Between Globalising Religions and Embodying Asia: Imagining Japan in Bengal

Abstract

This article subjects the varied meanings that Bengalis gave to their imaginations of Japan during the Swadeshi Movement (1905–11) to close scrutiny. It does so by contextualising it within the attempts made by Hindus and Muslims to use religion as a way of travelling globally. I use social hierarchy and embodiment as analytical perspectives to frame the ways in which invoking Japan provided opportunities to forge broader spiritual linkages and, in doing so, negotiate their histories as separate from colonial modernity. Further, this article problematises the categories of local/global and indigenous/foreign that are used to isolate these mobile acts of thinking, reading, negotiating and aspiring that were simultaneously located both beyond and within the nation. In turn, it suggests ‘imaginations’ and ‘invocations’ as a fruitful site of studying such fluid histories.

Keywords:

• Asia
• Bengal
• body
• global
• imaginations
• Japan
• pan-Islamism
• spirituality
• Swadeshi Movement

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the two anonymous peer reviewers of South Asia for their close reading of this paper and their detailed feedback. I am also grateful to my supervisor Faridah Zaman and Rosalind O’Hanlon for their encouragement and insightful comments on early versions of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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2. Prabasi 8, no. 1 (April 1908): 667; Swadeshi 3, no. 11 (November 1908): 467; Swadeshi 1, no. 1 (November 1905): 38; Prabasi 9, no. 6 (January 1907): 493. All translations from Bengali are my own unless otherwise notified.

3. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 5th ed., 2017): 78–126.

4. Sarala Devi Ghoshal, a prominent educationist, makes this comment in The Dawn VI, no. I (1904): 10.

5. The Modern Review: Monthly Review and Miscellany: Vol. I, ed. Ramananda Chatterjee (Calcutta: Modern Review Office, 1908): 104.

6. Michael Silvestri, ‘The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal and Its Relation to the European Experience’, Terrorism and Violence 21, no. 1 (2009): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550802544383; Victor A. van Biljert, ‘The Icon of Japan in Nationalist Revolutionary Discourse in India, 1890–1910’, in Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945, ed. Li Narangoa and R.B. Cribb (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003): 23–42; Steven G. Marks, ‘“Bravo, Bravo Tiger of the East!” The Russo-Japanese War and the Rise of Nationalism in British India and Egypt’, in The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, ed. John W. Steinberg (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 609–27; R.P. Dua, The Impact of the Russo-Japanese (1905) War on Indian Politics (Delhi: S. Chand, 1966); Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Nile Green, ‘Shared Infrastructures, Informational Asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c.1890–1930’, Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 414–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022813000351.

7. Silvestri, ‘The Bomb’, 20.

8. Peter Heehs, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’, Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (1994): 533–56, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00011859.

9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Home and the World in Sumit Sarkar’s History of the Swadeshi Movement’, in Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 5th ed., 2017): 470.

10. Martin J. Bayly, ‘Global Intellectual History in International Relations: Hierarchy, Empire, and the Case of the Late Colonial Indian International Thought’, Review of International Studies 10 (2022): 1–20; 9, 19, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000419.

11. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 4.

12. Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010): 23.

13. The Indian World II, no. A (1905): 188.

14. Ibid., 189.

15. Gita Chattopadhyay, Bangla Swadeshi Gaan (Delhi: Delhi University, 1983): 245–46.

16. Prathama Banerjee, 'The Work of Imagination: Temporality and Nationhood in Colonial Bengal’, in Subaltern Studies XII: Muslims, Dalits, and the Fabrications of History, ed. Shail Mayaram, M.S.S Pandian and Ajay Skaria (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005): 280–322.

17. Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 71.

18. Chattopadhyay, Bangla Swadeshi Gaan, 349.

19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000): 8.

20. For an overview, see Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

21. ‘Report by Mr. H.L. Salkeld I.C.S Regarding the Proceedings of the Anushilan Samiti in Dacca’, August 1909, National Archives of India (henceforth, NAI), Home Political, Part B, 21: 144–45.

22. Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst & Co., 2015): 5–7; Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India 1919–1947 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 22–23.

23. Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushidō in Modern Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 111–24.

24. Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches: 1890–1908, Vols. 6 and 7 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 2002): 1091–08; 1092.

25. Ibid., 1108.

26. Ibid., 223.

27. See John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, Past and Present 86, no. 1 (1980): 121–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/86.1.121; Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘From Brahmacharya to “Conscious Race Culture”: Victorian Discourses of Science and Hindu Traditions in Early Indian Nationalism’, in Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity, ed. Crispin Bates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 241–69.

28. Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Military Sports and the History of the Martial Body in India’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007): 490–523, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852007783245133.

29. The educationist Ashwini Dutta argued that Indians did not have a place in the scale of nations for they had ‘reduced themselves to the position of Sudras by their want of self-respect and self-reliance’: see (unknown author), The Swadeshi Movement, A Symposium: Views of Representative Indians and Anglo-Indians (Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co., 2nd ed., 1917): 124–29; 124.

30. Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, 239.

31. Amrita Bazar Patrika (August 13, 1905): 4.

32. Amrita Bazar Patrika (February 21, 1904): 7; (September 18, 1904): 10; (January 19, 1905): 3.

33. F.C. Daly, ‘Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal’, in Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939: Vol. I, ed. Amiya K. Samanta (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995): 3–216; 131.

34. Haldar’s account of the Anushilan Samiti is based on interviews with the surviving members: see Jibantara Haldar, Bharater Swadhinata Sangrame Anushilan Samitir Bhumika (Prakashana: Calcutta, 1989).

35. The Drill Books defined Aaka as ‘cutting the knee in a bent fashion beginning half a cubit above the right side of the right knee’, Tamacha as ‘cutting the end of the right ear, beginning from the left ear and passing it through the nose’, and Guruda Roast as ‘passing the sword into the armpit’: see ‘Report Regarding the Anushilan Samiti Society Established in the Dacca Dist.’, February 1908, NAI, Home Political, Part A, 70/71.

36. Ronit Ricci shows how citations and translations of Arabic words, phrases and terms or even the adoption of the Arabic script by various Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia was a way by which these communities ‘belonged’ to the broader Muslim world: see Ronit Ricci, ‘Citing as a Site: Translation and Circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia’, in ‘Sites of Asian Interaction’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 331–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X11000916.

37. Okakura visited Calcutta in 1902 for almost nine months during which time he travelled to different parts of India, visiting Buddhist sites and writing up a pan-Asian history of Japanese art, which would later be published as The Ideals. While most assume that Okakura’s visit was in search of Tagore, it was in fact Vivekananda that he was actually captivated by. It is through this connection that Okakura and Nivedita were acquainted: see Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006): Prologue.

38. Nivedita, ‘Introduction’, in Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 2nd ed., 1904): ix–xxii; xxi.

39. ‘Swami Vivekananda’s Speeches’, accessed April 5, 2022, https://belurmath.org/swami-vivekananda-speeches-at-the-parliament-of-religions-chicago-1893/.

40. Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 703–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X04001246.

41. O.C. Gangoly, ‘Relation between Indian and Indonesian Culture’, The Journal of the Greater India Society 7, no. 1 (1940): 68–69.

42. Carolien Stolte, ‘Compass Points: Four Indian Cartographies of Asia, c. 1930–55’, in Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration, ed. Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016): 49–74.

43. Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches: 1909–1910, Vol. 8 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, 1997): 26–27.

44. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986): 792–93.

45. Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, 85–86.

46. Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vol. I, ed. Gangadhar Adhikari, M.B. Rao and Mohit Sen (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971): 216–20.

47. For a nuanced exploration of the interconnectedness between Swadeshi politics and spirituality, see Alex Wolfers, ‘Born Like Krishna in the Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo Ghose’, in ‘Writing Revolution in South Asia: History, Practice, Politics in Modern South Asia’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016): 525–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1199253.

48. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993): 6–13.

49. Rabindranath Tagore, The Message of India to Japan: A Lecture (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1916): 16.

50. Amrita Bazar Patrika (April 20, 1905): 5.

51. Bharucha, Another Asia, 71–73.

52. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’, Representations, no. 37 (1992): 27–55; 29, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928653; Peter Heehs, ‘Bengali Religious Nationalism and Communalism’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 1, no. 1 (1997): 117–39; 127–28, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11407-997-0015-8.

53. Manjapra, M.N. Roy, 21.

54. Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017): 3–7.

55. For a comprehensive account of the movement, see Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).

56. Selections from The Mussalman 1906–1908, ed. Bhuiyan Iqbal (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1994): 20.

57. Government of India, Sedition Committee 1918 Report (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1918): 173.

58. Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom: An Autobiographical Narrative (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1959): 7.

59. The Modern Review, 153.

60. Ibid.

61. Faridah Zaman, ‘Beyond Nostalgia: Time and Place in Indian Muslim Politics’, in ‘Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27, no. 4 (2017): 639–45, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186317000335.

62. Islamic Fraternity I, ed. Mohammad Barkatullah and Ahmad Fadli, nos. 5–6 (1910): 110.

63. Samee Siddiqui, ‘Coupled Internationalisms: Charting Muhammad Barkatullah’s Anti-Colonialism and Pan-Islamism’, ReOrient 5, no. 1 (2019): 25–46; 40–41, https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.5.1.0025.

64. Nile Green argues this for the princely state of Hyderabad in ‘Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-Islamic Turn to Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 3 (2013): 611–31, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911813000582.

65. Nabanoor I, no. 7 (October 1903): 282.

66. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, 344.

67. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London: Macmillan & Co., 1951): 225–26.

68. Azad, India Wins Freedom, 5.

69. Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008): 211–12.

70. ‘Proposed Publication of a Contradiction of Assertions Contained in “A Statement of Recent Disturbances in Eastern Bengal” Which was Published in the Newspapers’, Proceedings against the Author of the “Red Pamphlet”, July 1907, NAI, Home Political, 189–92: 6.

71. See Tanika Sarkar, ‘Communal Riots in Bengal’, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, ed. Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2nd ed., 1985): 302–19; 310–11.

72. Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014): 1–37.

73. Anna Della Subin, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (London: Granta Books, 2022): 10.

74. ‘List of Seditious and “Swadhin Bharat” Leaflets in Circulation in Bengal from 1908 to 1918’, in Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939: Vol. IV, ed. Amiya K. Samanta (Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995): 375–518; 383.

75. For an analysis of Chatterjee’s judgement on Muslim rule, see Tanika Sarkar, ‘Imagining a Hindu Nation: Hindu and Muslim in Bankimchandra’s Later Writings’, Economic & Political Weekly 29, no. 39 (1994): 2553–61; 2558.

76. Selections from The Mussalman, 11–12.

77. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1906–1947, Vol. 1, ed. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (Karachi: National Publishing House, 1969): 51.

78. Mushir Hosain Kidwai in (no author), Swadeshi Movement, 289–93.

79. Mujbur Rahman in Swadeshi Movement, 251–55.

80. Minault, Khilafat Movement, 2.

81. Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau, ed., Regionalizing Pan-Islamism: Documents on the Khilafat Movement (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005): 169, 209.

82. For an overview, see Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Revolutionaries, Pan-Islamists and Bolsheviks: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the Political Underworld in Calcutta, 1905–1925’, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, ed. Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2nd ed., 1985): 101–24.

83. In her anonymous letter, ‘A Mohamedan Lady’ wrote of the attitude of Indian Muslims given the present condition of the country. ‘It has taken Bengal a century and a half to realise the truth, force and necessity of self-help…. From this point of view, we are Asiatics against Non-Asiatics and Indians against Asiatics’: see Selections from The Mussalman, 174–75.

84. Zaman similarly notes this of Jawaharlal Nehru’s reading of pan-Islamism in Discovery of India: see Zaman, ‘Beyond Nostalgia’, 631.

85. Swaraj (March 1907).

86. The Modern Review: Monthly Review and Miscellany: Vol. 5, ed. Ramananda Chatterjee (Calcutta: Modern Review Office, 1909): 156.

87. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan & Co., 1917): 97.

88. Ibid., 85.