Book review: Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui (Eds.),Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India,1840s–1960s

The China–India field of study is currently a thriving academic pursuit. Both comparisons and connections between the two giants are being researched and commented upon; more recently, the relationship is being viewed in terms of their regional and global impact (Tansen Sen 2017). To do justice to all the outstanding contributions of this rich, multifaceted and ambitious 500-page anthology is indeed a daunting task and it is justified in being a terrific page-turner volume. As the title suggests, the editors aimed to go beyond the often-quoted political unity and solidarity that Pan-Asianism allegedly sought in the face of Western imperialism.

Asianism is regaining academic attention in two ways. First, this timely volume shrinks the geographic lens from across Asia to China and India. Second, it broadens the focus from the voices of political leaders to a wider group of religious, philosophical, literary and political writers, as well as journalists, newspaper reporters, civilian diplomats and merchants. Luckily, this much-needed research work relies heavily on the extensive documentary and Chinese language archival study undertaken by all the learned contributors.

Beyond Pan-Asianism focuses not only on the rise and fall of British imperialism but also on the period when India and China were reconnected through their imperial information, communications and travel networks. The subtitle of the book suggests that the 1839–42 Opium War is the starting point for this volume. The 1962 India–China War marked the collapse of pan-Asian solidarity, being a natural endpoint. These periodic boundaries are generally convenient, but not very important in the overall structure of the volume as demonstrated well in this insightful book.

The Introduction penned by the editors (pp. 1–25) is an excellent launch on the growing field of India–China studies through an academic perspective. The 14 essays in this volume describe the diverse links between China, India and their respective societies from the 1840s to the 1960s. This period witnessed the relentless rise and eventual decline of Pax Britannica in Asia, the flourishing of anti-colonial movements of various ideological hues, and the spread and consolidation of nation-state systems around the world (Deepak 2001). This multifaceted heritage plays an important role in the relationship between Chinese and Indian societies in the twenty-first century.

Beyond Pan-Asianism draws extensively on a theoretical framework of cyclical connections between India and China, and the rest of the world, and is, therefore, thorough and surprisingly argumentative. The editors have deliberately chosen to divide Beyond Pan-Asianism into four well-structured thematic parts: literary visions, travelogues, personal encounters and networks, and it has served well the purpose of this much-needed timely volume on the myriad interactions between the two Asian giants.

Part I on literary visions focuses particularly on Chinese visions of India, from hostile interpretations of Indian complicity with British imperialism in China’s treaty ports through Chinese poetry and prose (Adhira Mangalagiri, pp. 26–62) to interpretations of shared religious and philosophical traditions in opposition to Western concepts (Gal Gvili, pp. 67–88 and Viren Murthy, pp. 94–126). Together, the three essays offered a different methodology for engaging with India–China connectedness.

Part II on travel writing includes people from both sides, with chapters on late Qing travel reports from British India (Zhang Ke, pp. 131–52), on Hindi-language, pan-Asianist writings about China from the 1880s to the 1920s (Kamal Sheel, pp. 155–81), and on the sympathetic writings of north Indian intellectuals and vernacular journalists about late Qing China muddled in crisis (Anand A. Yang, pp. 186–204). These three chapters clearly demonstrate that China and India already appeared regularly in each other’s print media at the turn of twentieth century.

Part III centres on personal encounters, like Rabindranath Tagore’s conversations with a select number of Chinese philosophers during the interwar period like Feng Youlan (Yu-Ting Lee, pp. 209–32), KMT-INC cultural relations before the late 1940s and the extraordinary career of the Tagore’s Chinese protégé Tan Yunshan (Brian Tsui, pp. 236–61), the Sikh diaspora in Hong Kong (Yan Cao, pp. 266–88) and Chinese Islamic goodwill missions to South Asia during the Pacific War (Janice Hyeju Jeong, pp. 293–321). These three chapters demonstrated how turn-of-the-twentieth-century replications of pan-Asianist identities came into conflict with, diverged from, or simply failed to bear in mind the hard realities of state-building.

Finally, Part IV deals with the emergence of imperial networks, such as those by exiled Indian nationalists in Republican China (Madhavi Thampi, pp. 329–48), KMT relations with British India during the Pacific War (Liao Wen-shuo, pp. 350–75), Indian and Chinese shipping businesses competing with their British counterparts in Asia during the 1920–1952 period (Anne Reinhardt, pp. 378–406), and finally the CPC-led PRC and KMT-led RoC spying activities in the Indian border town Kalimpong from 1947 to 1962 and the capriciousness of national categories such as ‘Chinese’, ‘Indian’ and ‘Tibetan’ (Tansen Sen, 410–53). This final section of the essays summarises the changing and multifaceted patterns of interactions between India and China, as the two countries transformed from colonial rule to nascent nation-states.

The cross-border movement of people and goods, tolerated under the (semi) colonial order presided over by the British, was ironically eroded in postcolonial Asia as borders hardened and geostrategic concerns assumed greater importance in nation-states with competing claims to territorial rights. As Tansen Sen (2017, p. 478) remarks, while appealing to grand civilisational discourses of unity and amity, nation-states imposed ‘monitored, managed, and restrictive people-to-people connections’.

Beyond the pan-Asianist, anti-colonialist interactions between intellectuals and political activists and the celebration of Hindi–Chini Bhai Bhai bonhomie in the 1950s (Ghosh 2017), this volume suggests that China engaged with the South Asian subcontinent and vice versa in more ambiguous terms.

It was indeed an appropriate moment that the book was launched in 2021 to retrospect the ties between the two Asian giants, at a time when India and China had a violent faceoff on 15 June 2020 at the Galwan River Valley in Eastern Ladakh where 20 Indian soldiers and 4 Chinese soldiers sacrificed their lives. It further exonerated the editors’ narrative that beneath the selective interpretation of historical sources to build a civilisational state narrative of the relationship lies a dangerous nation-state nationalistic agenda.

Beyond Pan-Asianism is an inspiring and refreshing collection of 14 profoundly researched case studies. The resources and arguments provided by the contributors in this edited volume are incisive, thought-provoking and comprehensive. This book is indeed a must-read, and hopefully, it will stimulate more research among East Asia area specialists, literary scholars and historians engaged in India–China relations, historical studies and international relations.