One or More Asias?: On Nile Green’s “How Asia Found Herself”

WHEN THE ASSOCIATION of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meets to decide how the states of Southeast Asia will navigate the tricky passage between China and the United States, they do it in English. Other languages fall victim to practicality (Bahasa or Tagalog aren’t widely learned outside their homelands) or politics (Japanese runs the risk of recalling wartime hegemony, and Chinese might suggest acquiescence to a contemporary one). There is irony in the fact that the world’s most economically dynamic region, and potentially its most turbulent one, operates in a language whose spread is a product of imperial history.

It’s this irony that lies at the heart of Nile Green’s fascinating and engaging book, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (2022). There is no doubt, as Green shows, that the geographical concept of Asia has become distinct and meaningful. But there was nothing natural about it. Of course, in a certain sense, all geographical terms are constructs. But rhetoric in recent years about an “Asian century,” or the importance of Asian markets or Asian values, belies the reality that the commonality in the region is often patchy and frequently a product of its experience being mediated through its encounters with Europe. The development of the European Union, flawed and partial an account of the continent though it is, has given shape to some sense of common purpose, although not a common language. Like ASEAN, the EU uses English more than any other language, Brexit or not. Asian collective identity does not have quite as obvious a political coalition, but a more amorphous one does exist and can be analyzed.

Green’s book tells a story and puts forward an argument. The story is compelling and not well known, consisting of the lives and writings of the intellectuals who translated texts central to one Asian tradition into the language of another. In 1923, a young man named Hai Weiliang traveled from Hunan province in southern China to Calcutta to study. A Chinese Muslim, he worked hard to learn English and Urdu, and eventually wrote a book in the latter language, Chini Musulman (“The Chinese Muslims”), with the aim of explaining Islam in China to co-religionists in the very different atmosphere of India. Calcutta was also the environment in which Prabodh Chandra Bagchi, who had graduated with honors in Sanskrit, extended his studies to China. He studied the language and would teach it at Visva-Bharati (in Santiniketan), the university founded by the great Asian cosmopolitan of the age, Rabindranath Tagore. Ironically enough, his studies of the Chinese translations of Sanskrit Buddhist texts were written in English.

This cultural interaction was not a product just of the 20th century: Green shows that South-Asian Muslim scholars learned about 19th-century Japan via books such as the Bengali-language Jepan (1863), which provided details about a Japan of premodern dress and customs that was, in fact, shortly to be transformed through the reforms of the Meiji Restoration.

Green’s argument is not that there was a long-standing, almost timeless network of interactions within Asia that stood essentially separate from the interventions of Western imperialism. Rather, Western intervention from the 18th to 20th centuries profoundly shaped Asian societies’ notions that they might have something in common. Preexisting trade networks, notably linking China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, had shaped the region, as had shared religious practices (notably Islam in western Asia and Buddhism in the east, with Confucian ethics shaping another section of the latter). Yet the integration of the region came only with the imposition of a modernity powered by gunboats, imperial trade (not least in opium), and a political-legal system that interacted with or overrode what had been there previously—and also, in Green’s argument, one particular tool: language.

English and French became languages of imperial conquest in the region, but they also became tools for translation and political-religious interaction among communities that had not previously been able to communicate easily. Hai Weiliang drew on English-language materials to inform himself about other communities. Others were inspired by the writing of perhaps the most famous advocate of Asian identity in the early 20th century, the art historian Okakura Kakuzō, whose 1903 book Ideals of the East, with Special Reference to the Art of Japan began with the statement “Hitotsu no Ajia”—“Asia is one.” Again ironically, the term “Ajia” was itself a rendering of an English-language word that had emerged in the classical world to describe a part of the Middle East very far from the territories that Okakura termed “Asian.”

But Green’s book does suggest a cross-Asian linguistic link through one particular city, Calcutta, and one particular language: Urdu. For a long time, Urdu was used as a lingua franca across South Asia: it was “the earliest vernacular language to be printed in the Asian informational hub that was Calcutta” and “was also the most widespread.” Calcutta became a powerhouse for publication of works on religion, politics, and society, and books published there in Urdu would then be translated into other languages of the subcontinent. Crucially, as Green argues, writers in Urdu would often be fluent in English, and therefore perfectly placed to read and translate Western texts. The Urdu network extended from Europe and the Middle East all the way to commercial communities in China and Japan.

Green’s argument is a powerful and convincing one that gives historical weight to the idea of Asia as a community that had to be imagined into being, to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known notion that nations are “imagined communities.” Crucially, that does not mean “imaginary.” The contemporary power of the idea of Asia comes from undeniable realities: economic weight, the integration and interaction of markets, norms of conduct in shared seas, and recognition of sovereignty. Green is clear that cross-Asian identity did emerge in powerful and visible ways in the late modern era, and that it is perfectly possible (despite the efforts of some to argue that “civilizations” are separable entities) to see different Asian cultures interacting productively. He argues that the growth of this network derives from detectable patterns drawing upon intellectual curiosity and growing economic and political interactions, and that it is impossible to remove Western empires (and their languages) from any meaningful account of how “Asia” came into being in the modern sense.

Green’s book ends with a brief but helpful account of where some of these trends went in the early 20th century. Mostly outside the scope of this book, but continuing its theme, is one of the most intriguing phenomena that emerged from the new idea of “Asianism”: its brief but ultimately disastrous adoption by the Japanese Empire. It was a Japanese, Okakura, who invented the idea of “Asia” as “one”—though he was influenced by an American, Ernest Fenollosa, to do so.

Yet the emergence of the idea of Asianism led to a greater interest in Pan-Asianism that inspired many thinkers, not least in India. Rabindranath Tagore’s rise to prominence as a cross-cultural figure was rooted in his popularity in Japan (not matched in China, whose intellectuals were less convinced by his ideas). A young Jawaharlal Nehru was inspired by the Japanese victory over Russia in their war of 1904–05. However, as Eri Hotta has shown in her book Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War, 1931–1945 (2007), Pan-Asianism gradually yet unmistakably mutated from a doctrine of culture to one of power, one in which Japan’s imperial might was held to make it superior to other Asian societies, permitting the ruinous campaign of invasion and occupation that eventually led to World War II in Asia. By the 1930s, Chinese intellectuals were deeply hostile to Japanese ideas of Pan-Asianism, with nationalist figures such as Du Zhongyuan making clear that he considered it nothing more than imperialism by another name.

The Japanese Pan-Asian experiment ended abruptly in August 1945. Its legacy, though, still echoes throughout Asia today. Japanese was a widely used imperial language in much of Asia during the early 20th century. It did not remain so, with a partial exception in Taiwan, which notably had a much less violent colonial experience with Japan than did China or Korea.

Japan’s empire may have faded, but its economic power and soft power (e.g., manga, anime) have only grown during the postwar era. China has made its own strides in economics and military strength, although the latter has constrained its ability to create an attractive idea of itself in the wider world. In some ways, though, it is South Korea that embodies Green’s thesis most effectively in the early 21st century. Korean media—television, music, gaming—have immense power across Asia, and indeed in the Western world more broadly. The new Asia may well find itself reflected on the screen of a Samsung phone.

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Rana Mitter is S. T. Lee chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. His most recent book is China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (2020).