Two Asian superpowers

The book brings out with admirable clarity all that India and China may have held in common, and much more so their historic and cultural differences.

LIKE all good titles, the title of the book under review tells you at a glance what it is all about. What China and India Once Were: The Pasts that may Shape the Global Future is, for one, a work of history, and because it is the history—or select history—of two different nations, it is fundamentally a work of comparative history. And because the two different nations, India and China, happen to be, from a civilisational perspective, arguably the two greatest countries on the planet, the book under review alludes to this greatness, albeit futuristically, as the reason why this book needed to be written and deserves to be read.

Old problem, new take?

This combination of subject and rationale—looking at India and China because they are poised to be global superpowers—is not new and has given rise to a fair number of works, speaking even only of the last decade. These include Tansen Sen’s India, China and the World: A Connected History (2017) and Peter Van Der Veer’s The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (2013). Like a reflective internal critic to the volume under review, Haun Saussy also observes: “This book is a new take on an old problem…. The leading question of this book… has perplexed Europeans since as far back as the Enlightenment and regularly stirred people in Asia to reflection” (page 310).

The same perspective would also apply to the volume’s premise of the impending rise of China and India, a premise that is reflected in the reference to the future in the subtitle. The fact is that, to quote Saussy again: “In the long run of a three-or-four-thousand-year time frame, India and China were always the places where the greatest amount of riches aggregated and where knowledge aggregated, along with other symptoms of being dominant cultures in their world. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the long-term norm is being restored now” (page 334). In other words, the rise of India and China today should perhaps more properly be represented as a reprise.

Be that as it may, we note that as opposed to a connected history approach, which is quite in vogue today and which examines the shaping influence the two regions may have had on each other, this book emphasises its comparativist project as its USP. Given that the objects of comparison are cultural behemoths of great antiquity, it is no mean feat that a volume all of three hundred-odd pages, still achieves, chapter after chapter, almost an encyclopaedic effect when it brings together a series of crash courses, as it were, on the ecology, art, religion, science, society, literature, economy and polity of India and China over some two thousand years of their existence. (Why does the volume claim to focus on the period between 1500 and 1800 CE when it actually covers so much more time?) That it does so selectively and in a freeze-frame narrative, with all the risks of essentialism that that entails, is noticeable—but, in all fairness, was perhaps unavoidable.

Regardless, it is useful to the general reader to have access to a concise and careful overview of so many iconic institutions and traditions that the two Asian neighbours developed. More so when the overview is authored by well-known Sinologists and historians of India such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Sumit Guha (writing on “Life and Energy”), Pamela Crossley and Richard Eaton (“Conquest, Rulership and the State”), Beverly Bossler and Ruby Lal (“Gender Systems”), Cynthia Brokaw and Allison Busch (“Writing History”), Stephen Owen and Sheldon Pollock (literature), Benjamin Elman and Christopher Minkowski (“Big Science”), Zvi Ben-dor Benite and Richard Davis (religion), and Molly Aitken and Eugene Wang (“Art and Vision”). A very interesting and critical afterword (“The Act of Comparing (Both Sides Now)”) is brought up by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Haun Saussy.

What China and India Once Were aspires, however, to provide more than a mere overview of two nations’ histories. Its self-declared aim is to do what it calls a “direct comparison” between the two nations, without reference, explicit or implicit, to any Western standard or model and to received views and misconceptions (pages 2, 4, 12). What this implies is that the volume contributors also intended to avoid any modernist standpoints (the gift of European Enlightenment) when assessing the long premodernity of which both India and China boast.

The introduction to the volume expands on the main ideal exciting this effort as being the desire to rescue India and China from Western stereotypes about them, and thereby “estrange” them, so that they may then be understood in their own right, and mutually so (pages 14-15). One hastens to declare this a highly worthwhile aim to profess, one which in fact all scholars of India and China need urgently to embrace and execute. The only challenge, however, may also lie in its execution.

For one thing, precisely in avoiding entrenched stereotypes, some chapters in What India and China Once Were end up restating these, unable apparently to make a clean break. For example, the notion that the Chinese wrote history and Indians did not (quite); that China was singularly unified and India irredeemably diversified; that China was meritocratic and India inegalitarian; or the very opening lines of the book that refer to Hindu-Muslim violence in India and cheap and abundant labour in China as being the norm.

Western and modern categories

Then, all the chapters attempt valiantly and efficiently to stick to the brief of “direct comparison”, presenting period-wise, neat and well-etched thematic discussions of one country, followed unerringly by that of the other, and then back to the first and so on. This is in a true-blue dialogic fashion that does credit to a comparative history and also promotes readability.

Ironically, however, none of the chapters, nor the volume as a whole, can truly succeed in their aim of avoiding Western and modern parameters since they are condemned to use categories of analysis—state, history, science, literature (and within that, epic and lyric), religion, gender, and so on—that are Anglophonic and modernist! (This is not to say that indigenous Chinese and Indic terms are not sprinkled throughout the book.)

One daresay the scholars are aware of this quandary regarding the concepts and frames they apply to China and India (for example, page 132 for concerns over the modern Western concept of history, pages 192-93 for epic, page 199 for science, and page 327 regarding all categories found in this book). They struggle to somehow depart from this West-centric compulsion that so envelops modern academia across the globe. That all of them are themselves based in the American academy, and seem to be addressing a Western general readership while writing about Asia, perhaps does not help their cause either (a point also made by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his internal review of the volume, page 337).

The larger import, then, of the exercise the volume undertakes is perhaps an unintended one, but also an entirely salutary one. Namely, it underlines the grave difficulty of truly representing non-Western cultures on their own terms and using their own frames of understanding and knowledge when the linguistic and intellectual apparatus used is a Western one, complete with all its preconceptions, conceptual limitations, and its colonial past.

Adding to the problem is the fact that, as Hans-Georg Gadamer pointed out years ago, “modern science and research and higher education everywhere follow the European model or its American reproduction” (emphasis added). So academies even in the non-Western world—and certainly in Asia—are verily sucked into becoming a part of the problem rather than the panacea.

The other aim of the volume, to help understand India and China in terms of each other, also deserves some comment here. The volume brings out with admirable clarity all that may have been held in common by the two countries and, much more so, their historic and cultural differences. What remains unexplored is why! And how, if at all, India affected China and vice versa.

Given the long and rich history of their interaction, it is natural if readers are left wondering along these lines. The volume editors do acknowledge this and try to explain it thus: “…we have avoided the connective history approach. China and India have interacted for two or more millennia in every domain…. But what we seek to capture here is not those connections and the ensuing emergence of particular material and cultural phenomena—their embryology, so to speak—but rather the nature of those phenomena when fully achieved—their physiology” (page 11).

To sum up, there are some very interesting write-ups in this volume. The one on megafauna in India and China over the centuries strikes an unconventional and fascinating note since anthropocentric histories are only just beginning to take on board non-human animals as objects of study, not to say as historical agents. The sections on forests and migration in the same chapter are also important.

The piece on all the different sciences and technologies that the Chinese and Indians excelled at, and the vicissitudes in their development, is awe-inspiring. It concludes with the following instructive passage that reflects on the larger running thread of the volume—Europe versus Asia in academics—and so deserves to be quoted:

“Earlier scholars have been so determined to explain why modern science, technology, and medicine arrived late in China and India…. This overly determined ‘failure question’ has been paralleled by scholarly efforts in other fields to explain why neither India nor China developed capitalism, modern industry, or democracy before Europe did. [However] we are now entering a new era that explores early modern science in east Asia and south Asia in more active rather than simply receptive terms. By problematizing the narrative of the ‘rise of the west’ circa 1500-1800, we can begin to see things in Asia regionally, as they developed from the inside” (page 229).

The chapters on history-writing and on literature and aesthetics more generally in What China and India Once Were are sensitive and nuanced at many points, as are the ones on religion and art. The last mentioned makes a point about how haze was preferred in Chinese wash painting as compared with the Indian preference for clear lines. This is only one delicate example of the fine insights that can emerge when we choose to look closely and creatively at comparative history.

Shonaleeka Kaul is Associate Professor of Ancient History at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.