Brilliant treatise on what Subhas Chandra Bose vision implied in Japan-led Asia

Chennai: This brilliantly researched monumental 680-page work, documenting how “a continent rises from the Ravages of Colonialism and war to a new dynamism’, in an eminently readable style is substantially about how the 20th century in Asia “was largely Japan’s century’.

However, the canvas of the Asian drama, unfolding the response to Western imperialism and capitalism, the highly exploitative trade that colonial European powers took to other parts of the world with their educational endowments and racial prejudices, is so vast that this treatise can be read diversely, from the point of view of individual nation-states.

As the author Prasenjit Basu, a scholar who has spent the past 25 years researching Asian economies and who presently works and lives in Singapore, says in his prologue: “The central characters are, however, the nations of East Asia (China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brunei, Burma, Camobdia and Laos) and those of South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, the Maldives), with significant roles for those of West Asia (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Soviet Central Asian states.) Primarily, “this book is an Asian telling of Asia’s story in the twentieth century.” Thus, it punctures at the very start critiques of British-centric historiography or purely Marxist historiography.

The book itself is very systematically arranged into six main chapters which need to be mentioned to get a hang of its big picture. They are: In Europe’s Shadow: Asia’s Political Landscape in 1900, The First Stirrings of Nationalism (1901-1913), The First European Civil War and Its Aftermath (1914-1925), The Nascent Clash of Imperial Titans And New Ideologies (1925-1939), The Great Asian War and the Ebb of European Empire (1940-1946), and Freedom, Revolution and Japan’s Miracle Amid the Cold War (1947-1971). Prasenjit marvellously rounds off with an epilogue on ‘Japan and its Flying Geese: The Acrimonious Colonial Legacy Further West’, which is a prologue of sorts for his companion volume to come. It is thus, political-economy, history, sociology, International relations et all, all rolled into one stupendous volume, weaved into a new Asian perspective tapestry as it were, laced with anecdotes and biographic sketches of the great actors.

Despite the extraordinary variety and a vibrant intra-cultural linguistic/ethnic plurality, countries of the Asian continent share a family resemblance in their underlying civilisation texture with a pronounced religious tenor. In fact as the author says, “if the old land of Palestine is included, then all the world’s religions originated in Asia.” And more importantly, “Asia’s indigenous religions were not exclusionary.”

For all the saga of human suffering and colossal tragedies witnessed, as Asian nations were engaging both the colonial powers- principally the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese with Philippines being an exception where American influence was directly established - and the process of industrialisation and modernisation flagged off by trade wars in the West, one of the central arguments of Prasenjit’s work is that Japan’s role in 20th century Asia was “akin to Napoleon’s role in 19th century Europe.”

“While the Institutional legacy of Japan is underappreciated, the alleged positive legacy of European colonial rule is much exaggerated,” writes the author. Also, “an understanding of Islam, and the complex history of oil politics is an essential part of the story how Asia evolved in the last century,” he points out.

Given the vast setting of this historical-hermeneutic theatre presented by Prasenjit, for a reader from the India point of view, the script that unwinds India’s Independence story comes out as a very eloquent tribute to one of our greatest freedom fighters Subhas Bose, the first to politically articulate the relevance of the Japanese vision in taking on European imperial powers. The work is thus simultaneously an exposition and a critique of the politics and economics of those crucial decades of the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century led by the Indian National Congress and its leaders.

In the same breath, the author has exhaustively captured the first waves of revolutionary nationalistic fervour that informed the 1857 ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, when Hindus and Muslims stood shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting the British, how East India company and Britain consolidated their territorial presence with Calcutta as the Imperial capital, India coming directly under the British Queen, Lord Dalhousie’s famous ‘doctrine of lapse’ that ingeniously brought even the otherwise culture-proud Indian princely states under British influence with some exceptions, and Britain’s masterly ‘divide and rule’ policy that first began with the partition of Bengal in 1905 on religious lines, to during World War-II years the Churchill-induced Bengal famine of 1943 and culminating in the more cataclysmic partition in 1947.

At different stages of our freedom movement, particularly after Mahatma Gandhi made Congress the vehicle of effective mass-mobilisation through his creed of non-violence and ‘satyagraha’, the author dwells on how Subhas Bose’s prescient thought and action made a definitive difference, even if it meant fallout out with the Gandhi-Nehru line on key issues after Congress came to power in majority of the provinces in the first 1937 elections.

The heroic role of Bose’s Indian National Army (INA), to show the world that country had a credible army of fighters to fall back upon – not non-state actors prone to acts of terror-, and his strong belief in State-directed growth a la Japan, were extremely crucial to India winning Independence and emerging as a modern state, according to Prasenjit. He ticks off the Congress party for having “worked assiduously to obliterate the role of the INA.”

After Independence, the author derides the “shortcomings” of India’s Nehruvian model of ‘comprehensive import substitution’, even as several Asian neighbours, adopting pragmatic variants of the Japanese model of economic development, including Korea and China, have raced ahead.

If India was able to break the ‘Hindu’ rate of growth since the mid-1980s’, Prasenjit credits it more to Morarji Desai and later to P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1991, and now pins his hopes on the present Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

Strangely, though there is no mention about the role played by former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in boldly taking forward the Economic reforms, Prasenjit has not entirely rubbished the virtues of the Gandhi-Nehru legacy, including the positive outcomes of Nehru establishing the IITs’ and IIM in Independent India.