Makers of Modern Asia

Ramachandra Guha

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780674970809
  9780674365414
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674745285
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Hardly more than a decade old, the twenty-first century has already been dubbed the Asian Century in recognition of China and India's increasing importance in world affairs. Yet discussions of Asia seem fixated on economic indicators—gross national product, per capita income, share of global trade. Makers of Modern Asia reorients our understanding of contemporary Asia by highlighting the political leaders, not billionaire businessmen, who helped launch the Asian Century.

The nationalists who crafted modern Asia were as much thinkers as activists, men and women who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems. The eleven thinker-politicians whose portraits are presented here were a mix of communists, capitalists, liberals, authoritarians, and proto-theocrats—a group as diverse as the countries they represent.

From China, the world's most populous country, come four: Mao Zedong, leader of the Communist Revolution; Zhou Enlai, his close confidant; Deng Xiaoping, purged by Mao but rehabilitated to play a critical role in Chinese politics in later years; and Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang party formed the basis of modern Taiwan. From India, the world's largest democracy, come three: Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira Gandhi, all of whom played crucial roles in guiding India toward independence and prosperity. Other exemplary nationalists include Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, Indonesia's Sukarno, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and Pakistan's Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. With contributions from leading scholars, Makers of Modern Asia illuminates the intellectual and ideological foundations of Asia's spectacular rise to global prominence.

ONE

GANDHI, INDIA, AND THE WORLD

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

I

BORN IN THE WESTERN INDIAN PORT TOWN of Porbandar in 1869, educated in Rajkot and London, Mohandas Gandhi came to South Africa in May 1893 to help settle a dispute between two merchants. He spent much of the next two decades there, shuttling between Natal and the Transvaal. It was in South Africa that he developed the techniques of political protest for which he remains best known and to which he gave the name satyagraha, or truth-force.

The idea of what became known as satyagraha was first enunciated in Johannesburg’s Empire Theatre on September 11, 1906. Some three thousand Indians had assembled there on that day. Merchants, hawkers, waiters, and workers, they had come to protest a new ordinance of the government of the Transvaal that sought to end Asian immigration and place sharp restrictions on Asians already in the colony. They were to produce fingerprints, carry an identity card at all times, and be confined to specific locations so that they would not, so to say, “contaminate” the ruling whites. The resistance to the ordinance was led by Gandhi, a lawyer from Gujarat who had become a figure of considerable authority in the immigrant community.¹

On September 11, the Indian residents of Johannesburg stopped work at 10 a.m. The meeting was to begin at three in the afternoon; however, the doors were opened at noon to accommodate the people coming in from the suburbs and the countryside. By one thirty, the theater was packed to overflowing. The scene inside was described by a correspondent of the Rand Daily Mail:

Even in its palmiest days, the old variety theatre could never have boasted of a larger audience than that which assembled yesterday. From the back row of the gallery to the front row of the stalls there was not a vacant seat, the boxes were crowded as surely they had never been crowded before, and even the stage was invaded. Wherever the eye lighted was fez and turban, and it needed but little stretch of the imagination to fancy that one was thousands of miles from Johannesburg and in the heart of India’s teeming millions.

Five resolutions were presented to and passed by the meeting. One outlined what in the ordinance was repugnant; a second asked the Transvaal government to withdraw it. Two others conveyed the sentiments of those present to the imperial authorities in London. The crucial resolution was the one that enjoined the audience to court arrest if their demands were not met. It said that

In the event of the Legislative Council, the local Government, and the Imperial Authorities rejecting the humble prayer of the British Indian community of the Transvaal in connection with the Draft Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, this mass meeting of British Indians here assembled solemnly and regretfully resolves that, rather than submit to the galling, tyrannous, and un-British requirements laid down in the above Draft Ordinance, every British Indian in the Transvaal shall submit himself to imprisonment and shall continue to do so until it shall please His Gracious Majesty the King-Emperor to grant relief.

Speaking to the audience, Gandhi said that the responsibility for advising them to go to prison was his. “The step was grave, but unavoidable,” he remarked. “In doing so, they did not hold a threat, but showed that the time for action—over and above making speeches and submitting petitions—had arrived.” Gandhi added that he had “full confidence in his countrymen.” He “knew he could trust them, and he knew also that, when occasion required an heroic step to be taken, he knew that every man among them would take it.”

Gandhi warned his compatriots of the hardships along the way. “It is quite possible,” he remarked, “that some of those who pledge themselves may weaken at the very first trial.” For “we may have to remain hungry and suffer from extreme heat and cold. Hard labour is likely to be imposed upon us in prison. We may even be flogged by the warders.” The leader was clear that the “struggle will be prolonged.” But “provided the entire community manfully stands the test,” he foresaw that “there can only be one end to the struggle, and that is victory.”²

Thus far, the movement to get the Indians a fair deal in South Africa had followed a strictly legalistic route. Letters, petitions, court cases, delegations—these were the means by which Gandhi and his fellow reformers had attempted to challenge policies that bore down unfairly on them. Now, however, they were threatening to defy this new law and go to jail.

Shortly after the meeting at the Empire Theatre, Gandhi left for London to give the methods of petitioning and appeal one last chance. He met members of parliament, influential editors, and powerful ministers, among them the secretary of the colonies and the secretary of the India office. His hope was that the imperial government would lean on the government of the Transvaal and make them withdraw the Asiatic Ordinance.

In a leading article on Gandhi’s visit to London, the Times explained why it was foredoomed to failure. South Africa was a land of opportunity for ambitious and energetic Europeans. Sugar in Natal and gold in the Transvaal were creating a massive economic boom, attracting migrants from all parts of England and from the Continent as well. In the late nineteenth century, the Afrikaners who controlled the Transvaal had come into conflict with English investors and prospectors. The two sides had gone to war but had since forged a truce, after which they chose to come together in a white alliance against the colored races. And so the Times commented:

No young democratic community of white men can be expected to deal out even-handed justice to formidable rivals in their trade and business who come from another race, with other traditions, other creeds, and other complexions than their own. The fact that the interlopers are subjects of the same Sovereign, and can claim to be treated as members of the same Empire, will probably never, in our time, outweigh these considerations with them. The lapse of years, and perhaps of generations, may be needed to create, if indeed it can ever be created, such a spirit of common Imperial citizenship as will greatly mitigate the combined force of race prejudice and of self-interest.³

When the Transvaal government refused to yield, Gandhi and his colleagues courted arrest. They declined to carry passes—or burned them—defied nighttime curfews, and hawked without licenses. Between 1907 and 1910, several thousand Indians were put in prison by the Transvaal authorities. Gandhi himself served three terms in jail.

Later, in 1913, Gandhi led another protest movement in defense of Indian rights. This originated in Natal, the province where the majority of the community was based. This struggle had three aims: (1) the elimination of a punitive annual tax imposed by the state on indentured laborers who stayed on after the expiry of their contract; (2) the recognition of Indian marriages conducted under traditional religious rites (a recent judgment had rendered these marriages invalid); (3) a more general relaxation of the harsh laws that impinged on Indian rights of residence, travel, and work in South Africa.

The movement of 1913 was even more intense than the one preceding it. Coal miners and plantation workers went on strike across Natal. Indian merchants closed shops, Indian waiters refused to serve customers, and Indian railway staff stayed at home. Women joined the struggle, including Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba. Gandhi led a march of several thousand Indians across the border into Transvaal, in a spectacular collective defiance of a law that restricted colored people to the province where they normally resided. Once more, thousands of Indians served prison sentences ranging from a few weeks to a few months.

The struggle in South Africa attracted great attention in India. Meetings of solidarity were held all across the subcontinent. The interest was particularly keen in South India, the region from where the majority of the protesters came. A Tamil paper published out of Madras praised the “wonderful determination” of “Mr Gandhi and his followers”; they had “glorif[ied] the good name of India by means of their noble and courageous conduct, risking even their lives.” A Kannada paper printed in Bangalore saluted “the leadership of that zealous servant of India, that generous and heroic personage, Mr. Gandhi.” A Telugu weekly in Guntur reached for mythic parallels—Gandhi, the leader of the resistance, was like the hero of the Mahabharata, Arjuna, brave and fearless.⁴

Back in 1906, the imperial government had declined to intervene in South Africa. Now, however, it worried about the impact on the growing nationalist movement in India, where the viceroy himself recognized that the passive resisters led by Gandhi had “the deep and burning sympathy” of their compatriots. He went on to say that “if the South African Government desires to justify itself in the eyes of India and the world, the only course open to it is to appoint a strong impartial committee, whereon Indian interests will be represented, to conduct the most searching enquiry” into the causes of the troubles in Natal and the Transvaal.⁵

Leaned on by London, the South African government did this time constitute an inquiry committee. This repealed the punitive annual tax, legalized Indian marriages, and agreed to issue identification certificates for three years at a time (rather than for one year, the existing practice).⁶ Eight years of sustained struggle had resulted in some gains. The whites still would not recognize Indians (or indeed Africans) as equal citizens, but now they were at least allowed to practice their trade and live with their families without undue harassment by the authorities.

II

The satyagrahas led by Gandhi in South Africa rejected the cautious incrementalism of petition-writers. To defend one’s rights, one had sometimes to defy discriminatory laws and court arrest. But satyagraha also emphatically rejected the violent methods then fashionable among nationalists and revolutionaries. In Europe, anarchists sought to bring about political change by assassinating kings and prime ministers; socialists, by organizing the working class in violent insurrections. These methods were emulated in India, where young radicals sought likewise to kill colonial administrators in a bid to frighten the British into leaving the country.⁷

From where did Gandhi get the idea of nonviolent collective resistance? In his native Kathiawar, he had seen or heard of sit-down strikes by peasants protesting high taxes, and hunger-fasts by creditors at a debtor’s door. In South Africa, he had Baptist friends who told him of their “passive resistance” against Anglican orthodoxy. But a deeper influence than either was that of Leo Tolstoy, whose idea of “non-resistance to evil” powerfully spoke to him.

Like many of the other leaders profiled in this book, Gandhi’s political philosophy—and practice—was shaped in part by Western ideas and thinkers. But where Mao and Ho admired Marx and Lenin, and Nehru the British Fabians, Gandhi’s main mentor was the greatest Russian novelist of his age. So far as we can tell, Gandhi had not read Anna Karenina or War and Peace. Yet he had read—and reread—Tolstoy’s philosophical tracts. One of his favorite books was The Kingdom of God Is within You, which argued that in matters of faith an individual must follow his own inclinations and his own conscience, rejecting creeds and credos imposed by ancient scriptures or authorized clerics.

Gandhi also admired Tolstoy’s pacifism and the movement of conscientious objectors in Tsarist Russia he had helped spawn. He was further impressed by the fact that as a man of aristocratic birth, Tolstoy had deliberately declassed himself, seeking to live simply and work with his hands. After more than a decade of reading Tolstoy, Gandhi wrote to him in 1909, outlining how the Russian’s life had “left a deep impression on his mind.” He told Tolstoy of the satyagrahas led by him in South Africa and of how they drew on his own example and writings. The writer, flattered to find this new disciple in the East, praised the struggle of “our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal,” which had—as in Russia—opposed “meekness and love against pride and violence.”⁸

III

In South Africa, Gandhi was in essence a community leader. He spoke for the 150,000 Indians who lived in Natal, Transvaal, and the Cape Colony. His role was limited; so were his aims. Recognizing the force of white prejudice in South Africa, Gandhi never fought for full citizenship for his fellow Indians. When he first became politically active in Natal, he wrote a pamphlet demanding that educated Indians be given the franchise. He dropped this demand in later years, asking only that their rights of residence and livelihood be protected and their family and community customs not be threatened or dishonored.

Some astute observers recognized that behind these apparently modest demands was a larger cultural and social force. The racial laws in the Transvaal were implemented by the Boer War hero General J. C. Smuts, who served as secretary of the interior. When Gandhi and his mates began to troop into prison, an old Cambridge friend of Smuts’s, H. J. Wolstenholme, wrote to him that those he had jailed “belong to a race, or complex of races, with an ancient civilization behind them, and a mental capacity not inferior to that of the highest Western people, who are developing rapidly a feeling of nationality and a capacity for the more active and practical life of the more materialized West.” The Cambridge scholar saw an “epoch-making” change taking place in relations between East and West, whereby the Japanese, the Chinese, and the Indians would no longer accept exclusion and disability on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Politics behind the Economics of Asia’s Rise
• 1. Gandhi, India, and the World
• 2. Chiang Kai-shek and Chinese Modernization
• 3. Ho Chi Minh: Nationalist Icon
• 4. Mao Zedong and Charismatic Maoism
• 5. Jawaharlal Nehru: A Romantic in Politics
• 6. Zhou Enlai and China’s “Prolonged Rise”
• 7. Sukarno: Anticipating an Asian Century
• 8. Deng Xiaoping and the China He Made
• 9. Indira Gandhi: India and the World in Transition
• 10. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew: Traveling Light, Traveling Fast
• 11. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: In Pursuit of an Asian Pakistan
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Credits
• Index