Religion and Nationalism in Asia

Giorgio Shani, Takashi Kibe, Giorgio Shani, Takashi Kibe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367777425
• eBook ISBN: 9780429593758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book re-examines the relationship between religion and nationalism in a contemporary Asian context, with a focus on East, South and South East Asia.

Addressing empirical, analytical, and normative questions, it analyses selected case studies from across Asia, including China, India, Iraq, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka and compares the differences and commonalities between the diverse configurations of nationalism and religion across the continent. It then goes on to explain reasons for the regional religious resurgence and asks, is the nation-state model, aligned with secularism, suitable for the region? Exploring the two interrelated issues of legacies and possibilities, this book also examines the relationship between nationalism and modernity, identifying possible and desirable trajectories which go beyond existing configurations of nationalism and religion.

Bringing together a stellar line up of contributors in the field, Religion and Nationalism in Asia will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Asian religion and politics as well as sociology, ethnicity, nationalism and comparative politics.

1 Tagore and the conception of critical nationalism

Sudipta Kaviraj

In the discipline of conceptual history, few concepts are so hard to tackle as the idea of the nation. This is so because of its variations across two different axes: different stages in history accord different collective valences to the concept; but within each period and each group individuals inflect the term in distinctively different ways. Some political terms like the state, despite their own indeterminacies, at least have some elements of material, institutional fixity. The nation, by contrast, is just an idea – one of the most indefinable, intangible and yet emotionally forceful concepts affecting political action in the modern world. Nationalism in its two primary forms – European imperialist nationalism¹ and anti-imperialist nationalism in Europe’s colonies – were shaping the world throughout the span of Tagore’s life; and he looked at these vast political convulsions with great attention and rare insight. His peculiarity lay in the fact that unlike most intellectuals of his times he did not embrace the simple solution of deciding which side to support; he decided to observe critically the strange impulses that emerged from the diffuse nationalist sentiment, and provided a critique of both sides, not just of imperialist Europe. Nationalist sentiment associated with religious communities has re-emerged as a powerful force in our times as well – though not in forms that were familiar to Tagore. Thus there is a straight connection between the question that fascinated and troubled Tagore and the urgent political predicaments we face today. Because of the detachment, sanity and civility of his thinking on this question, it repays close attention in our troubled world. I am a Bengali, and for a Bengali interested in literature, thinking about Tagore is a fraught and intense experience – not unlike the experience of believers in thinking about God: it is a pleasure to think about him, but it is also a humbling experience. He was the creator of my world, at least the intellectual world inside which I live and think, because he literally created the language through which I think, through which my mind touches every object in my world.

The intellectual world that Tagore’s mind/art created is one of great beauty, but one that is not always grasped, also of great intellectual complexity. It is inadequate to honor him simply as a great artist. Apart from a producer of great art, undoubtedly, he was also a producer of social thought of unusual complexity and subtlety – gifted with a strange, unordinary vision. He was able to see much about the world of his times that others who were social thinkers of the more obvious often failed to grasp. I have argued elsewhere that he was an unusually astute analyst of the nature of modern political power; and his complex reflections on nationalism form part of that very unusual corpus of profoundly critical reflection on the nature of the political. In this chapter I shall use material from his essays and writings on nationalism, but supplement them with some readings of his poetry and fiction.

There is a widespread, but to my judgement erroneous, view that accounts for the rise of nationalism in Asian societies like Japan, China and India in a simple diffusionist way. The prejudice that all significant things originate in Europe and circulate to the rest of the world with a lag is so deeply entrenched that we often accept a casual, inattentive, entirely diffusionist theory of the spread of modern nationalism.² Through the accumulation of several mutually reinforcing processes of modernity – the rise of capitalist industrialism, of the modern state and its requirement of a form of sociability that transcended the ‘unsocial sociality’³ of bourgeois economies, a new relationship emerged between rulers and their subjects – of an unprecedented connection of intimacy and ownership between political subjects and their state, which was known as nationalism. It was not merely the power of capitalist economic productivity that enabled the expansion of Western power across the world, but its coupling with this entirely new form of collective belonging. Once other societies saw the immensity of the effects of this power – that lay behind the dominance of modern Europe – they started emulating this sentiment. That is simple version of this textbook story of nationalism.

Historically minded people will realize that this story is woefully inadequate and misleading. There is no doubt that many Asian observers thought that the strange fact that a small number of people from a distant island could navigate the world and conquer India could not be simply explained by the power of military technology. After all, military techniques could be easily mastered by Asian peoples; what gave the Europeans an ability to mobilize a superior form of force was a peculiar organization of emotion behind their state apparatus, and the chemistry of an affect that produced an unprecedented figuration of collective intentionality and collective action.⁴ This was the invention of the nation-state. The negative experience of European colonization made this sentiment attractive to the elites of colonized societies. Intelligent observers from Asia prefigured in their analysis of European power some of the disciplinary features later examined by Foucault, and this gave rise to an envy for forms of similar techniques for forming collective intention and launching collective action. But it was not easy initially to introduce this new idea, or even to linguistically capture and express it with precision and clarity. In India, Bengal was the first regional culture in which these questions began to be raised, simply because it was the region subjected to British rule earliest, and for the longest time. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, a novelist, satirist and political essayist, spoke first of the need for anti-colonial opposition to British rule.⁵ But it was not easy to introduce this novel idea that Indians – all the diverse communities who were subjects of the British Indian Empire – should begin to think of themselves as a single people: a nation. When he wrote about this theme, Bankim would often signal the awkwardness and absence of an equivalent term in Bengali by using the telling phrase – what the English call ‘the nation’. The Bengali word that he was forced to use to capture this sense was the word jati, which was heavily freighted with previous semantic weight. It referred to either a bland logical class – like the class of cows, the class of tables, the class of pots; or caste groups like Brahmins or Kayasthas or Shudras. Eventually, the term settled into a polyvalent use, adding the reference to the nation parallel to its other antecedent semantic denotations: but audiences could unerringly understand its particular valence in a sentence by techniques of contextual reference. Go-jati, for instance, will mean the class of cows, Vaishya-jati the Vaishya or mercantile caste and Bharatiya jati the Indian nation. Clearly although the same term – jati – is used, the three meanings are separate; but the only linguistic marker of this semantic difference would be the contextual placement of the term in the syntactic chain. Bankimchandra’s works were pioneering in two senses: they showed both the newness and the vagueness of a pioneering idea: though Bankim passionately wrote to persuade his compatriots that they should oppose British power/rule, there remained a fatal ambiguity in his thinking.⁶ The jati that was to take on the historic task of opposing British rule remained oddly unspecified: at times it seemed this was the historic task of the Bengalis, at others of the Hindus or of the Indians – which had very different implications for the character of subsequent nationalism. Bankim was surely a passionate anti-imperialist; but strangely he had not yet chosen his nation.

By the time Rabindranath Tagore became a young intellectual, a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and serious political commentary, Bankim’s literary interventions had made nationalism a familiar idea. His historical novels were immensely popular, and translated widely in numerous other languages – to provide them with vast audience that transcended the boundaries of his native Bengal. Bengalis began viewing with intense interest the dramatic unification processes unfolding in Italy and Germany, and reading Mazzini’s works in English translation.⁷ But this unfamiliar new sentiment, which could sweep everything before it, took concrete form and expression through a British decision in 1905 to divide the province of Bengal into an eastern and western part.⁸ Though the ostensible reason was given as administrative convenience, as Bengal was an unwieldy, large territorial unit, research has convincingly shown that their objectives were less benign.⁹ A split in the province would create two administrative regions statistically dominated by two religious communities – likely to fuel discord between their elites, and thus retard Indian demands for self-government. Certainly, this was not the first major uprising against British rule: the 1857 rebellion started by a section of the native soldiers of the British army which spread to much of northern India, was a major upheaval that seriously threatened British dominion in India; but clearly, the organization, ideology, leaders and followers of this uprising were quite different from what we see as a modern nationalist movement. The partition of Bengal evoked a massive popular response against the British decision, and it brought about for the first time in Indian history the peculiar convergence of elite-intellectual and mass-popular mobilization against foreign rule. Tagore, a relatively young intellectual, initially enthusiastically supported the growing mass movement. But Tagore practiced a peculiar and rare form of intellectual participation – taking part in action and observing the consequences of one’s actions at the same time.¹⁰ In classical Indian philosophy, the mind is sometimes likened to two birds – one of which acts, and the other observes the other acting; this, by implication, is the nature of truly intelligent action, a mark, as the Gita would say, of detachment in the process of acting itself

As the Swadeshi movement ended after three years of deep political convulsions, with some success, two divergent views of political action emerged which derived utterly different conclusions from a retrospective analysis of what had happened. For ordinary political activists and intellectuals, the Swadeshi movement showed, first of all, that the power of the British colonial state was not entirely unanswerable. A decision of the British government, even at the highest point of imperialism, could be thwarted by a ‘movement’ – an entirely new form of political action. Western educated intellectuals knew about the powers of such movements from the history of modern Europe; but this kind of collective action was unprecedented in Indian colonial history. Political intellectuals began thinking about what could be the ways in which such mass mobilizations could be better organized and directed towards larger goals – e.g., extracting more self-governing powers, or eventually, even independence from British rule. After Swadeshi, the central question of Indian political thought changed: from How did India become colonized? to How can India become independent?

Rabindranath’s individual reflections took a wholly different and distinctive direction. Tagore closely examined the stages through which the movement had evolved, and what happened inside every stage, and his analytical conclusions were far more complex. Like many other young intellectuals, he was impatient with the strange contentment of the leaders of the moderate, constitutionalist agitation of the early Indian National Congress (INC), chafed at the restraints such leaders accepted; and sought a more rebellious infusion of popular participation in the defiance against British rule. When the Swadeshi movement gathered strength, he exultantly supported its cause. But, like all popular movements, as it expanded in its influence and support, it also became more complex, developing many different strands of mobilization and political action. Two types of development caused him concern. The first was an intensification of activist enthusiasm into terrorist action against individual British officials. The outbreak of terrorism profoundly troubled Tagore’s consciousness because of its complex features – its immense heroic attractiveness to youth, its colossal waste of idealistic lives, and its futility as a political technique. As the movement intensified, Tagore observed with unease, mobilizers became more ferocious and desperate to increase the force of popular power. Hindu activists of the Swadeshi movement began to use appeals of Hindu religion, eliciting responses of resistance from Muslim groups opposed to the movement. A movement directed at a political objective became troubled with intense mobilization of two religious communities. For Tagore, this was a strangely frustrating outcome of a popular mobilization which had brought out deep democratic energies of politics, widened participation, but also mobilized the darkest forces of atavism. Associated with this were deeper causes of concern. In mobilizing popular numbers, politicians not merely showed unconcern for religious divisions, and felt happy if they could mobilize large groups of people despite the cost of antagonizing an equally large number – creating a large mobilized popular force, but at the same time threatening to rip apart the fabric of everyday peaceability and neighborliness between Hindus and Muslims. It was a travesty of the dream of a mobilized people: the dream, in parts, had turned into a nightmare.

From the troubled outward field of political life, after the apparent success of the Swadeshi agitation, Tagore retreated into the internal field of his artistic imagination, where his thought was untrammeled by constraints of external reality, and he could depict without hindrance the logic of these different, often contradictory strands of dark populist politics – which, for Tagore, would either make freedom impossible, or it might bring into reality an entirely travestied version of independence. He was not a stranger to the conflicts of political debate – but was an unenthusia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: legacies and possibilities
• 1 Tagore and the conception of critical nationalism
• 2 Midnight’s children: religion and nationalism in South Asia
• 3 Articulations of religiously motivated nationalism within Philippine Catholicism: a critical assessment
• 4 Reconsidering the relation between ‘sectarianism’ and nationalism in the Middle East
• 5 The irony of secular nation-building in Japanese modernity: Inoue Kowashi and Fukuzawa Yukichi
• 6 Buddhism, cosmology, and Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere: multiculturalism and nationalism in the pre-war period Japan
• 7 Political modernity in East Asia: religion, nationalism and subversion of imperialism
• 8 Religious nationalism with non-domination: Ahn Changho’s cosmopolitan patriotism
• 9 The structural problem of religious freedom in China: toward a Confucian-Christian synthesis
• 10 Augustine’s critique of religious identity and its implications for the Chinese church
• 11 Post-Chinese reconnections through religion: Buddhism, Christianity, and Confucianism
• Conclusion
• Index