India–China ‘Connectedness’

Native-language source materials shed much light on the nature of modern subaltern perception of India–China ‘connectedness’. They have, however, remained scantily used. In this context, this chapter provides an overview of ‘native voices’ available in Hindi and other languages in burgeoning local print media in the late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century north India. Published in popular books, journals, and newspapers, they present an alternative discourse and open up new vista in our comprehension of areas of India–China interactions. Examples of this may be seen in books in Hindi on China by Thakur Gadadhar Singh and Dr Mahendulal Garg, or in editorials and independent commentaries on various events in China by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Rabindranath Tagore, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, and many other contemporary native intellectuals. Demonstrating yearnings for unity and harmony, these writings provide context to explore various vicissitudes of ‘connectedness’ as well as sources to the contemporary invocations of common ideas of ‘Asian values’ and pan-Asianism.

China–India Myths in Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’

This chapter analyses the scholarship of prominent May Fourth writer Xu Dishan as gateway for understanding his fiction. A close examination of his engagement with Indian religions and mythology in his fiction constitutes a vision of a China–India literary horizon through a literary device termed as ‘transregional metonymy’: tropes that travelled between China and India through the cultural exchange of myths. The chapter elaborates on this literary device through a close reading of Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’ (1923). The reading shows how a shared China–India figurative domain emerges in the story to offer a new understanding of myths and how they function in modern life. It also suggests that instead of rewriting the past, myths can rewrite the present; instead of using myths to establish a national culture, literature can use myths to imagine a transregional horizon. Focusing on India to think about the nature of storytelling and the relationship between myth and reality, Xu Dishan undid the binary distinction between ancient India as a soul brother and colonial India as a cautionary tale.

Erecting a Gurdwara on Queen’s Road East

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Sikhs emigrated from Punjab to Southeast and East Asia to purse a better livelihood. At the same time, the Singh Sabha Movement was gradually gaining momentum in Punjab, strengthening the Sikh identity. Furthermore, Sikh soldiers and policemen were deployed widely in Asia to safeguard the interests of the British Empire. This chapter argues that the three seemingly irrelevant historical events (the modern Sikh diaspora, the Singh Sabha Movement, and the Indian expedition during the Boxer Uprising in China) were essentially interrelated. The convergent point of these moments was the erection of a Sikh temple (gurdwara) on Queen’s Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong Island, in 1902. Taking this event as a case study, this chapter seeks to explore the Singh Sabha Movement through the lens of the Sikh diasporic network and the imperial network. It also unveils the Indian face of the British Empire by the turn of the twentieth century, when Indians, rather than the British, were the protagonists and engineers.

China in the Popular Imagination

The crisis in China at the turn of the twentieth century, beginning with the Boxer Uprising and the ensuing International Expedition, elicited tremendous sympathy and support for China and the Chinese from people in India. As contemporary books and articles highlighted in this chapter show, China exerted a powerful hold over the popular imagination in India because its people saw themselves and their experiences as colonized subjects reflected in the tumultuous events in China. Vernacular newspapers in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu echoed similar concerns and sympathies; their reports on China also invariably sided with their Asian neighbour and lamented the growing might and influence of Western powers in the region. Many voices also expressed concern that the colonization of China would mean the end of an Asia they envisioned themselves part of, with ties particularly strong and intimate with China because the two countries were bound together by geography, history, civilization, and the shared experience of Western imperialism and colonialism.

Rethinking Pan-Asianism through Zhang Taiyan

The early twentieth century Chinese thinker, Zhang Taiyan is most famous for his role as a radical anti-Manchu propagandist as well as being a major proponent of national learning. However, he was many things to different readers: a scholar, a revolutionary, a Buddhist, and a pan-Asianist. Recently, scholars have turned to his pan-Asianist writings and his Buddhist critique of capitalist modernity. Continuing the above trend, the contributor brings India and China together through Zhang Taiyan by examining his writings on India, which are often embedded in his works on anti-colonialism. Then, he turns to Zhang’s writings on Buddhism, through which he constructs a critique of imperialist epistemologies and specifically deconstructs the Hegelian idea of history as progress. He contends that the critique of colonialism and linear narratives of history are two sides of Zhang’s use of India in his writings, which continue to be relevant today.

When Culture Meets State Diplomacy

Focusing on the India-based Chinese scholar Tan Yunshan and the institution he found, Cheena Bhavana, this chapter explores how Tan’s apparently apolitical pan-Asian cultural position lent and accommodated itself to Nationalist China’s diplomatic priorities and the anticolonial aspirations shared between the Indian freedom movement and China’s ruling party in the second quarter of the twentieth century. As the Chinese state became the main source of income for Tan’s enterprise, cultural and academic activities could not but become enmeshed in manoeuvres of governments, activists and bureaucrats, in spite of Cheena Bhavana’s professed aloofness from politics. In a time when nation-states, revolutionary fervour, and anticolonial activism took centre stage across China and India, the idea that connections between the two societies could remain purely ‘cultural’ became untenable.

Introduction

The essays in this volume describe the manifold ways in which China, India, and their respective societies were connected from the 1840s to the 1960s. This period witnessed the inexorable rise and terminal decline of Pax Britannica in Asia, the blooming of anti-colonial movements of various ideological hues, and the spread and entrenchment of the nation-state system across the world. This layered legacy looms large in the relations between Chinese and Indian societies in the twenty-first century. Euro-American imperialism figured as much more than the backdrop against which China and India interacted. Practitioners of global history (...

The Chinese Intrigue in Kalimpong

This chapter focuses on Kalimpong, a small Himalayan town located in northern West Bengal, India. In the mid-1940s, the British intelligence officials in India identified trade through Kalimpong into Tibet as an activity that required surveillance and inspection. These officials produced detailed records on the types of commodity traded, volume of trade, diverse groups traders, and smuggling of goods. Such surveillance and intelligence gathering continued after the establishment of independent India in 1947. The intelligence officials paid special attention to individuals in Kalimpong suspected as spies for the Chinese government, both the Kuomintang and the People’s Republic of China. Using these intelligence records, the chapter analyses the portrayal of Kalimpong as a site of covert and clandestine activity. It spotlights several individuals who were identified as ‘Chinese agents’, the complicated and problematic nature of intelligence gathering and recording, the arbitrariness of the categories ‘Chinese’, ‘Tibetan’, and ‘Indian’ in a place such as Kalimpong, and the ways in which the changing geopolitical relationship between India and China in the late 1950s impacted Kalimpong and its Chinese residents.

Through the ‘Indian Lens’

This chapter examines the Chinese views on India in late Qing Chinese travel writings. There were two distinct modes of observation and critical reflection. On the one hand, by observing and analyzing India, the Chinese authors tried to gain knowledge of the British rule in India and the Western culture. On the other hand, seeing a reflection of China in India, they pondered China’s own international crisis. Huang Maocai, the first official sent by Qing government to British India, utterly praised British governance in India, but the observers after Huang were more eager to find out the reasons why India became colonized by the British Empire. By studying these travelogues, this chapter reveals a key transition of Chinese intellectuals’ views towards Western colonial power in the nineteenth century, from ‘positive confrontationism’ to ‘resistant nationalism’.

Shipping Nationalism in India and China, 1920–52

The steamship networks that linked China and India from the mid-nineteenth century were a key facet of the British colonial presence in both places. By the early twentieth century, shipping was an important arena of nationalist mobilization in both as well. In China and India, the nationalist shipping entrepreneurs Lu Zuofu and Walchand Hirachand used both commercial and political means to dismantle the colonial shipping system, foster national autonomy, and envision decolonized futures. Although these entrepreneurs did not a have any direct contact with one another, the unmistakable parallels in their actions and arguments underscore the importance of the historical and structural connections between China and India between the 1920s and 1950s as these entrepreneurs contended with a shipping system of global reach. This chapter compares Lu and Hirachand’s strategies to develop national shipping power under colonial/semi-colonial rule and as a part of decolonization.