce all the great religions of the world, and distinguishing them from those maritime peoples of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, who love to dwell on the particular, and to search out the means, not the end, of life.”

It was around the time that he met Tenshin, that Tagore had just founded Shantiniketan; which he envisioned as the intellectual, cultural and aesthetic thread linking India to the world.  Shantiniketan is an academic institution or University for higher learning founded by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore with an ingenious and innovative method of teaching of humanities, arts, culture and philosophy.

While Tenshin’s thinking on Asianism surely influenced Tagore’s, there were significant differences in many aspects.

Tenshin’s idea of pan-Asianisim was rooted in the rise of Japanese Nationalism. He was a prophet of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, which, if you are familiar with your WW 2 history, you will know was the pretext for Japanese imperialism. The idea was to create an Asia for Asians while getting rid of the hated Western colonizers. The part that wasn’t said out loud was that the Japanese intended to take their place as imperialists or colonizers.

Tagore had romantic vision of pan-Asianism that was centred in Indian Buddhism. He saw Asia as a spiritual, traditional place; in contrast to the modern, rational and materialistic West. He failed to realize, however, that Buddhism had morphed dramatically as it spread eastwards.

On Tagore’s first visit to Japan in 1916, Japan was on a high after it defeated Russia; the first time an Asian power had prevailed over a Western one. Nationalism was at a fever pitch much to Tagore’s dismay. But the Japanese told him that his pacifist philosophy can attributed to the fact that India was a defeated nation. Tagore’s worst fears were confirmed, however, in subsequent trips in 1924 and 1929, in the lead up to World War 2. The last trip broke his vision of a harmonious East. As he wrote to Japanese poet Noguchi Yonejiro, ‘You are building your conception of an Asia which would be raised on a tower of skulls’.

In Korea, he found a warmer reception to his pacifist pan-Asianism, as Korea too was suffering under the yoke of Japanese colonialism.

Tagore wrote a poem, The Song of the Defeated, to a Korean student who visited him in Japan. The poem goes:

My master has bid me while I stand at the roadside, to sing the

song of defeat, for that is the bride whom he woos in secret.

She has put on the dark veil, hiding her face from the crowd,

but the jewel glows on her breast in the dark.

What about Tagore’s reception in China?

Tagore found limited reception among the Chinese revolutionary youth eager to shed the shackles of tradition. Lu Xun, one of the greatest Chinese writers of that era, and firmly opposed to tradition, didn’t like Tagore’s ethereal aura. One leaflet said Tagore was not welcome in China because his praise of Oriental civilization meant his endorsement of gender-based hierarchy, caste hierarchy and feudal despotism. Pan-Asianism, it said, was abolition of nationality and politics.

Pan-Asianism was thoroughly discredited after World War 2, and didn’t rear its head again until the late 1990s, which saw the rise of the Asian Tigers, and a defiant Singaporean PM, Lee Kwan Yew, who posited Asian values of filiality, hard work and community in opposition to the Western values of freedom and the individual. Here again in a repeat of the past endeavours, Asia was being defined in opposition to the West, and while Lee Kwan Yew’s pan-Asianism may have been more to Tagore’s taste, it came with a hard-edged capitalism, that may not have been acceptable.

In retrospect, it was a tragedy that in the nationalist fervors leading up to the conflagration of World War 2, the true intent of Tagore’s pan-Asianism was lost in his poetry. Tagore was seeking an alternative to the Westphalian system of international relations, which centred the entire system on the ethno-religious state.

Instead, he wanted the peoples of the non-Western world to reach into their ancient civilizations for a more enlightened conception of statecraft. This in turn can offer newer possibilities and opportunities for a energetic yet harmonious world-order which the current leaders are seeking with the complete debunking of the old systems and ideas.

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