Is India Part Of

8/6/2019 Is India Part Of

1/24

1 Introduction

` India as a Land of Desire forms an essential element in General History. From the

most ancient time downwards, all nations have directed their wishes and longings

to gaining access to the treasures of this land of marvels, the most costly which the

Earth presents; treasures of Naturepearls, diamonds, perfumes, rose-essences,

elephants, lions, etc.as also treasures of wisdom.''

George Wilhelm Fredrick Hegel The Philosophy of History(quoted in Prasad, 2000, page 1)

Perhaps one of the more significant, yet underexamined, aspects of the rise of econo-

mies along the Pacific Rim of Eurasia is a reconceptualization of Asia in dominant

spatial imaginaries. Over the last two decades, not by design but by the almost

imperceptible logic of circumstance, India has been gradually excised from reigning

conceptions of Asia.(1) The glacially slow progress of economic growth in the subcon-

tinent, compared with the star performers along the Pacific coasts of Asia, resulted in

the exclusion of India from discussions on the wellsprings of rapid growth in the Àsian

miracles' and from the widespread debate on Àsian' values. Its relatively poor exportperformance meant that Indian manufacturers were not viewed as formidable com-

petitors overseas, and as politicians debated on alleged `dumping' practices by South

Korean chaebol (conglomerates), or the use of prison labor in China, India was

benignly ignored. De tente and the erosion of Soviet power greatly reduced the scope

of nonalignment and undermined the prominent role that Indian politicians, especially

Jawaharlal Nehru, had once played on the world stage. In the 1980s and early 1990s,

when the prior elimination of racially discriminatory immigration policies led to an

explosive rise of migrants from East and Southeast Asia to North America and

Australasia, debates on Àsian' migrants were focused almost exclusively on East Asian

Is India part of Asia?

Ravi Arvind PalatDepartment of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton, NY 13902, USA;e-mail: [email protected] 26 March 2001; in revised form 28 January 2002

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2002, volume 20, pages 669 ^ 691

Abstract. In casting Asia as Europe's Òther', it is often assumed that European spatial imaginariesare unproblematically assimilated by the peoples of Asia themselves. In this paper I challenge thisassumption by charting the changing characterization of India, from being virtually synonymous withAsia for centuries to being virtually excluded from the reigning conceptions of Asia. I provide athumbnail sketch of the spatial imaginaries of some of the peoples inhabiting the cartographicquadrant labeled Àsia'. Against this background, I examine how these imaginaries were subvertedby the incorporation of Asia within the capitalist world system. I then chart the impact of modern-ization theories on the newly independent states of the region. I argue that as several major centers ofcapital accumulation emerged in Asia, and capitalism ceased to be a Euro-American narrative, a newconception of Asia emerged in the 1980s. If India's lack of industrial development marginalized it

from these imaginaries, it is suggested that the meltdown of the Asian `miracles' has once againdestabilized hitherto-dominant conceptions of Asia.

DOI:10.1068/d260t

(1) To maintain consistency, Ìndia' is used throughout this paper to refer to the independent statesof Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


2/24

migrants. As Asian Studies programs in Australasia, Europe, and North America

responded to this range of concerns surrounding the rise of East Asian states, interest

in India flagged, except perhaps in the old colonial power. Yet, Britain's historical andcontemporary ties with India were not sufficient to prevent the exclusion of India from

the annual Asia ^ Europe Meeting (ASEM), institutionalized since 1996! (2)

This was astounding because Ìndia' had long been virtually synonymous with Asia

for Europeans. The ancient Greeks who gave us the term Àsia' had thought India was

at the end of the inhabited world (Morris-Suzuki, 1998, page 5). As late as 1523,

Maximilian of Transylvania could write, ``the natives of all unknown countries are

commonly called Indians'' and in the 18th century Abbe Raynal could define the

East Indies as ` all regions beyond the Arabian Sea and the kingdom of Persia''

(quoted in Lach, 1965, page 4). It was this Indiaan Ìndia Major' covering much ofwhat we call Ìndia' today, flanked by an Ìndia Minor' stretching from the north of the

Coromandel Coast to the peninsulas of Southeast Asia, and a `Meridional India'

extending from Ethiopia to Arabia (Le Goff, 1980, pages 195 ^ 196)which contoured

the spatial imaginaries and the political and social aspirations of the medieval West.

` The Indian Ocean, which was believed to be enclosed, was a storehouse of dreams

in which the unsatisfied desires of penniless, repressed Christian Europe worked off

their inhibitions. These were dreams of wealth connected with islands: islands of

precious metals, of rare woods, and of spices ... . Or they were fantastic dreams

peopled with mythical men, and animals, and monsters, or dreams of abundanceand extravagance invented by a poor and limited world. They were dreams of a

different life where taboos were destroyed and where there was liberty in opposition

to the strict morality imposed by the Church. It was a fascinating world of

alimentary aberrations such as coprophagy and cannibalism, of nudism, polygamy,

sexual liberty, and debauchery'' (Le Goff, 1988, page 140).

The imagined and real splendors of this land so dominated European aspirations

that Jacques Le Goff even cast India as the `òneiric horizon'' of the medieval West,

a repository of myths, legends, and dreams where nightmares and raptures jostled

together! ` Impoverished Western Christendom latinitas penuriosa, Alan of Lillecalled itthought the Indian Ocean abounded in riches, was swamped in a flood of

luxury'' (page 196).

Even if the Mongol invasions finally impressed on the European mind that Cathay

was a distinct civilizational entity, Donald Lach (1965, pages 4, 47) suggests, India

seemed more fabulous to Europeans because it was better known than China. Put

another way, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have forever been cursed with

the legacy of being called Ìndians' because neither Cathay nor any of its cognates

Seres, Serica, Sinica, and other less familiar termswere ever used as a synonym for

the Èast'. After Vasco da Gama pricked this `òneiric horizon'', and European famil-iarity with the geography of the Èast' increased (Lewis and Wigen, 1997, pages 55 ^ 68),

India continued to retain its central position in the ensuing redefinitions of Asia.

Despite the virtual identity between India and Asia, India itself was an amorphous

entity, a geographical abstraction rather than a concrete sociopolitical reality: until the

British named their colony in South Asia as its Indian Empire, no jurisdictional entity

bore the name Ìndia'. Even if outsiders may have perceived a civilizational unity, it is

unlikely that the Tamil felt an affinity to the Pathan, or the Bengali to the Maratta.

(2) At its inaugural meeting in Bangkok in March 1996, ASEM consisted of ten Asian statesBruneiDarussalam, China, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,Thailand, and Vietnam the fifteen member states of the European UnionAustria, Belgium,Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal,Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdomand the President of the European Commission.

670 R A Palat


3/24

Like its synonym, Àsia' was also a geographical expression and whereas no one

posited a shared civilizational unity for the societies between Japan and Afghanistan

the practice of treating Asia as a unitary entity analogous to Europe persists becauseEuropean identity is premised on it:

` the idea of Europe, as of the West generally, has come into being as an adverse one,

so to affirm a subject European `we' (by contrast with a sub-regional subject within

Europe) has meant opposing a non-European `they' that in historical perspective is

equated with Asia. Our modern Àsia' is perpetuated not for science but on behalf

of those strata whose care is to maintain the ideal of western civilization and who

benefit from its sacred myths of individualism, private property and aggressive

defence of liberty'' (March, 1974, page 35, emphasis in the original).

If the concept of a despotic Orient was central to the self-definition of a Europeansubject, in a Sinocentric world, civilization ``was one and inclusive, distinguishable only

from barbarism, and to be civilised was to participate in the Chinese high tradition''.

Drawing an analogy with Samuel Johnson's objection to the adoption of the French

word civilization' because it was synonymous with civility' and hence superfluous,

Wang Gungwu (1991, pages 145 ^ 164) concurs that, instead of an irremediable òther-

ness' characterizing the foreign, the significant distinction in traditional China was

between elites who subscribed to the moral precepts of `Han Confucianism' and

those, including other Han Chinese, who did not. Similarly, Wilhelm Halbfass (1988,

page 187) underscores the contrast between the Hellenic concept of the `barbarian' andthe Sanskritic concept of mleccha. Unlike the barbarians who helped the Greeks to

identify themselves, the mlecchas in dominant philosophical conceptions did not

possess an ` òtherness' against which one's own identity could be asserted'':

` Classical Hindu thought has developed an extraordinary wealth of schemes and

methods of religious and philosophical subordination and coordination, of inclu-

sion, hierarchization and concordance of world-views. But in this process, it has

developed a complex, internally differentiated framework of orientation, a kind of

immanent universe of thought, in which the contrast of the ìndigenous' and the

`foreign,' of identity and otherness, seems a priori superseded, and which is socomprehensive in itself that it is not conducive to any serious involvement with

what is different and apart from it i.e., the òther' in its otherness.''

And in the Japanese tripartite view of the worldTenjiku (India), Kara (China),

and Honcho (Japan)Japan was placed not at the center ` but at the end of a

geographical succession which moved from the exotic and the sacred (represented

by `Tenjiku') to the mundane and secular (represented by `Honcho ')'' (Morris-Suzuki,

1998, page 6). As these instances suggest, the persistence of the `medieval conceit' of

Asia stems from the fact that whereas reigning conceptions in European thought

posited that there were two ways to be civilizedthe European way being defined asthe negation of Asiadominant strands of thought in eastern Eurasia defined

civilization solely as participation in their own high traditions.

If the construction of Asia' is a European artifice, it follows that it is not an

ideologically inert or politically neutral term. All too often it is simply assumed that

peoples elsewhere on the globe unproblematically assimilated the imaginative geogra-

phies generated by what Martin Heidegger and others have called ` the complete

Europeanization of the earth and of mankind'' (see Halbfass, 1988, pages 167 ^ 168).

The exclusion of India from reigning contemporary imaginaries of Asia cannot be

located merely by retracing the history of the making of Asia in the imaginativegeography of Europe because Asia continues to be Europe's civilizational Òther',

as revealed by debates on Àsian values'. Accordingly, instead of assuming that peoples

elsewhere on the globe simply adopted the imaginative geographies generated by a

Is India part of Asia? 671


4/24

European-centered capitalism, I begin by discussing the spatial imaginaries of the

peoples inhabiting the cartographic quadrant that the Europeans called Àsia'. This is

largely an unfamiliar story, as we tend to accept Eurocentric definitions of geoculturalregions as natural and self-evident. Thus, we continue to view Asia as segmented into

relatively watertight compartments designated as `South', `Southeast', and Èast' Asia

though these terms gained widespread currency only after the end of the Second World

War and represented geopolitical realities of the Cold War rather than socioculturally

coherent, and timeless, entities. Interactions between peoples living in these zones

and between them and other compartments labeled `Middle East' and Africa' are

minimized despite the historical and contemporary significance of these linkages.

Hence, in section 2 I seek to sketch in broad strokes some aspects of the spatial

imaginaries of some of the peoples of Asia' prior to the Vasco da Gama epoch,and then to examine the sociopolitical consequences of their subversion by new

European-inspired spatial imaginaries. The more accurate inscription of Asia on

maps did not, however, entail the epistemic constitution of the continent for its

inhabitants. In sketching the uneven and discontinuous incorporation of Asia into

the capitalist world-economy, I argue, in section 3, that only some cultural amphib-

iansa bilingual intelligentsia schooled in European imaginariesconceptualized

the continent as a civilizational entity. More insidiously, a Japanese reconstruction

of the Orient legitimated an essay in colonialism with Kanji characters.

Above all, the Japanese colonization of Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, andJapan's wartime occupation of much of China and Southeast Asia under the banner

of the `Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere', signifies that Asia is not a politically

innocent term and that representations of it are ideologically charged. Accordingly, in

section 4 I examine the ideological imperatives of Cold War, which not only led to the

constitution of Asian Studies as an academic enterprise but also ensured that a

comparison between a `democratic India' and a `socialist China' be an organizing

thematic with the field. This trans-Himalayan comparison was framed squarely within

the dominant modernization perspective and its focus was on charting multiple paths

to a singular modernity. Ipso facto, despite the constitution of Asian Studies, therewere no claims to a shared Asian cultural legacy. The projection of Asia as a culturally

coherent entity was possible, I argue, only with the emergence of major centers of

accumulation along the Pacific coasts of Eurasia. In section 5 I sketch how regional

elites cloaked their distinct contributions to the narrative of capitalism in Confucian

robes, and how the excision of Indiaand the rich Islamic traditions of Ìnner Asia'

from a new spatial imaginary of Asia was an integral part of this ideological project.

In turn, the meltdown of Asia's miracle economies has once more exposed the arbitrari-

ness of Asia as a geocultural construct, as we see in section 6. Simply put, the shifting

fortunes of Indiametamorphosing from being virtually synonymous with Asia' for theEuropeans to being virtually excluded from reigning conceptions of Asia'elegantly

chart underlying structural changes in the sociospatial patterns of capital accumulation.

2 A different horizon of meaning

Bronzed and weather-beaten as they were after months at sea, the first Portuguese who

stepped ashore on the island of Tanegashima in southwestern Japan in 1543 were

greeted as Tenjikujin or `men of Inde', just as they had been greeted earlier by the

Burmese and the Malays (Reid, 1994, pages 275 ^ 276; Toby, 1994, pages 327 ^ 328). If it

seems deliciously ironic that the first Iberians to make landfall on the eastern extrem-ities of Eurasia were mistaken for Indians just as other Iberians were `discovering'

Indians in the Americas, it was less comical than Marco Polo mistaking a rhinoceros

in Java for a particularly ugly unicorn! Confronted by an animal he had never imagined,

672 R A Palat


5/24

Polo identified it as a unicorn, Umberto Eco (1999, pages 57 ^ 59) suggests, because that

was the only quadruped with a single horn in his cultural encyclopedia. Analogously,

people at both ends of Eurasia could identify strange outsiders as Indians not onlybecause of India's central location, symbolically if not geographically, within the

bicontinental arena but also because `India' was an abstraction which did not corre-

spond to any concrete political entity until the creation of the British Indian Empire.

The common ascription of Indians as `foreigners' suggests that Asia and Europe,

rather than being two distinct geocultural zones, formed part of a single arena within

which trade and travel took place. This is perhaps most vividly depicted by the

extraordinary Korean world map of 1402, the Honil kangni yoktae kukto chi to (Map

of integrated lands and regions of historical countries and capitals, or Kangnido for

short).(3)

Predating all extant Chinese and Japanese world maps, the Kangnidopresents a clearly recognizable outline of Africa, Arabia, and Europe even though it

submerged the South Asian subcontinent within China (Ledyard, 1994, pages 244 ^ 245;

Pearson, 1987, page 12; Yi, 1984: page 81).

The combination of astonishing accuracy with astonishing ignorance in the

Kangnido is a persistent theme in early reports of faraway lands and points to

an uneven distribution of local knowledges.(4) A clue to deciphering the resulting

horizon of meaning may lie in the coastal maps drawn according to Chinese carto-

graphic protocols. Codified in the early Christian era, these maps represented coasts

in a horizontal direction lying from right to left regardless of their true direction(Mills, 1953, page 151). A typical illustration was the Thonburi version of the

18th-century Traiphum manuscript from Thailand. Though it purported to depict

the coast from Korea to Arabia, the coasts were all placed at the bottom of the

map and the seas at the top! None of the maps from East, South, or Southeast Asia

were drawn to scale, though more familiar locations were more accurately repre-

sented than more distant locations as mapmakers who produced the charts obtained

their information from a variety of sources rather than from direct experience of the

coasts.(5) Nor was there any attempt to situate pieces of the earth's surface depicted

on these maps on the globe through the coordinates of latitude and longitude(Schwartzberg, 1992, page 326; 1994; Thongchai Winichakul, 1994, pages 29 ^ 30).

What is striking about these crude coastal maps is that, though they plotted points

along the seaboard and provided serviceable guides to distances between them through

notations, they provided little information about the relations between land and the sea

(Thongchai Winichakul, 1994, page 32).(6) This bifurcation emphasized the subordination

of trade to agriculture in the twin anchors of eastern Eurasiapeninsular India and

southern Chinaand was directly related to the expansion of wet-rice cultivation in

(3)

For a reproduction of a 1470 copy of this map, see http://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl/Korean Map.htm.(4) Though Europeans had some knowledge of Indian religionsda Gama was met in Calicut bythe two Castilian-speaking and Genoese-speaking Tunisian Arabsda Gama and his companionsreportedly worshipped at a Hindu temple, mistaking it for a Christian church. From the otherextremity of the Eurasian landmass, even after his seventh visit to Calicut, Admiral Zheng Hebelieved that India was the birthplace not only of Buddhism but also of Christianity and Islam(Levathes, 1994, pages 170 ^ 171; Pearson, 1987, page 12).(5) Until the late-19th century there were no professional cartographers in China (Smith, 1998,page 58).(6) Drawing on a saying by the 3rd-century philosopher, Wang Bi, who noted that ``Image is whatbrings out meaning; word is what clarifies image'', Richard Smith (1998, page 60) suggests that thewritten word more than the visual image remained the primary source of representational author-ity in China. This, however, fossilizes the Chinese tradition as if there were no changes in theintervening centuries that could have led to a change in attitudes. In fact, it is precisely thisapparent historical immobility that has to be explained!

http://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl/Korean_Map.htmhttp://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl/Korean_Map.htmhttp://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl/Korean_Map.htmhttp://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl/Korean_Map.htmhttp://www.henny-savenije.demon.nl/Korean_Map.htm


6/24

these areas. As the seed-to-yield ratios of lands under wet-rice cultivation were at least

twenty-five (and possibly a hundred) times greater than those under wheat, barley, or

rye cultivation, it permitted the extraction of larger magnitudes of surplus (see Bray,1983; Palat, 1995). Accordingly, unlike European princelings, Indian and Chinese

monarchs were not reliant on urban patriciates to wage war or to suppress local

rebellions and were not obliged to enforce laws or promote activities favorable to

an emergent bourgeoisie. The insular outlook generated by these conditions was

particularly pronounced in the subcontinent, where an early-16th-century sultan of

Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, reportedly told a delegation of merchants complaining about

Portuguese harassment on the high seas that ` wars by sea are merchants' affairs, and of

no concern to the prestige of kings'' (Boxer, 1977, page 50). And just as subcontinental

rulers claimed the title of chakravartin or world conqueror, the Chinese emperorscalled their empire the Middle Kingdom, poised halfway between heaven and earth.

The contrast between these conceptions of universal rule and the transition from

parcelized sovereignty to the creation of compact autonomous domains in Europe

could not have been more pronounced. The shift from the feudal spatial code

of medieval Christendom to the capitalist spatiality of Western Europe and the

dominance of the logic of accumulation was accomplished by wars for the control

over areas of profitable investments with the wars themselvesthe Hundred Years'

War, the Italian wars, the Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War, the French wars

against the Dutch and the Holy Roman Empirebeing highly profitable means ofinvestment. The concept of sovereignty, enforced by arms, enabled the monarchical

European state to assert itself against the Church and the feudal lords and indeed to

fetishize space (Lefebvre, 1991, pages 275 ^ 282).

Unlike the transition to territorially compact states in Europe, conceptions of

universal rule in China or the subcontinent were based on ideological claims rather

than on actual political control. Gift-giving and tribute missions, bestowal of honors,

and exchange of women between superior and inferior rulers, or between those of

comparable standing, denoted the relative status of donor and recipient rather than

an unambiguous lexical ordering of power. The Chinese tributary system, thoughcloaked in grandiose language, was an intricate system to govern relationships between

those who sought contact with the emperor, and it never denoted territorial ambitions

on the part of Chinese dynasties (Wang Gungwu, 1999, page 65). ``Despite the ideo-

logical conventions of claiming to be at the zenith of the world'', Thongchai Winichakul

(2000, page 533) observes, ` all kings in the region realized their positions as one among

many kings of various positions in the hierarchies''.

The dispatch of tributary missions did not denote an unambiguously hierarchical

conception of sovereignty. Even after the Satsuma clan conquered the Ryukyu king-

dom in 1609, the Ryukyus formally remained a kingdom and continued its tributaryrelationship with China. Further south, while the Siamese king exercised suzerain

powers over his tributaries, they recognized that the Burmese monarch also

exercised similar powers, sometimes over the same tributaries (Hanazaki Kohei,

1996; Thongchai Winichakul, 2000, page 533). Although the Japanese and the

Vietnamese considered themselves to be `eastern' and `southern', respectively, in

relation to a Sinocentric world order (Hay, 1970, page 2; Lewis and Wigen, 1997,

page 236; Reid, 1994, page 268), this did not necessarily imply that the Chinese

emperor could arbitrate local politics. The power of a ruler generally faded as

one moved from the center to the marcher regions. Likewise, Admiral Zheng He'scelebrated expeditionary voyages did not lead subcontinental rulers to similarly

acknowledge Chinese suzerainty. In fact, the peoples of the subcontinent were so

insular that Halbfass (1988, page 182) notes that

674 R A Palat


7/24


8/24

under the influence of European cartography between 1584 and 1842. In the immediate

aftermath of the Opium War, Wei Yuan noted that India is in Asia, in his influential

world geography of 1844, but continued to use the prevailing scheme of classifyingcountries by seas.When Hsu Chi-Yu published his Ying-huan chih-lueh (A short account

of the maritime circuit) in 1848, he was accused of being seduced by barbarians and

was driven from office for more than a decade. Traditional spatial imaginaries were

decisively displaced only after armies of European surveyors and engineers swarmed

over the Qing Empire and brought the Middle Kingdom down to earth as one

territorial jurisdiction among many others. Even then, when yaxiya was introduced

as a classification in Xu Jiyu's world geography, he noted that Asia was the new name

for `Turkey Minor', suggesting that it remained of little epistemological consequence.

As compilations of European treatises that had earlier been translated into Chinese,many of the original ideas were subtly changed by the Chinese syntax and characters

(Drake, 1975; Karl, 1998, pages 1100 ^ 1101; Mills, 1953, page 152).

Encounters with the Iberians had a far greater impact on the Japanese as, with

some exceptions, Japanese encounters with the Òther' had occurred mainly overseas:

by traders or Buddhist monks going to China, or Japanese military expeditions

going to Korea. Until the arrival of the Portuguese during the reign of Emperor

Gonara-no-in (reigned 1525 ^ 57), Japanese iconographies had always portrayed

foreigners in foreign settings. Consequently, they were unprepared to `discover' the

Portuguese in the way that the Portuguese had been prepared by centuries of denselyknit Orientalist discourse to `discover' the Japanese (Toby, 1994, page 330). Neverthe-

less, the encounter so broadened Japanese geographical imaginaries that, by 1592, the

military overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi was even dreaming of conquering India after

subjugating Korea and China and his plans to conquer the Philippines sent the

Spaniards in Manila into a panic (see Kuno, 1967, pages 314, 320; Massarella, 1996,

page 137)!

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, increasing familiarity with Chinese and

European spatial imaginaries led to a shift in Japanese conceptions of the world. The

earlier triptych of Tenjiku ^ Kara ^ Honcho was replaced by a vision of the world as aseries of concentric rings of progressive foreignness. Surrounding Japan were the

`foreign countries' (ikoku), where people ate with chopsticks and wrote vertically

China, Tongking, Korea, and Cochin China. Beyond that were the òuter barbarians'

(gai-i), where people ate with their hands and wrote horizontally: Bengal, Holland,

Java, Luzon, Siam, and more exotic places like the `Land of the Bird People' and `Land

of the Creatures with Six Legs and Four Wings'. Whereas the scholar-bureaucrat Arai

Hakuseki was reputedly the first Japanese to use Ajia or Àsia' in 1708, a hundred years

later textbooks were still painstakingly instructing their readers on how the world was

divided into five Great Regions (taishu)Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, andSouth America (Morris-Suzuki, 1996, page 83; 1998, pages 6 ^ 7).

In this context, the establishment of direct navigational links between the Atlantic

coasts of Eurasia and its Indian Ocean and Pacific coasts was significant for three

reasons. First, precisely because representations of Asia' had been intimately con-

nected to European conceptions of the Self since Hellenic antiquity, Asians did not

pose problems of accommodation in the European intellectual universe, unlike the

peoples of the Americas (Massarella, 1996, pages 142 ^ 143). Second, if the balance

of power between European interlopers and the large agrarian-commercial empires

remained unchanged,(8)

the volume and quality of information about easternlands reaching Europe underwent a sea change. Whereas, earlier reports had almost

(8) I owe the formulation àgrarian-commercial empires' to Mark Selden (personal communication).

676 R A Palat


9/24

exclusively consisted of reports by a few inveterate travelers or missionaries, by the late

16th and 17th centuries there were voluminous reports from embassies and legations.

Often characterized by meticulous attention to detail, they expanded the horizons ofEuropean knowledge as Ìndia' ceased to be a synonym for the Òrient'. And as Le Goff

(1980, page 191) usefully reminds us, medieval Europeans ``were always ready to listen

and believe what they were told'', unlike the men of the Renaissance who evaluated

their sources more critically. Nevertheless, the Èast' itself remained amorphous, some-

times including the Islamic World, and at other times excluding it. As late as 1924, in

his book titled The Occident and the Orient, Valentine Chirol included only the Arabs,

the Turks, and the Indians in the category of the Orient (Lewis and Wigen, 1997,

page 54). No matter how essayists and philosophers conceptualized Asia', realities

on the ground compelled diplomats, soldiers, and merchants to treat Àsia' not as amonolithic sociospatial entity but as a complex and diverse collection of social forma-

tions. This diversity is aptly captured by A K Ramanujan's analogy to explain the

diversity of the subcontinent:

` One way of defining diversity for India is to say what the Irishman is said to have

said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or plural, he said,

`Singular at the top and plural at the bottom''' (quoted in Khilnani, 1999, page 6).

So it was, and remains, the case with Asia. Third, though the European entry into the

warm waters of the `southern ocean' accompanied, and contributed to, an expansion of

intra-Asian tradePortuguese shipping ``was merely one thread in the existing warpand woof'' of the entrepo t trade as Charles Boxer (1977, page 49) observedthere is

no evidence that it substantially increased the awareness among the peoples of eastern

and southern Eurasia of each other's societies.

3 A European Asia

Eventually, of course, the balance of power shifted inexorably towards European

powers and we need not rehearse here the conditions that led to the British victory

in the Battle of Plassey or to the defeat of the Qing imperial forces in the Opium Wars

or to the opening of Japanese markets by Commodore Perry's `black ships'. OnceEuropean superiority had been established over the large agrarian-commercial empires

of the Èast', the Orientalist discourse began to take its distinctive tone of authorizing

domination over the East. In material terms it was manifested in the geography of

conquest as armies of cartographers mapped and inscribed their power on alien lands.

The map in fact symbolized possession as it suggests that ``those with the capacity to

make such perfect representations must also have the right of territorial control''

(McClintock, 1995, page 28; see also Edney, 1997; Mills, 1953).

Though the filling-in-the-blanks on mapsor the substitution of topographical

detail for the dragons, unicorns, and cherubs that had decorated uncharted spaces inmedieval European mapsmade it possible to represent Asia less fancifully, there

was little consciousness of shared affinities among those who peopled these spaces.

On the contrary, European conquest of large territories and their assimilation into

rival imperial trading blocs severed preexisting linkages of great antiquity amongst

colonized populations. As a result of the European scramble for Southeast Asia,

J O H Boeke noted, the Netherlands East Indies, British Malaya, French Indo-

China, and the American Philippines were ``facing the world with their backs to

one another'' (quoted in Dixon, 1991, page 121). Similarly, Burma was administered

as a part of the British Indian Empire until 1935 and no roads linked it to Thailandand the Malay states.

As comparatively few Europeans were resident in their Asian colonies, the colo-

nial enterprise was largely staffed by collaboratorseither natives or migrants from



10/24

third countries. For most colonial subjects in Asia, who never directly encountered a

European, colonization did not signify the civilizational encounter that it did in

metropolitan literature, and colonial exploitation did not sublimate other forms ofoppressionJapanese colonialism in Korea and Taiwan was of course a different

matter altogether. In the twelve years before Indian independence, at the very height

of the nationalist movement, Aijaz Ahmad (1994) says, there was not a single novel

in Urdu in which the ``civilizational encounter between the English and the Indian

has the same primacy, as for example, in Forster's A Passage to India or Paul Scott's

The Raj Quartet ''. Though anticolonialism was an important theme, it was never the

dominant motif in these novels, which were primarily ``about other things: the

barbarity of feudal landowners, the rapes and murders in the houses of religious

`mystics,' the stranglehold of moneylenders upon the lives of peasants and thelower petty bourgeoisie, the social and sexual frustrations of schoolgirls, and so on''

(page 118).

What is particularly striking in Ahmad's insightful analysis is that in this sub-

stitution of the routine brutalities of everyday life for the grand opposition between

East and West, there is none of the jousting between the local, the national, and the

supranational that is so marked a characteristic of the evolution of the European

novel (compare Moretti, 1998, pages 53 ^ 57). The preference of the Urdu novel for

the `well-known reality' of the local is perhaps an apt metaphor for the fragmented

and localized character of structures of power and privilege in large multiethnic andmultilingual colonies where a national consciousness was forged only among a bilin-

gual intelligentsia assimilated into the colonial project as a comprador bourgeoisie,

lower-echelon administrators, professionals, and skilled technicians.

In these colonies, a bilingual intelligentsia was able to consolidate itself as an

` imagined community'' precisely because they shared a common cultural formation

through their participation in similar educational and bureaucratic pilgrimages, through

increasingly select provincial, colonial, and metropolitan academies and through admin-

istrative circuits of postings, specialized cadres, and disciplinary cultures (Anderson,

1991, pages 113 ^ 140). Yet, in the absence of a complex grid of translations, commen-taries, and annotations, their bilingual formation implied that their awareness of

other cultural formations, within these colonies themselves and elsewhere in the world,

was mediated through `European languages-of-state': a Bengali could access informa-

tion about Kerala or a Malay about Indonesia or Japan only through English. It was

not therefore surprising that notions of a shared Asian civilization were most readily

imbibed by intellectuals in societies most influenced by the WestIndia and Japan.(9)

However, with the uneven impact of European domination, and the disarticulation

of precolonial linkages as Europe's colonies in Asia and the few remaining indepen-

dent states ``face[d] the world with their backs to one another'', pan-Asianism hadlimited appeal to the bilingual elite. Even as they began to consolidate themselves as

a counterelite by creating a distinct national identity, when confronted by the institu-

tional racism inherent in colonial formations, the nationalist intelligentsia typically

tried to submerge class, ethnic, and gender differences to the primacy of the nationalist

struggle. If there was a recognition of similarities between Western incursions into

their own countries and into other countries, as in the anti-imperialist vision of Sun

Zhongshan (Sun Yat-Sen), pan-Asianism was nevertheless subordinated to the project

of national liberation (see Duara, 1997).

(9) In 1921, some 2.4 million Indians out of a total literate population of 19.3 million could read andwrite English. Ten years later the percentage of those who were literate in English had increasedfrom 12.5% of the literate population to 14.8% (Hay, 1970, page 247).

678 R A Palat


11/24

There were three significant exceptions to this broad tendency. First, there were

those like Rabindranath Tagore, who grew increasingly disillusioned with Indian

nationalism, which he viewed as a contaminated Western import. By extolling nativespirituality over European materialism, Tagore and many Indian artists sought to claim

a cultural superiority over the West. As Partha Mitter (1994) notes in his study of the

interplay of colonialism and nationalism in Indian art, artists were not drawn into a

revolutionary crucible in India because nationalism was a political movement seeking

the transfer of power to an indigenous bourgeoisie rather than a social revolution,

unlike the case with Mexico. Tagore, in fact, even advocated a partnership between a

spiritual India and a political Britain. If Tagore, influenced by Okakura Kazuko,

looked eastwards to China and Japan for a shared Asian spirituality, his contempo-

rary, the Bengali poet Nazrul Islam, conceptualized an Asia which stretched from theIslamic world to China (see Hay, 1970).

Far more interesting intellectually was a second strand, which located a solution

to the common problems of the people of the region in a united struggle against

imperialism. This is depicted most poignantly in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's extra-

ordinary Buru Quartet. As a fictionalization of the career of a pioneer Indonesian

nationalist, Tirtoadisuryo, in the titles of the first two booksThis Earth of Mankind,

and Child of All NationsPramoedya emphasized that ```this earth' of Indonesia is

for all those who love it, not merely its passport-carrying citizens, and that the heroic

originator of Indonesian nationalism was the heir of emancipatory nationalism inevery country'' (Anderson, 1998, page 292; see also Liu, 2000). Chinese intellectuals

also recognized parallels between Western incursions into China and similar incur-

sions elsewherewhat Liang Qichao analyzed in a 1901 essay facetiously titled

`Òn the new rules for destroying countries''and stressed solidarity with the other

victims of Western imperialism through the concept of tongzhong (`same kind/race').

Rather than signifying a narrow particularity, tongzhong was an expansive noun,

including not only Filipinos, Vietnamese, and Koreans, but also the Poles, Afrikaners,

Turks, Cubans, Indians, and Hawaiians (Karl, 1998). Yet, the very amorphousness of

the concept and the diversity of the concrete conditions of struggle meant that thismore radical interpretation of Asia remained a marginal strand.

At least in the short run, far more puissant, was a third, Japanese-inspired

imaginary. When European powers had been preoccupied with òpening up' China,

the Japanese elite had used their rare breathing space to construct an answering

Orientalism by formulating the concept of toyoshi (Oriental history). Toyo (literally

èastern seas', but usually translated as `the Orient') was fabricated to reappropriate

the Orient as Japan's origin, akin to the European reappropriation of Egypt

and the `Near East' as the origins of their civilization. Discursively, to yo shi signified

a shift from the imaginary of a centripetal Sinocentric world order to a world offormally equal states in which Japan was accorded primacy because of its capacity

to domesticate Western technology. In this formulation, China was seen as a

civilization rather than as a state, and Naito Konan, a Kyoto Imperial University

historian, argued that Japanese invasion of China would resuscitate a dilapidated

social order just as earlier invasions had rejuvenated China. Similarly, a civilization-

ally appropriate metaphor of filial piety served to suggest that the relationship

between Japan and its colonies in Korea, Taiwan, and China was not exploitative

and oppressive but reciprocal and complementary. The family metaphor had the

additional advantage of justifying the vertical and asymmetrical form of theserelations (Duus, 1995, pages 397 ^ 423; Koschmann, 1997, page 86; Miwa, 1990, page 136;

Palais, 1995, pages 409 ^ 425; Palat, 1999a, pages 12 ^ 16; Tanaka, 1995, pages 12 ^ 13,

107 ^ 108, 115 ^ 116). If late 19th-century and early-20th-century formulations of to yo shi



12/24

provided ideological justifications for Japanese imperialism, its echoes resonate even

today in the work of Kawakatsu Heita, who attributes Meiji Japan's industrial accom-

plishments to its ``escape from Asia'' (Lee, 1999).(10)

Significantly, too, as the intent ofJapanese Orientalism was to renegotiate Japan's reentry into a Eurocentric world from

a position of perceived inferiority, to yo shi was confined to areas not colonized by the

EuropeansChina, Korea, and Inner Asia! Eventually, of course, the coercive nature

of Japanese pan-Asianism consumed both Japan and the territories occupied by its

imperial forces during the Second World War.

In short, though the subordination of the large agrarian empires of Eurasia to the

drives of the capitalist world-economy denoted a shift in `planetary consciousness', to

employ Mary Louise Pratt's nice phrase, this shift was largely confined to a small

bilingual elite. The fragmented nature of localized structures of power, and the unevenimpact of capitalist incorporation dictated that, although textbooks may have adopted

the continental classification of space, there was little to suggest that it had acquired a

deep epistemological meaning for the inhabitants of the region.

4 A US Orient

Asia had remained little more than a geographical expression until the Second World

War, fragmented as it was into several bailiwicks controlled by Euro-American

powers and Japan. After the hostilities the rise of the United States to global

hegemony transformed the parameters of research and study on Asia. With limitedexperience with the peoples of this quandrant except for the Filipinos, policymakers

in the new hegemonic power created multidisciplinary assemblages of scholars of the

several Asian countries to provide them with a holistic and integrated perspective.

Although the plurality of cultural traditions and sociopolitical formations precluded

any attempt to treat Asia as an internally coherent unit, the institutionalization of

these programs of study in universities tended to reify subregional units such as

`South Asia' or `Southeast Asia' and consequently obscured the relations between

peoples within these new-fangled classifications (Liu, 2000; Palat, 1996a; 1999a).

Even if the remapping of the world entailed by the institutionalizing of area-studiesprograms distorted the internal structuring of units of analysisby separating the

study of the Islamic Middle East from that of South and Southeast Asia, for

instanceIndia continued to feature prominently in Asian Studies. But this promi-

nence did not stem from any claims to its centrality in region formation. In fact, it is

striking that the formation of area-studies programs appears to have had an inverse

relation to US attempts to promote regional integration, as demonstrated by the

contrasting patterns of postwar reconstruction in Asia and Western Europe. US

support for European political and economic integration stemmed from two impera-

tives: the need to redistribute liquidity that had become concentrated in the UnitedStates during the hostilities to enable its European allies to finance their trade with the

dollar and sterling areas; and the need to facilitate the transnational expansion of US

enterprises to Western Europe. Many influential European policymakers also advocated

greater integration as the best way to curb the dangerous tendencies of German

nationalism that had plunged Europe into two major wars within a generation. More

importantly, an integrated European market could reap considerable economies of scale

and help their enterprises become competitive with US companies in world markets.

Simultaneously, the unification of their narrow fragmented marketseach with its own

technical requirements and standardswould facilitate US investments and was hence

(10) Meiji Japan refers to post-1868 Japan.

680 R A Palat


13/24

welcomed by labor movements (McCormick, 1989, pages 53 ^ 58, 73 ^ 81; Palat, 1999a,

pages 18 ^ 19; van der Wee, 1986, pages 353 ^ 355).

There were no correlates to these conditions in the eastern theatre of the Cold War.Whereas reconstruction in Western Europe could be expected to create a rough parity

between Britain, France, and West Germany, for the United States a revived Japan had

no obvious counterweight in Asia especially after the victory of the Chinese Commu-

nist Party in 1949. Recent memories of brutal Japanese occupation from Korea to

Burma fed nationalist fires and were not conducive to greater political and economic

integration. The impoverished masses in these countries also did not offer an enticing

market to US enterprise. Consequently, as the United States pumped military and

economic aid to its allies, bilateral linkages between the hegemonic power and its

allies on the Pacific coasts of Asia were created, in contrast to the multilateralism ofthe European theatre. If US military expenditures during the Korean War underwrote

Japanese industrial reconstruction and its transformation into an export platform,

South Korea and Taiwan, like India, Indonesia, and other newly independent states

pursued vigorous import-substituting industrialization programs (see Palat, 1996a).

The pursuit of autarchic national economy-making policies meant that the

decolonized states continued ``facing the world with their backs to one another'',

just as they had before the Second World War. Regardless of ideological stance,

economic and political elites subscribed to the narratives of Westernized modernity

as neatly encapsulated by Milton Singer's (1980) aptly titled book on India, When aGreat Tradition Modernizes. It was this wholesale adoption of Westernized modernity

that moved a disgruntled nationalist to lament that the constitution of India repre-

sented the rude cacophony of an English band rather than the sublime melodies of

the veena and the sitar (see Khilnani, 1999, page 33). In tracing their varied paths to

modernity, the focus was not on recovering a shared civilizational unity among Asian

states but on whether capitalism or socialism was more appropriate for rapid

and sustained economic growth. The adoption of contrasting models of industriali-

zation by India and China, their size and the depth of scholarship on them, meant

that they were obvious candidates for comparative studies (Byres and Nolan, 1976;Moore, 1966).

Unsurprisingly, this trans-Himalayan comparison was the exception rather than the

rule and the predominant tendency was to compare patterns of economic growth in

individual states to an idealized Euro-American model. Paralleling autarchic national

economy-making, a highly diversified linguistic environment undermined Asian

Studies' promise of a comprehensive perspective on the geocultural region. Unlike

pioneer scholars, often missionaries and colonial bureaucrats, who had acquired a

deep familiarity with local languages and customs through a lifelong association with

their area of study, a shift in the site of knowledge production to metropolitanuniversities meant that most scholars had a far more circumscribed command of local

languages and value systems (Anderson, 1992). The absence of a complex traffic in

translations, commentaries, and annotations also meant that an apparatus of compar-

ative study of Asian societies was poorly developed (Ahmad, 1994, pages 92, 262 ^ 263).

These conditions led towards idiographic, microlevel studies rather than more catholic

and synthetic analyses, and the enclosed, self-referential nature of country-level and

microlevel studies in Asia reinforced tendencies towards national and subnational

exceptionalisms (Palat, 1996a). In each case, the `essence' of each region or subregion

was reduced to a few simple Orientalist axioms `Confucianism' for East Asiancultures, the caste system for India in which the voices, values, and beliefs of

women, subordinate social groups, ethnic minorities, and the working class were

summarily excluded.



14/24

Ironically, a plethora of studies had undermined these seeming verities. Whereas

East Asian societies are routinely presented as having a degree of ethnic homogeneity,

historians of Japan have traced the diverse ethnic origin of the allegedly homogenousNihonjinron (Amino Yoshihiko, 1992; Wigen, 1999). When ethnicity is seen as socially

constructed rather than genetically determined, studies have demonstrated that claims

of an overwhelmingly Han identity in China conceal a variety of significant ethnic

distinctions (Honig, 1996). Several studies of the caste system in India have indicated

that, far from being a traditional form of social stratification, colonial rule gave a fixity

to these inegalitarian structures of power and privilege that they had never had before

the incorporation of India into the capitalist world-system (see Ahmad, 1991; Dirks,

1987; 1992). If this cursory survey of some recent research suggests that traditions and

cultures are not to be seen as representations of some transhistorical primordialessence, the absence of a truly comparative framework has meant that these findings

continue to be discussed and debated in narrow self-referential compartments and

rarely intrude into contemporary political debates on Asian values' or models of

development.

As modernity was axiomatically equated with Westernization, the dominant trend

was to look for convergences with the Euro-American model (Garon, 1994; Ong, 1999,

page 251, note 9; Palat, 2000). Cast as exceptions to the rule, detailed investigations of

patterns of social transformation in the several states within Asia did not lead to a

broadening of the categories of the nomothetic social sciences. Despite detailed studiestracing the importance of elite bureaucracies in the economic successes of the `miracle'

economies of Asia, mainstream economists routinely attribute the high rates of growth

attained by Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan to their laissez-faire policies (Johnson,

1988)! More recently, as the high-performing Asian economies crashed in 1997, most

analysts saw their high debt-to-equity ratios as the root cause of the crisis. Yet, this

begs the question of how these economies could have competed in some of the most

technologically sophisticated and exacting markets if they had merely relied on

retained profits and equity markets for capital (see Wade and Veneroso, 1998). But

that is another story.In short, despite decolonization and the respatialization of the globe after the

Second World War, `Asia' remained a descriptive, cartographic label rather than a

coherent unit of analysis. Political and economic elites within that designated space

were preoccupied with national economy-making rather than with supranational inte-

gration. Just as there had been contending perceptions of space in precolonial Asia,

there were contending spatialities in a decolonized Asia: the spatiality of everyday life

bounded by the village, commune, and province; the spatiality of national politics; and,

least significant of all, the spatiality of the geocultural region.

5 A Confucian continent?

Just as changing balances of power had successively undermined earlier spatial

imaginaries, elites in East and Southeast Asia began to forge a new spatial imaginary

when the long US war with Asia ended in ignominious defeat in Vietnam and the

Chinese Communist Party turned its back on socialism. Whereas none of the earlier

spatial imagineries had portrayed Asia' as an internally coherent unit, with its

distinctive value systems, elites in East and Southeast Asia attempted to formulate a

common set of ideals shared amongst themselves. As states in the Indian subcontinent

had been relatively untouched by the US war with Asia, their sociohistorical andeconomic trajectories over the previous quarter of a century had been very different.

Reflecting these differences, as resurgent East and Southeast Asian elites began to

forge a new voice for themselves on the world stage, India became increasingly

682 R A Palat


15/24

marginalized in the new imaginative geographies of Asia. On another register, the

collapse of the Soviet Union, China's shift to a market economy, Vietnam's economic

restructuring and entry into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and theisolation of North Korea erased Cold War fissures and was reflected in the virtual

absence of comparisons between China and India since 1978.

Paralleling earlier attempts by Japanese elites to renegotiate their location in the

global hierarchy of wealth through the imaginary of to yo shi, rapid economic growth

registered by several economies strung along Asia's Pacific coasts served as a spring-

board for political and business leaders in the region to insert their own contributions

to the narrative of capitalism (Dirlik, 1995, page 237). If prior generations of national-

ists had subscribed to a Westernized modernity, the growing self-assertiveness of elites

in the region led to the recuperation of an earlier, Confucianand thus allegedlyauthentic non-Westerntradition as the wellspring for their stellar rates of growth.

While Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong attributed Singapore's success to the same `core

values of hard work, thrift, and sacrifice' that underlay the successes of the Japanese,

Koreans, and Taiwanese, his Malaysian counterpart, Mahathir Mohamad invoked an

```invisible but common Asianess' coursing through the blood of Asians'' in a book he

coauthored with the former Japanese parliamentarian Ishihara Shintaro (quoted in

Rahim, 1998, pages 61 ^ 62).

In the 1980s and 1990s, amid pervasive assumptions of a shift in the center of

economic gravity to the Pacific shores of Asia, the excavation of supposedly indige-nous traditions served to counter the normative thrust of a Westernized modernity.

Singapore's Senior Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, even argued that ``The exuberance of

democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions which are inimical to

development'' (quoted in Rahim, 1998, page 62). Curiously, while Lee sought

to establish parallels between the one-party regime of his People's Action Party

(PAP) and Confucian doctrines of good government, he also had to reinvent

Confucianism. As most of the English-educated Chinese were unacquainted with its

teachings, the government had to invite foreign expertsall but one of whom were

from the United Statesto induct Confucian ethics in the school curriculum (Dirlik,1995, page 239; Ong, 1997, page 192; Rahim, 1998, page 63). At the same time, the

reinvention of a Confucian culture in Singapore was paralleled by the invidious

suppression of the local Peranakan culture, created through the interaction of

Chinese and Malays, with its own distinctive language and religious practices (Dirlik,

1995, page 271). Ironically, this reinvention of a Confucian tradition paralleled an

earlier Jesuit manufacture of Confucianism itself (see Jensen, 1997)!

In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the new proponents of Asian'

values adopted the very characteristics that the Orientalists had attributed to Asians:

despotic authoritarianism, patriarchal familism, hierarchical social structures, theimposition of a coercive consensus over the exuberance of individualism in the inter-

ests of social harmony. These traits were now merely reassessed as being particularly

suited to contemporary capitalism, rather than being inimical to capitalist develop-

ment.(11) If this ahistorical depiction of Confucian valuessometimes called Asian

values' when applied to states with no obvious traces of Confucian legacies such as

Mahathir's Malaysiaserved as a basis for mobilization and collective solidarity

(11) Some commentators sought to reconcile the contradiction inherent in the failure of Asiansocieties to evolve independently towards capitalism and the suitability of Confucian `values'to contemporary capitalism by suggesting that, although these traits may not have facilitatedthe development of capitalism, they were eminently suited to capitalism once it had beenintroduced from the West (Chung-hua Institute for Economic Research, 1989; King, 1991).



16/24

against Western domination, it simultaneously consolidated the ideological supremacy

of the West by internalizing its Orientalist assumptions as well (Dirlik, 1997, pages

116, 120).Insidiously, as the reassertion of these Orientalist assumptions by regional elites in

order to legitimate authoritarian structures of control was consonant with ethnocentric

biases of Western elites, critiques have focused not on the ahistoricity of their claims

but have taken a normative Euro-American perspective. Yet, as Lily Rahim (1998,

page 58) pertinently observes, Western criticisms of human rights violations gloss

over their own dismal recordcolonial exploitation, slavery, and continuing institu-

tional discrimination against women and ethnic minorities. West European and North

American states even frustrated China's efforts to include provisions for nonracial

discrimination and equal rights in the United Nations Charter on Human Rights justas they had stymied similar attempts by Japan in the Treaty of Versailles after the First

World War.

In their present incarnation, procedures that led to the internalization of Orien-

talist assumptions by regional elites can be traced back at least to the US occupation

of Japan and South Korea. In his Embracing Defeat, John Dower (1999) sketches how

the Orientalist assumptions of the US occupation forces combined with the machina-

tions of the Japanese elite ` collusive Orientalism'' as he was to call it elsewhere

(see Selden, 1999)to produce a state structure that was more powerful than it had

been before the occupation. As the United States chose to exercise power indirectly inJapan, they strengthened the powers of the bureaucracy especially because the land

reforms they sponsored and the imposition of a `no-war' clause in the Constitution

removed rival claimants to power. Though US forces did not seek to introduce democ-

racy in South Korea, they also did not revoke the land reforms implemented by the

North Koreans (Cumings, 1989, page 12). After the Korean War, the US government

also shored up Chiang Kai-shek's conquest state in Taiwan with economic and military

assistance (Gold, 1986, page 69; Wade, 1990, pages 82, 246). In each case US inter-

ventionthrough infusions of economic and military aid, political support, and

through the opening of its marketswas crucial to the strengthened role of states.Likewise, Lee's PAP could exploit the insecurities and anxieties of the island state's

Chinese majority, surrounded as they were by a sea of Malays, to impose draconian

measures on labor movement. Singapore's vulnerability as an entrepo t without a

hinterland again entailed an interventionist economic policy. Conversely, after the

ethnic riots of 1969, the Malaysian state's discrimination against its citizens of Chinese

origin, who dominated local businesses, virtually disenfranchised its domestic bour-

geoisie, whereas the Malay-dominated state's vigorous pursuit of import-substituting

industrialization created a class of capitalists dependent on the state for industrial

licenses and tariff protection.Perched as they were on the ideological faultlines of the Cold War, it was imper-

ative for these states to promote the material welfare of their subjects as a defense

against the seductions of revolutionary socialism. Once they reached the constraints

imposed by narrow domestic markets on autarchic industrial development, the greater

relative autonomy of their state apparatuses enabled elite economic bureaucracies to

coordinate national economic strategies by targeting strategic sectors of increasing

sophistication for rapid growth. Moreover, as the sharp escalation in wage costs in

Japan coincided with the opening outwards of the smaller Southeast and East Asian

economies, it facilitated the transborder expansion of Japanese corporations. Theconsequent loose coordination of regional economic strategies by elite bureaucracies

led to the creation of complementary rather than competitive industrial structures

which enabled these states to post high rates of growth (see Palat, 1996b; 1999b).

684 R A Palat


17/24

We need merely to note three points for our present purposes. First, it is

significant that neither the United States nor other Western ìndustrial democracies'

criticized the absence of democratic rights in these states before the end of theCold War. Second, until the late 1970s, none of their governments attributed their

economic success to their shared Confucian heritage. In South Korea, which has one

of the most self-consciously Confucian societies, Koh Byong-ik has pointedly

observed that the `òvernight transformation of scholarly opinion [on Confucianism]

is unparalleled in the modern evaluation of any traditional society or religion''

(quoted in Dirlik, 1995, page 237). Indeed, it is often forgotten that Christians out-

number adherents of Confucianism in South Korea (Jun Sang-In, 1999, page 193).

Likewise, the Malaysian government's discrimination against its citizens of Chinese

originand the Singapore government's parallel discrimination against its Malaycitizensforcefully refutes Mahathir's claims of a ` oneness'' shared by Asians! Third,

and most importantly, the equation of Confucianismwith its greater respect for

patriarchal familial hierarchies than for individual rights, emphasis on hard work,

respect for authority, and filial loyalty of employees towards the corporation in return

for paternalistic solicitude for employeeswith Àsian' values corresponded more

closely to the new terrain of production where small family-based workshops work-

ing to order for large, multinational corporations replaced the large, integrated firms

employing large armies of workers. However, this was a selective appropriation of

Confucian values as Confucianism also involved a ``moral disdain for commerce andindustry'' and other elements detrimental to capitalist transformation (Jun Sang-In,

1999, page 197).

Imitating Japanese corporate practice, political and business leaderships in neigh-

boring economies also retrieved the Confucian virtues of filial piety, hard work, and

subordination of partisan interests to collective interests from the dustbin of history to

counter the greater militancy of labor and to dampen greater demands for political

rights by an increasingly educated and affluent middle class. By the late 1970s, the

increasing maturity of the industrial proletariat, especially in Taiwan and South Korea,

fostered more insistent demands for democratic rights, including the right of collectivebargaining (see Bello and Rosenfeld, 1990; Deyo, 1989; Koo, 1996). Anticommunist

rhetoric no longer served to rein in labor movements, and movements for greater

democracy more generally, as centrally planned economies were themselves adopting

market-oriented reforms. This was tellingly illustrated by the Chinese government

inaugurating the first conference on Confucianism in the People's Republic in 1978,

the very year when major steps towards economic deregulation were being imple-

mented there (Dirlik, 1995, page 240). From this perspective, the emphasis on familism,

hierarchy, discipline, and absence of individualism in the Confucian revival symbolized

the ideological deployment of antiliberalism in place of anticommunism by rulingelites. Notably, though the new Confucians emphasize consensus, the dominant

``trend has been for compulsion in the acceptance of single, state defined ideologies''

(Robison, 1996, page 311) rather than negotiations with their subject citizenry as

illustrated by Lee's opposition to democracy.

Precisely because South Asian states had not undergone a social revolution, they

experienced a different sociohistorical trajectory. Even before India became a sovereign

state, it had the most class-conscious bourgeoisie in any low-income or middle-income

country and they had virtually bankrolled the freedom struggle (Mukherjee and

Mukherjee, 1988). The adoption of a democratic federal structure, in conditions ofabysmally low levels of literacy and material deprivation implied that political leaders

were dependent on rural magnates who controlled large vote banks. A vigorous

democratic tradition also entailed that workers and intellectuals could not be muzzled



18/24

as easily as they were elsewhere in Asia. These conditions implied that the Indian state

did not have the relative autonomy that was so central to the constitution of postwar

Japan and the decolonized states of East and Southeast Asia. Despite the highincidence of poverty, the size and cohesiveness of India's domestic market meant that

the constraints imposed by import-substituting industrialization became manifest only

by the mid to late 1980s, when export-led growth under the aegis of Japanese capital

had already been consolidated in economies along Asia's Pacific coasts. Though the

rise in wages as a result of rapid economic growth in those economies might have

made India a tempting location for a second stage of transnational expansion of

Japanese production networks, the political economy of Indian capitalism was not

conducive to a transfer of the familial rhetoric of Asian' values. At the same time,

India's poor economic performance meant that, unlike the booming economies alongAsia's Pacific Rim, India was not seen as a potential economic rival to Western

economies. It is hence not surprising that the subcontinent that had once been synon-

ymous with `Asia' became excised from the new spatial imaginaries of contemporary

capitalism.

6 Many Asias?

If an economic resurgence stimulated a positive reassessment of an alleged Confucian

tradition, once the miracle had been pierced by the Great Crash of 1997 ^ 98, claims for

the superiority of this tradition evaporated. Rendered theoretically disarmed by theirown rhetoric, and savaged by the brutal intensity of the crisis, elites in what had been

some of the brightest stars in the economic firmamentespecially South Koreawere

unable to resist imperious demands by international financial organizations to con-

form to normative Western financial and business practices in return for capital

transfusions vital to prevent a further meltdown of their ailing economies (Palat,

1999b).

Coerced restructuring of the ailing economies has undermined the very foundations

that lent credibility to claims that their rapid economic growth over the last quarter

of a century had been a result of the Asian values they shared in common. Where oncegovernment ^ private-enterprise collaboration was seen as the subordination of parti-

san interests for the greater national good it is now denounced with increasing

vehemence as `crony capitalism', the root cause of the current crisis as these arrange-

ments led to ready infusions of capital to those with the right political connections

without the usual credit checks. Where `life-long employment' policies had been hailed

as emblematic of a paternalistic capitalism that had superseded antagonistic capital ^

labor relations in the West, it is now condemned as protecting inefficient domestic

industries and as an obstacle to the operations of the free market.

These fundamental transformations in the economic topography along Asia'sPacific Rim have undermined claims to the superiority of Asian' values. Corre-

spondingly, as India was not subject to the vicissitudes of international financial

marketsas its currency was not freely convertible and its enterprises were not

encumbered by high foreign currency debts, it emerged relatively unscathed in the

financial crises of 1997 ^ 98 which hollowed out the more illustrious economies on

the continent its position is again being reassessed. Its large pool of English-trained

computer technicians appeared to promise a new potential: just as US allies in East

and Southeast Asia had used their role as low-cost suppliers of goods to the US

market as a springboard for rapid economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s, therevolution in the `knowledge industries' suggested growth prospects for the Indian

economy as a supplier of low-cost software products. The association of Indians

with computers and information technology has even transformed the meaning of

686 R A Palat


19/24

Ìndian' overseas in the same way that `made in Japan' changed in the 1960s and

`made in Taiwan' in the 1980s (Wade, 2001).

More ominously, whereas South Asia had been ignored when economies in Eastand Southeast Asia were experiencing rapid economic growth, the tit-for-tat nuclear

detonations by India and Pakistan in May 1998 have thrust the region into the

forefront of concerns once again. As these developments have spurred the Iranian

government's attempts to develop nuclear weapons of its own, security concerns have

breached the boundaries between the `Middle East' and Àsia'. These concerns were

highlighted especially after hijacked airplanes crashed into the twin towers of the

World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. While this inaugurated a

new US war with Asia, it also drew the veil back from the consequences of the

collapse of the Soviet Union. The emergence of militant Islamic movements inthe Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, and their

links to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the restiveness among the Uighur

Muslims of China's Xinjiang province have undermined the political settlements

worked out between the Russian and British empires and which had survived through

the Cold War years. At the fulcrum of Asia and the Middle East, the idiographic

nature of area-studies programs and the assumption that China and the Soviet Union

were monolithic entities had meant that little attention had been paid to these

fissures and hence there were few scholars who could provide policymakers with

vital information.These different trajectories fractured the possibility of seeing Asia as a mono-

chrome collectivity precisely when Europe was becoming increasingly unified with

the adoption of a common currency by many member states of the European Union.

Of course, as I have suggested above, Asia was never a coherent entity, and talk of

the Asian miracle economies and Asian values merely masked what Bruce Koppel

(1998) called the `òther Asia'' the more than 1.5 billion people who eke out a bare

existence and who have not shared in the prosperity that had come to characterize

the miracle economies on its Pacific coasts. If the Asian miracles had temporarily

eclipsed `peasant Asia', the passing of the eclipse has once again turned the spotlighton the heterogeneity of the most populated geocultural quadrant on the planet.

Simply put, Asia's unity derives from, and derives only from, its historical and

contemporary role as Europe's civilizational other. Precisely because it is a unity

imposed on an extraordinarily diverse range of societies by outsiders, the constitution

of Àsia' has undergone kaleidoscopic transformations over the last five-hundred years

in accordance with broader sociohistorical changes. Although Europeans constituted

Asia as a cartographic unit, there were no holistic attempts to study the peoples

of Asia before the end of the Second World War. Though àrea studies' in US

universities were systematized after the war in order to provide a comprehensiveframework, the diversity of source materials, value systems and languages frustrated

these attempts, and the bulk of the work was on national, even subnational, units.

Coincidentally, this was the `golden age' of the nation-state, where the thrust of

economic modernization programs was to replicate the Western pattern of develop-

ment. The growth of greater regional economic integration along the continent's

Pacific coasts, and the greater prosperity of these economies, enabled politicians,

academics, and journalists to legitimate their positions by recuperating `Confucian'

values. This led to a widespread redefinition of Àsia' by excluding peoples marginal

to the emerging regionally integrated structures of production. Thus, India, whichhad been synonymous with Asia, was even excluded from the annual Asia ^ Europe

meeting. The collapse of the Asian `miracle' economies as well as the reemergence of



20/24

Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union has fractured the earlier orthodoxy

that had equated Asia with the rapidly growing economies on its Pacific perimeters.

Acknowledgements. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on ``Approach-ing Asia from Asia'', Sariska, Rajasthan, India, 20 ^ 22 February, 2000. I also acknowledge theconstructive comments of Mark Selden.

ReferencesAhmad A, 1991, ``Between orientalism and historicism: anthropological knowledge of India''

Studies in History, New Series 7(1), 135 ^ 163Ahmad A, 1994 In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, London)Amino Yoshihiko, 1992, ``Deconstructing Japan'' East Asian History 3 (June) 121 ^ 142Anderson B, 1991 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

(Verso, London)

Anderson B, 1992, ``The changing ecology of Southeast Asian studies in the United States,1950 ^ 1990'', in Southeast Asian Studies in Balance: Reflections from AmericaEds C Hirschman, C Keyes, K Hutterer (Association for Asian Studies, Ann Arbor, MI)pp 25^40

Anderson B, 1998 The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World(Verso, London)

Bello W, Rosenfeld S, 1990 Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (Penguin,Harmondsworth, Middx)

Boxer C R, 1977 The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415 ^ 1825 (Hutchinson, London)Bray F, 1983, ``Patterns of evolution in rice-growing societies'' Journal of Peasant Studies 11(1)

3^33Byres T J, Nolan P, 1976 Inequality: India and China Compared, 1950 ^ 1970 (Open University Press,

Milton Keynes, Bucks)Chung-hua Institute for Economic Research, 1989 Conference on Confucianism and Economic

Development in East Asia (Chung-hua Institute, Taipei)Cumings B, 1989, ``The abortive abertura: South Korea in the light of Latin American experience''

New Left Review number 173, 5 ^ 32Deyo F C, 1989 Beneath the Miracle: Labor Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism (University

of California Press, Berkeley, CA)Dirks N B, 1987 The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge)

Dirks N B, 1992, ``Castes of mind'' Representations 37 (winter) 56 ^ 78Dirlik A, 1995, ``Confucius in the borderlands: global capitalism and the reinvention ofConfucianism'' boundary 2 22(3) 228 ^ 273

Dirlik A, 1997 The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism(Westview, Boulder, CO)

Dixon C, 1991 South East Asia in the World-economy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)Dower J W, 1999 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W W Norton, New York)Drake F W, 1975 China Charts the World: Hsu Chi-yu and His Geography of 1848 (Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, MA)Duara P, 1997, ``Transnationalism and the predicament of sovereignty: China, 1900 ^ 1945''

American Historical Review 102 1030 ^ 1051

Duus P, 1995 The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895 ^ 1910(University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)

Eco U, 1999 Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition (Harcourt Brace, New York)Edney M H, 1997 Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India,

1765 ^ 1843 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)Garon S, 1994, ``Rethinking modernization and modernity in Japanese history: a focus on

state ^ society relations'' Journal of Asian Studies 53 346 ^ 366Gold T B, 1986 State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (M E Sharpe, Armonk, NY)Halbfass W, 1988 India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (State University of New York

Press, Albany, NY)Hanazaki Kohei, 1996, `Ainu Moshir and Yaponesia: Ainu and Okinawan identities in

contemporary Japan'', in Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern Eds D Denoon,M Hudson, G McCormack, T Morris-Suzuki (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)pp 117 ^ 131

688 R A Palat


21/24

Hay S N, 1970 Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)

Honig E, 1996, ``Native place and the making of Chinese ethnicity'', in Remapping China: Fissures

in Historical Terrain Eds G Hershatter, E Honig, J N Lipman, R Stross (Stanford UniversityPress, Stanford, CA) pp 143 ^ 155

Jensen L M, 1997 Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Tradition and Universal Civilization (DukeUniversity Press, Durham, NC)

Johnson C, 1988, ``Study of Japanese political economy: a crisis in theory'', in Japanese Studiesin the United States: History and Present Condition Ed.The Japan Foundation (Associationfor Asian Studies, Ann Arbor, MI) pp 95 ^ 113

Jun Sang-In, 1999, ``No (logical) place for Asian values in East Asia's economic development''Development and Society 28 191 ^ 204

Karl R E, 1998, ` Creating Asia: China in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century''

American Historical Review 103 1096 ^ 1118Khilnani S, 1999 The Idea of India (Penguin, New Delhi)King A Y C, 1991, ` The transformation of Confucianism in the post-Confucian era: the emergence

of rationalistic traditionalism in Hong Kong'', inTheTriadic Chord: Confucian Ethics, IndustrialAsia, and Max Weber Ed.T Wei-Ming (The Institute of East Asian Philosophies, Singapore)pp 203 ^ 220

Koo H, 1996, ``Work, culture, and consciousness of the Korean working class'', in Putting Classin Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia Ed. E J Perry (University of California Press,Berkeley, CA) pp 53 ^ 76

Koppel B, 1998, ``Fixing the other Asia'' Foreign Affairs 77(1) 98 ^ 110Koschmann J V, 1997, `Asianism's ambivalent legacy'', in Network Power: Japan and Asia

Eds P J Katzenstein, T Shiraishi (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY) pp 83 ^ 110Kuno Y S, 1967 Japanese Expansion on the Asiatic Continent: A Study in the History of Japan with

Special Reference to Her International Relations with China, Korea, and Russia (Kennikat Press,Port Washington, NY)

Lach D F, 1965 Asia in the Making of Europe: I. The Century of Discovery (University of ChicagoPress, Chicago, IL)

Ledyard G, 1994, ``Cartography in Korea'', in The History of Cartography: Cartography in theTraditional East and Southeast Asian Societies Eds J B Harley, D Woodward (University ofChicago Press, Chicago, IL) pp 235 ^ 345

Lee J, 1999, ``Trade and economy in preindustrial East Asia, c.1500 ^ c.1800: East Asia in the ageof global integration'' Journal of Asian Studies 58(1) 2 ^ 26

Lefebvre H, 1991 The Production of Space (Blackwell, Oxford)Le Goff J, 1980 Time,Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, Chicago,

IL)Le Goff J, 1988 Medieval Civilization, 400 ^ 1500 (Basil Blackwell, London)Levathes L, 1994 When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405 ^ 1433

(Simon and Schuster, New York)Lewis M W, Wigen K E, 1997 The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (University

of California Press, Berkeley, CA)Liu H, 2000, ``Sino-Southeast Asian studies: toward an alternative paradigm'' Asian Studies

Review 25(3) 259 ^ 283

McClintock A, 1995 Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context(Routledge, New York)McCormick T J, 1989 America's Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War

(Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD)March A L, 1974 The Idea of China: Myth and Theory in Geographic Thought (Praeger, New York)Massarella D, 1996, ``Some reflections on identity formation in East Asia in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries'', in Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern Eds D Denoon,M Hudson, M Gavan, T Morris-Suzuki (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)pp 135 ^ 152

Mills J V, 1953, ``Chinese coastal maps'' Imago Mundi 11 151 ^ 168Mitter P, 1994 Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850 ^ 1922: Occidental Orientations

(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)Miwa K, 1990, ` Japanese policies and concepts for a regional order in Asia, 1938 ^ 1940'', in

The Ambivalence of Nationalism: Modern Japan Between East and West Eds J W White,M Umegaki, T R H Havens (University Press of America, Latham, MD) pp 133 ^ 156



22/24

Moore B J, 1966 Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Makingof the Modern World(Beacon Press, Boston, MA)

Moretti F, 1998 Atlas of the European Novel, 1800 ^ 1900 (Verso, London)

Morris-Suzuki T, 1996, À descent into the past: the frontier in the construction of Japanesehistory'', in Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern Eds D Denoon, M Hudson,G McCormack, T Morris-Suzuki (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) pp 81 ^ 94

Morris-Suzuki T, 1998, `Ìnvisible countries: Japan and the Asian dream'' Asian Studies Review22(1) 5 ^ 22

Mukherjee A, Mukherjee M, 1988, ` Imperialism and the growth of Indian capitalism in thetwentieth century'' Economic and Political Weekly 23(11) 531 ^ 546

Ong A, 1997, ``Chinese modernities: narratives of nation and of capitalism'', in UngroundedEmpires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism Eds A Ong, D M Nonini(Routledge, New York) pp 171 ^ 202

Ong A, 1999 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press,Durham, NC)Palais J B, 1995, À search for Korean uniqueness'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55(2)

409 ^ 425Palat R A, 1995, ``Historical transformations in agrarian systems based on wet-rice cultivation:

toward an alternative model of social change'', in Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy Ed. P McMichael (Praeger, Westport, CT) pp 55 ^ 77

Palat R A, 1996a, ``Fragmented visions: excavating the future of area studies in a post-Americanworld'' Review 19 269 ^ 315

Palat R A, 1996b, ``Pacific century: myth or reality?'' Theory and Society 25 303 ^ 347Palat R A, 1999a, ``Spatial imaginaries of capitalism: dynamics of the Northeast Asian regional

order'' Asian Perspective 23(2) 5 ^ 34Palat R A, 1999b, ``Miracles of the day before? The great Asian meltdown and the changing

world-economy'' Development and Society 28(1) 1 ^ 47Palat R A, 2000, ``Beyond orientalism: decolonizing Asian studies'' Development and Society

29(2) 105 ^ 135Pearson M N, 1987 The New Cambridge History of India: The Portuguese in India (Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge)Pr

Documents

Is India Part Of