The book discusses various decisions and struggles that nationalists went through to build the countries of their vision.
M.V. KAMATH
[dropcaps round=”no”]F [/dropcaps]or more than a century Asia was under the dominance of European countries, be it Britain, France, Portugal or the Netherlands. Though China was not conquered as was India, it was a country divided and often undergoing humi¬liation at the hands of European powers. A sense of purpose started growing as in India around the beginning of the 20th century which was to end in all Asian countries achieving freedom from colonial masters by 1950.
Nationalism won the day. The nationalists who crafted modern Asia had a great task ahead of them which they successfully underwent whether it was in India, China, Indonesia or Vietnam. The names of Gandhi, Sukarno, Ho Chin Minh and Mao Tse-tung are legion. This book has undertaken to write about eleven such. They are four from China, namely Mao Zedong, Zhou En-lai, Chiang Kai-shek and Dene Xiaoping, three from India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, one from Pakistan, Zulf iqar Ali Bhutto, one from Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, one from Vietnam Ho Chi Minh and one from Indonesia, Sukarno.
In every major Asian country the struggle for national unity was an arduous process and each nation faced problems peculiar to it. Only China could have a Mao Tse-tung, Indonesia, a Sukarno and, for that matter India a Mahatma Gandhi. How did they meet the challenges they had to face? What were the errors they committed and how did they overcome them, if they did?
As Guha points out, in Indonesia and Pakistan, for example, the military was a key player extremely influential in political matters even when a civilian leader was formally president or prime Minister. In China Chiang Kai-shek had to flee to the island of Taiwan after his Party lost to the communists in civil war and was thereafter airbrushed out of official Chinese history. Lee Kuan Yew, a man of forceful views came to embody his state and though Singapore is just a city, according to Guha “the power of his personality mandated his inclusion in this book.
But why was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto included in this list? Says Guha: “Jinnah played the critical role in the founding of Pakistan, but in Pakistan today there is little impact of his legacy.” Bhutto became a natural choice, for inclusion, but insisted on going his way, was arrested, tried and in due course hanged. Admits Guha: “For all that it omits, this book does contain a reasonably representative cast of characters whose lives taken together present a fairly comprehensive portrait of modern Asia’s political history.” Such a book was long overdue and Guha has filled a lacuna.
As a man of his times Sukarno was shaped by the same large forces that shaped other leaders of Asia in the 20th century. His ‘biographer’ James R.Rush says as a boy Sukarno recognised himself as Bima, one of the heroic Pandava brothers (the reference obviously is to Bhima). Rush is obvious a stranger to India history for he spells Kauravas as Kurawas. But for Rush, Sukarno is “unquestionably the formative political actor in the creation of Indonesia.
Notes the contributor: “In assessing his role in history it is worth remembering that he was born at the very peak of western colonial domination in Asia. His life stood astride the entire era of modern nationalism revolution when a new Asia-to-be was being brilliantly improvised by protean actors like himself, who through stunning nets of political imagination and will, and even in failure, drew whole societies into the hopes and bitter truths of the post-colonial world.”
Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam was, one who mesmerised the entire world by his victory over French Army in 1975. His biographer writes: “The Vietnamese Communist Party’s claims to legitimacy continue to rely on their Ho Chi Minh lineage. In future the party leadership may realise that in order t restore Ho’s relevance for a new generation, they will have to open up a more hones t examination of his political career and the battles that he waged.” Having said that perhaps I’ll be forgiven if I concentrate on Gandhi for Indian readers.
As Guha sees it, in India, today Gandhi “is an extremely controversial figure”. Says he: “Presidents and Prime Ministers visit his memorial in Delhi on the days of his birth and death (but) on other days of the year dignitaries do not appear to remember Gandhi”. Interestingly Guha notes that the Civil Rights Movement in the United States owes a great deal to the influence of Gandhi and long before Martin Luther king’s arrival on the scene, Gandhi’s name and doings were widely written about in the African-American press.
It is revealing to learn that in the 1930s, the leading black preacher in the US, Howard Thurman came to India to seek Gandhi’s counsel. Says Guha: “Gandhi himself never visited America yet he was to have a decisive posthumous impact on the politics and culture of that land.”
Yet another revelation concerns Gandhi’s influence on China. Though in the 1630s and 1940s there were few takers for Gandhian methods in China, says Guha, “In China today there is an increasing interest in Gandhi and what he stood for.” It is interesting, even intriguing to know that among Gandhi’s admirers is China’s Nobel Laureate Liu Xiabao who is quoted as saying that “the appearance of a single martyr can fundamentally turn the spirit of a nation and strengthen its moral fibre – and Gandhi was such a figure.
Guha in his chapter on Nehru dismisses him as a “romantic in politics and he quotes a letter Nehru wrote to Madame Chiang Kai-shek when he was in jail in August 1942. As Guha writes, the times have changed and “the hero of his age has become the Outcaste of ours”. To say that this book should be must reading for the GenNext may be an over-estimation, but one can’t think of another work that has presented Asian heroes in full light as this compendium. Personalities like Indira Gandhi suddenly come alive in all their greatness and smallness making this book literally unputdownable.
Makers of Modern Asia
Ed. By Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Pages: 385; Price: 895 |
