China, India and Alternative Asian Modernities 9781138339781, 9780429260865

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CHINA, INDIA AND ALTERNATIVE ASIAN MODERNITIES

‘This rich collection of essays pluralizes our understandings of ­modernity by offering new conceptual frameworks and empirically grounded analyses of alternative modernities. The contributions, all by well-known scholars, show how differently the world was ­experienced and constructed across time and space in Asia.’ — Anand Yang, Professor and Chair, Department of History, University of Washington, author of Bazaar India: Markets, Society, and the Colonial State in Bihar (U of California Press, 1999) and co-editor of a multi-volume New Oxford World History series published by Oxford University Press ‘This is an excellent collection of essays on India, China, and beyond by some of the outstanding scholars in the field. The book offers insights into a wide range of ­topics, from issues of modernity to ­circulatory history. It also presents innovative methodologies to study and understand Asia through comparative and connected ­ frameworks. The book will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists, but also to those interested in the religious, philosophical as well as the political traditions of Asia.’ — Tansen Sen, Director of the Center for Global Asia and Professor of History at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Professor at NYU, author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of India–China Relations, 600–1400 (U of Hawai’i Press, 2003); India, China, and the World: A Connected History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017)

‘From ‘connected’ to ‘circulatory’ and ‘competitive’ histories, this ­volume brings together a stellar cast of scholars, from across a range of disciplines, to provide alternative and vernacular accounts of modernity in China, India and Southeast Asia. It provides a platform for conversations between ‘alternative’ modernities as south–south dialogues, making it unnecessary for these conversations to be always mediated through the west. It is a timely venture and an ever more important one.’ — Gurminder K. Bhambra, Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies, University of Sussex, author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007); Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury 2014) ‘It is now abundantly clear that some of the deepest engendered by capitalist modernity cannot problems ­ be solved only by the social, political and ethical categories associated with the modern west. Yet, while much scholarly energy and effort have been expended on a small but dominant number of western traditions, little ­systematic research has been done to excavate the conceptual treasures of other non-­western forms of life. Only when the resources of the critical t­ raditions of India, Africa, China, Persia, Arab, and the Latin American ­subcontinent are imaginatively unearthed will we make headway towards addressing the pressing issues of our times and transform the social and political imaginaries of our crisis-ridden societies. This ­illuminating collection of essays on Indian and Chinese modernity will make an ­invaluable contribution towards that endeavor and is bound to become an i­ndispensable guide to alternative modernities.’ — Rajeev Bhargava, Professor, CSDS, Delhi, author of The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (OUP, 2010) and Secular States and Religious Diversity (UBC Press, Vancouver, 2013)

The conception of modernity as a radical rupture from the past runs parallel to the conception of Europe as the primary locus of global history. The chapters in this volume contest the temporal and spatial divisions – between past and present, modernity and tradition, and Europe’s progress and Asia’s stasis – which the conventional ­narrative

of modernity creates. Drawing on early modern Chinese and Indian history and culture instead, the authors of the book explore the ­provenance of modernity beyond the west to see it in a transcultural and pluralistic light. The central argument of this volume is that modernity does not have a singular core or essence – a causal center. Its key features need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations ­imagined. By studying the Bhakti movement, Confucian democracy and the ­maritime and agrarian economies of China and India, this book enlarges the terms of debate and revisits devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authority and the rural as resources for modernity. This book will be of great interest to researchers and academicians working in the areas of history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, geopolitics, South Asian and East Asian studies. Sanjay Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. He is engaged in a comparative study of South Asian vernacular and folk literary and cultural traditions as sites of articulation of alternative modernities. Satya P. Mohanty is Professor of English at Cornell University. He has written and edited books on literary theory, minority studies and colonial and postcolonial studies. Archana Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. She is currently engaged in research on women’s folk culture and has done extensive fieldwork in the Banaras region to collect women’s folksongs. Raj Kumar is Professor of Hindi at Banaras Hindu University. He has extensively published research articles in reputed Hindi journals and is currently involved in a comprehensive project of retrieving, editing and interpreting rare vernacular texts and manuscripts of the early modern period.

CHINA, INDIA AND ALTERNATIVE ASIAN MODERNITIES

Edited by Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-33978-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-26086-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

FOR KAMAL SHEEL HISTORIAN, FRIEND AND MENTOR

CONTENTS

Notes on contributorsxi Preface and acknowledgmentsxvi

Alternative Asian modernities: an introduction

xviii

SANJAY KUMAR, SATYA P. MOHANTY, ARCHANA KUMAR AND RAJ KUMAR

PART I

Transcultural Asian modernities

1

  1 European self-making and India’s alternative modernities3 ARJUN APPADURAI

  2 Circulatory and competitive histories

18

PRASENJIT DUARA

  3 Connected histories: the Asian roots of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions

42

ARUN BALA

  4 Dominant and counter-imaginaries: analyzing India’s modernities60 MARTIN FUCHS

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C ontents

PART II

China and Southeast Asia

79

  5 A perspective on Confucian democracy in Cultural China

81

TU WEIMING

  6 Chinese maritime economy: historical globalizing forces

103

MAYFAIR YANG

  7 Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century: early modern or what?

121

GEOFF WADE

PART III

India143   8 Alternative modernities: the Odia Lakshmi Purana as radical pedagogy

145

SATYA P. MOHANTY

  9 Vernacular modernity and the public sphere of bhakti

168

PURUSHOTTAM AGRAWAL

10 Before the great divergence: the early modern South Asian agrarian economy in a global perspective

185

RAJAT DATTA

11 Revisiting the early modern merchant: caste, power and the politics of transition

203

LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

12 Modernity as renewal mechanism: alternative(s) to modernity in India

220

AVADHESH KUMAR SINGH

230

Index

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CONTRIBUTORS

Purushottam Agrawal, formerly Professor at the Centre for Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, is currently associated with the ITM University at Gwalior. He has researched and written extensively on the Bhakti movement and its social context (especially on Kabir), and vernacular modernity. His key publications include Sanskriti: Varchaswa Aur Pratirodh (1995); Teesra Rukh (1996); Vichaar Ka Ananta (2000); Nij Brahma Vichar: Dharma Samaj Aur Dharmetar Adhyatma (2004); Kabir: Sakhi Aur Sabad (2007); Akath Kahani Prem Ki: Kabir Ki Kavita Aur Unka Samay (2009); and Hindi Sarai: Astrakhan via Yerevan (2012). More recently he has turned to fiction writing; his maiden novel, Nacohus (2016), has been very well received by Hindi readers and critics. Arjun Appadurai is an anthropologist and Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He is presently spending a term (2016–2018) as Visiting Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University, Berlin. He has authored a number of seminal books within the field of globalization studies, such as Modernity at Large (1996); Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006); and The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013). His latest book is Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (2015), which offers an unconventional approach to the economic collapse of 2008. Arun Bala is the author of The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (2006) and Complementarity Beyond Physics: Neils Bohr’s Parallels (2017). He also edited Asia, Europe and the Emergence of Modern Science (2012) and co-edited The Bright

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Dark Ages: Comparative and Connective Perspectives (2016). He is currently a partner in the international collaborative project. The Cosmopolitan and the Local in Science and Nature, creating an east–west partnership between universities in India, Canada and Singapore. Rajat Datta is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He researches, teaches and writes on the economy of early modern India, with special reference to the eighteenth century. He is also an editor of the Medieval History Journal and serves on the editorial board of the Worlds of the East India Company, a series of monographs published by Boydell and Brewer. Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University and Director of the Global Asia Initiative. He was Pro­ fessor of History at the University of Chicago (1991–2008) and Raffles Professor and Director of Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2008–2015). He is the author of Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (1988; Joseph R. Levenson Prize of the Association of Asian Studies and John K. Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association); Rescuing History From the Nation (1995); Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003); and, most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (2014). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many European languages. Martin Fuchs holds the Professorship for Indian Religious History at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany. Trained in both anthropology and sociology, he has taught at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and New Zealand. His research interests include cultural and social theory, urban anthropology, social movements, struggles for recognition, normative transformations and religious individualization; his regional focus is on India. He has most recently ­co-edited Religious Individualization, a special issue of Religion, 45 (3), 2015. Archana Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. She is currently engaged in research on women’s folk culture and has done extensive fieldwork in Banaras region to collect women’s folksongs. She is writing a book on Voices from the Margins: Women and Folksongs. She is also working on cultural practices of Indian xii

C ontributors

indentured diaspora. She has done fieldwork among descendants of indentured migrants in Mauritius and has written a monograph on Birth Songs of Mauritius and India along with an audio CD of songs. Raj Kumar is Professor of Hindi at Banaras Hindu University. His areas of interest are literary theory and criticism, postcolonial studies and early modern vernacular literary cultures. He has extensively published research articles in reputed Hindi journals. He is currently involved in a comprehensive project of retrieving, editing and interpreting rare vernacular texts and manuscripts of the early modern period. Sanjay Kumar is Professor of English at Banaras Hindu University. He is engaged in a comparative study of South Asian vernacular and folk literary and cultural traditions as sites of articulation of alternative modernities. He is currently working on a book project on the oral epics of Bharthari and Gopichand, and co-editing a ­volume of essays on a sixteenth-century Odiya vernacular text, Lakshmi Purana and a related Bhojpuri folk song based on the story of ­Lakshmi Purana. Satya P. Mohanty is Professor of English at Cornell University. He has written and edited books on literary theory, minority studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. His book, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (1997), argues for a ‘postpositivist realist’ theory of culture and literature and introduces a new theory of social identity, especially minority identity. He is one of the founders of the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) Research Project and the founding director of the FMS Summer Institute (established 2005). Mohanty has (co-)edited four volumes, including The Future of Diversity (2010) and Colonialism, Modernity and Literature (2011), and is completing a book titled Thinking Across Cultures, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Avadhesh Kumar Singh is Vice Chancellor of Auro University at Surat. He has been Professor and Director of the School of ­Translation Studies and Training, Indira Gandhi National Open ­University, New Delhi. His key publications include Indian Knowledge S­ystems, 2 Vols. (with Kapil Kapoor) (2005); Ramayana Through Ages (2007); Voices of Woman: Gargi to Gangasati (2008); Interventions: ­Critical and L ­ iterary Discourses (2009); Towards ­Interdisciplinarity: (the) University, Social Sciences and Humanities (2010); Revisiting xiii

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Literature, Criticism and Aesthetics in India (2012); Samkalin Alochana Vimarsh (2016); Sanskrit Alochana ki Bhoomika (2017); and Valmiki’s ­Ramayana: Voices and Visions (2017). He is also General Editor of the Critical Discourses in South Asia series, Routledge. Lakshmi Subramanian is Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. Her main research areas are the Indian diaspora in the Indian Ocean and transnational networks; the economic and cultural history of India; and histories of music and performance. She is the author of The Sovereign and the Pirate Ordering Maritime Subjects in India’s Western Littoral (2016); Three Merchants of Bombay (2012); A History of India 1707–1857 (2010); Veena Dhanammal: The Making of a Legend (2009); Ports, Towns and Cities: A Historical Tour of the Indian Littoral (2008); New Mansions for Music Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism (2008); and From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (2006). Geoff Wade is a Canberra-based historian of Asian connections and interactions. His key publications include Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: An Open Access Resource (2005; http://epress.nus. edu.sg/msl/); China and Southeast Asia, 6 Vols. (2009); Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor (ed. with Sun Laichen) (2010); Anthony Reid and the Study of the Southeast Asian Past (ed. with Li Tana) (2012); and Asian Expansions: The Historical Experiences of Polity Expansion in Asia (2015). Tu Weiming is Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and the Chair Professor of Humanities and the Director of Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, Beijing, China. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has held positions at Princeton University, UC Berkeley and Harvard University. As a prominent philosopher, he was elected as the Fellow of the ­American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Executive Member of the Federation of International Philosophical Societies and Titular Member and Vice-Chairman of the International Institute of Philosophy. Mayfair Yang is Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural anthropologist of Chinese religions in the context of modernity, post-coloniality and the modern state. She is the author of Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (1994; American Ethnological Society Prize) and Re-enchanting

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Modernity: Ritual Economy & Indigenous Civil Society in Wenzhou, China (forthcoming). She has also edited Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (1999) and Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (2008).

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The chapters in this volume mainly focus on the early modern period of Chinese and Indian histories, during which the societies of these regions, contrary to a general perception of their having become stagnant and decadent, witnessed considerable transformation and change in social, political and economic spheres that led to the emergence of new values and institutions. Our exclusive preoccupation with western modernity has made us oblivious to these changes and to the possibilities for the emergence of discourse of indigenous modernities being articulated through these changes. The chapters seek to identify and analyze those features of early modernity in Asian societies and how these features encapsulated the possibilities of the articulation of alternative forms of modernity. The volume not only examines the notion of modernity empirically in two different Asian contexts (China and India) but also explores it on a theoretical plane, thus significantly expanding and e­ nlarging the terms of debate. It focuses on the inclusionary dynamics of modernity to reveal the patterns of assimilation and cross-fertilization of ideas, institutions and practices which characterize Eurasia of the early modern period. Such a move both helps to shift our gaze from the idea of European exceptionalism and the ‘me too’ approach, and opens up possibilities for new conceptualizations of a non-capitalist modernity based on a non-instrumental conception of nature, and even of rationality itself. Further, in considering modernity a shared and ­ transcultural phenomenon, it goes beyond mere comparison to explore and e­stablish connections and linkages in terms of how changes in and development of institutions and practices in one part affected and contributed to changes and developments in other parts of the world. And, more importantly, this volume brings India closer to the center of the discussion on modernities. These chapters were first presented at two conferences – M ­ ultiple Trajectories of Early Asian Modernities and Transcultural Asian xvi

P reface and acknowledgments

Modernities – hosted by the Inter-Cultural Studies Center at Banaras Hindu University in December 2011 and 2012. One of our most pleasant tasks as editors is to gratefully acknowledge the varied and manifold debts that we have accumulated in organizing the conferences and putting together this volume. Our first debt of gratitude is to all the scholars who participated in the conferences and contributed richly to our discussion and debate. We take this opportunity to thank them all: J. N. Mohanty, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Ashis Nandy, Namwar Singh, Ashok Vajpeyi, Vasudha Dalmia, Harbans Mukhia, John ­Hawley, ­William Pinch, Claude Alvares, C. K. Raju, Prathama Banerjee, Brij Tankha, Makarand Paranjape, A. Raghuramaraju, Rakshanda Jalil, Ranjana Mukhopadyaya and Raka Ray. It is with their generous support and encouragement that we have made the conference on alternative modernities an annual event. Special thanks are due to all the contributors who went through the arduous task of revising their papers for publication. We are thankful to Cambridge University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press for granting us permission to publish revised versions of Prasenjit Duara’s and Satya P. Mohanty’s essays. We also thank Verso for granting permission to use part of Arjun Appadurai’s previously published material in the essay that he wrote for us. We must make a special mention of Kamal Sheel, our friend, mentor and historian and the then-Dean of the Arts Faculty of Banaras Hindu University, who has been the guiding force behind this endeavor. In fact, his presence looms large over this volume, and we dedicate it to him. Sudhir Chandra has been a patient listener and interlocutor. He was kind enough to go through many drafts of the Introduction as well as many of the chapters and offered insightful comments and suggestions for improving clarity, although we have had our share of disagreements. Without his help, this volume would not have seen the light of day. We must thank Shashank Sinha of Routledge for securing quick approvals and expediting the publication process of an already muchdelayed project. We are grateful to Antara Ray Chaudhary, our editor at Routledge, for working through the manuscript, offering many valuable suggestions for its improvement and, finally, overseeing it through the complex publication process with patience and understanding. We also thank Makenzi Crouch for her meticulous copyediting and typesetting. SK SPM AK RK

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ALTERNATIVE ASIAN MODERNITIES: AN INTRODUCTION Sanjay Kumar, Satya P. Mohanty, Archana Kumar and Raj Kumar

Historians approach the past from the perspective of the present, and when the present changes, they adjust their historical lens. The categories of the social sciences were developed – and most histories written – to account for the rise of the west. The rise of the non-west after decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and more specifically the rise of Asia, may require us to revisit these categories and histories. This interdisciplinary volume by a group of international scholars challenges the dominant understanding of modernity. It engages with Asian (Chinese and Indian in particular) modernities with the hope that ‘at some point in the future when different sites in Asia become reference points to each other and different intellectual circles begin to interact, new and alternative modes of knowledge production might be able to emerge from this experiment’ (Chen and Chua 2007: 4–5). But more than the shift in geopolitical relations and the need to account for it, what has prompted us to engage in this exercise is the need to address the crises produced by the current phase of global capitalist modernity. Modernity, in its unending pursuit of material growth through the rational mastery of nature, has led to exploitation of the earth beyond its carrying capacity. Climate change and global warming now pose the threat of extinction to humans and other species. Clearly, the capitalist mode of development, together with its present patterns of production and consumption, is not sustainable. In order to imagine a more just and sustainable future, it is time that we looked at the possibilities of conceiving a non-capitalist modernity based on a xviii

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non-instrumental conception of nature, and even of rationality itself. The present volume, in seeking to explore and examine the traditions of China and India as alternative sources of modernity, sees itself as a step in that direction. An assumption shared by the editors of this volume is that modernity, which has popularized such cherished values as social equality and the inherent dignity of individual human beings, is not tied exclusively to the capitalist mode of production. As a concept, modernity does not have a singular core or essence, a causal center. Modernity’s many key features, we propose, need to be disaggregated and new configurations and combinations imagined. This requires both historical and theoretical work as well as a revivification of the intellectual imagination.

Modernity: the conventional narrative The conventional narrative of modernity has largely been the narrative of the ascendancy of the west to a position of global dominance in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Much of this narrative has been cast in the form of the west versus the rest, and it is always premised on the following question: why was this breakthrough – namely the passage to capitalist industrialized society and other related developments in social and political realms – achieved only by Europe and not others? In seeking to account for this phenomenon, it posits the thesis of Europe’s uniqueness and tells the tale of European superiority. Europe becomes the active agent as well as the locus of history: it claimed not only to have discovered the rest of the world (through the great voyages of exploration and discovery) but also to have drawn the world into history. Modernization, in this narrative, becomes synonymous with westernization, and the program of modernity becomes the program of diffusion of European modernity to the rest of the world. Modernity, then, comes to be associated with a set of features that are proclaimed to be normative – the capitalist mode of production, a liberal market economy, the centralized bureaucratic nation–state, individualism, the sovereignty of reason, a scientific and secular outlook, historical consciousness, civil society, the public sphere and forms of republicanism and democracy. This phenomenon of modernity is considered not only ‘uniquely’ European but also altogether new, setting Europe off from both the rest of the world and its own past. Thus, this narrative introduces not only a temporal division, carving up history into different epochs (ancient, medieval and modern), but also a spatial one between Europe/the west and non-Europe/the rest of the world. It creates a polarity between tradition and modernity in which xix

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tradition has come to be associated with all that is primitive, unchanging and static, and modernity with change, dynamism and progress. One dominant strain in this narrative, of both the Marxist and Weberian kinds, has been that modernity is a single, homogenous process or a single unified package comprising various sub-processes; and its rise is attributed to a single causal principle – the capitalist mode of production in the case of Marx and a more abstract principle of rationality of the world in the case of Weber. Further, it predicts the convergence of all societies into a uniform modernity of the European type. Given the universalist claims of modernity, it is assumed that as this modernity spreads from Europe to other societies, the latter – which are made to discard their archaic and pre-modern institutions, practices, beliefs and values – will come to resemble modern European societies. This dominant strand of thought has spawned numerous versions of this narrative, but all are variations on the same general theme.1 This discourse of modernity is similar to the Orientalist or mission civilisatrice discourse. These discourses construct a whole host of conceptual categories based on the binaries between plenitude and lack, presence and absence. Thus, Asia is constructed as the other of Europe, as being radically different from Europe, and this difference is translated and read as a disability. Asia is portrayed as a moribund continent characterized by the Asiatic mode of production or oriental despotism that kept it backward and stagnant. One just needs to recall here the famous observation Marx made regarding India in 1853, that it ‘has remained unaltered since remotest antiquity’. What Marx said about India was symptomatic of the rest of the world, except Europe. But while the difference with Europe was highlighted (a whole body of works was undertaken to produce knowledge of the Orient), differences within the non-European world were considered to be inconsequential or not significant enough to merit any attention. Thus, both Europe/the west and nonEurope/Asia (and together with Asia, the rest of the world) were respectively reified and hypostatized as homogenous and coherent entities. These discourses are overlapping and often informed by similar assumptions; only the rhetoric changes. The classical ‘modernization theory’ (which, in fact, comprised a number of related theories) of the 1950s and 1960s, as the narrative of modernity came to be called in the American social sciences (with translation of Weber’s ideas into American sociology by scholars like Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Reinhard Bendix, Hans Gerth, C. Wright Mills and W. W. Rostow), xx

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is only the latest version of the earlier discourses, and it corresponds to the postcolonial moment just as the earlier discourses corresponded to the colonial moment. While the earlier discourses promised salvation first by conversion to Christianity and later by the civilizing mission, the modernization discourse promised salvation by development (Mignolo 2011). Modernization theory gains academic currency around the same time when the European colonial empire is dissolving; the center of power shifts from Western Europe to the United States; and there is an ensuing Cold War rivalry between the First World, led by the USA, and the Communist bloc, led by the USSR, over the domination of the newly emergent independent nations of Africa and Asia (now rechristened as the Third World). In this rivalry, the claim of the superiority of the American and Western European model of capitalist democracy is asserted over the regulated autocratic socialist model of East European Communism.2 It is important to recognize, however, that modernity in the west was not uniform. There were substantial differences within the western societies in their paths to modernity. Referring to North America and Western Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bjorn Wittrock argues that ‘it is simply not true that all these countries have roughly similar types of economic and political institutions in this historical period’ (2000: 33). He points out how most of the European countries not only had an interventionist, state-oriented economic order as opposed to liberal market economy and free trade, but also a civil society that acted in concert with and aid of the state rather than in opposition to or independent of it.

The antinomies of modernity? What Wittrock refers to as deep differences within western modernity are called ‘antinomies’ or ‘irreducible dilemmas of modernity’ by Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000). Eisenstadt points out various kinds of tension within modernity, conflicts between different visions of modernity and how they have played out differently in the western context: for example, tension between freedom and control; between reason and emotion; between equality and liberty; between various forms of liberalisms and republicanisms; between the discrete self-interests of individuals or groups and the common good; between state control or intervention and free market economy. Were Jacobinism, National Socialism and fascism not just as much products of modernity as was electoral democracy? Were Montesquieu and Rousseau not convinced xxi

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that excessive emphasis on economic growth is detrimental to the democratic spirit? And what about Weber himself and his apprehension about the ‘iron cage’ (‘stahlhartes Gehäuse’) (2001: 123) – that bureaucratization of society restricts and limits human freedom and potential? Most important of all is the tension that Eisenstadt finds between various (totalitarian) universalist and pluralist visions in modernity. For example, the pluralist visions would require separation between civil society and political order; the totalitarian tendencies would conflate both. More critical is the tension between totalizing and pluralist visions of rationality, as it was considered to be central to the project of modernity. Eisenstadt argued that we keep in mind the crucial difference between a view that accepted the existence of different values and rationalities and a view that conflated different values and, above all, rationalities in a totalistic way. . . . The most significant movement to universalize different rationalities – often identified as the major message of the Enlightenment – was that of the sovereignty of reason, which subsumed value rationality (Wertrationalität) or substantive rationality, under instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität), transforming it into a totalizing moralistic utopian vision. (2000: 7–8) In fact, what was passed off in the name of rationality was only a particular notion of rationality, namely instrumental rationality, which viewed nature as available to man for ceaseless appropriation and exploitation to serve his interests and thus implied man’s control and domination over nature. In this context, one could ask: is being rational, and hence modern, to be essentially like the capitalist west, or are there other forms of rationality and modernity? Did other nonwestern societies have no alternative than to replicate the model of modernity as it emerged in the west? This issue becomes pertinent since Weber himself acknowledges that there are different kinds of rationality and multiple rationalization processes operating in different spheres/realms of life.3 Referring to different spheres of life – legal, political, economic, aesthetic, erotic, religious and ethical – Weber says that each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from xxii

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one point of view may well be irrational from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture. (2001: xxxviii–xxxix) Substantively rational points of view may also differ within a single sphere. Furthermore, rationalization processes can take place in each sphere independently from others and at their own pace. The rational structures of law, for example, did not originate in England, the earliest country to have industrialized, but rather in ancient Rome, and were taken over in the Catholic countries of Southern Europe long before the onset of industrialization there. Similarly, worldly rational philosophies emerged earliest in France with the Enlightenment rather than in England or Holland, where economic ‘rationalism’ had reached its highest stages (Karlberg 1980). This pluralistic conception of rationality (as Martin Fuchs points out in this volume) has not been pursued seriously in a comparative project. The idea is not to repudiate the western modality of rationality but rather to pluralize and contextualize it. While Weber attributes the rise of industrial capitalism in the west to the unfolding of particular types of rationality and rationalization processes, he suggests by implication that rationality and rationalization processes – albeit of a different kind – are evident in non-western civilizations as well. The important thing to note here is the manner in which Weber frames his problem; his exclusive concern is to account for the rise of industrial capitalism in the west (and also to consider why it did not happen in China or India or other parts of the world). Weber says: these studies do not claim to be complete analyses of cultures, however brief. On the contrary, in every culture they quite deliberately emphasize the elements in which it differs from western civilization. They are, hence, definitely oriented to the problems which seem important for the understanding of western culture from this view-point. (2001: xl; emphasis in original) As is evident from the above remark, Weber’s studies were not intended to be comprehensive analyses of different non-western cultures per se or developments therein but rather an attempt to look at these cultures only in terms of their differences from the western culture, and that too from the limited perspective of a specific form of capitalism as it arose in the west – what he calls bourgeois capitalism, with the rational organization xxiii

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of free labor. The problem with such an approach is that only a specific form of capitalism associated with the west and the particular type of rationality that led to the rise of this capitalism are accorded both a normative status and universal significance; it also marginalizes other forms of capitalism. Weber himself talks about other forms of capitalism and about India and China possessing fairly sophisticated forms of rationality. But since other forms of economic development and other forms of rationality are neglected, the non-western world or cultures would, in such a case, figure only negatively as sites of lack. The Weberian thesis or other narratives of modernity, despite their claims to being future-oriented, take the form of post-facto justification: accounting for the success of the west as capitalist ­ ­industrialized ­societies/economies after it had happened. As ­Prasannan Parthasarathi argues, Marx, Weber, North and other writers on divergence project a nineteenth-century imperative, an industrial economy, into historical periods when such a mode of economic organization was not a category of thought. Even the leading economic thinkers of the eighteenth century, including Adam Smith, did not conceive of industrialization as the direction for the economic change, as betrayed by Smith’s failure to anticipate the industrial order that emerged within decades of the publication of the Wealth of Nations. (2011: 8) It was only with the emergence of the new economic and social order – industrial society – in the west in the nineteenth century, and not before, that this order came to be seen as the universally desirable developmental goal of all societies. But this is an example of anachronistic thinking, of reading history backwards from the vantage point of the present, of projecting the nineteenth century onto earlier periods. One can clearly see that this move is ideological and that it assigns to the west a far greater unity of purpose than is warranted. It would appear that the west was consciously and systematically working towards the goal of a capitalist industrial society, which was certainly not the case, as has been pointed out in numerous studies, most notably in Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), Roy Bin Wong (1997), Andre Gunder Frank (1998) and more recently in Prasannan Parthasarathi (2011). It is this particular outcome, and the manner in which Europe achieved it, that have, then, been presented as the future destiny of all non-western societies. xxiv

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Such ideological narratives of modernity are always constructed in binary terms, and they are historically inadequate. These narratives lead to either the rise of industrial capitalism or its failure. The nonEuropean world has been excluded from this enterprise. Jack Goody argues that Europe in the nineteenth century . . . undoubtedly had a comparative advantage. But to push that advantage back in early modern and medieval periods is to discount the many achievements, in the economy, in technology, in learning, and in communication, which these other societies had undoubtedly achieved, including in the earlier stages of ‘capitalism’. The result is to appropriate the whole nature and spirit of capitalism (or in Braudel’s case ‘true’ capitalism) and to claim it uniquely for the west, or even for one component of the west, England or Holland. (2006: 210) In fact, there is an emerging body of scholarship that suggests, c­ontrary to the conventional wisdom that Asian societies were ­stagnant and static before they came into contact with Europe, that they had been societies of vibrant economic and cultural d ­ ynamism, each progressing along its own modernizing course of development, in some instances even ahead of Europe. They had been undergoing processes of fundamental transformation and restructuring in all spheres of life – intellectual, social, cultural, political and ­economic – heralding new institutions, practices, beliefs and values. For example, China of the Ming period was characterized by not only a fl ­ ourishing economy with rising productivity, widening networks of commercial exchange and a robust expansion in manufacturing activity, but also the restructuring of the social and intellectual spheres; it ­consolidated and drew on Neo-Confucianism as a rational and secular system of thought with its new conceptions of human nature and a self-perfectible, morally responsible self, fostering new forms of learning and scholarship. This Neo-Confucianism spread to Korea and Vietnam in the fifteenth century and then to Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century and played a vital role in social and intellectual formations there. Similarly, in the Indian subcontinent, based on new realities of social and economic mobility, as evidenced in growing and expanding commerce and production, the Bhakti movement became the means of articulation of a newly emergent s­ensibility with a new conception of the individual based on action, duty and xxv

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work rather than socially ascribed station like varna and caste (see the chapters in this volume by Mohanty and Agrawal).

Alternative modernities Our exclusive preoccupation with western modernity has made us oblivious to these changes and to the possibilities for alternative or indigenous modernities being articulated through these changes. The fact that the non-western societies are at present developing differently and producing their own versions of modernity has something to do with these earlier diverse histories and paths of development, which were thwarted by the imposition of western modernity through two centuries of imperial and colonial dominance. They should not be seen merely as extensions or different versions of western modernity or as projects of assimilating an alien modernity from the west into the various Asian contexts with their social and cultural specificities, as scholars like Eisenstadt (1998, 2000) and Dilip Gaonkar (2001) suggest; they are also products of the historical dynamics and processes of earlier times, as Mayfair Yang shows in this volume (see, in this context, Charles Taylor 2004). This volume seeks to retrieve these marginalized or suppressed narratives and histories in an effort to understand our present better. In the process, it leads to new conceptualizations and understandings of modernity by pointing to diverse trajectories and patterns, alerting us to the possibility of multiple experiences of modernity, of significant divergences capable of changing and transforming the practices of modernity. In our view, modernity is a shared and transcultural phenomenon across Eurasia. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam says, arguing against the diffusion model, modernity is historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a diverse set of phenomena. (1998: 99–100; emphasis in the original) Agreeing with Subrahmanyam, we contend that modernity did not develop in one remote corner of Eurasia (Northern Europe) in isolation on account of some exceptional or exclusive qualities that the latter possessed. Rather, it developed as a result of interaction among xxvi

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different societies and regions of Afro–Eurasia and the Atlantic. Thus, what we have in Europe is only one kind of modernity, for these interactions produced other kinds of modernity elsewhere. Indeed, as one of the editors of this volume, Satya P. Mohanty, has proposed, modernity is not a unitary phenomenon, and as a concept it does not have a singular essence. Rather, its ‘crucial features . . . can be disaggregated: they can even be recombined in a number of different ways, shaped by differences in sociocultural context’ (Mohanty 2011: 3). The historical phenomenon we call modernity is, in fact, the product of what Subrahmanyam (1997) calls ‘connected histories’, or better still what Prasenjit Duara in this volume calls ‘circulatory histories’. Duara points out that at different times, different cities or regions in Eurasia – whether joined by trading, and religious and technological networks, or separated by empires, disease, political instability, piracy or climate change – created different nodes of absorption, innovation or isolation in this gradually expanding zone over the millennia. The early modern world (Eurasia) was essentially a globally connected world with varying degrees of intensity of interaction among its different entities.4 There were multiple levels of interaction in this network: intraregional, interregional and supra-regional or global. These interactions at the interregional and supra-regional levels created forces that exerted varied pressures and challenges on different societies, to which they responded differently depending on their local contexts and needs. For example, the global trading system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generated different sets of opportunities, pressures and challenges for different societies/actors in various parts of Eurasia, which made them seek solutions that were radically different. One can cite here two well-documented instances of trade in cotton textiles and flow of bullion which had different consequences for different societies. While much scholarly energy has been expended on documenting the exchange of goods and services through overland and maritime trading and commercial networks, not much attention has been paid to the flow and exchange of ideas, knowledge and mental constructs across this shared and interactive space. Subrahmanyam (1997) draws our attention first to such flows when he points out how the ideas of millenarianism and universal empire and monarch were shared, adapted and given local expression among different political xxvii

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dispensations and groups across Eurasia. Similarly, Arun Bala points to the patterns of exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas and practices among different astronomical traditions in Eurasian civilizations which eventually led to the rise of modern astronomy in Europe. As a result, there was not one singular path but multiple paths to modernity. That is why Subrahmanyam argues for delinking ‘the notion of “modernity” from a particular European trajectory (Greece, Classical Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and thus “modernity” . . .)’ since ‘it represents a more-or-less global shift, with many different sources and roots, and – inevitably – many different forms and meanings depending on which society we look at it from’ (1997: 737).5 This volume, therefore, argues for a notion of polycentric modernity with many centers across Eurasia, with continual interaction between centers and peripheries and also among different centers, creating different nodes of circulation, absorption and transformation. Exclusive focus on nation–state or civilization, or what J. M. Blaut (1993) calls ‘tunnel-history’, following the domination of western modernity has obscured from our view these patterns of interaction which were crucial to the formation of modernity/ies. Changing the optic from individual societies as self-contained entities with histories of autonomous developments such as nation–states and civilizations to their trans-local and -regional relations of varying reach leads us beyond the exclusionary and hegemonic binarism of the earlier modernization discourses to an inclusionary and non-hegemonic approach. As Arif Dirlik puts it, ‘rethinking modernity in terms of transcontinental relations de-centers the production of modernity in its formation. It also calls into question the historicist conceit of autonomous national and civilizational origins and development that is a common assumption of all centrisms’ (2011: 297). The advantage that such an approach offers is that one can thus engage with Asian modernities and speak of diverse Asian pasts and presents without lapsing into reification of Asia as a homogenous identity, or reversing and installing another hierarchy by promoting Asia-centrism. Asian societies are seen with all their plurality and multivocality as existing in an open network of relationships – both in and out of Asia. On this view – that modernity is a shared and transcultural phenomenon and that there is not one but multiple paths to modernity which different societies and cultures followed – it follows that modernity is not a single homogenous phenomenon or an integral and unified package of features causally connected with one another, but rather that these features can be disaggregated and combined in various ways. European modernity is one such combination, but there can be and xxviii

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have been different combinations. It is also feasible and possible that not all features would be present in all societies in the same measure and that each of these features can shape up independently at their own pace. Here we would like to take our cue from Marx and Weber themselves. Sudipta Kaviraj (2005) points to two opposing and rather ambivalent strands between the economic and the political writings of Marx, one structural and the other historicist.6 For our purpose, it is the historicist reading that is important. He points out that two different ways of thinking can be discerned in his reflections on the history of evolution of capitalist social forms. In his early writings, Marx proposes a kind of convergence theory that, despite their differences, all societies eventually tend historically towards a single structural form; however, in his later writings he takes an increasingly complex and nuanced view of a plural vision of historical paths, which makes him pronounce the distinction between the ‘first way’ capitalist development of England and France, which promotes political forces of democracy, and the ‘second way’ of Germany, Italy and Russia, which retards and obstructs them. Kaviraj says, at least by implication, this is then the beginning of a theory of ‘multiple modernities’ within the western world itself, and inside the canonical traditions of western social theory. This would suggest that although the impulses towards a capitalist economy, urbanization, and political democracy are all general tendencies in the history of modern Europe, there are different configurations of their complex figuration, and even differential trajectories within the history of European modernity. (2005: 507) Similarly, Anthony Giddens in his Introduction appended to the classic work of Weber (PE) also draws our attention to the presence of historicism in Weber when he says that ‘the work expresses his conviction that there are no “laws of history”: the emergence of modern capitalism in the west was an outcome of an historically specific conjunction of events’ (2001: xviii). We have also pointed out above how Weber himself suggests that not only are there diverse rationalities and rationalization processes but rationalization in each sphere also takes place independently of other spheres and at its own pace. One can perceive in both Marx and Weber the element of contingency in the constitution of modernity. Such being the case, modernity need not be seen in terms of specific institutions and practices of the xxix

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European kind since the institutions and practices will vary from society to society and context to context. The basic flaw in this approach is that it conflates different dimensions of modernity – structural, institutional and cultural – with the values/ethos of modernity, and as a consequence all these dimensions become universal and normative. We often talk of the one by way of the other. Thus, nation–state is modern while empire is pre-modern; industrial capitalism is modern while mercantile capitalism is pre- or proto-modern; and so on. Further, if one talks of individualism, then it is always individualism of a certain kind as it has emerged in the west; if it is democracy, it is always democracy of a certain type. We always have in mind certain idealized criteria of modernity, ideal–typical western modernity.

Redefining socio-cultural modernity In order to avoid this pitfall, we propose that socio-cultural modernity should be perceived in terms of ethos and values, and not be too closely identified with particular institutions and practices. Of course, values cannot exist apart from practices and institutions. They are always embodied in institutions and practices. But we need to separate practices, processes and institutions from values for heuristic purposes, since focus on particular institutions and practices have in the past proved to be a limiting and inhibiting exercise. If modern ethos and values have been present in non-European societies, even though they are articulated differently and through institutions and practices different from those of European societies, they should be considered modern. As Satya P. Mohanty says, after proposing that the concept of modernity be ‘disaggregated’ and studied in more context-sensitive ways, if we can find modern values and ideas articulated in socioeconomic systems very different from eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury European capitalism, part of the challenge for us as scholars is to trace the provenance of such values and ideas in these non-European contexts and to examine the alternative institutions and cultural forms that supported them. (2011: 3) We would like to point out here that all modern values are anchored in two fundamental premises which provide an overall framework to these values. They are the notions of human self-making, or human agency, and the sovereignty of reason. Humans are capable of shaping their world in a rational manner. The capacity for human autonomy, xxx

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together with the spirit of rational inquiry or questioning, forms the bedrock of the values of modernity. Since these two notions are apprehended and experienced differently in different societies or even within different sections of societies, they find numerous and divergent expressions in terms of values, institutions and practices in their conception of self, society, nature, cosmos, time and history. It is within this broad, pluralistic framework that this volume seeks to try locate the modern values and ideas in the Asian context, more specifically India and China, and to explore the provenance of these values and ideas and what specific institutions and practices support them. This approach has led, as many of the chapters in the volume (see especially Arjun Appadurai, Martin Fuchs, Tu Weiming, Mayfair Yang, Satya P. Mohanty and Purushottam Agrawal) show, to revisiting devalued terms and concepts like tradition, religion, authoritarianism, rural and provincial as resources for modernity rather than as essentially opposed to it.

The Essays While the chapters in the first section engage with modernity on a theoretical plane, not only evaluating its premises from a transcultural perspective but also suggesting a polycentric conception of modernity, the chapters in the second and third sections focus on China and India in particular, pointing to various trajectories and divergent patterns. A common strand that runs through these chapters is that imagining alternatives to Eurocentric notions of modernity is inextricably linked to retrieving resources that modernity rejects or forgets and to rethinking these forgotten resources in light of the present. One of the most persistent puzzles that has plagued modernity is its intimate connection with colonialism (Bhambra 2007; Mignolo 2011; Pagden 1982; Toulmin 1990). But most narratives of modernity often gloss over the contradictions between the ethical ideals of the Enlightenment (including its central emphasis on the universality of reason) and its imperial project. The opening chapter by Arjun Appadurai points to the connection between modernity and colonialism by arguing that ‘post-Renaissance European idea of modernity . . . requires complete global expansion for its own inner logic to be revealed and justified’. This notion of modernity is an outcome of what he calls ‘trajectorism’ in European thought, a tendency to always see its history as some sort of predetermined journey to a desirable destination. A deep epistemological and ontological habit, ‘trajectorism is the idea that time’s arrow inevitably has a telos, and in that telos are to be found all the significant patterns of change, process and history’. This xxxi

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is the overarching conceptual frame (Appadurai calls it the meta-trap of the west) within which the self-imagining and self-understanding of Europe developed. In this optic, Europe is the singular expression of time’s arrow, and the world written in the image of Europe is the known destination. But the self-image in which Europe seeks to cast the rest of the world is not itself a unified one. It is pieced together by drawing many competing and often contradictory genealogies into the optic of the trajectorist narrative, and the colonies become the sites ­ etropolitan to stage the unresolved contradictions and tensions of m Europe. Appadurai proceeds to examine the way in which one such unresolved debate over secularization, the place of religion in the ­public sphere and the relative importance of church and state in public life in Europe, was projected and played out in India through British colonialism. This had led, he points out, to rewriting and organizing what was essentially a heterogeneous and diverse religious landscape of numerous sampradayas with their institutions, beliefs, customs and practices into a single conceptual category together with a community of believers crystallized around this category – Hinduism and a Hindu community. This process of conceiving of a single Hindu faith/religion and a Hindu community led to the suppression and marginalization of the way in which Indians perceived, experienced and organized their religious life and interactions. He argues for the redemption of these suppressed formations, which could be the basis of alternative roads to contemporary modernity in India, while cautioning us that ‘the path to such a rediscovery is neither easy nor linear’. Prasenjit Duara, too, addresses the problématique of trajectorism, but he does it from the perspective of temporality and poses a different set of questions: under what conditions did linear notions of time and history rise to a hegemonic position during the modern period; how did linear histories become territorially bounded into national histories; and how was it deployed in the service of capitalism? He attributes the rise of the linear notion of time and history to the environment of the competitive state system in Europe between 1450 and 1650, which viewed all resources and bio-power in its territory as susceptible to mobilization. Subsequently, this competitive state system, combined with the ideals of the secular state and popular sovereignty in the wake of the French Revolution, led to the rise of nation–states. The modern conception of time/history sought its metaphysical roots in the authenticity of nation, the unchanging subject in the course of a changing history. In the disenchanted world, the nation comes to acquire a quasi-divine moral authority and is elevated as a transcendent entity much like the God or Heaven of earlier times. His contention xxxii

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is that the authenticity of the nation is necessary not just to overcome the uncertainties and disruptions caused by the accelerating pace of changes but also to anchor these changes. Duara underlines the necessity for replacing linear, tunneled histories of nations with circulatory histories. Circulatory histories are shared histories, he explains, which take into account both the different experiences of events by different people and the often oblique routes through which histories and ideas travel. Not unlike Duara’s circulatory histories, Arun Bala presents a dialogical account of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and relocates them in a Eurasian rather than a narrowly European context. It has several implications for our understanding of modernity. If these revolutions are dialogical phenomena, and modernity itself is rooted in them, then we would have to construe modernity as a dialogical phenomenon and one that is moreover transcultural. This makes the notion of the roots of modernity as solely European questionable – modernity is as much a phenomenon of Asian as of European origins. We have to conclude that transcultural Asian modernity need not be construed only as a project of assimilating an alien modernity from the west into the various Asian contexts, but also as a project of rereading modernity through its Eurasian roots. In the final chapter of this section, Martin Fuchs takes up the notion of human agency or human self-making as the foundational assumption of modernity and explores it in terms of three process categories of modernization – rationalization, secularization and individualization. Pointing to the polymorphous nature of rationality and the multiplicity of rationalization processes, he contends that the historic rationalization process that the west went through in the wake of the Enlightenment is not the only form of rationalization but only one among numerous others which could be evidenced in other societies. But due to the rise of the west to a position of dominance, the rationalization process associated with the west came to acquire universal and normative status, and the other rationalization processes were eclipsed. He calls for a retrieval of the pluralistic concept of rationalization process(es) in an effort to contextualize and relativize the now dominant form of rationalization. As regards the second process category of secularization, he suggests that we should conceive of it as part and parcel of a socially dominant and therefore contestable ­imaginary – supported by some people and not by others – and not so much see secularization as an overall process that has or has not led to full-fledged secularism, or has done so unevenly only. Making a distinction between (institutionalized) religion and religiosity, Fuchs xxxiii

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argues that religiosity is not opposed to secularization, but it can very well accompany the process of secularization. Citing the examples of Ambedkar and Gandhi, whose social and political action had strong religio-ethical underpinning, he further asserts that ‘it is in my eyes fully feasible that a religious person is reflexive and critical, and a concerned citizen’. This takes him to the third process category of individualization, and he argues that there have been notions of individualization developed in contexts other than those of Europe. Citing the examples of the Bhakti movement and Ambedkarite Buddhism, he shows that they present an inter-subjective notion of individualism – constituting of one’s self in the act of experiencing the other – which makes it different from the possessive, moral and expressive individualisms of the modern west. Satya P. Mohanty and Purushottam Agrawal also deal with the notion of individualism developed during the Bhakti movement in their chapters. The second section of the volume has three chapters, all focused on Asian societies – two on China and one on Southeast Asia. Weber blamed religion in societies like China and India for their inability to develop capitalism. While accepting the broad culturalist framework of Weber in accounting for socioeconomic development, Tu Weiming refutes the specific Weberian thesis of Confucianism being an impediment to modernity. Tu proposes the idea of Confucian democracy in the context of Cultural China (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Mainland China) and Singapore. The idea of Confucian democracy may appear to be self-contradictory since Confucianism as an ideology is commonly held to be incompatible with, even opposed to, democracy. But this view, he suggests, rests on two false assumptions: i) that Confucianism is a stagnant, fixed and outmoded ideology and practice, not capable of change and adaptation; and ii) that the western style of democracy, based on multi-party electoral systems, is the only form of democracy possible. He points to the dynamic, resilient and adaptive nature of Confucianism by showing its complex interplay with modernization in Cultural China and Singapore over the last century, and especially in the last three decades. He shows how in each case, even as these societies adopted western practices and institutions, Confucian values like civility, rightness and justice, wisdom, filial piety and trust continued to form the bedrock of these societies. As for democracy, what is essential, according to Tu, is not a multiparty based electoral system but rather a culture of vigorous public reasoning in a vibrant public space which becomes the arena for public reasoning with dialogue, discussion and debate among citizens, with such reasoning influencing public policy. For such a public space to xxxiv

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exist, it is essential to have a healthy civil society, which, in turn, must meet two conditions: first, it must have a multi-centered power structure; that is, all spheres of interest must have their authority independent of the political center. Second, each sphere of interest must be able to exert pressure on the center according to its own agenda. Such a public space, when combined with Confucian leadership, yields the template for a Confucian democracy in which ­conscientious, ­public-spirited elite-leaders work for the public good with little regard for their self-interest, and their policies and actions are subject to ­public scrutiny. He claims that while it is difficult to predict what style of democracy will emerge in Cultural China, ‘the emergence of an institutionalized “public reasoning” in a widely accessible public space buttressed by a vibrant civil society and supported by a responsible leadership is a wholesome style of democratization’. What the experience of development in industrial East Asia suggests is not the passing of a traditional society but the continuing role of tradition in providing rich texture of an evolving modernity. An exercise in micro-history, the second chapter of the section by Mayfair Yang shows ‘what . . . older alternative models of indigenous economy may offer to the modern capitalist world of hegemonic nation–states, multinational corporations, and Protestant ethic rationalities’. The point of departure is the ‘Wenzhou Model’ of China in the coastal Zhejiang Province, a model of dramatic rural development based on small family enterprises engaged in light industrial manufacturing or commercial ventures in the post-Mao era. Yang argues that long before western imperialism arrived at China’s shores, China had already developed its own internal historical dynamics based on a tension between two modes of power – agrarian sovereignty and maritime coastal economy. Maritime coastal economy, with its porous borders and potential mix of natives with foreign others, admitting a continuous flow of traders, travelers, goods, money and culture across territorial boundaries, was perceived as a threat to the agrarian, land-based territorial imperative of sovereign power. She shows that the post-Maoist Wenzhou Model of rural economy is informed by these deep structural patterns that have been played out in China since at least the eleventh century; ­Wenzhou’s social transformation today is not so much a reaction to the challenge of western capital, but is in many ways a reinscription of a key dynamic of power that extends back to the beginning of the xxxv

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Ming dynasty in the fourteenth century. What the west did do was to trigger a major reassertion of agrarian sovereignty in the twentieth century, the systematicity and pervasiveness of which far outstripped that other assertion at the beginning of the Ming dynasty. This alter­ native narrative of history has the benefit of assigning primary agency to Chinese forces rather than the west. It also de-centers the west from the human history of globalization and capitalism by pushing history back a few centuries from the European Age of Exploration. Geoff Wade questions the current periodization of history, especially the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, which has been dubbed the early modern period by historians. According to Wade, this was done from the narrow point of view of European history, and its application to the history of other regions of the world outside Europe is problematic. He chooses to focus his attention on Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century as the beginning of the early modern period and examines the range of changes – economic, political, social and ideological – that took place in the region during that century. By juxtaposing the changes and developments that took place during this period with those during the tenth to fourteenth centuries in Southeast Asia, he argues that the changes and developments in the fifteenth century can be traced back to the earlier period and are the continuation of those processes of change and development. In other words, the changes and developments in the fifteenth century were not radically new, and they did not represent a break from the past. In light of this, Wade then asks whether we can extend the early modern period back to the tenth century, or whether this earlier period, i.e., the tenth to fourteenth centuries, should be called as the ‘early’ early modern period. Wade’s argument comes very close to the argument made by scholars like Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), Jack Goody (2006), Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), Andre Gunder Frank (1998) and others, who suggest that Southeast Asia has been early modern since the tenth century and had bustling trade and commerce, which Europe joined only as a latecomer in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Claiming that the changes that occurred during these two periods in Southeast Asia were real and hugely influential, Wade suggests that we need to ‘begin to think about how to periodize Southeast Asian history in ways which do not draw on categories created for examining the European past’. Fuchs’s chapter calls for revisiting the pre-modern and precolonial and searching for trends and strands that speak to questions and issues concerning modernity. The chapters in the third section of the volume, focusing on India, are in some ways a response to this call. xxxvi

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The opening chapter of the section by Satya P. Mohanty focuses on a sixteenth-century Odia text, Lakshmi Purana by the radical saint– poet Balaram Das, and shows how neglected genres like the puranas can yield insights into radical social and cultural values, values that scholars have not always expected to find in precolonial India. The Lakshmi Purana is both a feminist and an anticaste text, and what makes it unusually interesting for scholars is that Das intended it to be recited every year during the harvest season by women in every Hindu household – and that practice has continued for five centuries, even to this day. Mohanty’s close textual analysis shows how Das’s narrative develops the notion of a self-critical individuality that is distinct from – rather than merely embedded in – the dominant social structure and its patriarchal and caste-based value system. He argues that such analyses of precolonial cultural texts can help ‘provincialize’ the European experience and provide the grounds for a genuine comparison across cultures, building on Charles Taylor’s important intellectual archeology of the west. Such analyses can show how quintessentially modern values like human equality, based on the ideal of a critical and self-reflexive individual, are not necessarily Eurocentric notions, and that they have been articulated in some precolonial, non-European contexts. The chapter also suggests ways of doing comparative historical and cultural studies of what we call ‘modernity’ by expanding the range of texts we traditionally examine. It indicates how literary analysis, especially of traditional South Asian texts, can contribute to a multidisciplinary collaborative project of historical retrieval, leading to a reinterpretation of what we often condescendingly call the ‘pre-modern’. Citing the example of emergence of vernacular modernity through the Bhakti movement in India, Purushottam Agrawal claims that to think in terms of vernacular modernity, or even of alternative to modernity itself, is to recognize that the precolonial past of non-European societies was not being made only by prescriptive forces of depersonalized systems such as cultures and religious beliefs or, in the case of India, by compulsive caste identities. It was being made by self-conscious people who were acquiring the status of individuals and collective historical actors through their interactions. The public sphere of bhakti was the site of the voice of such individuals in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north India. The idea of bhakti was certainly not new, but the idiom of its articulation and the social base of its practitioners were certainly new in this era. Agrawal argues that the ‘newness’ of this historical phenomenon can be better grasped through the category of the public sphere. In doing so, he critically engages with such questions as: did xxxvii

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bhakti really help create a set of social spaces distinct from private ones and autonomous from the state? And did such spaces really communicate public sentiments to the state apparatus and in some way influence it? Answering these questions, according to him, obviously does not depend on finding a replica of the European bourgeois public sphere. Instead of looking for something like the European public sphere and the processes causing its structural transformation, he explores the interactive dynamics of notions, ideas, institutions and practices that made the perceptible change in attitudes and practices in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north India possible. Rajat Datta’s chapter argues that the genesis of modern economic (capitalist) relations has always been located in the urban sector, much to the neglect of the agrarian sector, which, according to him, has an equally significant role to play. Focusing his attention on Bengal in eastern India during the early modern period, especially the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, he shows that early modern globalization, which saw an unprecedented rise and growth in maritime trade and commerce centers in the Indian Ocean and an intensive monetization of economies, acted as a catalyst for change in economic relations in the agrarian sector. Rural areas no longer remained isolated but were drawn into the burgeoning trade and commerce network, which extended from large cities downwards to villages through a series of intermediate townships and gunjes. As a consequence, commercial farming and craft production percolated deep into the countryside. Not only was there a great diversification in agricultural products with the introduction of cash crops, but production centers for textiles and crafts also spread out to the hinterlands of Bengal. Complex tenurial relations, with land being largely owned privately; capital investment in land and agriculture; and complex division of labor, together with market-oriented agriculture with innovative and intensive farming, came to characterize the agrarian economy of Bengal. Datta shows the performance of the agriculture sector in Bengal to be comparable with those of the two most advanced regions of Western Europe, England and the Low Countries, including the Netherlands, with many similarities in their agricultural systems and techniques. According to him, all these features provide sufficient reason to suggest that new impulses had begun surging into India’s early modern economy, and one could even go further and argue that ‘capitalist’ features, to the extent that they existed in sixteenth-century Europe, then had begun seeping into both manufacturing and farming in India through this period and later. xxxviii

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Key features of modernity have been bureaucratic centralization and the replacement of customary law with formal and statutory laws based on abstract principles of justice. British rule, often seen as ushering in modernity in India, sought to introduce statutory law in India. But instead of being a straightforward imposition, it often involved a complex process of negotiation and compromise with different social actors, resulting in the incorporation of customary laws into statutory law, as is evident in the codification of Hindu and Muslim personal laws. This process of negotiation was not confined just to customary laws; it was a much wider process including the incorporation of the Mughal institutions and idiom of rule (Subrahmanyam 2006). Lakshmi Subramanian looks at this complex process of negotiation in the early years of colonial rule through the lens of the merchant community. With the East India Company assuming control and rule of certain parts of western India, especially the coastal enclaves and cities in the latter half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, an informal Anglo-Bania (merchant) order emerged as the merchants chose to throw their weight behind the Company and support it in its military as well as commercial ventures in return for protection offered by the Company for their business interests. The nexus between merchants and the Company led, on the one hand, to the former’s growing involvement in the political dealings of the latter with other ruling powers, most notably the Mughals and the Marathas; on the other, it led to changes in merchant practices as the merchants increasingly submitted to the new laws and regulations introduced by the Company as a means to settle their commercial disputes. Subramanian argues that these changes, which entailed an enlarged public role for the merchants as well as adoption of the new idiom of rule of law based on the principle of equity and fairness, point to a newly emergent merchant rationality in response to the transitional politics of the times. But even as this new rationality partook of the new idiom of law, it did not abjure the traditional idiom of customary law based on caste and social hierarchy. In fact, the adoption of the new idiom was only partial and selective and was based on pragmatic considerations. The merchants rationalized the coexistence of the customary and the modern, and they selectively invoked one or the other to suit their particular interests. This is evident from the case of Tarwady Arjunji Nathji, the prominent merchant banker and principal financier of the Company in western India in the 1780s, who, while routinely resorting to the new idiom of law in his commercial dealings with the Company, successfully invoked the customary law to defend himself from xxxix

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charges of manslaughter. On its part, the Company, dependent on the merchants to meet its financial needs, also relented and did not insist on the implementation of abstract law. As opposed to the rigid governmentality that is often taken to mark British rule, Subramanian points to its negotiated and flexible character as it was made to reckon with local demands and conditions. The concluding chapter of the volume, by Avadhesh Kumar Singh, conceptualizes modernity in two contrasting senses: as a novel happening within tradition and as a novel being without tradition. The dominant European sense of modernity is captured by the latter conceptualization, which points to a distinct break from the past. In some cases, this is compounded by not just the break from the European past but also the break from the indigenous past in the new site of modernity. Singh brings to the fore an alternative sense of modernity, drawing on the idea of sanatana and nutan/navin. Citing the example of India, he argues that modernity may be understood in terms of punaranavta (renewal mechanism). It renewed the society in different periods without necessarily severing the link with the past. For this, the philosophers of new logic in the middle of the seventeenth century used the term navin (modern) or navinata (modernity). Singh examines the issue of new logic or renewal mechanisms in different periods in the Buddhist, Bhakti, colonial and postcolonial periods in India. The volume turns the classic modernization question – why did a capitalist breakthrough not occur in China, India and the rest of the world? – on its head. Instead, the chapters in the volume seek to address what changes and transformations were taking place in these societies and how to account for these changes. How does one read these changes, not in terms of an overly idealized notion of modernity, but in terms of what these changes imply and how they contribute to our understanding of modernity as a shared phenomenon? It seems arguable that European modernity was not quite the exception with reference to either its own ‘medieval’ past or, more emphatically, the rest of the world. It is possible to envisage it as a continuous process, one that has evolved through multifaceted global i­nteraction – economic, technological, cultural, ideational or aesthetic. And in ­ doing so, the volume challenges the basic assumption of western or nationalist historiography that development is solely a product of internal dynamics of societies. It does not deny the importance of historical formations such as nations or civilizations. But it broadens the scope of the forces that go into their making and, more profoundly, introduces greater contingency to their historical formation. It also transforms the boundaries around which history is organized. xl

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The focus of the most of the chapters in the volume is the early modern period, the time when modernity began. But this was precisely the time when there were different trajectories of change and development, with the European one just one among many. These different trajectories were overshadowed by the dominance of western capitalist modernity in the last two centuries. This volume is an attempt to recover some of the ‘lost modernities’ (Woodside 2006), not for reactionary purposes of restoration or revival, but as resources to understand the (postcolonial) present and imagine a more just, more genuinely global and interconnected future.

Notes 1 On the dominant model, see Rostow (1960). Charles Taylor (2004) provides a good philosophical account of the best aspects of European modernity. For perceptive discussions of versions/variations on this narrative of modernity and other related issues, see Gurminder Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity (2007) and Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘An Outline of Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, Archives of European Sociology, XLVI(2005): 497–526; especially section IV, Two Views of Western Modernity, pp. 508–14. 2 Interestingly, Wang Hui (2004), one of the foremost New Left intellectuals of China, suggests that state socialism should not be seen as opposing capitalism but as part of the capitalist framework. In his view, there are structural similarities between state socialism and market capitalism. According to him, ‘the practice of socialist societies originally was believed to be an escape from market society or capitalism, but in the end they only played the role of a specific political and economic form of market society’ (cited in Viren Murthy 2006: 160–61). With the decline of communism in the late 1980s, the modernization discourse was to receive a major boost since its claim about the superiority of the western model seemed to have been proven right after all. This was evident in formulations and pronouncements like the End of History and the End of Ideology. But then this period also saw the emergence of rival claims in the form of multiple and alternative modernities. 3 There are deep ambivalences in Weber. On the one hand, he proposes a unilinear, quasi-evolutionary process of rationalization; on the other, he also proposes multiple rationalities and rationalization processes. 4 This is not to deny that in earlier times the world was not connected, but certainly the intensity of interaction during the early modern period became much greater than that of earlier times, which distinguishes the early modern period from the earlier periods, just as the heightened level of interaction during the present phase of globalization sets it apart from the early modern or modern period. See especially world system historians like Fernand Braudel (1995) and Andre Gunder Frank (1998), and also Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) and Jack Goody (2006) regarding the connectivity of the world, which stretches over long durée. Scholars like Jack Goody and David Pingree (1992) take it much further back in time and argue that

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Eurasia has been unified since the Bronze Age. For a dissenting view regarding the c­ haracterization/periodization of the early modern, see Geoff Wade’s ­chapter in this volume. 5 Gurminder Bhambra (2007) also argues for the idea of connected histories and sociologies and proposes ‘de-linking our understanding of the sociohistoric processes from a European trajectory and focusing on not only the different sources and roots, but also on the ways these interacted and intersected over time would provide us with a richer understanding of the complexities of the world in which we live and the historical processes that constitute it’ (76). 6 Kaviraj clarifies what he means by the term historicist/m: ‘historicist in the strict sense used by German thinkers like Dilthey, not in the very different sense used by Popper in his Cold War study: Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1945). In the first sense, historicism means staying away from law-like generalizations specific to natural sciences, and treating each historical situation as unique. Popper’s idiosyncratic use means almost the opposite – a belief in inexorable historical teleology. Unfortunately, in much contemporary writing, the second sense has overshadowed the first’ (2005; 505, fn 27).

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Blaut, J. M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1995. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. I. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Chen, K. H. and B. H. Chua. 2007. ‘Introduction: The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements Project’, in K. H. Chen and B. H. Chua (eds.), The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 1–5. New York: Routledge. Dirlik, Arif. 2011. ‘Revisioning Modernity: Modernity in Eurasian Perspectives’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 12(2): 284–305. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1): 1–29. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1998. ‘Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities – A Comparative View’, Daedalus, 127(3): 1–18. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gaonkar, Dilip P. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Giddens, Anthony. 2001. ‘Introduction’, in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, pp. vii–xxiv. Routledge Classic Series. London and New York: Routledge.

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Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hui, Wang. 2004. Zhongguo xiandai sixiang de xingqi (The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought), 4 Vols. Beijing: Sanlian Shudian. Karlberg, Stephen. 1980. ‘Max Weber’s Types of Rationality: Cornerstones for the Analysis of Rationalization Processes in History’, The American Journal of Sociology, 85(5): 1145–79. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2005. ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, European Journal of Sociology, 46: 497–526. Marx, Karl. 1853. ‘The British Rule in India’, The New York Daily Tribune. 25 June, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mohanty, Satya P. 2011. ‘Introduction: Viewing Colonialism and Modernity Through Indian Literature’, in Satya P. Mohanty (ed.), Colonialism, Modernity and Literature: A View from India, pp. 1–21. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Murthy, Viren. 2006. ‘Modernity Against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought’, Modern Intellectual History, 3(1): 137–65. Pagden, A. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pingree, David. 1992. ‘Hellenophilia Versus the History of Science’, Isis, 83: 554–63. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rostow, W. W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31(3): 735–62. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1998. ‘Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750’, Daedalus (Special Issue on Early Modernities), 127(3): 75–104. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2006. ‘A Tale of Three Empires: Mughals, Ottomans and Habsburgs in a Comparative Context’, Common Knowledge, 12(1): 66–92. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 2001. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons and Introduction by Anthony Giddens. Routledge Classic Series. London and New York: Routledge.

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Wittrock, Bjorn. 2000. ‘Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition’, Daedalus (Special Issue on Multiple Modernities), 129(1): 31–60. Wong, Roy Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Woodside, Alexander. 2006. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea and the Hazards of World History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Part I TRANSCULTURAL ASIAN MODERNITIES

1 EUROPEAN SELF-MAKING AND INDIA’S ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES Arjun Appadurai

The self-making of Europe1 In a different context (Appadurai 2013), I proposed that it would be useful to look at the trajectory of Europe’s self-making through the lens of what I called ‘trajectorism’. Trajectorism has an old history in the west, traceable at least to the Bible with its ideas about the journey from sin to salvation, from this world to another, from blindness to redemption – all exemplified in the life of Jesus at one level and in the road to Damascus at another. The Greeks were not exempt from this way of thinking, and Plato’s famous allegory of the Cave is an early version of the journey from darkness to light, from shadow to substance. And ever since, the idea of a trajectory has formed and framed western thought, even to the extent of creating a retrospective narrative of the inevitability of the west itself, constructed out of the bits and pieces of Greek philosophy, Biblical mythology, Roman law, Gothic architecture, Renaissance humanism and many more minor elements, constantly composed into a retrospective story of ‘rise and fall’, of progress and stasis, of dark and bright episodes, all framed in a grand trajectory that we still see, with remarkable lack of distance, as the story of the west. But the story of the west is no more than one version of our deep bias towards what I call trajectorism. And this is the meta-trap that social science has inherited most powerfully from its great prior ancestors in religion and pre-industrial humanism. Trajectorism is not the same as evolutionism, triumphalism, predestinationism, the myth of progress, growth or convergent modernization, though each of these relies on the hidden ontology of trajectorism. Trajectorism is a deeper epistemological and ontological habit, which 3

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always assumes that there is a cumulative journey from here to there, more exactly from now to then, in human affairs, as natural as a river and as all-encompassing as the sky. Trajectorism is the idea that time’s arrow inevitably has a telos, and in that telos are to be found all the significant patterns of change, process and history. Modern social science inherits this telos and turns it into a method for the study of humanity. In other places, such as China, India, Africa and the Islamic Belt, not to speak of the islands and forests of anthropology, the trap of the trajectory never became the framing conceptual trap, although its presence can sometimes be detected, especially in Islam. These places have their own meta-traps, such as the idea of the nothingness of the world, or the myth of eternal return, or the idea of multiple births, or some other driving meta-narrative. But trajectorism is the great narrative trap of the west and is also, like all great myths, the secret of its successes in industry, empire and world conquest. So far, I have perhaps conveyed the assumption that trajectorism is mainly an episteme about time’s arrow and has only to do with sequence, cause, duration and chronology, the normal hallmarks of our current scientific assumptions about temporality. This is true, but it is not the most important truth for my purposes. Let me back up. One of the persistent puzzles about the European world journey has been the question of the link between the universalism of the Enlightenment (which argued for the necessity of worldwide equality through the spread of knowledge, among its other key arguments) and the European imperial project, a project of spatial dominion that ended up as a project of world conquest as well. In spite of many efforts to cast light on this inner affinity between the project of Aufklarung (Enlightenment) and the project of world dominion, by authors like Edward Said (1978), Valentin Mudimbe (1988), Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (1982), and many others, we have made no real progress on this problem. Foucault, who might have had something to say on this matter, did not speak much of the French imperial project, and even the great Max Weber did not elect to link the global journey of capitalist ethics to the project of empire. Suffice it to say that it does not seem likely that the journey from Renaissance humanism to Kantian universalism, roughly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in Europe, could not have been connected to the project of Vasco da Gama and his many maritime successors to find the New World in searching for the Old World and also vice versa. Well before the age of industrial capitalism and the imperial adventure of Europe in the nineteenth century, the Iberian sailors and conquistadors had connected the projects of conquest, conversion and 4

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economic plunder in the New World, a connection touched upon in the work of writers like Anthony Pagden (1982) and Peter Hulme (1986). Perhaps this is not the first time in human history that a project of ethical universalism was tied to a project of conversion and conquest: two large earlier examples are the Roman Empire and the early history of Islamic expansion. But there is something special about the ­European understanding of its ethical universalism (rooted in Enlightenment ideas of knowledge, education and common humanity) and the urge for world exploration and global expansion that characterizes the Dutch, English and French projects after 1800, and later the German, Belgian and Italian adventures, especially in Africa. What is this special quality? I propose that this quality has something to do with the post-­ Renaissance European idea of modernity, which requires complete global expansion for its own inner logic to be revealed and justified. In both the Roman and Islamic examples, the ethical project was self-standing and conquest was a secondary extension of this project. But European modernity could not regard itself as complete without covering the surface of the globe. This proposal does not pretend to address the myriad ways in which ethical visions seeped into mercantile, ­military and political ambitions, sometimes of the most violent and greedy varieties. Another way to put this proposition is that the idea of the cosmopolis as it took shape in the seventeenth century in Europe (see, for example, Toulmin’s useful overview of this process (1990)) was in some ways integrally linked to the imperial vision. Until very recently, European cosmopolitan impulses, whether expressed in travel, adventure, mapping, surveying, trading or ­warfare, were characterized by an inner contradiction between the urge to translate and interpret other worlds, and the urge to colonize and to convert, often by means of violence. What I have called trajectorism is thus not only a parochial vision of temporal processes but also a problematic ideology of spatial expansion. Empire, specifically the European imperialism of the last three centuries, is a transverse spatial enactment of a defective vision of temporality in which time’s arrow always has a single direction and a known destination. That destination is the world written in the image of Europe. Europe, in this mode of thinking, is unthinkable except as the singular expression of time’s arrow, and this arrow is so conceived as to require its dominion over the globe. Thus, the world and the globe become one and the same, and each is seen as Europe’s t­ omorrow and Europe’s elsewhere. The inner problem of European cosmopolitanism in the past three centuries has something to do with its contradictory and alternative 5

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genealogies. We must recognize, to start with, that contrary to the dominant meta-narrative of western modernity, it is not itself a cumulative, predictable or inevitable outcome of any discernable history. This meta-narrative is itself an expression of a trajectorist ideology, which tends to see Europe itself as a logical outcome of ideas that led from one phase or idea to the next, in some sort of destinarian manner. The fact is that the self-construction of Europe, itself a selective later image of certain possibilities in the idea of western Christendom, is a product of continuous triage and selective retrospective historicization. Parts of Europe’s special mix of confidence, ethnocentrism and world adventure come surely out of the modern debt to the missionizing logic of western Christendom, a genealogy that is still visible in current debates over the future of secularization. Other parts owe themselves to a conscious orientation to the Roman vision of the world, which centers on law, technology and military force as key elements of the relevant past. Yet other parts favor the classical Greek heritage, notably those modern self-images of Europe in which reason and its empire take precedence over all other forms of argument and imagination. Still other images are deliberately shortsighted and see in modern Europe a history that most importantly begins in the Renaissance and its ideas of humanism, individual expression and a highly aestheticized vision of what is properly Europe’s real past. There are, of course, many other streams of European self-fashioning, which stress more obscure referents in the past, ranging from its early scientific traditions to more arcane poetic, mystical and political moments and texts in its past. Thus, the idea of Europe, in the modern period, always builds the meta-narrative of the European trajectory from a varied and sometimes contradictory archive, a rearview mirror that is continuously adjusted as different classes, estates and regions seek to see in their own claims a larger unfolding of the European story. Thus, when the Enlightenment becomes the dominant ideology of the political present in Europe, it never fully displaces alternative images of the European trajectory. The battle between the varieties of trajectorist meta-narratives never really abates, and we can see this in a series of debates, sometimes strictly intellectual and sometimes bloody struggles for power and place among groups and classes in Europe. Thus, when the idea of the cosmopolis takes shape in Europe after the seventeenth century, what it exports to the rest of the world is less a unified value system or world-picture and more a series of efforts to paper over the cracks in the European meta-narrative, the struggle between its contradictory trajectorist narratives. The battle between church and state (which is addressed in more detail in the second half 6

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of this chapter), the struggle between private property and various visions of collective ownership, the tension between the rule of law and the rule of the masses, the opposition of this and otherworldly impulses in European religiosity – these are all examples of the unresolved contradictions that Europe played out in the imperial project, in which these deep conflicts encountered societies and ideologies that contained their own, often very different visions of these very matters. For cosmopolitanism is ultimately a matter of ideas, and what Europe exported in its imperial projects was its own demons, divisions and unresolved anxieties, this time on a global terrain. This is the most serious problem with European ethnocentrism as it played out in the colonies of Africa, Asia and the Islamic world in the age of empire: not its clarity or arrogance, but its numerous contradictions, all of which found their genealogies in different versions of trajectorism. In a word, European cosmopolitanism – as spread throughout the world through books, speeches, icons, images and narratives – imposed profound European conflicts onto an unpredictable series of colonial spaces, each of which had their own forms of intellectual culture and world imaging. In short, European cosmopolitanism was not primarily an effort to impose some European consensus on the rest of the world; it was an effort to find consensus by the staging of unresolved European debates on a world that had not invited this engagement. What do we do with this troubled project of cosmopolis?

India and the drama of European trajectorism I have argued so far that the long-term self-making of Europe, undergirded by what I have called ‘trajectorism’, expressed itself in the period after 1700 CE in the search for a world stage, or rather a series of world stages, on which to enact those internal struggles and debates that Europe could no longer solve within the limits of its own geography. Europe after 1700 CE comes to need a global empire not so much to find new markets for its goods, new commodities for its elites or new labor for its expanding economy, but rather because the struggles of European trajectorism could no longer be confined within the space of Europe. The colonies were now needed to enact Europe’s internal contradictions and debates. The chronology of European domination of the non-western world is the subject of a veritable library of scholarship and cannot be addressed in detail here. Suffice it to say that it begins with the Spanish search for ‘India’, which resulted in the colonization of much of the Caribbean and Latin America, first by the Spanish and then by the Portuguese. The maritime extension of the European horizon to the rest of the world is 7

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marked in the Indian subcontinent by the arrival of Vasco da Gama in Calicut in 1498, six years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean islands. The period between these events and the French Revolution of 1789 is marked by the global dominance of Spain and Portugal and is characterized by a mixture of commercial, political and religious motivations within the framework of pre-industrial European capitalism. The period of European expansion after the French Revolution is of special relevance to my argument, since it is after this event that the northern European nations, especially France and England (but also the Dutch, Danes and other minor players) begin to push Spain and Portugal into the background as world conquerors, largely because of the rapid advancement of their capitalist economies. It is only after the Enlightenment that the radical contradiction between European ideas of equality, freedom and reason at home and racialized, hierarchical and exclusionary protocols in the colonies emerges and flourishes. In this context, the British gradually became the principal European players in the Indian subcontinent, pushing the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese to the edges of Indian politics, leaving today only small traces of their presence in such places as Goa and Pondicherry. Much has been written about British rule in India, and the historiography of this period is marked by an internal tension between scholars who stress the economics of empire (often Marxist scholars) and those of a more social and cultural bent, who have stressed knowledge, information and ideas as the driving engines of British rule in India (Bayly 1996; Cohn 1996; Chakrabarty 2002). I identify myself with this second group of scholars. With this brief review of the complexities of the European imperial project, I turn to look more closely at India as a major site in which European ‘trajectorism’ played itself out, primarily through British rule in India, which began with commerce (mainly the activities of the East India Company) and, after 1858, was followed by full-fledged rule over India by the British monarchy and later by the British parliament and its executive branch. How can we connect the known history of British rule in India to my argument about European trajectorism? I have already suggested that after the Enlightenment, Europe’s project of self-making required the colonies in order to enact its own metropolitan contradictions. Let us consider the British in India in this light by focusing on a single issue: the problem of church versus state in Europe, which was resolved in the late eighteenth century on behalf of the emerging bourgeois classes and appeared to put clerical authority, Christian ideology and religious values on the backstage in Europe, and specifically in Britain. The name for the broad social process that encompasses these various expressions is ‘secularization’. 8

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As a process, scholars tended to associate secularization with modernization, science, rationality and the spread of cosmopolitan values. As we now know, the hoped-for victory of secularism in relation to religious values, elites and institutions never came. In many western societies, religion continues as a powerful force, and there is a growing sense that religion is still a dominant force in these societies. In this sense, secularization has not been the twin of modernization, and religion has proved that it can coexist with modernization and change its forms and vocabularies sufficiently as to survive and even thrive in the context of modernization. The worldwide renaissance of Islam, the massive power of the Christian evangelical presence in the United States, the militant Buddhism in Sri Lanka and other countries in the Theravada belt, the turn to the Hindu right in India, the prestige of the Pope among the world’s large Catholic population – all of these point to the vigorous life of religion in much of the world. In India, the many struggles over secularism that have taken place since Indian independence have been seen as symptoms of the clash between imposed western values and traditional Indian ones, especially by those on the Hindu right, who have coined the pejorative term ‘pseudo secularism’ to bait their opponents. Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular commitments are among the main reasons he is so despised by the Hindu right and the ruling party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which sees Nehruvian secularism as the main reason for India’s failure to develop a strong economy and globally recognized political power. India after 1800, when the British East India Company was expanding its dominion and turning mercantile advantage into political power, was a perfect site for playing out the British version of European struggles over the place of religion in the public sphere and the relative importance of church and state in public life. There is an extensive literature on the ways in which the British in India described, analyzed, interpreted and managed religious ideas and practices in India in the nineteenth century, and the highlights of this emergent British ideology were as follows: that the roots of Indian weakness and degeneracy lay in Hinduism; that Hinduism was a religion of superstitions, myths and prejudices peculiar to the Orient; that the major beneficiaries of Hindu domination were the priestly Brahmin caste; and that caste and Hinduism were the source of India’s moral and material backwardness (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993; Dirks 2001; Pennington 2005; Bloch, Keppens and Hedge 2010). Of course, there were also other elements of the British ideology about India that evolved in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the ambivalent British view of India’s Mughal rulers, seen as more familiar to the west than the Hindu 9

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elites (as warriors, monotheists and imperial conquerors who set the stage for British rule); the wholesale takeover by the British of Mughal systems of land revenue, tax administration and law enforcement; the mapping and measurement of India’s geography, ethnology and ancient monuments; and the development of specialized knowledge of India’s languages, cultures and customs, starting with William Jones’s scholarly projects in Bengal. All of this is well known and belongs to the study of British Orientalism and the administered exploitation of India’s economy, polity and society from the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. But what does all this have to do with the struggles over European secularization and the European imperium in India? In England, the issue of church versus state was the primary political expression of the struggle for secularization as an overall direction for British society. Unlike in France and the United States, the British monarchy remained the symbolic apex of the Church of England, and the relationship between the British state and the Church of England (the major site of religious authority in England) was not a stark struggle between old and new, modernity and tradition. From this point of view, the church was deeply intertwined with the public life of Britain at every level, from the parish to Parliament, a situation in sharp contrast to both France and the United States, where the division between church and state was a primary part of the vision of their democratic revolutions. Thus, secularization in England was a less dramatic process than in these other countries, but in the course of the nineteenth century, it did become a contentious issue in the colonies, particularly in India. The primary tension involving religion and the secular realm, which was initially an internal issue in the metropolis and which England exported, imposed and enacted in India, was a consequence of the difference between the principle of ‘non-interference’ by the state in the religious life of ordinary citizens and the logic of proselytization as understood by the Church of England. Starting in the early nineteenth century and then throughout the rest of the century, there was an intense debate about how to reconcile the East India Company’s interest in minimal interference in the religious life of Indian natives with the Anglican missionary interest in proselytization and conversion of Indians. After 1858, when the East India Company ceased to be in control of India and India officially became subject to the British monarchy, the British government found itself increasingly drawn into issues about the management of Hindu religious institutions and the adjudication of debates to do with social reform movements that arose among Indians wishing to modernize Hinduism (Presler 1987). The Church of England was never a major force in the politics of the 10

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Empire, but the question of how to reconcile the imperial interest in leaving the Hindu religion as free of state interference as possible with the acknowledged interest of British (as well as other European missionaries) in converting Indians to Christianity was never fully resolved. The gradual secularization of English public life starting in the seventeenth century was enacted in India through the effort to regulate Indian religious institutions and practices without active interference in Indian religious beliefs and practices. This ambivalent policy had far-reaching effects on the Indian subcontinent and affected society, politics and public morality in several long-lasting ways. Among the most important of these effects were the following. Most important, the East India Company and later the Indian representatives of the British Crown created a way of conceptualizing Hindu identity which had no precedent in India’s past. What was in fact a tremendously varied mosaic of beliefs, institutions, traditions and practices across the continent was reduced to, in Romila Thapar’s famous phrase, ‘syndicated Hinduism’ (Thapar 2010). Hindus were encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a single overarching community across the subcontinent, a community which could be counted, defined, mobilized and managed as a coherent sociological entity. Indeed, the very idea that there was a Hindu ‘community’ was itself a projection of British (and generally European) ideas of religious faith, confession and organization. What existed across India was a vast array of sampradayas (followings or traditions) defined by an original saintly figure, whose followers and descendants identified with each other, with certain specific texts and with certain places and patterns of worship. Turning these sampradayas into communities, or varieties of samaj, was a colonial projection of the battles between Protestants and Catholics in Europe, as well as between European Protestant denominations. In a frequently used colonial idiom, different traditions were turned into ‘sects’, and sects only make sense against the backdrop of some sort of church, the latter being an idea which was completely alien to Hindu thought and to Indian society. This transformation was a paradoxical effect of the secularizing ideology of the British rulers of India, and it was to have other, even more troubling and long-lasting effects. The reification of Hindus into a countable community in the middle of the nineteenth century was a major impetus to the birth of Hindu nationalism, and, along with later efforts to create separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims in the early twentieth century, it was the basis for the communalization of Indian politics, which, in turn, was a precondition of the Partition of 1947 as well as the rise of the Hindu rightwing parties of independent India, including the 11

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currently ruling BJP (Pandey 1990; Jaffrelot 1996, 2005, 2010). None of this could have happened without the sociological invention of the Hindu community in the middle of the nineteenth century, and this, in turn, would not have happened except by the projection onto the Indian canvas of the church–state tensions of early modern Europe. What is less appreciated and more important to my argument is that the secularizing ideology of the British state and the projection onto India of the idea of the ‘Church’ as the counterpoint to the State also had the effect of burying or truncating a series of Indian institutional formations which could have been the basis of alternative roads to contemporary modernity in India. These ‘roads not taken’ cannot be fully understood without understanding the enactment on the Indian stage of conflicts having to do with the ambivalent and incomplete process of secularization in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What were some of these roads not taken? Because Hindu India never generated a central ecclesiastical organization of the sort that could be called a church, Indian religious life was a cross-pollinating series of sampradayas, holy places and revered religious figures. Insofar as there was an overarching sociological structure in the Hindu world before the arrival of the British, it consisted of the networks of temples, monasteries and sampradayas that characterized south India at least after the eighth century. In the north, the sociological framework of Hinduism was provided by the interactions between monastic institutions, ascetic orders (akhadas) and pilgrimage centers and specialists (Ghurye 1953; Bhardwaj 1973; Appadurai 1981; van der Veer 1988). To some considerable extent, Indian Muslims participated in these networks across religious lines and replicated them in their own patterns of religious organization and affiliation in pre-British India. This continental sociology of temples, monasteries, religious followings and ascetic orders, with no central authority, leadership or doctrine, was supported and enlivened by a complex continental geography of sacred centers and pilgrimage routes and calendars. These pilgrimage centers, which gave Hindu India much of its coherence and connectivity in pre-British times, was built on a puranic geography which connected sites from Rishikesh to Rameswaram and from Nathdwara to Bhubaneswar. These centers were administered by a great diversity of specialists, including priests, pandas and monastic groups, who did not control any of these centers exclusively. Pilgrims traversed these centers across remarkable geographical distances, and these centers were in many ways the hubs of a Hindu cosmopolis that was nevertheless not a church, a denomination or a single faith. In the precolonial world, these pilgrimage centers were the basis for complex 12

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trans-regional networks of trade, learning and linguistic diversity, and many of them continue to play such a role today. Under the British, this civilizational geography of pilgrimage was radically transformed, and its potential for providing an alternative to ‘syndicated Hinduism’ was arrested. This arrest was itself the product of many independent strands of British ideology and administration, and the trend towards imagining the existence of a ‘Hindu community’ had the paradoxical effect of truncating a different vision of connectivity, interaction and organization from that of a uniform and majoritarian Hinduism. Among these strands was the British tendency to see India as fundamentally a land of villages (as in the writings of Marx, Munro and Maine on the ‘village community’). This vision of India’s essentially rural character erased India’s tradition of urban centers, long-distance urban networks and overlapping religious geographies. India gradually became rendered as a landscape of villages, castes and local communities, rather than a civilization of networks, cities and trans-regional commerce. Among the casualties of this localizing ideology was the fabric of religious cosmopolitanism which was a hallmark of pre-British India, in which, for example, disputes among ruling castes in Maharashtra were settled in religious parliaments in Banaras (O’Hanlon 2010); small kings and nobles from southern and western India maintained religious establishments in northern pilgrimage centers; and Jain communities in Karnataka maintained active ties with their counterparts in Gujarat and Rajasthan (Carrithers and Humphrey 1990; Cort 2011). Some of these ties and affiliations remain today, but they are minor elements of an entirely different sort of ‘national geography’ built on rigid boundaries between India’s major faiths, such as Hinduism, Jainism, Islam and Sikhism, and on fabricated conceptions of ‘sect’ and ‘church’ which were imposed on a much more fluid and decentralized Hindu world. Another strand of this truncation and localization of Hindu institutions was the push to create a legal regime for the management of Hindu religious institutions, a process that has yielded, especially in south India, an entirely new form of state-level bureaucratic departments, which are in charge of Hindu temples (Appadurai 1981; Presler 1987). Just as at the sociological level, a distinctly Indic way to organize large-scale connectivity and dialogue between myriad religious followings and traditions across the subcontinent was suppressed and overlaid by a much more centralized and bureaucratized mode of governance, so too at the level of ideology and cosmology was a complex and dynamic structure of conviviality, cohabitation and coexistence between different religious traditions and doctrines arrested and suppressed by British 13

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ideas and regulations. In the multiple traditions of the subcontinent, there was no counterpart to the modern, western idea of ‘tolerance’ as a governing value for the relationships between members of different faiths. Tolerance is an idea which cannot be understood outside of the general trend towards secularization in Europe, in which a secular state was the referee of the relationships between different religious faiths. This secular state could insist on ‘tolerance’ between religious communities while its own practices of defining, counting and binding ‘communities’ had created a sociological state of affairs which required tolerance as a value to maintain civil order in the relationship between these manufactured ‘communities’ (van der Veer 1994). The pre-British order in India was not organized around the idea of tolerance; it was rather built on very different but quite effective methods for minimizing major conflicts between religious faiths, followings and collectivities. The primary mechanism for this sort of religious conviviality was the widely understood power of Hindu kings (of whatever scale of kingdom) to make substantive and binding decisions on issues involving conflict between castes, religious groups or other social groups. This power often took the form of highly specific rulings involving sumptuary privileges, processional routes and property issues. There was also a vigorous royal and courtly pattern of assembling scholars and thinkers from different traditions to express their views, to translate their works into different languages and to debate their differences under the royal jurisdiction. Nor was this only a pattern among Hindu kings. Recent scholarship shows that these ways of negotiating, translating and mediating across religious traditions also crossed the Hindu–Muslim line and was a marked feature of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries of Mughal rule in India (Busch 2011; Grewal and Habib 2011; Truschke 2016). It now seems clear that what had evolved in India to mediate religious differences and conflicts across the subcontinent did not depend on reified religious communities or ideas about a church–state division or even ideas about ‘tolerance’, which is itself a highly specific western idea tied up with western secularization after the Enlightenment. This is the history of royal patronage and arbitration, complex and overlapping pilgrimage geographies and decentralized religious followings and networks that characterized India and were undermined and transformed by the ideas and protocols of British rule. This argument should not be taken to mean that pre-British India was a land of peace and harmony, that there was never bloodshed in the relationship between followers of different religious ideas or that India had a hidden tradition of secularism avant la lettre. There is good historical evidence to doubt all of these characterizations. What is true is 14

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that the Indian subcontinent had a different way of defining, managing and regulating relationships between religious faiths and followings, and this format was not allowed to develop its own logic after the period around 1800. This truncated and alternative history belongs to a series of other roads not taken, including those which involved potential paths in monetization, urbanization and technical innovation that were equally suppressed, deflected or marginalized in the course of British rule. These other roads are not within the compass of my argument in this chapter, but they would all be relevant to the question of alternative modernities and suppressed histories on the Indian subcontinent.

Risks, possibilities, alternatives There is today a major struggle in India over the ownership of modernity. In this struggle there are two major contenders. The first is the Hindu right, and the ruling party of India, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which seeks to impose a regime in India combining a neo-liberal orientation to globalization, foreign investment and entrepreneurial capitalism with an authoritarian approach to matters of culture, religion and public life in which dissent from Hindu norms is under heavy and explicit attack in many realms of everyday life, including diet, sexuality and education. The major opponent to the Hindu right is a loose coalition of secularists who seek to uphold some version of the ideals of Jawaharlal Nehru, which linked science, socialism and secularism. There are other voices, too, but they are too scattered and disorganized to count as major players in the struggle for an Indian modernity. The argument developed in this chapter opens up the possibility of yet another claim on Indian modernity, one that could be built on the elements of an Indic way of assembling faith, practice and geography in a framework of institutions and ideas which is neither secularist nor fundamentalist. This alternative was suppressed and marginalized by the playing out of European trajectorism in India, especially in respect to the European drama of secularization as enacted by the British in India. But it is nevertheless alive and available today. It is an assemblage of faith, pluralism and conviviality that is pre-modern but not anti-modern. It was the basis of a world of Indic conviviality which was not devoid of violence, bloodshed and warfare. But this world was also the basis for a complex dialogue between Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh faiths and, even more recently, with Christianity in India. It rests on a sociology of followings, networks and places, which is opposed to the idea of communities, churches and sects. It is also multi-linguistic and pan-regional, with networked elements that link 15

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south and north, as well as different castes, territories and doctrines. It is an Indic cosmopolis, in which languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Tamil, Telugu and many others produced translations, hybrids and crossover forms which have continued to resist the categories and exclusions of bureaucrats, politicians and demagogues (Pollock 2006). It is available for rediscovery and restoration. The path to such a rediscovery is neither easy nor linear, and it will have to address the numerous challenges of contemporary India, including those of caste-based violence, sexual predation and corruption at every level of state and society. But it certainly offers an alternative to syndicated Hinduism as well as to elite secularism. It has been marginalized by the march of European trajectorism under British rule in India. But India is no longer a colony, and the only form of violent trajectorism that Indians need to fear is that of an authoritarian Hinduism, which is itself a by-product of European trajectorism and does not deserve to dominate the space of India’s possible modernities.

Note 1 This section is a slightly revised section of Chapter 2, ‘The Spirit of Weber’, in my book, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013). The original chapter benefited from the comments of Sheldon Pollock, whose work on the Sanskrit cosmopolis (Pollock 2006) is also relevant to the current chapter.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1981. Worship and Conflict Under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. The Future as a Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso. Bayly, C. A. 1996. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhardwaj, S. M. 1973. Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bloch, E., M. Keppens, and R. Hedge, eds. 2010. Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism. London and New York: Routledge. Breckenridge, C. A. and Peter van der Veer, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Busch, Allison. 2011. Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India. New York: Oxford University Press. Carrithers, M. and C. Humphrey, eds. 1990. The Assembly of Listeners: Jains in Society. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cort, John E. 2011. Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India. New York and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ghurye, G. S. 1953. Indian Sadhus. Bombay: Popular Book Depot. Grewal, J. S. and Irfan Habib, eds. 2011. Sikh History from Persian Sources: Translations of Major Texts. New Delhi: Tulika. Hopkins, Terence K. and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1982. World Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology. Beverly Hills: Sage. Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London and New York: Methuen. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1996. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics. London: C. Hurst & Co. and Penguin. Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed. 2005. The Sangh Parivar: A Reader (Critical Issues in Indian Politics). New York: Oxford University Press. Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2010. Religion, Caste and Politics in India. New Delhi: Primus Books. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. 2010. ‘Letters Home: Banaras Pandits and the Maratha Region in Early Modern India’, Modern Asian Studies, 44(2): 201–40. Pagden, Anthony. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pennington, Brian K. 2005. Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Presler, F. A. 1987. Religion Under Bureaucracy: Policy and Administration for Hindu Temples in South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Thapar, Romila. 2010. Syndicated Hinduism. New Delhi: Critical Quest. Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press. Truschke, Audre. 2016. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York: Columbia University Press. van der Veer, Peter. 1988. Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre. London: Athlone Press. van der Veer, Peter. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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2 CIRCULATORY AND COMPETITIVE HISTORIES Prasenjit Duara1

As a graduate student in the Boston area, I once encountered a stray sheet of paper in a library, the blank side of which I wished to use for notes. It was a photocopy of a handwritten page from an archived document of 1833, which mentioned the impending visit from India to Salem, Massachusetts, of the famous Unitarian, Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), who at the time was visiting Bristol. In preparation for his visit, the Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in it. I was taken aback, because, as an Indian, I had known of Roy as the founder of the reformist Hindu Brahmo Samaj, a deist and the ‘father of modern India’; I also knew that he had visited England, but had no idea of his planned visit to the United States or that he was even known there, let alone the reverence with which he was held by some. Roy died in Bristol in 1833 and so never did step foot on the shores of Salem, although his ideas and a lock of hair did represent him there. Over the years, I picked up other scattered pieces of information that began to coalesce into a remarkable history of circulations. For one thing, the New England Transcendentalists, particularly Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishadas and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. They were doubtless familiar with the exchanges between Roy and the British Unitarians, which were published in 1824 (Stein 1970; Jackson 1994: 8–9; Aburrow 2013). The American Transcendentalists would come to influence a wide range of ideas and practices in America and the world, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism and civil disobedience founded upon Transcendentalist conceptions of the self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and the consciousness of ultimate reality. In 1849, Thoreau published Civil Disobedience; it became deeply influential and affected 18

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many great writers like Leo Tolstoy and the worldwide spirituality movement by the late nineteenth century. Mahatma Gandhi, who was experimenting with his ideas of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha or truth force) from his days in South Africa in the 1890s, became profoundly impressed by Thoreau’s (and Tolstoy’s) philosophical and moral ideas upon reading Civil Disobedience and Walden. He adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English term for his own project (Frederick 1998; Myerson, Petrulionis and Walls 2010: 633). What we have here is the circulation, or rather, the circulatory nature of historical ideas and practices over a hundred years, emerging from one part of the world, India, traversing continents and visited by various transformations while still retaining recognizable connections to its sources, and then returning to India enriched and made usable for a new era. The story, of course, hardly ends there, as Gandhi is viewed as the patron saint of the Civil Rights movement in the United States rather than Thoreau. I have brought up this episode merely to illustrate this chapter’s theme of circulatory versus linear, tunneled histories, and not to examine its details, which are best left to specialists. All societies have multiple ways of conceptualizing the passage of time, whether through natural cycles of the seasons, ritual or sacred times, business cycles or through patterns of institutional complexities. At the same time, certain conceptions of the past become dominant or hegemonic among different temporalities, such as the linear conception of time and history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, our very notion of history as an irreversible movement is inseparably bound to the conception of time as a linear succession of some bounded entity. I want to understand how this historical temporality became dominant in the modern world, its functional relation to competitive states and how we might build histories upon alternative temporalities. The chapter explores different conceptions of time and modes of apprehending the past in relation to the present and future. I urge that we consider the advent of the realist conception of history not as radically new but as one that became a globally hegemonic cosmology from the nineteenth century because of its ties to the environment of competitive capitalist states. Most of all, this history became a means for specifying a population as distinctive and rights-bearing, leading not only to national histories but also to an entire mode of recognition-seeking narratives often designed to be translated into ­ legal rights, nationally and globally. On the other hand, however, older modes of coexistence between narratives of belonging and cosmologies of a greater God/good have been sidelined. I argue against this marginalization for the following 19

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reasons: i) modern linear histories of identity are themselves not free of a metaphysical basis in requiring certain anchors of time; and ii) in turn, this excises from view a wider circulatory realm of historical developments and transformations that have actually shaped i­ndividuals and groups. The early modern period is the most proximate period in which different modes of historical apprehension coexisted. In today’s globalizing world of endangered planetary sustainability, we need to cultivate histories beyond exclusivist ones.

Cosmological and historical time Pre-modern, pre-national societies were not dominated by a sense of linear history. But, in my understanding, the non-linear conception was hegemonic and not exclusive. While the cosmological values dominating time urged a return to the truths of a golden age or subordinated them to transcendent goals, there also existed other conceptions of time and history or histories in a minor key. There were incipient narratives of a bounded linear movement in time or ones that traced and justified the power of one worldly community over others. This has been clearly recorded for Greek and Chinese historical texts, which reveal many traits associated with the evidential history of modern times. I will return to the Chinese case below. But, as Romila Thapar (2011) has recently argued, this is equally true for the most notorious exemplar of a non-historical culture, India. Colonial administrators and scholars relied overwhelmingly on Brahmin views of Indian society and culture, in which the cosmology of Brahmanism had priority. Colonial and modern historians have tended to ignore the genealogies, chronicles and dated inscriptions of events and grants in the Puranic tradition, as well as the histories of the Buddhists and the Jains, who sought to make many worldly claims, often in sectarian debates or disputations, by linking persons and events to the succession of monastic elders and the legitimacy of the sangha. Thus, while, from a cosmological perspective, Hindu conceptions of time were cyclical (or spiral-like), there were also more measured versions of linear time associated largely with the claims or proof of legitimacy recorded in the various samvats, or Hindu calendrical systems (Thapar 2011). Chinese civilization possessed a sophisticated tradition of historical writing. Historical writing, such as that by the great Han dynasty historian, Sima Qian (c. 140–85 BCE), was characterized by a more contemporary conception of time, an urge to create new institutions for a new generation. Indeed, Sima Qian’s Shiji depicts a kind of empty, 20

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homogenous space-time. The chronology consists of ‘a series of years that proceed at a perfectly mechanical pace with events in the various states that made up China’ revealing a space-time within which unrelated things could be contemporary (Harbsmeier 1995: 57). Michael Puett (2001) has argued that in early Chinese history, during the period of the Warring States and the early Han, strong claims were made for discontinuity, change and the creation of new institutions that were transgressive of the past and the divine; in other words, some Chinese statesmen advocated a conception of time as secular and innovative. The point, however, is that these views did not become hegemonic as they did later in Europe and with nationalism in Asia. The account of the emergence in Europe of linear history and its epistemic condition, homogeneous and empty time-space, is a familiar one that I will briefly summarize below. My goal is not to dispute this account but to grasp: i) what were the conditions in which this linear vision became institutionalized and hegemonic; and ii) how linearity came to be about territorially or socially bounded histories within this time-space. In some ways, I suggest, this is a paradoxical development since this time-space is relatively unbounded. In the classic account of J. G. A. Pocock, the disenchantment of cosmological time in Europe began with the European Renaissance. In The Machiavellian Moment (1975), Pocock explores the Christian and Renaissance conceptions of time. Simply put, the ‘Machiavellian moment’ refers to the relationship of virtue to history. Both Christian and Renaissance humanist conceptions of time gave true meaning to the divine or rational virtue that existed outside time – outside the secular or temporal time of history. Pocock argues that while humanists, such as Machiavelli, believed that the citizen fulfilled himself through civic virtue rather than through ecclesiastical sacraments, they were still unable to develop a theory of history, or what Pocock calls historicism. Natural law was rational, unchanging and true; history was irrational, fickle and corrupting. The ‘moment’ consists of the deferral of the inevitable collapse or corruption of virtue in mundane time. Pocock’s insight into the Machiavellian moment has resonances with the conception of time in imperial China. The idea of the dynastic cycle embeds something very like the Machiavellian moment in the cycle of virtue and corruption, and the Tongzhi Restoration (1861) has been interpreted precisely as an effort to extend the regime of virtue in the face of impending collapse (Wright 1967). The European Renaissance was coeval with the failure of imperial consolidation in Latin Christendom, especially after 1300, when localism, commercialism and competitive warfare began to dominate the 21

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region. Historians have dubbed the competition between effectively sovereign states in Western Europe from 1450 to about 1650 ‘fiscal militarism’. This period of constant warfare produced state indebtedness, which further accelerated warfare in order to garner greater revenues not only from landed territories but also from overseas. This kind of feedback loop between merchant or banking capital and political power also accelerated technological change and geographical expansion. During this period, even the mightiest European command structures became dependent on an international money and credit market for organizing military and other undertakings (McNeill 1982). Moreover, legitimate and illegitimate representatives of the overseas ventures of European monarchs frequently used the language of sovereignty and law to stake claims to their conquests, acquisitions and possessions in the emergent empires. Imperial expansion from the sixteenth century often entailed what we might call the ‘sovereignty effect’ within Europe. As royal-commission holders, adventurers and even pirates staked claims over territories and waters in the New World and in Africa and Asia against other European claimants, they made sovereignty claims in the name of the king in legal courts back home. Arguably, the notion of sovereignty within Europe, which was seen to be divided or amorphous before the modern period, became homogenized as a result of these ‘effects’ within both Europe and the early modern world (Benton 2010: 280–81; Borschberg 2013). Antony Anghie (1996) goes still further to argue that sovereignty was developed in the confrontation with Indians in Spanish America. In his discussion of the sixteenth-century Spanish jurist Francisco De Vitoria, Anghie argues that Vitoria justified extreme acts against ­American Indians by developing a form of power which defined the Indians as being so barbaric as to be beyond civilized organization and natural law, while simultaneously defining civilized sovereign power as the capacity to wage war and acquire title over territory and the alien, non-­sovereign Indians. ‘Sovereignty doctrine acquired its character through the colonial encounter. This is the darker history of sovereignty which cannot be explored or understood by any account of sovereignty doctrine which assumes the existence of sovereign states’ (1996: 332). Thus, not only did European state-building depend heavily on resources and ­technologies – such as silver, textiles, tea, spices and gunpowder – from the rest of the world, but these discursive practices also contributed to state formation and sovereign territoriality in Europe. Territorial states and modern imperial power emerged from the competitive state system, which was subsequently consolidated as the Westphalian–­Vattelian system of nation–states by the eighteenth century. 22

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Under these conditions, secular conceptions of time since the Renaissance became serviceable for innovations and the capitalist revolution, which, however, ended up desacralizing all dimensions of the world and the commons as resources. The Renaissance was made possible not simply by a direct leap back to Greek antiquity but also by the contributions and circulations of Eurasian thought, which had conserved and developed Greek knowledge as well as knowledge from Islamic, Chinese and Indian traditions (Bala 2006). At the same time, however, the conditions of the Renaissance enabled the successful institutionalization of secular knowledge for the long term. It was in the eighteenth century that the linear conception began to dominate European society. By the eighteenth century, Reinhart Koselleck (1985) tells us, there was an increasing gap between the space of ‘experience’ and the horizon of ‘expectation’ in the dominant views of time. Whereas up to this time, the bulk of the population in Western Europe had expected to live their lives as did their fathers and forefathers, the accelerating pace of change in their lives now caused their expectations to diverge from experience, and from this tension emerged the concept of historical time as we know it. Linear history was experienced and formulated as unique in that the past became distinct from the future, not simply in one case but as a whole (1985: 276–81). By the time Hegel was lecturing on history in the 1820s, histories had already become the histories of nation–states, although Hegel’s nation–state was considerably different from our own. He writes, ‘in the history of the World, the Individuals we have to do with are peoples, totalities that are states’ (Hegel 1837). In the Hegelian view, histories were expressed by particular nationalities but expressed through the records of the state, which embodies reason. Thus, by this time, linear histories appear to be established (of course, for Hegel, it was not secular in the strict sense of the word) (Costas 2002; Lawrenz 2007). But what is less understood is how these histories became bound as they did.

Modern times: disenchantment and global space-time The transition from competitive states to nationalism and national histories inherited by the bulk of the world in the twentieth century was by no means automatic. The ideals of the secular state and popular sovereignty – both heralded by the French Revolution – were combined with the gritty realities of the competitive territorial state, and 23

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it is this mix that yielded the template adopted by twentieth-century states. The new form of national histories emerged to address the dual charge of undergirding the ideals of secular and popular sovereignty while developing the nation into a sleek, efficient body capable of competing for economic and strategic superiority: to emancipate and discipline for competition.2 National histories were cast in the common mold of an emerging national subject that joined an ancient past to a modern future, often by overcoming a dark Middle Age of disunity and foreign contamination. Note how this is fundamentally the trope of ‘Renaissance’. It allows you to disavow the present or immediate past and use a classical or ancient ideal as a motor to propel you into the future. Note also how, although there may be some continuities textually or archeologically with the ancient past, a particularly strong ownership claim is made on it, often by narrowing the optic that could view the wider cultural environment and the circulations in which that ancient past may have been engaged. This is an important means of binding the historical subject as exclusive and unifying territoriality, popular sovereignty and progress. The new historical consciousness synthesized ideas of progress and popular sovereignty with claims to territorial sovereignty, three basic assumptions of nationalist thought. This relationship became the means of creating a historical agent or (often juridical) subject capable of making claims to sovereign statehood. A ‘people’ with a supposed unified self-consciousness developed a sovereign right to the territory they allegedly originally and/or continuously occupied. The unity of territoriality, popular sovereignty and progress is not secured simply by a one-way, linear temporality. Crucial to academic histories located in the nation as much as to nationalist historiographies is the unit in which this history is framed, the national subject of history. How is it that different groups, conquerors, exterminators, people with a different sense of space, with no recognizable geographical knowledge or unity over millennia, come to be thought of as a single people with atavistic and primordial claims to the territory? In 1882, Ernest Renan solved this vexed problem of all national historiography with the idea that the nation is the daily ‘plebiscite of the will’. He affirms the Spartan song, ‘We are what you were, we will be what you are’ (11), as the hymn of every patrie. We may think of the nation as the machinery that produces the will to mythologize the historical unity of the nation. Thus, the presumed subject of history – the nation – has to be seen as an unchanging subject: the intemporal kernel of time. In earlier 24

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periods, such a non-temporal being was none other than Heaven or God, from whom Machiavelli negotiated some secular extension. But if in pre-national histories ‘real’ time was sacred and eternal or belonged to the sage-kings, national histories sought the unchanging in the ‘authentic’. The authentic referred to that which remains unchanged in the course of changing history. The nation–state operates largely in a disenchanted system of states which presupposes an ontological plane of linear, secular time. As such, it does not usually appeal to God or the eternal real but to the authentic – the primordial and unchanging – subject that courses through history and realizes its goals in the progress, or end, of history. Authenticity in linear history generates not only a timelessness within the dominant apprehension of time as linear and forward moving but also a ‘regime of authenticity’ to secure the functions of timelessness in linear time. This aporia of linear history demarcates two zones: capitalism and (national or transnational) authenticity, which institute two opposed poles of authority. Certainly linear, measurable time is necessary for capitalism (where time is money), but the corrosive effects of capitalism (where all that is solid melts into air) are also made visible by this very conception of time. It is not simply the disruption caused by rapid material change that necessitates the production of an abiding truth. It is ultimately the dominant temporal conception that exposes this change as having no goal or meaning that necessitates a continuous subject of history to shore up certitudes, particularly, as we will see, for the claim to national sovereignty embedded in this subject. The regime of national authenticity is crucial to the internal and external sovereignty of the nation–state. Why do nations have to establish their uniqueness? They do so because by the time of the transition to nation–states, the ‘nationform’ itself is a circulatory global resource. Aspiring nationalists and states are busy importing all the norms, institutions and practices that will qualify them as nation–states. In part, nations are built from circulatory global resources – particularly from stronger states – because competition entails imitation, but, more importantly, because the secularization of the competitive political order as a whole (or its detranscendentalization) generates a crisis of authority.

Regimes of authenticity The regime of authenticity may be seen as a late, even nineteenthcentury, expression of the responses to the problems of transition from the Christian regime of the eternal, which shored up the power of the 25

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Holy Roman Empire. The anarchic conditions underlying the competition between multiple states produced several successive conceptions of sovereignty, including Renaissance, divine-right and absolutist conceptions (Bartelsen 1995: 208–12). The regime of authenticity came to be established particularly after the French Revolution in the emergent nation–states, based upon ideas of disenchanted polity and popular sovereignty. Michael Freeman (1999) has said that in the French Revolution the nation was accorded a quasi-divine moral authority, and the right of national self-determination has since then been in tension with the other idea of the rights of man (what we now call human rights) (47–50). As the nation–state staked its claim to sovereignty within and without, the idea of authenticity came to presuppose the unity of people, culture and state, and the regime of authenticity was deployed to deter fractious components and multiple claimants, particularly in the face of external threat. As such, the national ideal has become entrenched and has largely subordinated the broader ideal of human rights. Moreover, the regime of authenticity also seeks to reverse the erosion brought on, doubly, by disenchantment itself and the accelerating temporality of capitalism. This is represented in Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, described unforgettably by Walter Benjamin as the ‘Angel of History’, a figure blown irresistibly by the storm of progress, facing backward, seeking fruitlessly to pick up the shards from the destruction left by this gale. Authenticity may be seen as this same angel turned forward towards the uncharted, leading the people and bearing the face of the chaste woman or the disempowered monarch or the natural aboriginal, telling us that we have salvaged something essential about us that will carry us through to our destiny at the end of history. The latter image represents a mobilizing call: this will happen only if we believe this, stay together, work hard and make sacrifices. If the residue of the sacred, eternal and timeless still remains in modern histories, what differentiates the embodiment of authenticity from the regime of the eternal is that the former does not seek to trump history. It accepts the ineluctability of the passage of historical time, negotiates its status within it as the immanent timeless and tries to promise progress. But, in so doing, authenticity produces its own form of politics: the politics of identity. Identity politics is premised upon a certain unchanging essence reflected in the mirror of a collection of people that seeks to constitute itself as the collective. The nation is the Ur-form of identity politics. As Renan tells us, it is the will (read regime of authenticity) to show daily that ‘we are what you were, we will be what you are’. 26

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We begin to get a clearer sense of why identity politics is so much more central to modern history than it was in earlier times. Nation– states staked their claims to sovereignty in identity politics, representing the nation with authentic claims to territory, people and resources. As the principle of identity politics became internalized in the ­population, it became tied to the discourse of ‘rights’, whereby any collectivity that could demonstrate its historical unity or demonstrate that it could be ‘recognized’ as an entity through history could claim its rights. The Hegelian understanding of the relationship of recognition (a central component of identity) and rights is now getting considerable attention as claims of identity lead to the endless proliferation of rights generating new contradictions. They are challenging the nation itself, as new identity groups demand recognition, whether through nationalist or other identitarian claims. The historical rise of this problématique as the dominant temporality needs greater exploration if we wish to get beyond its logic (Lawrenz 2007). Among the most significant historical functions of modern history – not necessarily of academic history – has been to produce identity, recognition and rights for a group so it may chart its destiny in the present and future. This was important in pre-national times, but it is only with the totalizing power of the fiscal–military state to mobilize the resources of the people, land and water in endless competition that this mode was catapulted to the hegemonic position it possessed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My critique of national histories is the following: i) that identity function was enabled by the regime of authenticity which provided the basis of sovereign action in an anarchic condition; and ii) the regime of authenticity reified and absolutized the history of one people or national community.

Histories of circulatory transformations in early modern Eurasia I have discussed authenticity in terms of the problem of time. There is, however, another very important way to understand the authenticity to which we have alluded in passing. Creating the authenticity of a historical people is also a way to expunge the real history of a community or space, which is based on multiple interactions and circulatory transformations. The eclipse of the latter precisely at the moment, historically, when they were becoming more and more forceful in the early modern world is testimony to the ideological power of bounded and identitarian histories that culminated in the hegemony of national histories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 27

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I propose that we replace the primacy of the linear history of nations with a circulatory, interactive and transformative history. Local, regional and national histories are by no means to be excluded, but the analytical priority in this optic should be given to how these histories interact and loop with circulatory transformations. In the first place, it is important conceptually to distinguish older theories of ‘diffusion’ from circulatory histories. Theories of diffusion tend to emphasize a one-way relationship, typically from a center to a periphery (in terms of the idea or process being diffused), and tend to become involved with political contestation over origins. Circulatory histories emphasize both the necessary forms of adaptation and the recreation of the circulatory form at the points of reception. Circulatory processes can often circulate back to the node of emanation, albeit in a necessarily modified form. Histories ought not to be seen on the model of evolution whereby species develop through internal codes in order to interact with the local environment. Humans are the species, not historical institutions territorially or cultures. Of course, institutions – especially in the ­ bounded state – are self-referential and depict their actions in ­iterative codes (Luhmann 1989). But the environments of the people who occupy the institutions are varied and multiscalar, and they are often influenced by remote ideas, practices, markets, t­echnologies, microbes and networks. Jack Goody, David Pingree and others have demonstrated repeatedly that Eurasia has been basically unified ­ since the onset of the Bronze Age. Pingree (1992) has declared that, as ‘a ­simple historical fact, scientific ideas have been transmitted for millennia from culture to culture, and transformed by each recipient culture into something new’ (563). The early technological revolution enabled intensive ­ agriculture that permitted surplus accumulation, class stratification, literacy, bureaucracy, urbanization and interlinked, city-based ­civilizations across the zone. As a consequence of these factors, and depending on the changing circumstances of access in a particular region, the zone was connected by long-distance trade, warfare, technology, ideas and organizational and institutional practices (including mass industrial production). In some of his recent works, Goody (2006) shows the ways in which European scholars have striven to disembed ‘western’ history from its actual, interactive historical context, from antiquity to the present. Carthage, Phoenician traders, Persia, Egypt, India and, most of all, China and the Islamic world have played a much greater role in western histories than even the most radical analysts have acknowledged. Thus, while it cannot be denied that the Industrial Revolution of the 28

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late eighteenth century was a northern European achievement, this revolution cannot be understood without the background of ‘industrialization, mechanization and mass-production developed . . . in China with textiles, ceramics, and paper, in India with cotton, later taken up in Europe and the Near East’ (210). Goody also discusses the realm of institutions, particularly of knowledge production and values, including mathematics, medicine, humanism, democracy, individualism and romantic love. In none of these cases does he find European societies to be the exclusive proprietors of these institutions and values. Rather, the Europeans owed these traditions in a significant way to other societies, most notably Islamic ones. At different times, different cities or regions in Eurasia – whether joined by trading and religious and technological networks, or separated by empires, disease, political instability, piracy or climate change – created different nodes of absorption, innovation or isolation in this gradually expanding zone over millennia. Seen against this wider canvas of changing zones of innovation, the capacity of some European social formations to institutionalize secular knowledge production and sustained economic growth over the last two centuries represents a very important but not unique achievement. Other societies were poised to learn the lessons from one part of the Eurasian world quickly enough – given the time scale of ­history – and it is unnecessary to identify the distinctive qualities of a region or nation as unifying all dimensions of life and reaching back into the mists of time – that is, unless that society has a competitive agenda. Just as Foucault (1977) once asked us to focus not on ‘causal’ history but on ‘effective’ history – attending to the dispersed reception of an event – so, too, without denying the importance of internal institutional processes, I want us to shift our focus from internal processes to how those processes are themselves affected by myriad outside forces. Such a shift not only redresses the imbalance in the understanding of historical forces but can also help to redistribute sources of identity formation and lead to the recognition that the historical subject is never an entirely self-contained entity. While major differences must be admitted, this also bears some resemblance to the various, often coexisting modes of apprehending time and history in pre-modern societies. More importantly, global conditions are particularly ripe for such a non-linear conception of history. Competitive capitalism is by no means less intense, but capitalism today is as much about interdependencies of nations and units as it is about competition between nationally or imperialistically unified 29

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entities. Today, there is a greater mismatch between our globality and national institutions than in the twentieth century. A short chapter is hardly the place to demonstrate the nature and content of Eurasian historical connections, but we can try to identify a few routes and patterns over the last two millennia that joined East Asia to South and West Asia and beyond to the European cores. The famous Silk Route may be thought of as the name for a network of several different land routes linking East, South, Central and West Asia with North and East Africa and the Mediterranean that became increasingly supplemented and was gradually exceeded in importance by the maritime routes linking these spaces, including Southeast Asia. The trading centers of South Asia were particularly important because they represented important nodes in both the land and sea routes. Among the most important connectors across Asia in the early period was Buddhism. The spread of Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent to different parts of Asia by both maritime and land routes through traders, migrants, monks, envoys, artisans and the royal patronage of kings over the course of several centuries in the first millennium is too well known a phenomenon to recount here. Suffice it to suggest that Buddhism exemplifies the mode of circulatory history in which ideas, practices and texts enter society or locale as one kind of thing and emerge from it considerably transformed to travel elsewhere even as it refers back, often narratively, to the initiating moment. As Tansen ­ uddhism to Sen (2012) and others have shown, the circulation of B China until the fourth century was not a linear movement of diffusion from the subcontinent, but involved different carriers from places such as the region that is now Iran, who made their own contributions to the faith. China had long been a significant player in global circulations, especially in the Tang and Song periods. The succeeding Mongol (Yuan) dynasty, which ruled China during much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, expanded considerably the ambit of Eurasian interactions with China by virtue of its being part of the wider Mongol Empire, which was the largest land-based empire the world has seen. Chinese ties to the Islamic empires, which had been interrupted during the political turmoil of the late Tang dynasty, were revived by the regional integration under the Mongols. For much of the century, Pax Mongolica guaranteed the relative openness of trade routes. China’s position was crucial to this trade because it linked the overland with the overseas route, as evidenced, for instance, by the travels of Marco Polo (Abu-Lughod 1989: 347; Park 2012: 18).

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The legacy of connections with the Buddhist and Muslim societies of Central and West Asia remained important for several centuries. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which followed the Mongols, was, in the early years, able to undertake the largest in scale and most powerful naval voyages of the time, in no small measure because of the cosmopolitanism of the earlier period. Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who famously reached the southern tip of Africa before the Portuguese on his unprecedentedly large flotillas, in seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, exemplifies this cosmopolitanism. Descended from Central Asian Muslim governors of Yunnan during the Mongol period, Zheng He was captured and castrated by the Ming rulers as a boy. He subsequently became a famous general of the Ming and was commissioned to lead the voyages. Zheng recruited as his interpreter Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim from Zhejiang, who was proficient in Arabic, the lingua franca of sailors and merchants on the Indian Ocean. Moreover, while Zheng was born a Muslim, he was a practicing Buddhist and took a Buddhist name. Indeed, Chinese ­Buddhist pilgrimages – which circulated cosmological, medical and geographical knowledge – from China through Central Asia, India and Southeast Asia continued until the fifteenth century (Dreyer 2006). A recent work by Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (2009), is very relevant to our project. It is a monumental comparative work on the Eurasian region over the last millennium. Lieberman seeks to explain the ‘strange parallels’ between different regions of Eurasia. He distinguishes two types of historical states in this region – namely, those in the ‘protected zone’ and those in the ‘exposed zone’. Geographically, the latter included South Asia and China, which have large northern and northwestern areas exposed to inner Asian invasions, whereas the former zone included kingdoms in Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, France and Japan, which were relatively protected from direct massive predation. Maritime, or island, Southeast Asia belatedly developed into an exposed zone, exposed to takeover by the ‘white Inner Asians’ from the sixteenth century. Historically, the two zones were separated by the presence in China and India of precocious civilizations, from which the protected kingdoms later crafted their own ‘charter kingdoms’ towards the latter part of the first millennium. In Frankish/ Carolingian France, the charter state derived its ideas from the Roman Empire, whereas Kiev derived them from the Byzantine Empire. Lieberman sees two patterns over the millennium. The charter states in the protected zone facilitated a cycle of agrarian and population

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expansion, commercial growth and development of new literate elites and charter religious ideologies of integration – in short, an early form of agrarian state-building. This pattern was also experienced in China and India, although in these cases, new techniques and cultures of state-formation derived from inner Asian invasions – such as those by the Khitan, Jurchen, Tangut and Turks – combined with the older civilizational forms; these combinations created more hybrid forms rather than the civilizationally pure forms claimed, for instance, by Confucian and Hindu–Buddhist states in the protected zones. This hybridity might be considered ironic, though only from a national origins perspective ( 2009: 896–97). Lieberman argues that the causes of the rise of these states were global and had parallel effects. First among them was the global medieval climate anomaly, which had the effect of extending the growing season and arable lands, population adaptation to diseases (particularly smallpox) and long-distance trade between 830 and 1240. The period of efflorescence was followed by the collapse of these polities in the protected zone, which occurred very roughly within the same period, between 1240 and 1470. Just as with their rise, the decline of these states was coordinated by climate change – the relapse of the good but anomalous climactic conditions – the spread of bubonic plague and the impact of the Mongol Empire – whether directly through spread of disease, direct assault or indirect displacement of peoples such as the Tai, who then extended the invasive and disruptive process into other parts of Asia (160–64, 268–70). A new cycle began around 1500, when stronger states ­consolidated in both zones. The new state-formation that we noted as ‘fiscal militarism’ in Europe appeared, albeit in different modes across ­ ­Eurasia. Territorial expansion by the successor states was accompanied not only by deepening of administrative control and integration but also by the development of what Lieberman calls ‘politicized ethnicities’ – the horizontal and, to some extent, vertical, social and cultural homogenization within these empires, which in turn created a majority group (who, presumably, become the dominant national core). Administrative and political technologies improved to the extent that political fragmentation during the interregna between centralized polities became shorter over the millennium in both zones. Lieberman is not primarily interested in connections. Indeed, his goal is to see patterns of evolution to modernity, to observe the development (or at least parts of the development) of the modern centralizing state and the national community in different parts of the world over the longue durée. Thus, while his study is admirable and valuable for 32

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the extensive coverage and illumination of comparable ‘early modernities’ across several different parts of the world, the almost studied neglect of connections between these ‘strange parallels’ represents an important weakness. Indeed, the few global factors he mentions, such as the impact of the Mongol Empire and the bubonic plague, are already well known and are not explored in depth by him, whereas the evidence for the impact of the medieval climate anomaly upon different parts of Eurasia appears not to be very strong. However, in other studies, the connections between these regions from the first millennium at the very least is very well developed, and Jack Goody, Janet Abu-Lughod, Marshall Hodgson, Eric Wolf, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, David Christian and many others have put the connections in the second millennium at the center of their work, through both the land and sea routes (Christian (2005: 320–35) presents a digest of some of these historical views on Eurasian connections and beyond). Synthesizing the growing literature on the early modern world and Europe, Jerry Bentley (2007) has shown that early modern Europe reflected, depended upon and contributed to an early modern world. The parallels that Lieberman observes were accompanied by the spread of global trade networks, the flow of bullion, migrations and the exchange of biological species in various different parts of Eurasia. European advantages were not overwhelming until the eighteenth century either in military technology or in economic strength. In both value and bulk terms, Asian merchants carried the majority of world trade until around 1750. In the vast Indian Ocean trade – the Indian Ocean Trade Ecumene or the Maritime Silk Route, as it is variously dubbed – of this period, European companies could rarely compete with Asian traders in any market, except when they could use force without fear of retaliation (Abu-Lughod 1989: 11; Subrahmanyam 1995: 753). Over time, they were able to inflict greater violence to secure trade not because of vastly superior maritime technology and military power, but, rather, because the Europeans brought state power to maritime control. Most Asian states were landed powers and did not derive their revenues principally from maritime trade. Where certain Asian sea trade-based powers did emerge, often in response to Portuguese and Dutch activities, as did the Yaruba Imamate in Oman (1650), they were able to oust the Portuguese. Cooperation between the Ottomans and the Gujarat sultan had earlier led to defeat of the Portuguese. Zheng Chenggong, considered a hero in Taiwan as its liberator, was able to defeat the Dutch in Taiwan as late as 1661 (Andrade 2010; Casale 2010). 33

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More importantly, from our perspective, early modern practices, technologies and cultures were shared, especially in the maritime space. The scholar–novelist Amitav Ghosh (2008), Hyunhee Park (2012), Engseng Ho (2006), Barbara Andaya (2014), Hugh Clark (2002) and others, riding on the shoulders of an earlier generation of Indian Ocean stalwarts such as K. N. Chaudhuri and Ashin Das Gupta, continue to reveal the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of the sailing community, including sailors, merchants and shipbuilders. Although seafaring was hardly devoid of violence, the demands of the ocean and the absence – in most cases – of accompanying military power to control the sea-lanes made for cooperation and cultural exchange. Muslim sailors from the thirteenth century combined the technology of the Chinese magnetic compass with their own system of determining a ship’s latitude by measuring the altitude of the stars, as did Zheng He’s crew. Chinese and Islamic geographical knowledge was combined to produce coastal maps of the region. Vasco de Gama might not have been able to reach India if he had not been guided by the ‘Moor of Gujarat’. Peter Shapinsky (2006) discusses the ‘portolans’, or pilot books – collections of written and diagrammed sailing instructions – in use among Japanese ships with multicultural, cosmopolitan crews before the Tokugawa restriction of maritime trade in the late 1630s. The nautical culture that developed in this maritime space was facilitated by cross-cultural brokers who assimilated Mediterranean navigation techniques with those of East Asian provenance, drawn from diverse sources, including the Zheng He expeditionary charts of a century earlier and various Arab and Korean sources. Indeed, these Japanese portolans were sometime readopted by European cartographers in the late seventeenth century because they recognized the improved Japanese depictions of East Asia over the European ones (13, 26). By the eighteenth century, the situation had changed radically. Not only had the Indian Ocean become militarized, but cross-cultural relations also became increasingly replaced by ‘scientific’ racial hierarchies about the capacities and functions of different groups (Andaya 2014: 13). It was not only economic practices that joined this polycentric but shared world. Religious, intellectual and cultural factors were also very important in connecting the different parts of Eurasia. Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997) points to the massive expansion of cultures of travel outside Europe, which led to patterns of knowledge exchange across the regions and sub-regions, and the emergence of forums of debate between Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians and others. Even though Buddhist pilgrim and teacher exchanges between China 34

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and India had begun to decline after reaching its height during the early centuries of the second millennium, exchanges among Buddhist monks, teachers and advisers continued between Sri Lanka and Southeast Asian kingdoms. Millenarianism was a particularly powerful attractor for rulers and rebels and a connector between Christian and Islamic groups, including those in Southeast Asia, where the legend of Alexander, not only as a world conqueror but also as a prophet and universal monarch, had become established by the seventeenth century.

Regional scales of historical circulations Another dimension of circulatory histories worth noting is the scales of circulation. In the modern period, methodological nationalism has tended to obscure the region as the crucial transmission scale that has mediated and facilitated circulations between the world and the nation or locality. Although, as we have seen, China has participated in circulations with Southeast Asia and beyond, I focus here on the Northeast Asian core of East Asia. Japan, Korea and China shared not only a common culture in Confucianism but also the range of popular ideas that derived from the substratum of Chinese and Buddhist cosmologies, including syncretism and millenarianism. The imperial Chinese tribute trade system which framed economic relations between them joined these societies even when the Japanese were not formally part of it. These societies became still more tightly interconnected in every sphere of activity during the formative period of modern nationalism. Much of the modern linguistic recreation of Chinese and Korean drew upon the earlier Japanese translations of modern concepts, which, in turn, drew upon classical Chinese words. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Chinese and Korean ideas of gender, religion, citizenship and many other modern institutions drew – whether consciously or not, albeit not exclusively – from recent Japanese models and ideas. The very form of national histories is an exemplary place to seek their wider provenance. To be sure, many historians recognized that they were affiliating with a universal history; certainly, their histories could not be recognized as national without the common narrative form. But the very idea of a collective subject of history born of common origins – or, as in East Asia, of founding ancestors – could hardly be recognized as an imported model. By the early twentieth century in East Asia, for instance, the idea of the common origin of a people typically derived from a common ancestor, such as the Yellow Emperor or the sage-kings of ancient yore in China; Amaterasu as the divine ancestress of the Yamato people in 35

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Japan; or Tangun for the Korean people. Early Korean nationalists like Shin Chae-ho believed that the emergence of nationalist historiography was hindered by the strong tendency of Korean elites to see their state as a tributary of China as well as a mentality of subordination to it (sadae). Even while struggling to free themselves from Chinese hegemony, Korean nationalists were faced by Japanese colonialism, which sought to depict Koreans as lesser versions of the Japanese and tried ultimately to assimilate them. Writing in the early twentieth century, Shin Chae-ho struck out against both of these obstacles by transforming the myth of Tangun into the starting point of the history of the Korean people, or minjok, distinct from both the Chinese and the Japanese (Schmid 2002: 183). The semantics of the unique nation was expressed through the syntax of the circulating global mediated by the lexical and interactive pragmatics of the region. Each of these societies sought to distinguish the authenticity of its nation, often by resignifying symbols from a circulatory historical reservoir. One such symbolic role was that of the ‘self-sacrificing woman’ (xianqi liangmu, ryo s¯ai kembo), upon whose sacrifices for the home and nation the new citizen and modern society would be built. Similarly, historical practices of self-cultivation and discipline were evoked from Confucianism and Buddhism to produce new habits of citizenship, as in the New Life movement of the Kuomintang (KMT) (Chinese Nationalist Party; the name was later romanized as Guomindang) in China and later in Korea.

Conclusion In light of the circulatory histories we have referenced and discussed from the early modern period, Lieberman’s contributions reveal that the contemporaneity of widely separated parts of Eurasia are limited by the nationalist-modernization paradigm to which he appears to subscribe. This paradigm functions through a rather tunnel vision of national histories projected back in time. His narrative is in some ways of a piece with the very important discoveries of the mid-twentieth century decolonizing historians of China and India – for example, Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming’s Chinese Capitalism, 1522–1840 (1990) and Irfan Habib’s ‘Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India’ (Journal of Economic History, 1969), among many others. These studies also sought to show how developments in each of their societies reflected sprouts of capitalist or protomodern formations.

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Much of this work was conducted within the framework of antiimperialist theories, particularly Leninist theories. Indeed, Japanese Marxist scholarship (and the Needham project on Chinese science at Cambridge University) during the postwar years made enormous contributions to our understanding of the highly developed state of imperial Chinese society that we now take for granted. Mark Elvin’s celebrated work, published in 1973, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, which documented the economic revolution from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, would not have been possible without this contribution. At the same time, the Marxist/anti-imperialist framework of Asian scholars frequently obscured the other, nationalist framing which was just as important in these works. The theory of modes of production became lodged within certain national or regional boundaries that were not immediately evident until they became signifiers of difference and identity. Take, for example, the case of the ‘sprouts of capitalism’ argument made in China in the 1950s and 1960s. It gained salience during a time when Soviet historians insisted on consigning Chinese history to a stagnant ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and thus logically one more primitive than even the slavery mode of production. Chinese Marxists identified their own historical system as a feudal mode (semi-feudal, semi-colonial) and were eager to demonstrate that China almost made the breakthrough to capitalism through the idea of the ‘sprouts’ (Wang 2000). The falling away of the Marxist goals has led to the celebration of civilizational achievements in nation–states like China and India solely as elements of nationalist pride and privilege. The question that has dominated the history of science and modernity among both western and non-western scholars has been, ‘Why is it that the west is the only society that broke into modernity?’ Sometimes when the question is asked by non-westerners, they seek to assimilate their own society into the western club that exceptionally broke into modernity. Can we extricate the wider Eurasian developments from the teleological paradigm of national modernization histories and see them instead in a paradigm of early modernity? Admittedly, since what we call early modernity can now be seen as a polycentric global phenomenon, and the moderns appropriated the earlier cosmopolitan period to the name of modernity, the term itself may be a malapropism. But let us bracket that problem for the moment. If the telos of early modernity is not modernity as we know it and modernity catalyzed only some aspects of early modern forms, what other aspects may be catalyzed or developed in this globalized era?

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I believe a profoundly significant dimension of ‘early modernity’ was precisely deepening circulations, interconnections and interdependence, especially from 1500 onwards. The historical reality of the early modern world as a collective heritage that was interactive and polycentric has been systemically obscured by the dominance of linear narratives of historical process. Exclusive histories of nations and civilizations underpinned unequal relationships in the capitalist world even as capitalist relations were integrating the basis of historical developments globally as never before in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The misrecognition of historical flows tied to goods, ideas, microbes, finances and networks has finally become unsustainable as the consequences of these real flows can no longer be controlled by a self-sufficient nation–state.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter appeared as Chapter 2 in my book, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Reproduced with permission from CUP. 2  The next five paragraphs summarize my thesis in Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chapter 1.

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Aburrow, Yvonne. ‘The Day-Star of Approaching Morn: The Relationship Between the Unitarians and the Brahmo Samaj’, http://bristolunitarians. blogspot.sg/2013/08/the-rammohun-roy-connection.html (accessed on 13 October 2013). Andaya, Barbara. 2014. ‘Connecting Oceans and Multicultural Navies: A Historian’s View on Challenges and Potential for Indian Ocean-­Western Pacific Interaction’, in N. Lenze and C. Schriwer (eds.), Converging Regions: Global Perspectives on Asia and the Middle East, pp. 181–98. Farnham: Ashgate. Andrade, Tonio. 2010. ‘Beyond Guns, Germs, and Steel: European Expansion and Maritime Asia, 1400–1750’, Journal of Early Modern History, 14: 165–86. Anghie, Antony. 1996. ‘Francisco De Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law’, Social Legal Studies, 5: 321–36. Bala, Arun. 2006. The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern ­Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Bartelsen, Jens. 1995. A Genealogy of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bentley, Jerry H. 2007. ‘Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World’, in Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (eds.), Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, pp. 13–31. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Benton, Lauren. 2010. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empire, 1400–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. Borschberg, Peter. 2013. ‘From Self-Defence to an Instrument of War: Dutch Privateering Around the Malay Peninsula in the Early 17th Century’, Journal of Early Modern History, 17: 35–52. Casale, G. 2010. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press. Christian, David. 2005. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clark, Hugh R. 2002. Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the Third to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Costas, Douzinas. 2002. ‘Identity, Recognition, Rights or What Can Hegel Teach Us About Human Rights?’ Journal of Law and Society, 29(3): 379–405. Dreyer, Edward L. 2006. Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming, 1405–1433. Library of World Biography Series. New York: Pearson Longman. Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter Memory, Practice, pp. 139–64. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Frederick, Michael J. 1998. Transcendental Ethos: A Study of Thoreau’s Social Philosophy and Its Consistency in Relation to Antebellum Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, http://thoreau.eserver.org/mjf/ MJF3.html (accessed on 11 October 2013). Freeman, Michael. 1999. ‘The Right to National Self-Determination’, in Clarke M. Desmond and Charles Jones (eds.), The Rights of Nations: Nations and Nationalism in a Changing World, pp. 45–64. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 2008. ‘The Ibis Chrestomathy’ [The Glossary of the Cosmopolitan Seafarer Language], in Amitav Ghosh (ed.), Sea of Poppies. New York: Picador. Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harbsmeier, Cristoph. 1995. ‘Some Notions of Time and of History in China and in the West, with a Digression on the Anthropology of Writing’, in

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Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Zücher (eds.), Time and Space in Chinese Culture, pp. 49–71. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Hegel, G. W. F. 1837. ‘Philosophy of History: III. Philosophic History (Thesis 17)’, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm (accessed on 11 October 2013). Ho, Engseng. 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jackson, Carl T. 1994. Vedanta for the West: The Ramakrishna Movement in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lawrenz, Jürgen. 2007. ‘Hegel, Recognition and Rights: “Anerkennung” as a Gridline of the Philosophy of Rights’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 3(2–3): 153–69. Lieberman, Victor. 2009. Strange Parallels. Vol. 2. Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830. New York: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1989. Ecological Communication. Translated by John ­Bednarz, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McNeill, William. 1982. The Pursuit of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Myerson, Joel, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Park, Hyunhee. 2012. Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-­Cultural Exchange in Pre-modern Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pingree, David. 1992. ‘Hellenophilia Versus the History of Science’, Isis, 83(4): 554–63. Pocock, J. G. A. 1975. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Puett, Michael. 2001. The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Renan, Ernest. 1990 [1882]. ‘What Is a Nation?’ in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, pp. 8–22. New York: Routledge. Schmid, Andre. 2002. Korea Between Empires, 1895–1919. New York: Columbia University Press. Sen, Tansen. 2012. ‘The Spread of Buddhism to China: A Re-Examination of the Buddhist Interactions Between Ancient India and China’, China Report, 48: 11–27. Shapinsky, Peter. 2006. ‘Polyvocal Portolans: Nautical Charts and Hybrid Maritime Cultures in Early Modern East Asia’, Early Modern Japan, 14: 4–26.

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Stein, William Bysshe. 1970. ‘The Hindu Matrix of Walden: The King’s Son’, Comparative Literature, 22(4): 303–18. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1995. ‘Of Imarat and Tijarat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37(4): 750–80. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31(3) ­(Special Issue, The Eurasian Context of the Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 1400–1800): 735–62. Thapar, Romila. 2011. ‘Was There Historical Writing in Early India?’ in ­Cynthia Talbot (ed.), Knowing India: Colonial and Modern Constructions of the Past: Essays in Honor of Thomas R. Trautmann, pp. 281–308. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Wang, Edward Q. 2000. ‘Between Marxism and Nationalism: Chinese Historiography and the Soviet Influence, 1949–1963’, Journal of Contemporary China, 9(23): 95–111. Wright, Mary C. 1967. The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T’ungchih Restoration, 1862–1874. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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3 CONNECTED HISTORIES The Asian roots of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions Arun Bala

Beyond tunnel histories of modern science and society The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions are generally seen as the key events that ushered in the era of modern science and modern society. But the history of this change to the new era has generally been seen in terms of a Eurocentric tunnel that connects ancient Greek traditions of philosophy, science and democracy, interrupted by a European Dark Age, to their rebirth and re-articulation in early modern Europe. However, the period from 500 to 1500, defined as the Dark Ages of Europe, was also the Bright Ages of Asian science and society; dramatic advances were made in India, China and the Arabic world, not only in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine and the other sciences in general, but also in forging new social, political and economic institutions that built trading networks across the Eurasian region, connecting these civilizations. This chapter will examine how these advances played a key role in providing intellectual and practical resources for both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Europe. What is particularly striking is that the very Asian traditions – Arabic–Islamic, Chinese and Indian – which contributed most of the resources for the Scientific Revolution did the same for the Industrial Revolution. The chapter will focus on how these Asian traditions came to be connected to the modern revolution in science and society. To accomplish this task, the discussion will attempt to link together the dialogical account of the Scientific Revolution in my study, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (2006), with the dialogical account of the Industrial Revolution in John Hobson’s 42

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The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (2004). At a time when economic historians are attempting to connect the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, albeit within a Eurocentric perspective, bringing these two studies together can pave the way for a richer Eurasian contextualization of both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, since these studies attempt to shift our attention from Eurocentric tunnel histories toward Eurasia-centric dialogical histories – the former dealing with the emergence of modern science and the latter with that of modern society. Together they show that much of the knowledge and practices needed for these revolutionary changes were created in Arabic, Indian and Chinese civilizations long after the decline of ancient Greek science and society. To illustrate the importance of these Asian impacts, I will first look at the growth of astronomical knowledge in the Asian traditions in the era of the European Dark Ages that laid the basis for the Scientific Revolution in Europe, and then proceed to delineate the social and economic contributions of these same cultures to the Industrial Revolution and modern social revolution that accompanied it. Finally, I will use the concluding section to point to some important questions and implications that these two dialogical accounts have for rethinking our understanding of the rise of modern science and society within Europe.

Relocating the Scientific Revolution In the preface to his book, The Origins of Modern Science (1957), British historian Herbert Butterfield writes: The so-called ‘scientific revolution’, popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. . . . It looms so large as the real origin of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance. (8) Butterfield clearly associates the Scientific Revolution with the rise of the modern world. Nevertheless, his history of the Scientific Revolution, like many others which followed, largely ignores Asian 43

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contributions. Such studies may acknowledge that important elements of the Scientific Revolution might have been anticipated by Asian cultures, but rarely do they allow any but marginal influences from these cultures on the Scientific Revolution in Europe. Their orthodox views presume that modern science is simply the direct descendent of ancient European – primarily Greek – science. Many even assume that ancient Greek thought contained all the necessary philosophical, mathematical, astronomical and scientific ideas needed to trigger the Scientific Revolution, and that the major makers of this revolution – ­Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton – took their departure from the point ancient Greek science had left off. This view is, for example, typified by the historian Dijksterhuis (1961), who maintains that the arguments advanced by Copernicus in Book I of De Revolutionibus depended only upon ancient sources to defend the physical plausibility of the heliocentric theory, and that Books II through VI followed Ptolemy closely, deploying epicycles and eccentrics as he did, but significantly without the use of his instrument of the equant. It leads Dijksterhuis to conclude that ‘barring the application of trigonometric methods of computation one finds nothing in [De Revolutionibus] that might not just as well have been written in the second century by a successor of Ptolemy’ (1961: 288).1 Hence, the historical development of the Scientific Revolution in Europe can be explained by means of a tunnel history from developments in ancient Europe – a history disconnected from developments outside Europe. Such accounts also tend to treat the intervening period between ancient Greek science and the Scientific Revolution as the ‘Dark Age’ of science. However, recent scholarship (Goody 1996; Hobson 2004; Bala 2006; Joseph 2011) has increasingly come to recognize that not only did important advances in science and society take place in Asia during the European Dark Ages, but also that these advances significantly impacted the rise of modern astronomy and society in Europe in the seventeenth century. Let us now examine the pre-Copernican traditions of astronomy and cosmology in the Arabic, Chinese and Indian worlds during these Bright Dark Ages – the bright ages of Asian science at the time of the relative decline of Greek science. The most advanced schools of astronomy in these cultures were the Arabic Maragha, the Chinese Xuan Ye and the Indian Kerala traditions, which largely developed in the millennium from about 500 to 1500. Their astronomical views were built on quite different conceptions of the cosmos. The Arabic tradition adopted the geocentric model of Greek science in which the sun, moon, planets and stars orbited the earth. It also adopted the 44

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geometric approach of Ptolemy and the ancient Greeks but combined it with the Indian number system and algebraic techniques. The Indian astronomers espoused a geo-heliocentric model in which the sun orbited the earth but the planets went around the sun. Surprisingly, although they adopted pre-Ptolemaic epicyclic models from the ancient Greeks, their emphasis on algebraic rather than geometric methods led them to very different mathematical orientations in articulating precision knowledge of astronomical processes. The Chinese, too, had their own distinctive conception of the universe – one that treated the stars and planets as revolving around the Pole Star,2 which they saw as the fixed point in the heavens around which everything else moved. Unlike the Indians and the Arabs, their focus was on predicting the revolutions of the stars, and they developed a strong tradition of star maps. Moreover, to get precise representational knowledge of the heavens, they built mechanical models that were increasingly refined from the time of Zhang Heng (78–139).3 Let us now proceed to examine these three traditions to see how they anticipated many discoveries that contributed to the Scientific Revolution in Europe. Maragha School of geocentrism Translations of Greek, Indian and Sassanid works fueled astronomical developments in the Arab–Islamic world during 700–825. The following two centuries were marked by the dominance of Ptolemaic astronomy. In the eleventh century, the Arabic scientist and polymath Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040) wrote his renowned work Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, which demanded that astronomical theory should not only mathematically model the universe but also be physically plausible. He argued that the Ptolemaic theory failed to do this because it used the notion of an equant that requires uniform rotation of an epicycle about a point neither centered on the earth nor on the center of the deferent cycle on which it rotates. His critique generated enough interest to inspire what has since come to be referred to as the Maragha School of astronomy. The school succeeded because of the discovery of two new mathematical theorems – the Urdi lemma and the Tusi couple.4 The great flexibility for model building rendered achievable by these theorems finally made it possible for Ibn al-Shatir (1304–75) to formulate a geocentric model of the universe without the use of the equant. Ibn al-Shatir’s planetary model had the same predictive power as Ptolemy’s but effectively removed the need to deploy the physically implausible equant as demanded by Ibn al-Haytham three centuries earlier. 45

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What is surprising is that the motivations of the Maragha School to eliminate the equant and the new mathematical tools they deployed are also those of Copernicus when he formulated his heliocentric theory of the universe. Indeed, the similarities are so close that Swerdlow and Neugebauer (1984) are led to conclude in their study, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus, that ‘Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely as the most noted follower of the Maragha School’ (295). Such parallels between the Maragha School and Copernicus have generated deep controversy between dialogical and tunnel historians concerning the extent to which the Maragha School influenced Copernicus. Chinese polar-centric astronomy In contrast to the focus on planetary motions in the Arabic tradition, Chinese astronomical theory focused on the study of stars, although attention was also paid to the sun, the moon and the predictions of their eclipses as well. The dominant tradition among the Chinese at the time of the Scientific Revolution was the Xuan Ye theory, which was already described in the fourth century by Ko Hung (283–343) but became ascendant subsequently because it was endorsed by the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, especially Chang Tsai (Ronan 1981: 88). This theory assumed that all heavenly bodies were formed by the condensation of an ethereal substance, qi, and that these bodies, including the earth, were floating in an infinite empty space.5 Moreover, the heavens revolved in an anti-clockwise direction around the Pole Star because they were carried by a floating, rushing qi in their orbits. However, it was also known that the sun, the moon and the planets (the seven luminaries of Chinese astronomy), unlike the stars, sometimes moved in an opposite direction – what we now recognize as retrograde motion. This was explained by postulating that these bodies, being nearer the earth, were subject to drag by the viscous resistance of the qi of the earth. It is very likely that this was the theory described by Matteo Ricci when he writes back to Europe in 1595 contrasting European and Chinese astronomical views. He notes a number of ‘absurdities’ – as he dubs them – which Chinese astronomers believed in. He lists the following: The earth is flat and square, and the sky is a round canopy. There are not many skies but only one sky. The space between the planets and the stars is not filled with air – it is a void. 46

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There are five elements – earth, water, fire, wood and metal, and not four – earth, water, fire, and air. The eclipse of the sun is caused by the moon which dims its light as it approaches the sun. During the night, the sun hides under a mountain near the earth. (Cited in Needham 1958: 2) What is striking today is that some of the Chinese cosmological ideas Ricci takes to be absurd – that there are not ten skies but one, and that the space between the planets and stars is a vacuum not filled with air – became a part of modern science after the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, he must also have been struck by the fact that Chinese astronomers had carefully recorded the passage of comets, the appearances of novae and the occurrences of sunspots as heavenly phenomena. By contrast, such events even when observed were taken as illusions or exhalations from the earth by European astronomers who were guided by the Aristotelian view of the heavens as unchanging and immutable beyond the lunar sphere. Just as in the case of the Maragha School, the anticipations by the Chinese astronomers of subsequent discoveries made in modern science raises the question of the extent to which their views shaped early modern astronomy in Europe. Indian geo-heliocentric astronomy In order to fully appreciate the development of the Indian astronomical tradition, we have to understand the historical context within which it developed. Many of its achievements took place only after Greek astronomical models and their associated techniques were introduced into India.6 However, the Indian mathematical astronomers used the Greek models as the basis for developing new and more powerful mathematical techniques that went far beyond Greek computational and algebraic achievements. The earliest and most influential of the Indian mathematical astronomers was Aryabhata (476–550). His book Aryabhatiya, written in 499, gave details of an alphabet–numeral system and rules for arithmetical operations that greatly enhanced computational facility, and anticipated most of the features of the current number system we use. He also gave general rules for the summing of natural number series, their squares and their cubes. One of the major innovations in his pioneering work is the introduction of the sine and versine (inverse-cosine) functions for the first time in history, thereby laying the basis for modern trigonometry (Joseph 2011: 373–75). 47

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The flexible arithmetic provided by the Indian number system, the development of the mathematics of finite series and the extension of trigonometric knowledge over the next millennium led in the fourteenth century to what has been called ‘the passage to infinity’ by the Kerala School of mathematical astronomy. This involved new methods that led to infinite series representations of trigonometric and circular functions as well as techniques that anticipated many elements of modern analysis and calculus. Although the Kerala School includes a chain of mathematicians whose work extended from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the accomplishments of two of them are particularly relevant for our purpose – Madhava (1350–1425), the pioneer of the Kerala School, who made the decisive step of going beyond the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to deal with infinite series; and his follower, Nilakantha (1444–1544), who not only extended the discoveries of Madhava but also instituted a mathematical revolution in Indian astronomical theory. Madhava was the greatest of the Indian medieval mathematical astronomers. To him may be credited the discovery of the power series for inverse tangent now attributed to Gregory; the power series for π associated with Leibniz; the power series for sine and cosine named after Newton; and approximations for sine and cosine functions to the second order of small quantities linked with Taylor (Joseph 2011: 428). Nilakantha’s major work is the Tantrasamgraha, an astronomical treatise written in 1501, which uses epicycles and eccentrics in its mathematical model and treats ways to compute planetary positions by applying techniques developed by the Kerala School. His work unites two mathematical approaches used to compute orbits of the inner and outer planets and formalizes the geo-heliocentric theory of Indian astronomy under one computational framework.7 What is also striking is that the mathematics of infinite series, which played such a crucial role in the birth of the calculus during the Scientific Revolution, and the geo-heliocentric theory now linked to Brahe were also anticipated within the Indian astronomical tradition. These anticipations, as with the anticipations of the Maragha and Xuan Ye schools, again raised the question of the extent to which Indian astronomical ideas came to influence the Scientific Revolution. The extent to which the Asian astronomical traditions influenced the Scientific Revolution has generated intense controversy in recent years. Although the existence of such anticipations has been recognized for more than half a century, they were initially interpreted simply as 48

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anticipations of independent discoveries subsequently made by European thinkers at the time of the Scientific Revolution. However, there has now emerged increasing circumstantial evidence which suggests that these findings were transmitted to Europe following the voyages of discovery that began at the end of the fifteenth century, although the routes and modes of transmission remain controversial. The pioneering works proposing such transmissions – Needham (1958), A. K. Bag (1979), Swerdlow and Neugebauer (1984) – have since been developed further by Bala (2006: 131–34; deals with Chinese transmissions), Saliba (2007: 193–232: deals with Maragha School transmissions) and Joseph (2011: 435–44; deals with Kerala School transmissions). Their dialogical claims are not based on documentary but rather on circumstantial evidence such as appeals to priority of discovery, existence of possible corridors of communication and thematic, epistemological and methodological similarities between Asian anticipations and subsequent parallel discoveries in Europe. Although they have been criticized for not establishing transmission beyond reasonable doubt, these dialogical historians counter that this is an excessive demand since they demonstrate that the case for transmission has more competitive plausibility than that for non-transmission. The dialogical histories of the Scientific Revolution suggest that we cannot understand the historical or geographical context of the Scientific Revolution by confining it within the realm of Europe. This is possible only if we suppose that it was solely Greek science and astronomy that had the major impact on the Scientific Revolution, as tunnel historians suppose. However, once we acknowledge that cosmological ideas, empirical discoveries and methodological and mathematical contributions from a number of Asian cultures – Indian, Chinese and Arabic – went into shaping the Scientific Revolution, we have to widen our perspective into a Eurasian historical and geographical arena. It is this Eurasian relocation in space and time that is the most important consequence of the dialogical perspective.

Relocating the Industrial Revolution We have already seen that historian of science Herbert Butterfield considers the Scientific Revolution to herald a new vision not only of the cosmos but also of modernity. However, just as he did not take into account the role of Asian traditions in the Scientific Revolution, he also did not see any role for these traditions in the making of modernity. I will now draw upon John Hobson’s (2004) dialogical account of modernity, which suggests that a confluence of Asian impacts also 49

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shaped the Industrial Revolution that consolidated modernity. In this case, it was not astronomical and mathematical ideas and practices but rather social, economic and institutional ones that Asian cultures contributed. Consequently, as with the Scientific Revolution, modernity and the Industrial Revolution must also be seen through a Eurasian context. As a result, the dialogical account of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions can be seen as complementing each other and laying the basis for subverting Eurocentric tunnel histories of both science and society. Hobson begins by questioning the tunnel histories of modern society as advanced by pioneering thinkers such as Max Weber and Karl Marx, who laid the foundations of the modern social sciences. He argues that these thinkers assumed that the modern west emerged through a logic of immanence that involved no contributions, or only marginal ones, from cultures beyond Europe. Instead, Hobson maintains that Europe could not have arrived at modernity without drawing upon what he calls ‘resource portfolios’ (ideas, technologies and institutions) from the east, especially the Arabic–Islamic, Chinese and Indian civilizations. Interestingly enough, Hobson’s account transcending tunnel histories of modernity invokes dialogical connections to the same civilizations that contributed to the making of the Scientific Revolution. This argument is quite plausible because there were corridors of communication across the Eurasian region connecting the different civilizations. In her study Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) shows that in the period 500 to 1500 a number of trading routes developed connecting the different civilizations of Asia, as well as Europe on its margins. She identifies three major trading routes – a northern route through the Mongol empire; a central route connecting the Middle East with India and China; and a southern route linking Europe through Egypt with East Africa and the Indian Ocean. The northern route through Pax Mongolica enabled very long-distance trade across territories that linked China and Europe. This facilitated the diffusion of advanced eastern ideas and technologies to the west, and even enabled traders such as Marco Polo to travel and find employment in China. The middle route, which began on the Mediterranean coast of Syria and Palestine, passed through Baghdad before splitting into land and sea routes. The land route crossed Persia through Samarkand to China. The sea route passed down the Persian Gulf into the Indian Ocean to join the trading networks that linked India, Southeast Asia and China. In particular, it promoted trading relationships between the Crusader kingdoms and the Muslim world, which brought goods from places as distant as China to Europe. Within Europe, it was the Venetians who 50

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dominated trade, although they joined this global system on terms dictated by the Middle East. The southern route through Egypt connected both Venice and Genoa to the Afro–Asian economy in the Indian Ocean that linked East Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and China through maritime links. It is these trading routes documented by Abu-Lughod that Hobson sees as providing the corridors for eastern ideas, technologies and institutions – what he calls ‘resource portfolios’ – to enter Europe and shape modernity and the Industrial Revolution. Let us now look at Hobson’s account of the different transmissions from the Arabic–Islamic, Chinese and Indian civilizations. Arabic–Islamic resource portfolios Hobson argues that while it may be true that Italian trading cities became the centers through which commercial, financial and navigational innovations were introduced into Europe in the early modern era, but these cities were not the pioneers of these innovations. They only served as intermediaries for the diffusion of innovations and discoveries originally made in the east into the west. He observes: Eurocentric scholars place particular emphasis on the ‘post1000’ commercial revolution . . . as well as the navigational and financial revolutions. And we are told that behind all these breakthroughs was the genius of the pioneering Italians. . . . Likewise, Eurocentric accounts of the ‘leading powers’ in the world in the post-1000 period often begin with Venice . . . the image of the ‘Italian pioneer’ is but a myth. Italy derived its economic strength by locating itself within a pre-existent global economy that had been pioneered, and maintained, by the major eastern powers. (2004: 116) Hobson’s observation that commercial capitalism on a global scale in the Eurasian region was first conducted by the Muslims had been noted much earlier by Fernand Braudel: ‘Capitalist’ is not too anachronistic a word. From one end of Islam’s world connections to the other, speculators unstintingly gambled on trade. One Arab author, Hariri had a merchant declare: ‘I want to send Persian saffron to China, where I hear that it fetches a high price, and then ship Chinese 51

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porcelain to Greece, Greek brocade to India, Indian iron to Aleppo, Aleppo glass to the Yemen and Yemeni striped material to Persia’. In Basra, settlements between merchants were made by what we would now call a clearing system. (1995: 71) This global capitalism was also possible because Muslims had developed sophisticated financial instruments, which included ‘the creation of a whole series of capitalist institutions (concerning partnerships, contract law, banking, credit and many others), upon which not only Islamic production, investment and commerce rested but also global trade’ (Hobson 2004: 44). Apart from financial instruments, the transmissions from the Arabic–Islamic world that made long-distance navigation possible ­ were equally important, such as the advances in astronomy and mathematics, the astrolabe, maps and the lateen sail that allowed for longdistance sailing. Technological contributions were also significant. These include improvements in iron and steel production, advanced textile manufacturing, better dyes and techniques for harnessing wind and water energies through windmills and watermills in industrial production (Hobson 2004: 43–4). In his study, The Sources of Social Power, historian Michael Mann (1986) invokes the notions of extensive and intensive power to characterize two general types of global economic power. Extensive power refers to the ability of a civilization or culture to project its economic activities outwards into the world. Intensive power is the degree of productive power within its own boundaries (Mann 1986: 6–10). According to Hobson, the Arabic–Islamic world exhibited the highest development of both extensive and intensive power from 650 to 1000, but it lost this intensive power to China from 1100 to 1800, and even extensive power shifted to China in the fifteenth century. Let us now turn to the resource portfolios provided by the Chinese civilization for the making of the modern world. Chinese resource portfolios According to Hobson, the major contribution of the Chinese was in their articulation of technologies that shaped the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the eighteenth century. He comments that the British consciously acquired and assimilated the Chinese technologies – either the actual technology or the knowledge 52

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of a particular technology. In this sense Britain was like any ‘late developer’ or newly industrializing country in that it enjoyed the ‘advantages of backwardness’ and was able to assimilate and refine the advanced technologies that had previously been pioneered by early developers. (2004: 192) As documented by Joseph Needham in his monumental studies over many decades in the series Science and Civilization in China, there were numerous Chinese contributions that shaped the modern world. Most noteworthy were the achievements of the Song industrial miracle. During this period, there were many Chinese discoveries and accomplishments in iron and steel production; in transportation and energy; in the promotion of a commercialized economy with taxation, paper and printing; and in agriculture and navigation (Temple 1999; provides a summary account of these based on Needham’s studies). Hobson maintains that these revolutionary changes laid the basis for not only the British agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, but also cotton manufacturing. Associated with the British agricultural revolution were innovations such as the eighteenth-century iron moldboard plough (Rotherham plough), the rotary winnowing machine, seed-drills and horsehoeing husbandry. The British Industrial Revolution, linked to the steam engine, coal and blast furnaces and iron and steel production, was also shaped by prior Chinese discoveries and inventions. In the key area that made Britain the pioneering industrial nation in Europe – cotton manufacturing – the Chinese influence cannot be ignored (Hobson 2004: 51–61). Indian resource portfolios Prior to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, India was the world’s largest cotton textile producer as well as an important contributor to global silk textile production. Underlining the importance of Indian textile industry, Braudel comments: In fact all India processed silk and cotton, sending an incredible quantity of fabrics, from the most ordinary to the most luxurious, all over the world, since through the Europeans even America received a large share of Indian textiles. . . . There can be no doubt that until the British industrial revolution, the Indian cotton industry was the foremost in the 53

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world, both in the quality and quantity of its output and the scale of its exports. (1984: 509) The importance of Indian influence on early British industrial textile production is also reflected in the English language itself: chintz, calico, dungaree, khaki, pyjama, sash and shawl are all words of Indian origin (Pacey 1974: 187–88). However, even prior to European interest in Indian textiles was their interest in the spices of the Indies. This was what motivated the voyages both of Columbus to find a western route to the east and of Vasco da Gama to find a route around Africa into the Indian Ocean. Even before Columbus and Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese King John II had sent Pedro de Covilhao on an expedition to India in 1487. On his return, Covilhao reported that he was astonished at what he saw in the Indian ports – the lively commerce, the huge quantities of cinnamon and cassia in the storehouses of Arab merchants, the pepper vines climbing the trees and the vast fields in which spices grow just as wheat grew in Europe (Somogyi 1968: 83). Such observations lead Hobson to conclude that neither the rounding of the Cape nor the Portuguese arrival in India constituted the label of a pioneering discovery. . . . All that was really happening was that the Europeans were directly joining the Afro–Asian-led global economy that had been created in the post-500 period. In short, the Europeans did not ‘discover’ Asia and Africa, for the peoples of the latter had already long been in contact with Europe. (2004: 139–40) Despite his acknowledgement of Indian achievements, Hobson seems to underestimate the contributions of India to the pan-Asian trading network in comparison to the Arabic–Islamic world and China. In an article entitled ‘Southernization’, Lynda Shaffer (1994) underlines its significance. She argues that the Indian Ocean trade, which originally included the discovery of bullion sources, creation of a new mathematics, development of long-distance maritime trading routes, cultivation of cash crops such as sugar and cotton and the exchange of spices, first began in Southern Asia before spreading to China, the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. According to her, this ‘southernization’ laid the basis for the process of westernization associated with the modern world. She writes that 54

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the rise of the north, or more precisely, the rise of Europe’s northwest, began with the appropriation of those elements of southernization that were not confined by geography. In the wake of their Southern European neighbors, they became partially southernized, but they could not engage in all aspects of the process due to their distance from the equator. Full southernization and the wealth that we now associate with Northwestern Europe came about only after their outright seizure of tropical and subtropical territories and their rounding of Africa and participation in Southern ocean trade. (20)

Toward dialogical histories of modern science and society Both the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution exhibit strikingly parallel influences from Asian cultures. However, recent attempts to link the two revolutions do not seem to factor in the Asian contributions. For example, in a recent paper, economic historian Patrick O’Brien (2013) attempts to connect the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century with the Industrial Revolution that emerged in Europe nearly a century later. He links both to the emergence of interest within Europe of what he calls ‘useful and reliable knowledge’ of nature. He traces the rise of this interest to the scholastic tradition in the thirteenth century associated with the assimilation of Aristotelian naturalism into the medieval religious tradition. However, this interpretation is problematic since modern science emerged in opposition to both Aristotelian cosmology and philosophy, and modern society and the Industrial Revolution involved a radical break with the agricultural ethos of the medieval period. In Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (2011), another social historian, Toby Huff, also attempts to answer the same questions by appealing, as does O’Brien, to the Aristotelian scholastic heritage. He argues that the lack of this heritage explains why eastern traditions were particularly disinterested in developing a deeper understanding of nature that would have promoted the knowledge that would have made possible the Industrial Revolution. He illustrates this with the response to the discovery of the telescope in both Europe and other advanced civilizations of the east. Noting that the telescope reached the east shortly after its invention in Europe in 1608, he writes that 55

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the arrival of the telescope in China, India, and the Ottoman Middle East did not produce a similar upsurge in scientific curiosity. We can now see that a comparative approach starting with a different field – say pneumatics or ­microscopy – would have produced the same result: extraordinary advances in Europe but few or no parallel advances outside Europe. Nevertheless, the failure of the telescope to trigger an exciting new burst of scientific creativity, especially in astronomy, around the world serves best to highlight a deficit in scientific curiosity that seems to have prevailed outside Europe from before the seventeenth century all the way to the end of the twentieth century. That is an extraordinary record of cultural disparity. (2011: 300) However, Huff’s explanation for this disparity is extremely curious. He ascribes it to the interest in nature inspired by Aristotelian natural philosophy, despite the fact that it was only with the rejection of Aristotelian natural philosophy that the Scientific Revolution occurred. Nevertheless, the historical processes outlined in this chapter clearly point to the fact that, contra both O’Brien and Huff, who traced the origins of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions to Aristotelian natural philosophy, the dialogical structure of both the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions suggests that we cannot ignore the role of the Arabic, Chinese and Indian traditions in making these possible. Eurocentric historians of science and modernity generally locate the influences that shaped both as arising within the context of Europe alone. They see science and modernity as developing within the same European tunnel – often rooted in the scientific, philosophical and democratic traditions of Greece. A similar Eurocentric vision is entertained by both Weberian and Marxist traditions. The dialogical accounts of the rise of modern science and modern society put into question these conceptions by locating the influences that shaped them in the wider Eurasian context so that the historical influences from Arabic, Chinese and Indian civilizations can no longer be ignored. Moreover, by showing that the same three Asian civilizations made major contributions to these changes in science and society, they require us to examine these changes in a Eurasian context rather than a European one to achieve proper understanding of both modernity and modern science.

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Notes 1 Dijksterhuis continues: After a stagnation of about fourteen centuries the evolution of astronomy continued at Frauenburg [where Copernicus resided] at the point where it left off in Alexandria . . . he considered the greatest gain it had brought astronomy was not the changed ­position of the sun in the universe and the resulting simplification of the world-picture, but the abolition of the punctum aequans, the atonement for the sin against the spirit of Platonic philosophy which Ptolemy had committed in an evil hour. (1961: 288–89) 2 In the Confucian Analects 2.1, it is written: ‘Governing with excellence (de) can be compared to being the North Star: the North Star dwells in its place, and the multitude of stars pay it tribute’. 3 See Bala (2006) for a more detailed study of these interactions. 4 The Urdi lemma enabled astronomers to retain the effect of the equant in Ptolemy’s astronomical model without using the equant, and thus produce uniform motions that conformed to natural physical principles. The Tusi couple allowed astronomers to enlarge and shrink the size of the epicycle radius using only combinations of uniform circular motion (Saliba 1996: 125). 5 However, there were other Chinese theories. The earliest of these is generally considered to belong to the gai tian tradition developed in the first century BCE. The theory holds that the sky is a round disc; this rises up as a dome in the center, covering the earth, which is a square and also rises up in the center like an inverted plate. The sky disc is fixed to an axis at its center located near the Pole Star, about which it rotates, carrying the other heavenly bodies with it. A more sophisticated Chinese theory was the hun tian theory elaborated by Zhang Heng (78–139) in the early second century. He describes it as follows: The heavens are like a hen’s egg; the earth is like the yolk of the egg, and lies alone in the center. Heaven is large and earth small. Inside the lower part of the heavens there is water. The heavens are supported by qi, the earth floats on the waters. (Sun 2000: 441) Zhang Heng then proceeds to present the heavens in the form of a celestial globe as we do today. 6 According to the historian of Indian astronomy, David Pingree (1976), at least four different Greek texts on astronomy were transmitted to India in the second, third and fourth centuries. Since many Indian texts were composed in Sanskrit based upon these transmissions, it is now possible to recover early Greek non-Ptolemaic astronomical texts by studying Indian Sanskrit texts. 7 These advances were made possible because the Indians had, from the time of Aryabhata, the contemporary place value decimal system whose potential came to be articulated in all of the above developments. Its value was aptly summarized by Laplace in 1814 thus:

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The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India. The idea seems to be simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius. (Cited in Ifrah 2000: 361; also Dantzig 1967: 26)

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press. Bag, A. K. 1979. Mathematics in Ancient and Medieval India. Varanasi and New Delhi: Chaukhambha Orientalia. Bala, Arun. 2006. The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Braudel, Fernand. 1984. The Perspective of the World. New York: Harper & Row. Braudel, Fernand. 1995. A History of Civilizations. London: Penguin. Butterfield, Herbert. 1957. The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800. New York: Free Press. Dantzig, Tobias. 1967. Number, the Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-Mathematician. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dijksterhuis, E. J. 1961. The Mechanization of the World Picture. Translated by C. Dkshoorn. New York: Oxford University Press. Goody, Jack. 1996. The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huff, Toby E. 2011. Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ifrah, Georges. 2000. The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Joseph, George Gheverghese. 2011. The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Needham, Joseph. 1958. Chinese Astronomy and the Jesuit Mission: An Encounter of Cultures. London: The China Society. O’Brien, Patrick. 2013. ‘Historical Foundations for a Global Perspective on the Emergence of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development,

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and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge’, Journal of Global History, 8(1): 1–24. Pacey, Arnold. 1974. The Maze of Ingenuity. London: Allen Lane. Pingree, David. 1976. ‘The Recovery of Early Greek Astronomy from India’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 7: 109–23. Ronan, Colin. 1981. The Shorter Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saliba, George. 1996. ‘Arabic Planetary Theories After the Eleventh Century AD’, in Rushde Rashid and Regis Morelon (eds.), Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science: Technology, Alchemy and Life Sciences, pp. 58–127. London: Routledge. Saliba, George. 2007. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaffer, Lynda. 1994. ‘Southernization’, Journal of World History, 5(1): 1–21. Somogyi, Joseph De. 1968. A Short History of Oriental Trade. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung. Sun, Xiaochun. 2000. ‘Crossing the Boundaries Between Heaven and Man: Astronomers in Ancient China’, in Helaine Selin (ed.), Astronomy Across Cultures: History of Non-Western Astronomy, pp. 423–54. New York: Springer. Swerdlow, N. M. and O. Neugebauer. 1984. Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. New York: Springer-Verlag. Temple, Robert. 1999. The Genius of China. London: Prion Books.

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4 DOMINANT AND COUNTER-IMAGINARIES Analyzing India’s modernities Martin Fuchs

Modernity has to be taken as an open, unresolved and, perhaps, unresolvable question. There is not ‘one’ modernity, nor does modernity define a totality, under which each and every contemporary social phenomenon and social process can be subsumed. Nor can we necessarily conceive of modernization as a somewhat consistent overall societal process composed of sub-processes, which are considered closely intertwined (Joas 2012: 112). In a way, ‘modernity’ is a reflexive concept. The question of modernity addresses the situation and the processes we find ourselves part of. This implies that when we talk of modernity, we address the situation we are subjected to and take a deliberative attitude to.1 We have a stake in what we describe. For example, one can probably take the notion of human self-­ making as a widely shared modernist assumption. This notion has found numerous expressions. Shmuel Eisenstadt claims that what we call modernity is largely built on the ‘belief in the possibility that society could be actively formed by conscious human activity’ (2000: 5; emphasis added). For Charles Taylor, society and social agency under modern conditions are ‘grounded purely in [their] own common action’ (2002: 116). And for Peter Wagner, modernity refers to a situation in which human beings do not accept any external guarantors, i.e., guarantors that they do not themselves posit, of the certainty of their knowledge, of the viability of their political orders or of the continuity of their selves. Despite the enormous variety of specific conceptualizations of modernity, the great majority of them take it to be the 60

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key characteristic of modernity that human beings think of themselves as setting their own rules and laws for their relation to nature, for their living together and for understanding themselves. (2001: 4) We consider ourselves free to make our own world individually as well as collectively, and we assume we have the powers (agency) to do so. But this also implies that we are compelled to make ourselves, that we have no choice but to constantly work to re-establish society, to validate our knowledge of the world and to give meaning to our lives and undertakings. I want to take this foundational assumption as my starting point in this chapter. This, of course, is not meant as the only and exclusive approach to modernity. Further, scholars have responded very differently to this assumed modern predilection for human agency. Scholars of earlier generations were interested in the process(es) that led to the discovery or recognition of rationality and reason as core human faculties. These scholars tended to consider the process(es) as the unfolding of a general human potentiality, only to then create a new problem – the problem of how to deal with the varying paces of development and, in particular, with cases of development that take or took different directions. Even if scholars following this line of ­argument differed with respect to their evaluation of the process – steering between more optimistic and more pessimistic diagnoses – they tended to regard this as a self-propelling process that follows its own inner logic or law. Names that come to mind include Karl Marx, Max Weber, Theodor W. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas. I do not intend to engage with any of these approaches in detail here. This has been done from a variety of perspectives by a range of scholars. I would rather like to look at some more recent attempts at understanding modernity, attempts that operate on a level that looks less presumptuous and are more concerned with the dynamics of social action and interaction – not without creating their own new problems, however. To start with, emphasizing human agency can be interpreted in such a way that it relates to the perspectives social actors hold or are guided by. The idea of modernity has thus been connected – to use the concept proposed by Charles Taylor (2002), who got his impetus from Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) (without publicly acknowledging his debt to him) – to our imaginaries or to social imaginaries shared by a large enough number of social actors. Peter Wagner (2001), as 61

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well as Arjun Appadurai (1996), has used the idea of the social imaginary or the imaginary signification of modernity. However, the modern social imaginary has been characterized differently in each case. Taylor assumes a normative order of mutuality underlying the modern social imaginary, a notion of ‘mutual respect and mutual service of the individuals who make up society’ (2002: 96), which, for him, implies fundamental equality and is supposed to secure individual freedom (2002: 99f). On the other hand, Peter Wagner, while referring to both Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) and Johann Arnason (1989), takes the assumption of autonomy and the quest for rational mastery of the natural and social world as constituting the ‘double imaginary signification of modernity’ (2001: 4). Viewed thus, modernity considered as social imaginary would then be something – a kind of basic presupposition of thought and action – that is filtered through or underlies social practices, or channels social action, but would leave scope for contextually different articulation and, principally, for critique. Modernity would not appear as something fully fixed and determined, an objectifiable condition. However, this approach, too, runs the risk of being understood as conceiving modern attitudes and practices in a celebratory mode, and this is most obvious in the case of Castoriadis.2 One also has to be careful not to apprehend these attitudes and practices in a culturalist fashion, suggesting that it is primarily ideas that set the tone in society. Additionally, there looms the danger of presuming that such attitudes are being shared indiscriminately by all across the society, across a whole epoch and even across culture areas with their otherwise different genealogies.3 Arjun Appadurai’s notion of social imaginary tries to avoid this danger by explicitly emphasizing the fluidity and necessity of contextual translation of imaginaries. He thinks in terms of disembedded, globalized and, at the same time, multiple ‘imagined worlds’. In his case, it is not a particular social imaginary that constitutes modernity but a globalized modern condition that has led to establishing the imagination as ‘an organized field of social practices’ (1996: 31). Then there are others, like Hans Joas (2004), who start from the consequences of the prominence given to the human capacity of intervention and take the changed conditions of social existence into focus – the alterations of the frame of human action. They not only discover an increasing contingency of human action in the modern world but also point out the significance of our growing awareness of the condition of contingency. The issue then becomes one of orientation in social action and of finding anchorage in what we are used to calling ‘values’. Joas himself thinks in terms of three aspects 62

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or steps of how to combine agentive optionality with the possibility of co-sociality under conditions of value plurality: acknowledgement of differences of worldviews among members of a society; search for commonalities across different value and belief systems; and the requirement of constant renewal of attachment to values combined with a feeling of increased freedom to choose (2004: 397f). These deliberations are meant to basically reflect what others would call an ‘advanced’ state of modernity or a ‘postmodern’ condition. It misses the chance to compare the assumedly modern pluralistic constellations with pluralistic constellations found in South and Southeast Asia in earlier times, which provided options as well as closures for actors in ways somewhat different from modern constellations. The human capacity of intervention, however, can also lead to dogmatic, authoritarian and often violent consequences. Shmuel Eisenstadt (1999) contrasts pluralistic and monistic tendencies in modernity. The distinction between these tendencies is reflected in their different attitudes towards relationships between civil society and political order. Pluralistic positions require the separation between the civil society and the political order; monistic tendencies prefer to conflate both. The counter images of the pluralistic visions are various collectivistic orientations or ideologies that advocate the primacy of the collectivity. Among different types of collectivist orientation, it is the Jacobinist ideology that stands out. Jacobinism is a belief in the possibility of transforming or reconstructing society and of constructing new personal and collective identities through political action and participation of wider strata of society. Eisenstadt extends the notion of Jacobinism to all great revolutions since the eighteenth century as well as to what has been termed religious fundamentalist movements. Underlying Jacobin thinking are the following assumptions – it is humans who make and shape their world (and themselves); those who have the true insight (before the others), the avantgarde, who have to lead the society as they represent the historical tendency, ‘progress’ or ‘real’ will of the society (1999: 108). Of central significance is the sanctification of violence and terror and the compulsion to use them to overcome resistance and lack of insight from others as well as to keep the basic project (ideal) pure and untouched. Finally, I would like to include a suggestion that, seen against the background of the other two, allows for taking a more distant view of the modern condition and conceiving of modernity less as an achievement and more as an unresolved issue, a ring of problems that are to be faced. I have in mind the concepts of problématiques and of fundamental tensions that Peter Wagner and Shmuel Eisenstadt have 63

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also proposed in the context of their reflections on the modern condition. The problématiques that Wagner himself sees as inescapable but not conclusively answerable derive from the assumption of autonomy and the quest for rational mastery of the world and include the search for certain knowledge and truth, the building of a viable and good political order and also the issue of continuity of the acting person (or the problem of self-identity) (Wagner 2001: 8). These problems have to find socially adequate answers, and the answers have to be constantly renewed in accordance with the constant change of constellations. But this again brings back the differences in historical trajectories, social settings and political agendas since the answers given in different (cultural) contexts will be divergent. Eisenstadt (1999), on the other hand, distinguishes a range of fundamental tensions to which modern people and societies have to find answers: the tensions between the ‘general will’ (the common good, the community) and the discrete interests of individuals and groups; between discipline (control) and freedom (autonomy); between equality and liberty; and, finally, between ‘normal’ and revolutionary politics. All these he terms the ‘antinomies’ of modernity. These conceptualizations share the assumption of a deep caesura between the modern and the pre-modern. I rather want to help prepare the ground for a new approach to questions of modernity. I will argue for further deconstruction of inherent assumptions underlying the frames within which we discuss modernity as well as modernization and will try to establish the point that what we require is a much more differentiated view of what sociologists tend to regard as the pre-modern in order to be able to approach the modern constellation without conceptual blinkers. Looking at modernity or, rather, the modern condition, then against the background of the introductory discussion, two questions come up immediately: i What does the particular emphasis on human agency, on human self-fashioning and on social self-constitution as the markers of the modern mean for social contexts before and outside the reach of the modern? ii How do ideas about multiple modernities fare in this context and against this background? Let me take up the second question first. The idea of ‘multiple modernities’, as most prominently presented by Shmuel Eisenstadt (2002, 2003), suggests the possibility of overcoming the western perspective 64

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of modernization and modernity theories. But the idea of plurality of forms of modernity has to struggle with two major difficulties. The first difficulty concerns the notion of multiplicity itself: ‘multiple’ in which regard and on what level? To what entities do we refer when we compare different forms or different trajectories of modernization? Whether to those of civilizations, or of societies, or of just different sections of people? Civilizational comparisons suggest the idea of originating events that initially got a civilization off the ground and put it on a specific developmental track. Such comparisons speak of long drawn-out trajectories that show particular patterns, or to put it differently, they tend to assume path-dependencies. The notion of civilization seeks to overstate cultural differences between civilizational blocks and to underplay cultural distinctions and attitudinal differences within. It tends to enclose social actors in self-contained worlds. Civilizational analysis operates on a level that transcends that of actual social practices. On the other hand, the concept of society developed on the model of the nation–state (‘methodical nationalism’) suggests greater rigorousness than it can actually provide. Nor does it accommodate all types of social contexts (below or above or across individual ‘societies’), many of which are more of a network kind, nor is it able to handle change (or, respectively, provide rationales for continuities against this background, where they exist) due to its ­structural–functionalist heritage. Here we have to think in terms of ever-shifting social, political and economic constellations of different kinds and types and thus in terms of different stances concerning processes of modernization. This includes deconstructing notions of ‘the west’ or any other generalizing identities. The second difficulty with the notion of multiplicities concerns the requirement of a common denominator. Where to find this? What is common to all modernities? It seems that we are still stuck with the western modalities as main reference points, or prototype(s), however conceived. The reasons are obvious: apart from the particular global impact of western ideas and practices, and the power dimension involved, it is a fact that we can only start from the ideas we have inherited, and more particularly so when they have managed successfully to define the frame within which arguments are currently being developed and exchanged. We are part of what we discuss, i.e., we can only start reflexively. This is increasingly evident from reigning postcolonial (as well as postmodern) discourses critiquing western model/s. Only in the long run can we hope to be able to overcome not just ‘the biases’ of western-derived conceptualizations, but also the very fact of being tied to them. The issue is not so 65

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much how to find a balanced or ‘neutral’ definition of modernity; it rather concerns the very notion of modernity itself.4 Let us now turn to the first question. The usual approach has been to consider conscious human self-fashioning as a modern phenomenon. Not accepting any external guarantors or guarantors that humans have not posited themselves is regarded as the characteristic feature of a modern society. Pre-modern social forms of life were considered to be lacking with respect to the ability to harness human potentialities and capacities. And this ability to fully harness human potentialities was especially, if not exclusively, attributed to the west. In order to address this issue, I propose to focus on those process categories that have been seen standing for modernization and are among the preferred grounds of debate. I suggest that we take those process categories seriously, probe their trans-contextual relevance and not disqualify them from the start as culture-bound, i.e., western. The process categories I take up here are rationalization, secularization and individualization. All three process categories, suggested by leading western sociologists, have provoked strong critiques. But one cannot simply discard them and champion a position of non- or even anti-rationality, principled religiosity or communitarianism instead. Rationalization, secularization and individualization encapsulate something that seems of more than parochial relevance – they include at least validity claims of a universalistic kind. The fact that we cannot sweep such claims aside easily is evident from our ongoing struggle with these notions. I will only briefly touch upon rationalization and secularization and say more on individualization, and will in this context deal with things Indian. The notion of rationalization was made prominent in sociology by Max Weber5 and was later taken up by scholars like Jürgen Habermas.6 Weber thought in terms of a quasi-evolutionary process that by its own logic and through the tensions between different value spheres or life orders – among them the economy, politics, science, aesthetics, the erotic and, of course, religion – as well as through redirecting the ethical goals of life towards action in the world led humanity to the threshold of modernity (Weber 2004a). According to him, the last step in the process, which ended with discarding the mantle of religion, was only taken in the west (Weber 2002). But Weber himself already had doubts regarding the linear construction of rationalization that he himself had proposed. In his asides, he talks of multiple rationalizations – of and within civilizations – heading in different directions, as for example, rationalized asceticism in the case of yoga. In ‘­Prefatory Remarks’, which is considered the last piece that he wrote before his 66

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death, he contends that developments such as those that occurred in the west represent the development of ‘universal significance and v­ alidity’ as ‘we’ (in the west) specifically ‘like to think’ (1972, 1, 2004d: 101; emphasis mine). Each one of these fields may be ‘rationalized’ in terms of very different ultimate values and ends, and what is ‘rational’ from one point of view may well be ‘irrational’ from another. Hence rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in various departments of life and in all areas of culture. (Weber 1972: 11f, 2004d: 109) This pluralistic concept of rationalization, other than the overall evolutionist scheme, has never been taken up and pursued properly in a comparative project. But even if this had been the case, and my approach includes a plea to do so, this would not repudiate the nowdominant modes of rationalism. It would only, but importantly, contextualize and relativize them. Secularization has been of a somewhat different caliber. Weber was an inspirational source for this process category, too. Usually secularization is understood not as referring to a long drawn-out process but rather as signifying a late historical leap to a new social state, a leap from the regime of religiously dominated worldviews. Among those who take an opposite view is T. N. Madan. With Peter Berger, he sees ‘the seeds of secularization . . . sown in the Old Testament’ (1997: 6), thus converting secularization into something culture- and religionspecific, i.e., ‘western’ and ‘Christian’. He sees it as unfolding from seeds laid long back in history and obviously unaffected by ruptures or historical contingency. But such a stance, in effect, denies the significance of social and political struggles led over many centuries. Over the last two decades or so, the concept of secularization has come to be questioned from several quarters. On the one hand, it has been pluralized, with scholars making distinctions between different levels and modalities of secularization (e.g. Bhargava 1998; Casanova 2003). On the other, it has been proven to be a concept of limited validity for larger parts of the world, including the US, which did not experience a turning away from religion or religiosity on an overall scale (Casanova 2006; regarding India this has most prominently been argued by, again, Madan 1997 as well as Ashis Nandy 1990). Still, what is considered the western, or more correctly, the West European, model does remain relevant even in contexts that have developed their own modes of secularization or non-secularization, like India has. The 67

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reason for its continuing relevance for social actors in all parts of the world is that it frames the very core issue of the relationship between what we today call the religious sphere and the sphere of the public and the political. Secularization in this parochial but normative sense has been setting the terms for religiosity as well as institutionalized religion in modern times beyond its area of origin. I suggest that we should think of packaging the question of secularization differently and conceive of it as part and parcel of a socially dominant and therefore contestable imaginary – supported by some people and not by others – and not so much see secularization as an overall process that has or has not led to full-fledged secularism, or has done so unevenly only. Secularization as we have known it in its historical appearances has been concerned with the sources of authority regarding matters of morality and ethical questions, as well as with the legitimation of political decisions. It has thus affected both political beliefs and consciousness, and institutional arrangements of organized religion and the polity. Religion is, as we know, a problematic term when applied outside the realm of Semitic or Abrahamic religions. It is even more problematic to delineate religious continuities and verities with respect to dogmas, institutions and identities, not only regarding Hinduism and Buddhism, but also regarding Islam and Christianity. There are today more and more scholars of religion who prefer to think in terms of religiosity rather than religion. All this would allow for re-phrasing and re-framing certain questions that inform the secularization and secularism debates. It is in my eyes fully feasible that a religious person is reflexive and critical, and a concerned citizen. I think we should take much more seriously a position like that of Bhimrao Ambedkar, who deemed it necessary to have a religio-ethical grounding of social interaction and social relationships under modern auspices that allows for or works towards genuine social recognition, and also simultaneously supports the endeavor of social critique and participatory democracy.7 I will return to this in a moment. Gandhi underpinned his ideas about social and political action with a strong religious focus implied in his quest for truth. The emphasis in both cases would thus not lie on religion as an institution but on religiosity, and this religious mode can accompany processes of secularization. Religiosity of such kind is grounded in the individual as a social actor and citizen. The concept of individualization, to take the last of the three process terms, has seen a big revival in recent times. Particularly, proponents of the idea of a new stage of high-modernity or reflexive modernity have put individualization back on the agenda (Beck, Giddens and Lash 68

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1994). Sociologists have tended to connect individualization to the increasing personalization of the relationship to God in Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity; to the Renaissance turn; to social differentiation; to the weakening and loosening of interpersonal ties; to the bourgeois–capitalist economy; and, recently, to the pluralization of life style options (identity as of individuals’ own making) and the necessity for increased reflexivity society-wide. Individualization has found expression in the form of possessive, moral and expressive individualisms;8 it represents the guiding idea of mass consumerism, as it informs the struggles for political liberties and underlies modern forms of governance, including Michel Foucault’s pastoral mode of power.9 All these aspects are considered to be derived from western developments primarily. I would like to argue, though, that (religious) individualization was neither confined to what we have been used to call modernity nor to the west, and that the (current) modern forms of individualization do not exhaust individualization. In particular, individualizations occurred in what we consider the religious fields outside Christianity, and these individualizations were often of immense social relevance and thus cannot be regarded as negligible. I would further argue that while individualization has become the organizing idea of large areas of social life under modern conditions only, there have been other notions of individualization developed in many other (cultural, temporal) contexts as well. These other notions were also, in a certain sense, universalistic ideas and were widely held. Furthermore, these other contexts have also informed modern developments. I want to argue, especially with regard to India, for the recognition of precolonial processes of individualization that were, and are still, of relevance at the level of social imaginaries of at least some sections of people.10 At this point, the distinction between dominant and counter-­ imaginaries becomes relevant. In my view, what we usually find in a social context is not just one underlying social imaginary, not one notion of sociality, but different ones – including such that are related to conditions of subalternity – as there also exist different and opposed modes of social experience in one context, positive as well as negative ones. Let me discuss here briefly pre-modern Indian social imaginaries. Since this discussion requires rethinking the modal format of imaginaries, this diversifies Taylor’s notion of pre-modern social imaginaries.11 I regard bhakti religiosity as an important resource for individualization, different from renunciation or sanyasin-hood. To conceive of bhakti in this manner is to articulate the religious relationship with God (or the Supreme being) as a social relationship. The individual experience of God and the search for his/her grace – an unmediated 69

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relationship (or potentially unmediated relationship12) – stand at the center of bhakti, as do the relationships of each individual bhakta with his or her fellow humans: one’s self is being constituted in the experience of the other – an experience of self-transcendence – and in the communication of this experience to others. This is true even of God’s self, which is considered to be dependent on recognition from the other side (e.g. Krishna in the Gitagovinda). Bhakti articulates opposition to ritualism and the role of priests and has included religious experiences in the context of the everyday – making these experiences in principle available to everyone. Spiritual inquisitiveness found particular resonance among members of many subaltern groups and among women, as it often stood as emblematic for the possibility to break out of oppressive social duties, including connubial relationships (e.g. Akka Mahadevi and Mirabai). Some poet–saints like Kabir used their religious experiences to articulate a strong critique of social codes. I had myself earlier raised the question: why have at least some of the people – who experienced systematic humiliation, whose self-esteem is undermined – been able to assert themselves, start social movements and assume some sense of self-respect and self-worth (Fuchs 1999)? Aside from the recognition received from their immediate peers, members of their families and their own castes, and perhaps a couple of other people, it seems that bhakti, at least bhakti of a certain kind, allowed them to experience recognition as individual beings from both the side of the divine and that of other bhaktas. What is more, bhakti allows for diverse forms and formulas and thus represents a field that people who are otherwise stigmatized and marginalized can redefine and restructure by themselves. Thus, bhakti could provide a space for counter-imaginaries not just in the sense of a subaltern ideology, but also in the sense of a notion of inter-subjectivity that underlies and informs social interaction, at least in some areas of social life. It is this knowledge that stood and stands against (dominant) hierarchical notions of sociality. And it is this knowledge that seems still relevant today. Many of these bhakti traditions have survived and adapted to changed circumstances. In fact, most of the new forms of Hindu practices and beliefs, including those of ‘ecumenical gurus’ (Lucia 2014: 230, 235), have a basis in bhakti. The Buddhist revival started by Ambedkar, to just take another prom­ istory of inent modern example, translates, as indicated above, the h counter-imaginaries of inter-subjective recognition into a new, strongly ethicized and rationalistic language. Apart from the values of fraternity, 70

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equality, freedom and justice, it is karuna (compassion) and maitri (loving kindness) in particular that Ambedkar decided to foreground in his interpretation of Buddhism. The ‘necessity of man to love man’, as he called it in The Buddha and His Dhamma (1992: 323), though not yet gender-correct, redirected religious search towards this world. In this form, the anti-hierarchical religious ­counter-traditions represent, or feed into, an alternative modern idea of i­ ndividualization, challenging a society that still practices large-scale discrimination, but also challenging possessive and moral individualism of a (neo)-liberal kind. Bhakti and Ambedkarite Buddhism represent forms of individualization and establish forms of agency that are different from the forms dominant in the context of today’s ‘modernities’. They provide a source for contemporary struggles over India’s trajectory ‘to and through’ modernization.13 They create a space for the voices of s­ubalterns in addition to, and only partly different from, secularist ones. And they show a possibility for diversifying – or multiplying – modernities, considered as social imaginaries, beyond the civilizational straitjacket: a diversity of oppositional, contesting imaginaries of modernity within the context of India which build on, change and rearticulate earlier Indian social imaginaries. Some of these imaginaries, and not so much the hierarchical ones that for a long time were considered ­dominant, express something universal, articulate universal validity claims and thus create a possibility (or one step towards the possibility) of ­de-centering and de-constructing the very notion of modernity and ­re-centering certain process categories as comparative terms referring to a shared experiential world. Both of the questions framed earlier – the one regarding the multiplicity of modernity and the other regarding the constitutive human faculties under non-modern conditions – force us to reconsider the relationship to the pre-modern. This concerns more than just continuities of earlier social practices into the modern. It concerns core problématiques of modern forms of life (both in the west and elsewhere) that are mirrored in problématiques of pre-modern life forms. It is certain issues that look common, if not universal, and not specific templates or solutions. What the west presents as universal answers – like possessive and expressive individualism – has to be confronted and contextualized by other universalistic answers. We have to look back, revisit the pre-modern and precolonial and search for trends and strands that speak to our questions. We have to think in terms of plural forms and genealogies of processes of rationalization, of modern secularizations and of religious and non-religious individualizations – or of modern as well as pre-modern concepts of 71

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equality, self-respect and human dignity – as we have to bear in mind the limits of a processual approach to the development of ‘modernity/ ies’. Insofar as we can at all observe such processes as dominant processes, we have to also take into account other modalities and processes, including but not limited to oppositional ones. Thus, what I suggest, simply put, is to use some of today’s leading concepts and imaginaries as heuristics to then be able to transcend and re-frame or criticize them. Even if unhappy about taking those core ideas of western-led modernization as our points of reference, our best bet for the time being would be to explore them further – or more exactly, explore more thoroughly the diverse contingent versions which process categories, like the three briefly discussed here, have developed or exhibited. The guiding question would be: to what extent and in what respect do these reflect universal trends? Are they part and parcel of only the western, now globalized, model, or do we find different versions of the three elsewhere, so that the dominant versions of modernization and the dominant universalisms would just appear as selective, and thus limited and biased? Would this then open up new horizons, which provide space for other trajectories and narratives ‘to and through modernity’, including perhaps other, contrasting universalisms?14

Notes 1 ‘take a deliberate attitude towards the world’ (Weber 1968 [1904]: 180; the English translation by E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch [Weber 1949: 81] is here given as modified by Johann Arnason [2003: 89]; comp. Weber 2004c: 380f). 2 For Castoriadis, only two societies – ancient Greece and the modern western world, although still ‘imperfect and incomplete’ – represent constellations in which autonomy becomes a possibility. All other societies are under the influence of religion, and ‘all religions’ are, for Castoriadis, identical with heteronomy and ‘idolatry’ (1997: 316, 319, 325). 3 Taylor, in particular, insists that a social imaginary ‘is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society’ (2002: 106) and tends to inflate the social imaginary to a practically encompassing, holistic structure of signification that resembles Clifford Geertz’s (1973) notion of culture. Clifford Geertz proposes a generic western concept of personhood (that of a strictly bounded self as center of judgment and action) (1983; for a critique see Spiro 1993). What such an approach can lead to can be seen in the case of Max Weber with regard to ‘pre-modern’ contexts. Weber, in his comparative studies on world religions and civilizations, tends to consider civilizations as discrete cultural and social entities, each characterized, more or less in toto, by a specific worldview or attitude towards the world (represented exemplarily by the leading stratum or the ‘carriers’ of a civilization) (Weber 1972, 1976, 1978; for a critique, see Fuchs 1988 and 2017, among others; see also note 4 below).

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4 For a more detailed discussion of the concept of multiple modernities, see the Introduction in Randeria, Fuchs and Linkenbach 2004. 5 Of central relevance here is Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (GARS; Weber 1972, 1976, 1978), i.e., Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, a work in three volumes, never translated as an integrated body into English. See especially the conceptual and theoretical sections in volume 1 of GARS (Weber 1972; these sections were published individually in English translation, see Weber 2004a, 2004b, 2004d). 6 See especially Habermas 1984, 1987. For a critique of Habermas’s evolutionist approach, see Antje Linkenbach 1986. 7 Cf. Fuchs 2001. 8 For these three conceptualizations, see, e.g., Crawford Macpherson 1970; Charles Taylor 1989, 2007; Michael Sandel 2009; Magnus Schlette 2013. 9 E.g., Michel Foucault 1991. 10 For an outline of comparative studies of religious individualization, see Fuchs 2015; Fuchs and Rüpke 2015. Other contributions to the volume of the journal Religion, of which these two articles are part, deal with particular examples of pre- and early modern religious individualization, from European antiquity (Gordon 2015), early modern Western Europe (Reinhardt 2015), India, both renunciation and bhakti (Mal­ inar 2015), and the entanglement of bhakti with Christianity (Höke 2015) and modern Jewish thinking leading to sociological approaches (Sander 2015). 11 For an application of the idea of different religious imaginaries to Indian religious history, see Fuchs 2018. 12 There are numerous forms of bhakti, in which one prominent bhakta is regarded as representing the divine or as helping to approach and experience the divine. However, the prime objective remains the individual bhakta’s experience of the divine, or of one’s personal (and bodily) participation in the divine. 13 Adapting thus the title of an article by Göran Therborn (1995). 14 Regarding the concept of universalisms in the plural, see Bernhard Waldenfels’s ‘Universalisierung im Plural’ (Waldenfels 1993: 63) and Fuchs 2000. The path suggested here, while showing some affinities to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) deliberations on European abstract universalism and the search for alternative universalisms, suggests looking for historically grounded diversities of universalisms, of which bhakti and Buddhism would be examples.

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Arnason, Johann P. 2003. Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. 1994. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity. Bhargava, Rajeev. 1998. ‘Introduction’, in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics, pp. 1–28. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Casanova, José. 2003. ‘Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective’, in Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead (eds.), Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures, pp. 17–29. Aldershot: Ashgate. Casanova, José. 2006. ‘Rethinking Secularization: A Global Comparative Perspective’, The Hedgehog Review, 8(1–2): 7–22. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. ‘Institution of Society and Religion’, in Cornelius Castoriadis (ed.), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination, pp. 311–30. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Historical Thought and Postcolonial Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1999. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2000. ‘Multiple Modernities’, Daedalus, 129(1): 1–29. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2002. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, 2 Vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Foucault, Michel. 1991. ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87–104. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Fuchs, Martin. 1988. Theorie und Verfremdung: Max Weber, Louis Dumont und die Analyse der indischen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Fuchs, Martin. 1999. Kampf um Differenz: Repräsentation, Subjektivität und soziale Bewegungen – Das Beispiel Indien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Fuchs, Martin. 2000. ‘Universality of Culture: Reflection, Interaction and the Logic of Identity’, Thesis Eleven, 60: 11–22. Fuchs, Martin. 2001. ‘A Religion for Civil Society? Ambedkar’s Buddhism, the Dalit Issue and the Imagination of Emergent Possibilities’, in Vasudha Dalmia, Angelika Malinar, and Martin Christof (eds.), Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent, pp. 250–73. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fuchs, Martin. 2015. ‘Processes of Religious Individualization: Stocktaking and Issues for the Future’, Religion (Special Issue on Religious

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Part II CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

5 A PERSPECTIVE ON CONFUCIAN DEMOCRACY IN CULTURAL CHINA 1 Tu Weiming

In the 1980s, the so-called Confucian thesis was widely recognized as a plausible interpretation for why Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) had become the most vibrant economies of the world. It was considered appropriate to apply Max Weber’s classical study of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to East Asia (Weber 2002 [1930]). After the financial crisis in 1997, however, this thesis was virtually abandoned. Economists who had previously focused on the positive role of Confucian values in economic development – such as its work ethic, discipline, cooperation between government and industry, emphasis on education and group effort – now criticized Confucianism’s obvious negative features, such as the lack of accountability and transparency, collusion between officialdom and business, nepotism and corruption. However, South Korea’s speedy recovery from the economic fiasco, mainly due to an effort involving all members of society, including officials, industrialists, workers, intellectuals and housewives, clearly indicates that positive Confucian ethics played a significant role in uniting the nation in crisis. From the cultural perspective, both the euphoria of the 1980s and the frustration of the 1990s show the relevance of Confucian culture in East Asian economies. With the dynamism of the Vietnamese economy and the phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy, the idea of a Confucian cultural area takes on a new significance. Arguably, given that East Asia is the only region outside Eastern Europe and North America that has persuasively demonstrated that modernization defined in terms of GDP works well, its shared Confucian heritage

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must have contributed to that process. A nuanced interpretation, however, should also take into consideration the interplay between culture and the economy. My methodological assumption is as follows: if a feature of economic growth can be fully explained solely by using economic criteria, there is no need to evoke any other ‘externalities’. If a purely economic calculation fails to account for the phenomenon, then we most likely must consider political and social factors as well. If economic, political and social factors do not satisfactorily explain the development, then culture comes into the picture. Far from being reductionist, a cultural interpretation is an added value. It provides a ‘thick description’ of a phenomenon by adding color, tone, taste and shape to a view of life that social scientists often either deliberately reject or unconsciously ignore. Of course, the role of culture in economic development cannot be limited to that of an added value. Although social scientists for reasons of methodological purity or instrumental expediency tend to ignore culture, those who think that culture matters must also learn to appreciate the economic, political and social factors and to recognize that they too are relevant to a sophisticated cultural interpretation. The matter is complicated by the fact that a prominent feature of culture is its permeability: culture penetrates into and is intertwined with the economy, polity and society. This is why Lucian Pye ‘created’ political culture as an academic discipline at MIT and Peter Berger established an institute for the study of economic culture at Boston University. It is ironic that the ‘post-Confucian thesis’ formulated in the 1980s was proposed by two sociologists. Peter Berger and his collaborator, Hsiao Hsin-huang (Xiao Xinhuang) (1988) of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, argued persuasively that for historical and social reasons, Confucian ethics were profoundly instrumental in the economic development of the Four Mini-Dragons. Against the later backdrop of the financial crisis, a balanced interpretation must recognize both the positive and negative cultural factors. This revisit of the Confucian thesis in the last decades of the twentieth century indicates the complexity of offering a cultural explanation for an economic development. Culture’s boundaries are not precisely delineated, and there is ambiguity in its articulation of causal relationships. Often such a thesis tends to conflate empirical descriptions with normative claims. As a point of departure, we must first determine what has actually happened. In the present case, our primary concern is Cultural China – Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and Mainland China. These areas are diverse and they interact in ways that are unpredictable 82

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and sometimes hard to understand. It is ill-advised to offer generalizations that fail to capture the restless landscape. After all, even the concept of Chinese-ness is highly problematical. The rapid changes in this region over the last five decades compel us to continually reexamine our presuppositions in our quest for an explanation. I am acutely aware of the difficulty of exploring the significance of culture in the economic and political transformations in Singapore and the four regions across the Taiwan Strait. I propose the controversial idea of ‘Confucian democracy’ to make the case that cultural change features prominently in the process of democratization, one of the most powerful political trends in modern history. I hope such an inquiry will throw light on the relevance of culture to political dynamics in rapidly changing societies. I deliberately choose to approach my subject as a normative as well as an empirical exercise. I assume that democratization in the Confucian cultural area is inevitable and desirable. I further assume that there is substantial ideational and institutional convergence of all fullfledged democracies. Nevertheless, I would claim that democracy as a way of life may take different forms. I would further claim that ‘Confucian democracy’ is not only imaginable but also practicable. This is, of course, a debatable interpretive stance. Scholars such as Lucian Pye (1985, 1988) strongly assert that the term ‘Confucian democracy’ is contradictory. Pye argues that Confucian authoritarianism is incompatible with the democratic spirit. However, Samuel Huntington (1991), among others, observes that given the positive conditions, Confucianism as a ‘soft authoritarianism’ can facilitate the democratic process as well as economic growth. The debate is likely to continue, but both Pye and Huntington subscribe to the view that Confucianism as an ideology is by no means friendly to democracy. If we accept the conclusion, as many Marxists in Mainland China take for granted, that Confucianism is inescapably rooted in an agriculture-based economy, family-centered society and paternalistic polity, we cannot but admit that Confucianism is an obstacle to modernization, let alone democratization. But this view presupposes that Confucianism is a static structure frozen in history, rather than a dynamic process evolving and renewing in response to the changing environment. There is evidence that Confucianism as an ideology, a cultural movement and a way of life has undergone a profound transformation for more than a century, especially in the last three decades.2 An outstanding manifestation of this transformation is in terms of democratization. The success of Japan and South Korea in becoming democracies 83

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indicates that Confucian societies under the influence of pro-­democratic forces can indeed change into vibrant democracies. In Cultural China, Taiwanese democracy is well established; Hong Kong and Macao possess obvious democratic features, such as rule of law; and Singapore, despite its strong paternalism, embraces democratic principles as a ­justification for governance. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), since the ‘reform and opening’ policy of the late 1970s, has also dramatically changed in terms of its polity as well as its economy. Although the claim that a market economy necessarily leads to a democratic ­polity has yet to be substantiated, the emergence of a civil society bodes well for initiating a sustainable process of democratization. This seemingly optimistic scenario about the future of democracy in Cultural China does not automatically validate the viability of ‘Confucian democracy’. It is reasonable to assume that westernization is the major cause for the development of the democratic practices in Greater China. Confucianism might well be seen as an obstacle to democracy. The provisional success of democratization merely indicates that westernization has succeeded in overcoming the non-democratic and/or anti-democratic elements in the Confucian tradition. According to this line of thinking, the most we can claim is that deconstructed Confucianism is no longer an inhibiting force on the path toward democracy. The thesis that the Confucian ethic may have helped economic growth is not applicable to the political scene. A leap of faith is required to imagine that Confucianism has been instrumental in the flourishing of democracy in Cultural China. The major flaw in this dichotomous mode of thinking is its presupposition that Confucianism is incompatible with westernization3 and that the deconstruction of Confucianism is a precondition for the development of democracy. From a comparative civilization perspective, the limitation of this reasoning is obvious. Today all major religions, including Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, claim to be supportive of rather than detrimental to democracy. The Vatican is hardly a democratic institution, but Catholic democracy may very well be a vibrant form of democracy. Indeed, churches and temples are not democratic institutions, but priests and monks can advocate democratic ideas. Historically, the collapse of the Manchu Dynasty certainly signaled the demolition of the Confucian imperial bureaucracy, but it did not mean the demise of ‘Confucian China’. Nor did it suggest that the Chinese political and intellectual elite suddenly ceased to be influenced by Confucian values. It is simply wrong to believe that the Confucian habits of the heart no longer helped shape the 84

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life-orientation of the Chinese people. In studying the westernization of China, a more reasonable approach is to examine the complex interplay between imported western ideas and indigenous Confucian ideas. There are at least four possible effects of this dynamic interaction: resistance, acceptance, coexistence and fusion. By and large, the Confucians became devoted westerners. Of course, institutional and intellectual inertia compelled Confucian scholar–officials at first to resist westernization, especially when it took the form of colonialism and imperialism. In general, following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the Confucian attraction to western values was so overwhelming that the Confucians were willing and ready to change or abandon their heritage to embrace the west as the wave of the future. Some of them became wholesale westernizers. There was little resistance to the introduction of western ideas and institutions.4 The Confucians tolerated and even celebrated the coexistence of western civilization and Confucian culture in government, education and other public spheres. The majority of Confucian intellectuals strived for an ideal of ‘fusion’. The most cherished western values in this fusion were science and democracy. Such wishful thinking was vividly captured by one of the most popular slogans – ‘Chinese learning for substance and western learning for function’. Specifically, substance refers to the Confucian core values, such as humanity, rightness, civility, wisdom and trust; function refers to western science and democracy, among other values such as liberty and human rights. Implanting democratic seeds in Confucian soil is a far cry from the actualization of Confucian democracy in Cultural China. We may argue, however, that Confucianism actually nurtured the democratic seeds when they were introduced into China in the 1920s. The Confucian scholar–statesman Zhang Junmai was hailed as the champion of constitutionalism on the Mainland in the 1940s, and the Confucian scholar–statesman Xu Fuguan was praised as a major contributor to the liberal cause in Taiwan in the 1960s. What occurred was twoway traffic. Confucianism was first democratized; then it provided the resources for the Confucianization of democracy, meaning the Sinicization (indigenization) of western ideas, practices and institutions. Lest we romanticize the painful process by which democracy became the dominant discourse in Chinese political culture, we should note that the beginning of a fruitful interaction remains riddled with tension and conflict. At present, we can only hope that the peaceful coexistence of Confucianism and democracy will eventually lead to a fusion of horizons. 85

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Confucianism and Singapore’s success Lee Kuan Yew’s advocacy of ‘Asian values’ is a case in point. The mass media often cites this legendary Singapore leader, who got the best education that the English-speaking community could offer, as a staunch critic of western-style democracy. However, Lee’s heroic attempt to build Singapore into one of the most vibrant cities since the early 1960s is widely admired as an exemplar of modernization. When Singapore was first established as an independent city–state in 1965, its leadership compared it with Israel: a tiny Chinese island in the sea of Malays. The leaders took that self-image so seriously that they began to learn from Israel, especially in terms of military defense. They sent their military personnel to the Middle East to be trained by the Israelis and invited Israeli generals to serve as consultants. They soon realized, however, that Singapore could not be defended from armed attack, and they therefore needed a radically different strategy. In retrospect, the Singaporean leaders characterized their successful approach as the Asian way, specifically the Confucian way. Two general principles guided their actions. First is the principle of ‘reciprocity’: ‘do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you’ (Analects, 15.24). In practical terms, this meant when formulating policy, the overriding concern was that it would not offend the island’s strong and populous neighbors, such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The purpose was to defuse any obvious and hidden tensions so that no hostility, let alone threat, would be perceived by any adversary. One concrete step was to make it clear that Singapore’s primary loyalty was to the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In order to avoid Singapore being viewed as an integral part of Greater China, the leadership made sure that although Singaporeans are overwhelmingly ethnic and cultural Chinese (Huaren), they are not considered ‘Chinese’ (Zhongguoren) in the political sense. The meticulous attention to making Singapore a multi-ethnic, multilingual, multi-religious and indeed a multicultural society has, by and large, been successful. Chinese, Malays, Hindus and Caucasians live in peaceful coexistence. Furthermore, the government painstakingly crafts policies in economics, polity and education to ensure that a ‘harmonious society’ will endure. The second principle is to demonstrate that Singapore’s achievements can be shared. In a sense, by building the best university, hospital, banking system, regional center for learning English, institute of Southeast Asian studies, port and airline, Singapore demonstrates its resolve to make its facilities a benefit for the entire region. The idea 86

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that ‘in order to establish myself, I help others to establish themselves; in order to make myself prominent, I help others to be prominent’ (Analects, 6.30) is a positive principle of engagement that complements the passive principle of considerateness. Singapore is far from being a Confucian state, but, motivated by self-interest, it has managed to create a non-threatening environment for modernization. Confucianism has re-emerged as a major contributor to Singapore’s ‘common values’. Arguably, all five principles derived from the common values are characteristically Confucian: i ii iii  iv v

Society and nation above the individual; Communal respect for the individual; Family as the root of society; Tolerance between religions; and Harmony among races.5

In this ethos, tolerance and harmony among all races and religions are cultivated as necessary to nurture a culture of peace. Responsibility, civility and community are underscored as fundamental ingredients of a harmonious society. It would be naïve to accept Confucian rhetoric as a truthful representation of the Singaporean style of governance. Even though Confucian ethics features prominently in Singaporean common values, its government is tough-minded and legalistic. In Singapore, liberty is often (mis)interpreted as unbridled freedom, and human rights are critiqued as detrimental to social solidarity. Lee’s message on law and order and his rejection of rights talk may not have been seriously challenged domestically, but this does not mean that there is a consensus on his leadership. His exercise of power through a de facto one-party system, paternalistic rule and litigiousness may have ensured efficiency and orderliness, but it is hardly democratic by western standards. Yet in one sense Singapore is a paradigmatic example of a Confucian state: the elite are responsible for the well-being of the people. Officials in Singapore are law-abiding, clean, reliable and accountable. Citizens are generally satisfied with how the nation is run. With perhaps the most highly educated, mobile, cosmopolitan and energetic urban population in the world, Singapore in many ways exemplifies the fusion between the east and the west. It has certainly established a standard for incorruptible and meritocratic government in Cultural China. We may criticize Singaporeans for their failure to secure political freedoms and to fight for their individual rights, but as an outsider it would be presumptuous to conclude that the Singaporeans are so 87

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indoctrinated by ideological control that they merely accept what they have, or that they are so intimidated by political coercion that they dare not demand what they want. In an optimistic view, Singapore has great potential to develop a Confucian style of democracy based on the responsibility of the political and intellectual elite. When the issues of survival, security and subsistence are no longer urgent, the citizens’ desire for more public space actualization to express themselves and more opportunity for self-­ will lead to a new negotiation. Already, the populace’s aspirations for a creative educational system has prompted the government to pay attention to humanist and artistic values it had hitherto ignored. A new ‘Confucian’ leadership seasoned in social capital and cultural competence is likely to emerge, as long as it does not undermine the need for organic social solidarity. Singapore’s concern for national security is easily used as justification for authoritarianism, but survival in a knowledge economy requires the existence of a vibrant civil society. Real creativity in a learning civilization depends on its ­citizens being free, open and self-reflexive agents. The next step to soft authoritarianism is a responsible democracy. A multi-party ­system and a one-person-one-vote electorate are not essential elements of such a democracy.

Democratization and Confucianism in Taiwan Based on Joseph Schumpeter’s definition, Taiwan fully qualifies as a democracy (Schumpeter 1976). The role and function of culture in Taiwan’s democratization is a fascinating subject. Even a cursory survey of the interpretive literature on this subject is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to focus our attention on Confucianism. In 1982, China Forum,6 an influential intellectual journal, devoted a special issue to New Confucianism and Taiwanese modernization. A group of prominent intellectuals engaged in a structured conversation on the subject. Although quite a few were sympathetic to or identified with the Confucian course, the overall assessment was far from encouraging. Some of the liberal-minded participants straightforwardly asserted that Confucians such as Xu Fuguan and Mou Zongsan may have influenced the early stage of modernization (i.e., democracy), but as the modernizing process gathered momentum, they became irrelevant. Others took the more radical position that the erosion of Confucian influence may have contributed to Taiwan’s democratization. The events that subsequently unfolded suggest a different scenario. The opposition, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), gathered 88

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momentum in challenging the rule of the Nationalist Party (KMT) that had dominated Taiwanese politics since 1949. Its success depended more on compelling cultural and moral persuasion than on superior political and economic policies. People perceived the DPP as indigenous and supposedly righteous and clean. An increasing number of intellectuals in academia and the mass media began to support it. There were pervasive sentiments that the time was right for the ‘weather to change’, an obvious allusion to the transfer of the Mandate of Heaven. The KMT lost power even though it had managed the economy well and had coped with Taiwan’s international isolation relatively intelligently. Jiang Jingguo, Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek) son, peacefully nominated his trusted lieutenant, Li Denghui (Lee Teng-hui), a native Taiwanese, to assume leadership of the KMT and then the entire ‘nation’. Lee’s subsequent effort to de-Sinicize Taiwan is well known, but his deliberate attempt to use ‘soft power’ (more appropriately ‘symbolic power’) to orient Taiwan toward independence was acknowledged and personally felt by virtually all politically concerned Taiwanese citizens. This phenomenon of identity politics was widely recognized but rarely analyzed. I would assert that Lee’s skillful manipulation of moral force by evocating the indigenous sentiments gave him unrivaled authority to present a new vision for Taiwan’s national identity. Lee’s miraculous creation of a new cultural ethos in Taiwanese politics was preceded by a profound cultural transformation that had begun a decade earlier. In film, arts, literature, thought and scholarship, a quest for a uniquely Taiwanese ideological experience prepared the way for the Taiwanese independence movement. The single greatest threat by far to Taiwan’s security and stability is its complex relationship with the People’s Republic of China. Confucianism may provide a natural bond between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. For both countries, the Confucian classics, such as the Four Books, are excerpted in textbooks; major Confucian teachers, such as Confucius, Mencius, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming, are familiar names in intellectual circles; and civic virtues, social mores and family ethics are defined in Confucian terms. Yet the politicization of culture has significantly complicated this bond. Identity politics has adversely affected what on the surface seems to be a common cultural basis for reconciliation. One of the most revealing examples has been the evolving way the Taiwanese define themselves. The process, which began with political activists and eventually penetrated all social strata, went from stating that ‘I am Taiwanese, therefore I am Chinese’ to ‘I am Taiwanese, but I am not sure I am also Chinese’, to ‘I am Taiwanese, therefore I am 89

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definitely not Chinese’. Now an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese residents believe that they are significantly different from Mainlanders in economic well-being, political participation, social engagement and cultural expression, if not in race and ethnicity. This perceived difference has always been the case in Singapore. It is worth noting that like Singaporeans, only a small minority of Taiwanese define themselves culturally and ethnically as non-Chinese. Again, the two senses of being Chinese – Zhongguoren and Huaren – are relevant here. Another example is equally revealing. Virtually all Taiwanese are familiar with Mandarin. Under a strong nationalist cultural policy, Mandarin as the official spoken language has been strictly enforced. All students, especially in primary school, must speak Mandarin. Officials and journalists must, as well. A clear indication of a major cultural change, however, is the now pervasive use of Minnan, a Fujian dialect, on all public occasions, including during political campaigns. All Mainlanders must learn to master, or at least to demonstrate, a sincere effort to speak Minnan to attract the attention of voters. Culture changes slowly, but once change occurs, it endures for a long time. Even when the political situation changes substantially, it is unlikely that culture will automatically change with it. This is the reason why ‘identity politics’ plays such an important role in our understanding of the economic and political configuration of a specific society. The 1982 assertions about Confucianism by scholars in Taiwan were not wrong, but they were superficial. The historical background is relevant here. Obviously, the participants assumed that as the power of KMT waned, the influence of Confucianism, strongly promoted by the nationalist policy as an anti-communist ideology, would also decline. It is easy to see the flaws in this interpretive stance by focusing on a very limited aspect of Confucianism in the Taiwanese society. It may be an exaggeration to characterize the Taiwanese society as Confucian, but Confucian ‘habits of the heart’ are ubiquitous in Taiwanese officialdom, mass media, academia, the professions, business, social movements and non-governmental organizations. Religion is a way to demonstrate that Confucianism still wields influence in the Taiwanese society. Buddhism is by far the country’s most popular religion. Most Taiwanese Buddhist schools define themselves as ‘humanistic Buddhists’, which is comparable to the concept of the ‘engaged Buddhism’ in Southeast Asia and North America. The primary concern of these Buddhists is worldly activities rather than the ‘Other Shore’ or the ‘Pure Land’ beyond the ‘red dust’. To characterize them as Confucianized may be inappropriate. They are distinctively

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Buddhist. Yet, it is undeniable that they have consciously incorporated Confucian ethics into their teachings. They take it for granted that to promote Confucian ethics is to improve the livelihood of the people and to make society more humane. Confucian core values, such as humanity, rightness, civility, wisdom and trust, are integral parts of Buddhist teachings in temples and lay organizations. Most interesting is the Buddhist emphasis on filial piety, a distinctly Confucian practice. Virtually all humanistic Buddhist schools regard filial piety as a positive value. They lecture on it and offer courses in it. This particular attachment is deemed an essential commitment to family solidarity, which forms the basis for social harmony. Prominent monks take part in government affairs and political rallies as well as in social services such as charities and philanthropy. Their influence is immense, and they fervently use it to promote their cultural agenda – which always includes patriotism. This is true with popular religions, such as Yiguandao (which translates as ‘The Pervasive Truth’ or ‘The One Unity’), as well. Even its name is derived from a famous expression in the Confucian Analects. The most influential religious tradition in Taiwan is the Mazu cult. With a strong local affiliation, it manifests the southeastern coastal faith. Again, its legends, organization and ritual practices are a mixture of the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism). Confucian ethics and family structure feature prominently in its value orientation. This pervasiveness of Confucian ethics in popular culture inevitably affects the modus operandi of political praxis at the elite level. Those who actively engage in the political process are under a great deal of pressure to repeatedly demonstrate their civility, righteousness, incorruptibility and shamefulness. Those whose acts are seen as uncivil, immoral, corrupt and shameless are ruthlessly exposed in public and condemned by the mass media. This may very well be true in all democratic polities, but the intensity of moral indignation and righteous outcry of Taiwanese citizens can only be rivaled by that of the South Koreans, who are even more immersed in Confucian ethics. The total obsession of a large percentage of Taiwanese people in electoral contests is a spectacular phenomenon rarely encountered elsewhere. This phenomenon is layered with cultural complexity. The main explanation undoubtedly is identity politics. In Taiwan, identity politics is inevitably intertwined with Confucian symbolism: ethnicity, language, status, age, place and faith. Unless we transcend Confucianism as a political ideology, we cannot appreciate how it remains such an enduring presence in Taiwanese political culture.

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Ironically, when we apply the idea of Confucian democracy to Taiwan, liberal-minded observers react negatively because they associate it with corruption, nepotism, lack of transparency and accountability, and collusion between government and business. Nevertheless, prominent features of an electoral culture – such as moral indignation, demands for righteousness and justice, face-saving performances, a spirit of protest, apologies for a lack of sincerity and purity of heart, and expressions of filial piety and family virtues – are daily on display during Taiwan’s election seasons. The ubiquity of Confucian symbols and rituals does not mean Taiwanese democratization will lead to a Confucian democracy, but it seems obvious that it has assumed Confucian characteristics. With a view toward the future, a major challenge to Taiwanese democracy is the quality and mentality of its citizenry, especially of its elite. Currently, despite its fair elections, multi-party system and excellent record on human rights, the country has been thoroughly criticized and condemned as a negative example, even by its own citizens in Cultural China. The main reason is the perception that the powerful and influential beneficiaries of the democratic process lack public-spiritedness and moral integrity. The privatization of the mass media and the ineffectiveness of public intellectuals give the impression that the government is plagued with inertia, self-interest and corruption. Again, the responsibility of the elite is the key to (using a widely circulated phrase) the ‘revitalization or degeneration’ of Taiwanese democracy.

Hong Kong’s unique situation If Singapore’s provisional democracy is guided by soft authoritarianism and Taiwan’s full-fledged democracy suffers from identity politics, the case of Hong Kong is equally intriguing. As a special region within the PRC, Hong Kong has yet to become democratized. However, it is ably governed by a genuine collaboration between government and business, and is blessed with a legal system inherited from the British. Hong Kong citizens may not enjoy a fully developed electoral culture, but they benefit hugely from a clean and efficient government and rule by law. This policy, perceptively labeled ‘positive non-interference’, suits the current Hong Kong situation well. As the most cosmopolitan society in Cultural China, it is noted for its openness, flexibility, adaptability and self-confidence. The superficial impression that Hong Kong is thoroughly westernized and substantially de-Sinicized would be quickly corrected 92

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after only a few days in Hong Kong society. With a population over seven million, a substantial percentage of whom are immigrants from the southeast region of the PRC, Hong Kong is unavoidably part of the Pearl River Delta. The psycho-cultural construct of Hong Kong residents is closer to that of the Mainlanders, especially the ­Cantonese-speaking Chinese in Guangdong Province, than it is that of Singaporeans and Taiwanese. Professor Zhu Yan of the East–West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, while conducting research on ‘the Great Wall in Ruins’, confided to me that although he grew up in Taiwan with a strong background in Confucian education, in his view, Hong Kong people are much more ‘Confucian’ in their behavior and beliefs than the Taiwanese are. This was most notable at the popular level. Most Chinese restaurants throughout the city display a statue of Guandi (Lord of General Guan), symbolizing heroism and loyalty, and the tablet of the Lord of the Earth, symbolizing the well-being of the community. Many temples that attract a large number of incense-burning worshippers on daily basis are eclectic. The religious observants are rationalistic, pragmatic, materialistic and goaloriented, but they are also devotional, humble, respectful and sincere. This particular aspect of Chinese religion is intriguing to outsiders. However, it is characteristic of all Confucian societies. The coexistence of the Three Teachings, to which Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam must be added in China, is only part of the story. The variety of folk traditions makes the Chinese religious scene rich and vibrant. These are cultural resources relevant to identity politics. What does it mean to be a Hong Kong citizen? This question, which had never been raised before the 1980s, has helped to shape the political discourse in ways hitherto unimaginable. Unlike the situation in Taiwan, people in Hong Kong never doubt their Chinese-ness, but the kind of political system they deserve looms large in their minds. Neither Singapore nor Taiwan offers an alternative to emulate. With a healthy economic and legal environment, Hong Kong is strategically well positioned to develop a polity that can serve as an inspiration for Cultural China. Does the combination of Hong Kong’s internal governance and tutelage from the PRC provide a stable and sustainable model? What implications does such an arrangement have for the concept of ‘Confucian democracy’?

Mainland China’s past/present dilemma At first glance, the issue of Confucianism and democracy would seem irrelevant in China proper. One-party rule without open elections is at 93

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best non-democratic. Although a major Confucian revival appears to be underway, there is little indication that the Confucian discourse is politically significant. However, I would suggest that the idea of ‘Confucian democracy’ may paradoxically turn out to be a viable option on the Mainland. It is widely recognized that socialism, liberalism and Confucianism are the three most visible trends in China today. The same situation may have existed in the 1980s, but at the time there were hardly any fruitful interactions among the three. The liberals, by far the most powerful thinkers among intellectuals, determined that the collusion between socialism (Stalinist dictatorship) and Confucianism (outmoded feudal ideology) was the main reason that China failed to modernize – and, by implication, to democratize. The current situation is fundamentally different. The authentic possibility of a confluence among the three ‘isms’ is no longer beyond imagination. Liberalism supports the ‘reform and opening’ policy with emphasis on the market economy; socialism focuses on poverty, unemployment, injustice and inequality; and Confucianism plays an increasingly important role in defining China’s cultural identity. As a slogan, the ‘socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics’ is a meaningless phrase, but as a societal ideal it is a serious attempt to integrate liberalism, socialism and Confucianism in a new vision for China’s ‘peaceful rise’. The daunting task is to resolve a twofold conflict in modern Chinese history: past/present and China/the west. Unlike the situation in the 1980s, all ideological persuasions subscribe to the need to rediscover and retrieve the traditional cultural resources for strengthening both their own self-identity and their relevance to Chinese conditions now. There is a pervasive awareness among the political and intellectual elite that with its rapid economic growth, China’s political importance has been greatly enhanced. Consequently, the isolationist mentality of the past is being replaced by a new attitude toward the international community. Because China’s national interests are inseparable from regional solidarity and global security, the proper way of situating China in the global geopolitical environment demands that she develop a long-term and sustainable national, regional and global policy. This policy should be distinctly Chinese and at the same time deliberately international. Ideally, its ‘local knowledge’ will become globally significant. Underlying such an effort is China’s need to renew the past in order to animate the present and to study the west in order to enrich its own cosmopolitan spirit. The cultural identity that emerges will be able to deal with domestic and foreign challenges. Such an identity should 94

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criticize hegemonic universalism, such as unilateralism, but must also transcend closed particularism, such as chauvinistic nationalism. Admittedly, successfully implementing this idealistic program is unlikely, but reaching a consensus in confronting the century-old dilemma of past/present and China/the west would be an unprecedented achievement. It would lead to formulating positive economic and political policies. Rather than wishful thinking, it would guide China’s modernization for years to come. Yet, with the market economy, the most powerful current sweeping the country, all spheres of interest – government, academia, the mass media, the professions, religion, the arts and public services – have been profoundly affected. In less than a decade, marketization has penetrated all social sectors. China has literally been transformed into a market society. Can the combined effort of all three major ideological forces withstand this seemingly unstoppable torrent? Pessimists have no faith in the ability of cultural forces, least of all ideological ones, to block the tide. They believe that the cultural institutions themselves have already been thoroughly commercialized. This may very well be a realistic assessment of the situation. I would argue that the hope for a fundamental reorientation of Mainland China’s current course lies in collaboration between conscientious government leaders at both the central and local levels and public intellectuals in all sectors of an emerging civil society. The scholarly community is divided as to whether a functional civil society is in the offing in China, but undeniably Chinese society has become pluralistic. For the last three decades, the division of labor has become complex, and the ‘mechanical solidarity’ that preceded reform and the opening policy has completely disappeared.7 In its stead, all kinds of new social forces have emerged to shape China’s future direction. As a result, the role of government has undergone substantial change. Increasingly, government has become a mediator rather than a controller. The backing of the People’s Liberation Army, the police and its cadre of secret agents is much more powerful than all the non-­ governmental forces combined. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any truly independent NGOs exist in China. Nevertheless, with newly emerging economic and political structures and organizations, a new social dynamic is taking place. Traditional mechanisms of control have become woefully inadequate to comprehending, let alone managing, the situation. The advent of information and communication technologies has further complexified Chinese society. With the fastest growing number of internet and cell-phone users in the world, Chinese society is 95

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densely wired. The voices of the ‘net people’ (wangmin) are so loud and contagious that no one in a position of authority can afford to ignore them. The demands for openness, reliability, accountability and transparency of the political process have greatly increased. The functional equivalent of investigative reporting is no longer an abnormality. Officials in charge of security certainly must find the social and political landscape restless, unpredictable and threatening. As a consequence, a youth culture both cosmopolitan and ­indigenous has developed throughout the country, especially in urban areas. Familiar with the most advanced electronic gadgets, the young ­people’s exposure to global issues is qualitatively and q ­ uantitatively different from that of previous generations. They may be ­self-absorbed, ­egocentric and indifferent to political indoctrination, but they are also smart, sensitive, flexible and informed. By and large, they are more ­tolerant and cosmopolitan than their parents. They tend to confuse information with data, data with knowledge and knowledge with ­wisdom. They may have also lost the art of listening and a sense of direction. Worse, they may take virtual reality more seriously than their concrete lives, and while communicating with people they may never meet, they ignore relatives and friends near at hand. Yet, in their relativistic moral outlook, they are concerned with environmental issues and worried about their future well-being. In this new era, it seems that politics as usual is unsustainable, indeed, virtually impossible. The demand for a more open, flexible and responsive style of governance is evident. The question of legitimacy looms large in political discourse. A market economy does not automatically lead to democracy, but it encourages freedom of action, rational choice, protection of private interest, legal constraints, and a consciousness of human rights. A dramatic institutional change is unavoidable. Does this mean that democracy, characterized by elections and a multi-party system, is the only alternative? Can we imagine any other form of democracy that might be more suitable to the Chinese? Whether or not Confucian democracy is an option, it addresses crucial issues in China’s democratization.

Confucian politics and the future of Cultural China The Confucian insistence on the responsibility of the elite may serve as an example. In a Confucian society, all leaders, whether in government, the mass media, academia, the professions, business or social organizations, must be publicly accountable. They should address the urgent needs and long-term benefits of the people. The separation 96

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of the private and the public is not pronounced. As far as the leaders are concerned, there is no strict demarcation between private and public affairs. Successful businessmen and businesswomen are de facto public figures who are expected to perform social services. The presupposition is that those who are powerful, influential and endowed with wealth and other resources have a greater obligation than ordinary citizens to ensure the welfare of the people. They are under moral pressure, sometimes even legal constraints, to demonstrate their public spirit. Surely government should not interfere with the market; but economic activities are not private matters. Because market volatility affects society, it is the concern of all citizens. The shareholders’ profits are considered far less important than the security of stakeholders. Companies, especially gigantic corporations, are ‘public’ institutions, even though they are owned by individuals. Large family-owned ­businesses are no exception. They are indebted to society. This is predicated on the belief that despite their personal efforts, they are always the center of social relations rather than isolated individuals. From the Confucian perspective, a vibrant ‘public space’ is essential for democracy. It is more consequential than either a multi-party system or elections. A well-functioning public space is based on everexpanding participation by responsible citizens. Through dialogue, discussion and debate, politically concerned, socially engaged and culturally informed citizens carefully scrutinize national issues. These interchanges among citizens are in the public domain and serve as contributory factors and reference points for policy decisions. Government actions may not be dictated by public opinion, but they must be responsive to the issues the public raises. The policies resulting from such ‘public reasoning’ will be critiqued, examined and evaluated. Consultative mechanisms will be put in place so that the political process is never left in the hands of the power holders. Admittedly, there is a danger of abusive manipulation in this kind of system. It can become an illegitimate justification for the arbitrary exercise of power. But if the public space is substantially enlarged and its authority fully established, this system may very well facilitate an alternative style of democratization. A precondition for this to occur is the existence of an enduring and dynamic civil society. Two requirements are necessary for a healthy civil society. First, it must have a multi-centered power structure; that is, all spheres of interest must have their authority independent of the political center. Second, each sphere of interest must be able to exert pressure on the center according to its own agenda. Needless to say, all 97

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these spheres of interest must abide by the rules of an overall regulatory system, namely the constitution. It seems that the ‘public space’ has been broadened in China, Hong Kong and Singapore, not to mention Taiwan, during the last three decades. However, strictly speaking, even in Taiwan intellectual discussions and debates that might facilitate policies to maintain the public good are often partisan and privatized. Obviously, Taiwanese democracy has not matured enough to ensure that the public space functions well. It is not easy to compel politicians to give up their special interests, but a public space is a contested site where even a clash of special interests may not undermine public-spiritedness. This is an essential feature of Confucian politics. According to the Confucian principle of responsibility, leaders must perform public service. The quality of the leadership is not to demonstrate its self-interest, individual freedom, instrumental rationality and human rights. To be sure, these are values available to all people. However, because not all people benefit from the same kind of interests, freedom, rationality and rights, they deserve to be treated differently. Leaders should first assume responsibility for the basic security and livelihood of the people. They should transcend their self-interests, curtail their individual freedoms, constrain their instrumental rationality and limit their human rights. Dictated by the principle of the rectification of names (the Confucian principle of recognizing one’s role in the community and behaving to ensure social harmony), leaders must act like leaders. The Confucian concept of leadership is unique from a comparative civilizational perspective. Unlike Greek philosophers, Judaic prophets, Christian priests, Islamic mullahs, Buddhist monks or Hindu gurus, the Confucian leaders are managers and public servants as well as thinkers, scholars and teachers. They are committed to improving the condition of the world through proper governance. They believe that in dealing with economic and political matters, responsible leaders should be fair-minded, responsive and compassionate. They are the functional equivalent of our public intellectuals and government officials today. They look at the big picture but focus on burning issues at hand, and they aim at long-term gains without losing sight of immediate needs. They are effective administrators as well as moral exemplars. Their way of managing the world should be reliable, accountable and transparent. Singaporean and Hong Kong officials fit this ideal better than those in Taiwan and the Mainland, but all of them deliberately or unconsciously have inherited the mentality of the scholar–official. Their primary concerns, in order of importance, are security, economic sustainability and social solidarity. In public affairs, they assume ownership and presume 98

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that guidance must flow from their leadership. As a corollary, people expect them to take charge and to offer solutions. They take for granted that strong government is necessary and desirable. At least, they see it as better than a weak government. As long as it governs with cleanliness, credibility and predictability, it is trusted. Orderliness is a clear sign that the government is functioning well. The populace’s fear of chaos is deep, and the worry that officials, especially those at the top, have lost their reputation as ‘good leaders’ is pervasive. In this political climate, Singapore is perceived as well governed. Hong Kong’s policy of positive non-interference seems to work. Taiwan, despite its full-fledged democracy, is condemned for its lack of civility and harmony in the political process, even by those who enjoy a range of freedoms unprecedented in Chinese history. The underlying basis of authority is stability through consensus. On the Mainland, citizens regard their government with a mixture of general approval and occasional discontent. It may seem that the legitimacy of oneparty rule is determined by economic performance, but I suspect that issues of corruption and equity are even more consequential. The government will lose its mandate if the public believes it has lost its public-spiritedness.

The future of democracy in Cultural China It is difficult to predict what style of democracy will emerge from this political ethos. However, we can definitely state that the emergence of an institutionalized ‘public reasoning’ in a widely accessible public space buttressed by a vibrant civil society and supported by a responsible leadership is a wholesome style of democratization. We can perhaps further assert that such a style may lay a foundation for democracy that is as solid as elections and a multi-party system. We see strong evidence that this is occurring throughout Cultural China. Singapore is clearly moving toward this ‘road to democracy’. Hong Kong’s continuous negotiation with Beijing can also be perceived in this light. Even Mainland China has made substantial improvement in this connection since the ‘reforming and opening’ policy of the late 1970s. Strictly speaking, ‘public reasoning’, ‘public space’ and ‘civil society’ are far from readily observable in the PRC, but the public in general and intellectuals in particular have been vocal in what they believe to be reasonable demands. The internet, blogging and text messaging have exerted profound pressures on officials to meet international legal standards and to live up to their promises. As a result, the central 99

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government as well as provincial and local governments has been much more responsive to public opinion over the last two decades. Notwithstanding the irregularity and unpredictability of these public activities, the very fact that they take place bodes well for the development of a new dynamic between officialdom and the citizenry. Furthermore, as pluralism in leadership continues to develop, the dominance of political power will be inevitably eroded by ever-expanding social forces, such as the mass media, academia and business. Historically, Confucians took part in the political process by establishing and critiquing vitally important national policies. The channels through which they exercised their power and influence were both informal and formal institutions of ‘public discussion’ or ‘public discourse’ (gonglun). This process involved dialogues and debates. On the surface, because they were scholar–officials, the Confucians were an integral part of the establishment, but in both theory and practice, they often rose above the interest of the court by exerting their moral power to uphold standards for the public good. Of course, we must resist the temptation to romanticize the so-called righteous and conscientious officials, but even a tough-minded realist must admit that the spirit of protest never died and that ministers remonstrating the emperor and his inner court were the norm in pre-modern China. Mencius’s idea that people are the most important, followed by the state, and the interest of the ruler is the least consequential, was not merely wishful thinking. It was a basic belief, a practicable idea that avowed Confucians were firmly committed to. It may be farfetched to call them liberal democrats, as H. G. Creel (1960) has done, but they certainly advocated that because the people are the root of society, the rulers are obligated to protect them and promote their security, livelihood and prosperity. We may imagine a scenario whereby ‘Confucian democracy’ comes into being in the PRC. I would propose that the first step be a substantial enlargement of the ‘public space’. This means that many channels would be available for an increasing number of responsible people, including critics and those who are members of the loyal opposition, to take part in the political process. It is important that ‘responsible people’ are self-selected rather than determined by the state. They may come from different social sectors, but they must assume responsibility for their ideas. Government performance would be based on public judgment of how it responds to and takes responsibility for the public good. To ensure that government at all levels is accountable and transparent, an impartial and independent legal system must be established. An effective regulatory system would have to be in place to prevent 100

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officials from engaging in corruption and to oversee the routine government performance. A feedback mechanism would also be implemented to monitor officials’ conduct. The functional equivalent of human rights will be derived from the responsibility of the elite. This may provide the rudimentary elements for a ‘Confucian democracy’.

Notes 1 About the concept of Cultural China, please see Tu Weiming, ‘Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center’, Daedalus, 120.2 (1991): 1–32. 2 There are several ways to periodize the Confucian tradition. The Chinese Sinological convention is to use dynastic designations such as Pre-Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing and so forth. A common practice in the English-speaking scholarly community is the tripartite division of Classical Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism (Song–Ming) and New Confucianism (the Confucian revival in the twentieth century). 3 I am critically aware that westernization is not synonymous with modernization; however, the modernization process of China that began almost one century ago has been characterized mainly as westernization, a word connoting not only a material but also a cultural transformation. 4 For a fuller discussion of the issue, see Tu Weiming, ‘Implications of the Rise of “Confucian” East Asia’, Daedalus, 129.1 (2000): 195–218, esp. pp. 200–03. 5 For more on this, see Tu Weiming, Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge (Curriculum Development Institute of Singapore, Singapore: Federal Publications, 1984). 6 See China Forum, 15.1 (1982). China Forum is a journal sponsored by the United Daily News, which was founded in 1951 and is one of the biggest newspapers in Taiwan. 7 The notion of mechanical solidarity comes from Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1997).

References Berger, Peter L. and Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao, eds. 1988. In Search of an East Asian Development Model. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Creel, H. G. 1960. Confucius and the Chinese Way. New York: Harper Torchbook. Durkheim, Emile. 1997 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. Translated by George Simpson. New York: Free Press. Huntington, Samuel P. 1991. ‘Democracy’s Third Wave’, Journal of Democracy, 2(2): 12–34. Pye, Lucian W. 1985. Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pye, Lucian W. 1988. ‘The Role of the Entrepreneur in the New Asian Capitalism’, in Peter L. Berger and Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao (eds.), In Search of an East Asian Development Model, pp. 81–98. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

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Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1976. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: Allen and Unwin. Tu, Weiming. 1984. Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge. ­Singapore: Federal Publications. Tu, Weiming. 1991. ‘Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center’, Daedalus, 120(2): 1–32. Tu, Weiming. 2000. ‘Implications of the Rise of “Confucian” East Asia’, ­Daedalus, 129(1): 195–218. Weber, Max. 2002 [1930]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Stephen Kalberg. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury.

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6 CHINESE MARITIME ECONOMY Historical globalizing forces Mayfair Yang

The area of Wenzhou on the coast of southern Zhejiang Province has experienced dramatic economic development and industrialization in the post-Mao era, together with a revival of popular religion through the ritual worship of local maritime gods, temple fairs, festivals and processions.1 Starting from a discussion of the importance of maritime gods in the revival of popular religion in Wenzhou, this chapter will trace a genealogy of Wenzhou’s coastal and maritime economy back to China’s imperial era, with a view to understanding the present in China. I will show that China’s explosive economic growth and the international trade of the rural coastal areas do not derive from the recent introduction of western or overseas Chinese capital but rather predate them by several centuries. These gods of a commercialized coastal society harken back to much older periods in China’s past. Furthermore, a tension of the longue durée can be detected between two different historical forces or modes of power, between what I call an ‘agrarian sovereignty’ and a maritime economy of China’s southeastern coastal communities. This ‘deep structure’ of Chinese imperial history has informed and shaped the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries of Chinese coastal economic and social development and continues to do so. Since the 1980s, scholars around the world have increasingly participated in discussions regarding the ‘modernization’ of economy and culture. Despite the rise of the postwar Japanese economy, followed by the Four Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong), then the giant economy of China and subsequently India, Brazil, Russia, Malaysia and others, these developments do not seem to 103

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have had much impact on the dominant theories of modernization and modern political economy, which privilege the modern west. In my ­discussion here of the vibrant economic and religious revival in ­Wenzhou, I would like to address two major problems that p ­ ersist in the dominant theories of modernization: i) the Eurocentrism or ­American orientation in modernization theory; and ii) the lack of attention to the native past and internal histories of some colonized places that preceded European domination in the eighteenth century. These two problems can be found with the major works on the history of the capitalist world system, despite their Marxist and anti-­imperialist stance. A Eurocentric outlook is evident in Fernand Braudel’s (1973) otherwise masterful work on the social history of world capitalism, although he may well be excused because he was writing at a time when Japan had just emerged as an economic player. However, by the time of Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1979) neo-Marxist treatise on the ‘capitalist world system’, David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), and Hardt and Negri’s US-centered Empire (2000), Asia’s rise to global prominence was already evident. Yet these works continue to propound the idea that the only modernizing process was the outward radiation of western capitalism, while positioning Asia mainly in the role of ‘semi-periphery’ and sub-contractor, rather than global investor. Even anthropologist Eric Wolf (1982), who believed that he was restoring history to the colonized people of the world, who he called ‘the People Without History’, still wrote as if history began and ended with the triumph of the industrialized west. Although most studies written in English trace the global trade ­system to western imperial expansionism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there are other histories of globalization than that of the west. In recent years, a few economic historians of the Sinocentric and Islamic world have made valuable corrections to the world history of globalization. Scholars such as Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), Takashi Hamashita (1994), Andre Gunder Frank (1998), Timothy Brook (1998), and Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) have shown that long before the European Age of Discovery in the fifteenth century, much of the Old World had already been knitted together through extensive longdistance trade routes, via the ancient Silk Road in Central Asia and later through the maritime trade routes that connected f­ ar-flung lands in the Middle East, Persia and Central Asia with the kingdoms and empires of South, Southeast and East Asia. As Abu-Lughod (1989) convincingly argues, we must push back the history of ­globalization to the thirteenth century, a period of vibrant world trade that had already emerged and flourished before European domination. In that 104

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era, Venetian and Genoan commerce (the most developed in Europe at that time) were but marginal to the economic core engines of export and trade represented by China and parts of the Middle East and India. Hamashita (1994) and Brook (1998) have also shown that western imperialist might in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries merely appropriated and built onto an already existing lucrative global network of trade; it did not invent it.2 What I stress in this chapter is that the historical dynamics of these earlier periods of non-western modernization continue to inform the current movements of globalization and economic development in non-western places today. Therefore, in examining the recent surge in a local Chinese economy such as Wenzhou, we cannot understand it merely in terms of the expansion or penetration of western capitalist or neo-liberal forces, for in coastal China, indigenous globalizing forces were already operating back in the Song dynasty or the eleventh century, until it was severely curtailed by Chinese agrarian sovereign power in the fourteenth century.

The worship of maritime gods and cultural heroes in Wenzhou My fieldwork in the rural areas and small towns of Wenzhou in southern Zhejiang Province on the southeastern coast of China has shown a vibrant resurgence of traditional religious culture taking place in the post-Mao period of economic reform and global trade. Life-cycle rituals, religious festivals, deity temples, ancestor sacrifices and Buddhist and Daoist rituals have been revived after the severe state project of secularization banned traditional public rituals for over three decades during the Maoist era (1949–80). This area is famous across China as the ‘Wenzhou Model’ of rural economic development, and the local economy experienced rapid rural industrialization and urbanization, with light industrial manufactured products exported to countries across the globe. Since so many families have recently prospered beyond their wildest dreams, most people do not hesitate to deploy their newfound wealth in conducting all manner of lavish community rituals. In keeping with their rich maritime history, many of these community rituals today commemorate local heroes and gods of the imperial era who helped the local people fight off marauding pirates who plundered the shores from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In this coastal area, which is subject to typhoons and floods of the sea rushing onto the land, perhaps it is not surprising that the most popular god worshipped is a native of Wenzhou, called Yang Family 105

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Elder (楊府爺),3 a god of the sea (海神) who saves fishermen and sailors. He is often compared to Mazu, the maritime goddess who is also worshipped widely in the southeastern coastal areas of China. Lord Yang is an example of an originally local Wenzhou cult that spread outward across the southeastern China region. This deity cult can also be found in neighboring areas of southern Zhejiang such as Lishui and Taizhou, and further south in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces, as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Lord Yang’s human name was Yang Jingyi (楊精義); it is believed that after serving as an official in Shanxi Province under the Tang dynasty for 40 years, he retreated into the mountains in Wenzhou as a hermit to pursue Daoist self-cultivation and then attained the Way and became an immortal (得道成仙). He ascended to Heaven in 752 CE. It was during the Ming dynasty, when the coastal piracy problem reached a peak, that the worship of Lord Yang also attained new heights (Cai 2011). He is said to have rescued an imperial military official, Yuan Zuzhong, and his troops from pirate attacks by invoking a hurricane to destroy pirate ships in the Jiajing Reign period (1553). On the night of his rescue, Yuan received a vision of Lord Yang, dressed as a man in an orderly, arranged robe, holding a hu (笏), a plaque held in front of the breast by officials who have an audience with the emperor. In gratitude, Yuan paid a visit to the temple of Lord Yang in the North Mountain along with the local literati, rebuilt this temple and erected a stone stele to record this miracle. People have honored his memory ever since. Today, in some Wenzhou temples to Lord Yang, a wooden replica of a traditional Chinese junk with sails is displayed as a symbol of the god who saves people from the raging waters. Numerous other heroes – like Tang He (湯和, 1326–95), Qi Jiguang (戚繼光, 1528–88) and Wang Pei (王沛1485–1558) and Wang De (王德1517–58) from the Wang Lineage in Longwan District (Wang 2003), and the Sacred King of the Three Ports (三港聖王), who fought off pirates during the Ming period – are worshipped as local gods, and cults and rituals have developed around them. For example, today the City God temples in Ning Village in Longwan District and Jinxiang Township in Cangnan County dedicated to Tang He hold large-scale public ritual processions where they take out his statue and parade him around the edges of their community territory in a palanquin (Shen 2002). Similarly, members of the local Wang community gather together in their ancestor hall to conduct a sacrificial ritual in honor of their ancestors on the ninth day of each lunar New Year. Wealthy entrepreneurs, whether living in the local area or now resident in other parts of China or even the world, feel 106

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the tug of their native places and hometowns and donate generously to these rituals. Since the ‘pirates’ in the Ming and early Qing dynasties are understood as ‘Japanese’ pirates who sailed down from Japan to raid the southeast China coast, today these maritime gods and cultural heroes are often called ‘national heroes’ (民族英雄). This understanding of these imperial-era gods is refracted through the twentieth-century traumatic experiences of, first, the Japanese colonization of Manchuria, and then the full-scale Japanese military invasion of China in 1937. While the emphasis for local people in Wenzhou is on celebrating these gods as icons of their local communities, at the same time, they have had to accommodate the nationalism emphasized by their local governments. This is because, for most of the twentieth century, there has been a steady build-up of a modern secular nationalism in China that portrays traditional popular religion and community rituals as ‘backward’ and ‘superstitious’, as obstacles to modernization and economic development. The banning and destruction of popular religion in China reached its peak during the ‘Destroy the Four Olds’ campaign during the first three years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). However, even in the post-Mao period, in which the public worship of deities and ancestors has been revived by local community organizers, official permission for ritual processions continues to be difficult to obtain. Thus, in order to obtain official approval and support, local community organizers must secularize their public rituals and processions and incorporate certain nationalist messages. This accommodation of state interests and messages often means that the space of their deity temple must be shared with the state, which often establishes a ‘base area for patriotic education’ in a key temple or ancestral hall. It also explains how, at a recent ritual procession of Ning Village’s City God Tang He, a placard with a very modern allusion appeared in the parade of local volunteers dressed up in imperial costumes. The placard displayed in giant characters: ‘Never Forget National Humiliation’ (勿忘國耻), an allusion to China’s victimization at the hands of foreign – especially Japanese – imperialism in the twentieth century.

A brief history of Wenzhou and China’s coastal economy Historically, the port status of Wenzhou exposed it to flows of commodities and people, as merchants, travelers, scholars, foreigners, craftsmen, religious transmitters, monks, fishermen, pirates and smugglers 107

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created an independent cultural ethos often at odds with the agrarian, land-based power of the imperial state (Shi et al. 2002: 316–34). Wenzhou benefited from the mercantile state policies of the Song dynasty (960–1279), which departed from earlier dynasties in its court policy of promoting commerce, a monetary economy and maritime trade. Zhejiang Province had the highest economic growth rate in the empire, as shown by skyrocketing state income from commercial taxes that the imperial government collected in this province. During the ten-year period of the Xining reign period (1068–77), commercial taxes grew by 89 percent, as compared with only 34 percent in the Nanjing area and a mere 13 percent in the Beijing area (Chen and Xi 2003:111). It was also during the Song period that an urban revolution took place, as cities and towns multiplied and urban life flourished; paper money and wood-block printing were invented; and the handicrafts industry took off. Printed materials in the form of the Classics, encyclopedias, histories, religious scriptures, medical texts and the new genres of the novel and drama were widely disseminated through commercial means (Gernet 1985: 325; 332–37). According to historians Chen Guocan and Xi Jianhua, during the Southern Song, on the one hand, the marketing activities in each city were no longer limited within the boundaries and restrictions set forth by the imperial state. On the other hand, as commerce relentlessly expanded, it produced a multitude of new urban marketing centers and the specialization and division of labor among the different markets became increasingly clear. . . . For example, in the city of Lin An in Zhejiang Province not far from Wenzhou, there were specialized markets devoted to a single commodity: flowers, fresh fish, medicine, pearls, rice, meat, vegetables, seafood, pork, textiles, crab, nuts and books. (2003: 128) In the Northern Song dynasty, Wenzhou was declared a maritime port by the imperial court and was allowed to engage in foreign trade. In the Southern Song, a ‘Municipal Office of Ocean-Going Junks’ (shi bowu) was established here to manage and tax lively overseas trade with such places as Japan, Korea, Luzon and Cambodia and local exports of lumber, liquor, lacquerware, porcelain, embroidery and other handicrafts (Zhou 1990; Zhang 1998:1039). Thus, from the eleventh century, Wenzhou was a bustling port on China’s eastern seaboard that gave rise to a flourishing commercial and cosmopolitan urban coastal 108

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culture. Wenzhou joined other thriving cities along coastal China in their ascension to prominence: Hangzhou and Mingzhou (Ningbo) in Zhejiang Province and Fuzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian Province (Gernet 1985: 317; Wang 1999, 2009). In much of Zhejiang Province, a dense network of water transport routes made up of natural rivers and streams and human-made canals soon connected inland market towns and cities with the coastal ports and maritime routes of trade. In Wenzhou, which was still much forested at that time, trees were felled in the mountainous areas and the lumber transported down rivers and canals to the port for shipbuilding or for shipping to far-off foreign destinations. Due to constant invasions from northern pastoral peoples in the Song period and the closure of the Silk Road, especially the old northwestern long-distance trade routes on both sides of the Tarim Basin, the center of cultural and economic gravity in China shifted from the north to the southeast, and thus was born the maritime trade route or ‘the Silk Road on the Sea’ (海上絲綢之路). Merchant ships from Japan, Korea, Java, Sumatra, Luzon, the Ryuku Kingdom and as far away as Persia, the Middle East and India vied with one another to buy ­China’s highly prized luxury goods. At the same time, Chinese ­merchant traders set sail from Wenzhou and other coastal ports to trade with these foreign lands. Wenzhou in the Song period became famous for its shipbuilding, lacquerware, porcelain, printing and papermaking industries, and evidence of the city’s prosperity could be seen in its thriving shops and commercial streets; its entertainment establishments, such as public baths, restaurants and tea and wine houses; and its many academies and schools (Cai 1998: 48–54). It produced rivals to the Zhu Xi School of Neo-Confucianism, the pragmatic and ­commerce-supporting Yongjia School of Confucian thought. Commercialization during the Song period also brought about changes in the religious and ritual life of ordinary people. Before the Song period, Zhejiang people worshipped local earth gods, called gods of earth and grain (社稷神), and ritual activities involved spirit mediums or shamans called wu (Katz 1995: 25). By the height of the Song period, these earth gods, whose main task had been to protect the crops and assure good harvests, had declined along with the decreasing centrality of agriculture. A proliferation of new deities devoted to a wide assortment of beneficial feats for humanity took their place, and local cults developed around gods who fought bandits, exorcized demons, helped merchants, etc. (Katz 1995: 26). These local cults spread across regions and between city and countryside through the commercial networks and transport systems. They gave rise to new 109

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cult associations that organized local people for ritual, charitable and other social activities. This genius for organization can be seen in the occupational guilds, the merchant corporations, the elaborated clan and lineage associations and the deity cult associations that all became active during the Song period. New movements of Daoism and Buddhism also spread to the Zhejiang area via the northern land routes and eastern maritime routes and through print, which, according to Gernet, most likely developed with the need to reproduce religious texts (1985: 333). The Ming maritime prohibitions The subsequent Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) of the invading Mongols continued to support coastal commerce and Wenzhou continued to flourish, but things took a dramatic downturn with the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368. At the beginning of the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu court acted upon its fear of growing coastal independence and instituted the beginning of a series of infamous ‘maritime prohibitions’ (海禁) (Zhou 1990: 27; Shi et al. 2002: 313–28). In 1371, Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋), the peasant rebel founder of the Ming dynasty, issued a harsh edict, that ‘it is forbidden for those who live near the sea to go out privately [to trade] on the sea’ (quoted in Cai 1998: 71). Zhu ordered a ban on all private coastal trade (Cai 1998: 329), permitting only officially sponsored tributary trade with foreigners, and that too on a much smaller scale. He further ordered that many sailors and fishermen of Zhejiang be forced to join the imperial navy and army, so as to prevent them from returning to their old trading habits (Zhou 1990: 27). Thus, throughout much of the Ming and Qing dynasties, people of the coastal areas were prohibited from maritime trade on pain of execution, and imperial court policies sought to reduce and control the forces of commercialization and urbanization (Chang 1990: 65–6; Cheng 1990; Chao 2005). Foreign merchants were also banned from coming to trade with China, except on official tribute missions, which were restricted in frequency. The result was a radical decline of the coastal and maritime economy of the eastern seaboard, increasing economic hardship for the common people and reversion to an agrarian-based centralized power of the court. Born a peasant in the Chinese interior, Zhu Yuanzhang subscribed to a tradition of valorizing subsistence agriculture over handicrafts industry and trade (Cheng 1990: 219). As emperor, his policies sought to curb the power of wealthy local merchants and to divert petty traders, craftsmen and entrepreneurs back to occupations of sedentary 110

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agriculture. Zhu envisioned an agrarian imperial power based on a foundation of peasantry and soldiers, a vision that traced back to the Legalist School of statecraft and the centralization of state sovereign power under the Qin in 221 BCE (Yang 1994: 222). The drastic measures he took to kill commerce in a society that during the Song and Yuan dynasties had become highly commercialized is reflected in the dramatic decline of imperial tax revenues from commercial transactions (商稅). In the first 20 years of Zhu’s reign at the end of the fourteenth century, commercial tax revenues declined to a mere 200,000 liang of silver per year. Incredibly, this represents less than 1 percent of the annual commercial taxes that were collected over three centuries earlier in the year 1058 during the Song dynasty, which was 22 million liang (Chao 2005: 32–3). It shows that Zhu Yuanzhang was able to radically turn back China’s commercial revolution, which had unfolded during the Song dynasty almost a thousand years before the emergence of modern capitalism in the west. For Zhu and many fundamentalist Confucian scholar–officials in his court, coastal commerce, with its social mobility, large ­landowning families as regional economic powers and contacts with foreigners beyond the control of the court, was regarded as a destabilizing force that had to be stopped, regardless of its contributions to state tax ­coffers. Zhu Yuanzhang’s court was anxious to reassert Chinese sovereignty in every way after deposing the Mongol dynasty. The principle of coastal economy ran counter to the idea of territorial sovereignty, for maritime trade promotes the movement of traders, goods, money and culture across territorial boundaries and mixes the native with the threatening and destabilizing forces of the foreign other. Thus, the agrarian land-based territorial imperative of sovereign power sought to cut the growth of maritime commerce. This movement was also one in which the security and stability that official tributary trade brought to the agrarian state power was strengthened against the centrifugal dispersal of private maritime trade. By allowing only official tributary trade with foreign lands and banning private trade, the court brought economic disaster, especially to the ordinary people of southeast coastal China. The tributary missions (朝貢) that were allowed into China were composed of emissaries sent by foreign kingdoms across the seas to pay tribute to the court in the form of rare luxury goods for use by high-ranking officials and aristocratic families. These contrasted with imports by private merchants: raw materials for manufacture in the private handicrafts industry and commodities for daily household use by ordinary families (Lin 1990: 176). Furthermore, the burden of the expensive imperial receptions 111

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of tribute missions fell on the shoulders of the local population of the receiving ports. They had to pay for the generous gifts and banquets and provide the corvée labor that the court bestowed on these foreign envoys (Lin 1990: 174). With the closure of private maritime trade, not only did merchants and sailors lose their work, but the handicrafts industries throughout southeast China that produced the Chinese exports prized by foreign lands also suffered greatly. As Ray Huang notes, the emergence of the piracy problem off the eastern coast of China ‘was inseparable from international trade’ (1981: 163). The economic hardships caused by the maritime prohibitions spurred many coastal Chinese to migrate elsewhere in search of work. Many others were propelled into violating the imperial edicts and turning to a life of smuggling. The profits to be made from Chinese goods abroad were often over ten times that from the domestic market, so the lure of illegal trade was also very strong (Zhou 1990: 31; Chao 2005). The term wokou (倭寇 ‘Japanese pirates’ or ‘dwarf pirates’) is really a misnomer because most of the pirates did not come from Japan but were Chinese coastal people themselves (So 1975; Huang 1981; Cheng 1990). Historians Kwan-wai So (1975) and Chao Zhongchen (2005) have shown how Ming piracy cannot be understood in terms of the early twentieth-century Chinese nationalist discourse of defending the homeland against Japanese aggressors. Chao succinctly encapsulates the real historical cause of the piracy problem: ‘in reality, it was actually a problem of the Maritime Prohibitions and the struggle against the Prohibitions’ (Chao 2005: 2). The big coastal trading magnates were incensed by the Prohibitions, and they chose to fight back by smuggling. Smuggling had to be armed and defended against the imperial navy patrols and other rapacious smugglers, and thus smuggling and commerce quickly devolved into piracy. It is true that during the Ming dynasty there were real Japanese pirates coming down to raid the southeast China coast, but more often than not, the Japanese were organized and led by Chinese pirates who plundered their own countrymen and defied their own imperial troops. Many Chinese pirates even dressed up as Japanese pirates because that instilled more fear into their victims (Cai Keqiao, personal communication, 7/24/2004). Private merchants, smugglers and pirates became indistinguishable, and Chinese, Japanese and other foreign forces all joined in the activity of piracy to defy the rigid imperial restrictions on maritime trade. Thus, legitimate commerce devolved into armed smuggling and piracy. Given the general consensus among both western and Chinese historians about the actual triggering mechanism for the piracy ­problem, there is a great historical irony when people in Wenzhou 112

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today commemorate their Ming dynasty ‘national heroes’ and gods who supposedly defended the homeland against foreign aggressors. The irony lies in the fact that these heroes were not so much defending their homeland against Japanese invaders as they were dealing with the results of their own government’s harsh anti-commercial policies. The economic situation took a turn for the better during the late Ming dynasty. There occurred a revitalization of commerce and urban culture throughout southeast China, accompanied by what Peter Bol calls a ‘localist turn’, in which local gentry and elites expressed their increasing autonomy from the imperial state through establishing lineages, academies, religious cults, temple associations and charities that all enabled local self-government (Bol 2003). They wrote lineage genealogies and local gazetteers that recorded and celebrated local identity. I prefer to locate this localist turn in a specific geographical region as part of the revival of coastal economy, because these localizing movements were mainly found in the Jiangnan region of southeast China. Despite the anti-commercial policies earlier in the dynasty, the late Ming period saw a growth of population and commercialization that attained new historical heights, and legions of new market towns emerged, while older cities and their handicrafts industries expanded. The late Ming witnessed ever-expanding commercial networks that linked merchants, producers and consumers together, and everywhere reduced the differences between town and country. Towns became increasingly interlinked with each other regionally and overseas trade revived. In many places in Jiangnan, an astounding 70 to 90 percent of the population had abandoned agriculture and moved into towns, pursuing handicrafts and commerce, often traveling far from home (So 1975: 126–31). The phenomenon of merchants and petty traders leaving home became so common that one of the primary ways that ‘virtuous widows’ gained their places in written Ming biographies was through their maintenance of chastity after their merchant husbands had perished in the course of their travels (Brook 1998: 72). Many historians have come to understand this economic revival not as a new development but rather as a recovery of an interrupted tradition tracing back to the Song and Yuan pattern of development (Bol 2003: 3). With the Communist Revolution in the twentieth century, an agrarian anti-commercial modern state quickly reasserted itself with remarkable and uncanny parallels to the Hongwu period of the early Ming. In the reversion back to agriculture and the diminishing of maritime trade, Wenzhou was no exception to the rest of China’s coastal areas. Collectivization was instituted in the surrounding countryside, 113

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and Maoist policies once again called for strict adherence to agriculture and the military as the primary occupational pursuits. Thus, the entrepreneurial activity, commodified handicrafts and industries, and overseas economic connections that many local people had pursued all came to an end. Since Wenzhou was positioned close to Taiwan, where the defeated Guomindang had retreated, it was considered a potential war zone, and the central government did not invest much money in Wenzhou. The entrepreneurial and family-oriented culture of Wenzhou, coupled with the region’s historical legacy of independence from the imperial center, meant that Wenzhou did not respond well to the experience of state-directed collectivization. In the 1970s, Wenzhou was one of the poorest rural areas of China. And it was one of the earliest areas of the country to take up privatized economic activities again, even before the death of Mao in 1976. Today, it is one of the most prosperous rural areas.

Agrarian sovereignty and maritime economy: internal and external forces of history In their brilliant philosophical, historical, anthropological and psychoanalytic treatise on world history, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) trace two distinct but often interwoven forces of centralizing power, or what they call ‘thresholds of consistency’: the commercial town impulse and the centralizing State impulse. The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation, and of circuits. . . . It is defined by entries and exits; something must enter it and exit from it. It imposes a frequency, . . . it causes the . . . flow, to pass through specific places, along horizontal lines. It is a phenomenon of transconsistency, a network, because it is fundamentally in contact with other towns. It represents a threshold of deterritorialization, because whatever the material involved, it must be deterritorialized enough to enter the network, . . . to follow the circuit of urban and road recoding. The maximum deterritorialization appears in the tendency of maritime and commercial towns to separate off from the back-country. . . . The commercial character of the town has often been emphasized, but the commerce in question is also spiritual, as in a network of monasteries or temple-cities. . . . 114

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The State indeed proceeds otherwise: it is a phenomenon of intraconsistency. It makes points resonate together, points that are not necessarily already town-poles but very diverse points of order, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities. It makes the town resonate with the countryside. It operates by stratification. . . . It forms a vertical, hierarchized aggregate. . . . In retaining given elements, it necessarily cuts off their relations with other elements, which become exterior; it inhibits, slows down, or controls those relations. . . . [State] deterritorialization is a result of the territory itself being taken as an object, as a material to stratify, to make resonate. Thus the central power of the State is hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service sector; the center is not in the middle . . ., but on top, because the only way it can recombine what it isolates is through subordination. (432–33) Town formations generate and cluster lines and flows of commercial, religious, informational and other traffic across space, situating themselves as nodes within vast networks of interconnected points of horizontal movement. Their genealogies trace back to such urban commercial and dispersed formations as the ancient city–states of Sumeria and the Mediterranean world of the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians and the Venetians. States, on the other hand, are ‘apparatuses of capture’ that not only attempt to capture and incorporate diverse social formations but also seek to contain, stem and rechannel their flows of activity into a vortex that retrieves everything back to the center. Inspired by Marx’s notion of the Asiatic mode of production, Deleuze and Guattari trace the lineage of states to the archaic empires of ‘the Orient’ revealed by archaeology, such as ancient Egypt, China, India and so forth. States seek to ‘overcode’ their own centralizing lines of administration onto primitive communal territories as well as towns. In a movement of ‘deterritorialization’, states seize spaces, lands and labor, things previously organized according to diverse socio-spatial configurations, and then re-arrange them into a new unity based upon the principles of hierarchy and resonance, in which all things reverberate around and conform to the pivotal axis of the state. Spaces and populations are rendered resonant by states when they all revolve centripetally around a common single center or vertical trunk, in an ‘arboreal’ formation, such as the central command post of the imperial capital, palace or bureaucracy. 115

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In their notion of ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and ‘Oriental despotism’ respectively, both Marx and Wittfogel reduce and essentialize ‘the Orient’ as a binary opposite of what the west supposedly stands for. Just as the centralizing ‘state’ impulses of Egypt made their way into ‘the west’ or the Roman Empire, which in turn left its ‘Oriental’ stamp on modern nation–states of the west and their imperial ambitions, so also can the town configuration be found not only in the Mediterranean but also in China, since at least the urban and commercial revolutions of the Song dynasty. That is to say, both state and town impulses can be found in the histories of both China and the west, and doubtless other places, too. The notion of Asiatic mode cannot explain the impressive levels of economic productivity, high material standards of living, urbanization, commercialization, unparalleled maritime trade and printing industries, invention of paper money, geographic and social mobility and extensive long-distance trading networks that late imperial China attained (Gernet 1985: 312–29; von Glahn 2003). These achievements surpassed or equaled those of Western Europe until as late as the end of the eighteenth century (Frank 1998; Pomeranz 2000). Indeed, according to French historian Jacques Gernet, ‘in the four and a half centuries from . . . the Song empire to . . . the Ming empire, China was the greatest maritime power in the world’ (1985: 326), and private maritime activities were very much part of this strength. The dominant globalization theories generally neglect to examine the indigenous historical dynamics of different parts of the world, but unreflectively privilege western agency and western capital in their global history. I suggest that theories of globalization and global capitalism must also address older dynamics of power and economy that predate the formation and entrance of western capital and continue to exert their force today. Thus, we can no longer work with the simple model of the west introducing commercialization and capitalism to other places, as if writing on a tabula rasa. This means that we must examine how the entrance of the west retrieves and exacerbates older indigenous historical–economic dynamics, and how western capital itself might be quickly displaced and overlain by indigenous forces from a deep structure of history predating the entry of the west. At the same time, we must be attentive to what these older alternative models of indigenous economy may offer to the modern capitalist world of hegemonic nation–states, multinational corporations and Protestant ethic rationalities. Today’s Wenzhou Model represents the latest reassertion of the commercial impulse of the coastal economy that once flourished in the Song and Yuan dynasties, was interrupted by agrarian sovereignty in 116

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the early Ming dynasty, was revived in the late Ming, was interrupted again in the early Qing and then re-emerged in the late Qing, only to subside through the wars and impoverishment of the twentieth century and come to a halt in the mid-twentieth century. While the entrance of western capital in the nineteenth century at first strengthened the forces of coastal economy, in the twentieth century it triggered the opposite effect – the vigorous renewal of agrarian sovereignty that adopted the new form of Maoist nationalism and state ownership of the economy. Like Zhu Yuanzhang, Mao promoted only two occupations, peasantry and the military, and hated commercialization. However, he was much more radical than Emperor Zhu in his establishment of a totalizing state. In the economic reform period of the post-Mao era, the second entry of western as well as overseas Asian capital into China is again interacting with this indigenous historical dynamic between agrarian sovereignty and coastal economy. The main difference is that now Chinese agrarian sovereignty has transformed itself from state socialism into an Asian capitalist developmental state and is fully active in the profit economy, global capitalism and maritime trade. On the one hand, western and multinational capital penetrates and strengthens a new sort of Chinese sovereign power that now eschews its past agrarian orientation and territorial boundedness. Instead, it favors new hybrids of industrial state–capital formations which now range across the globe in search of investors, raw materials, labor and markets. Although it is centered in cities and places where one finds state-led development and joint state–foreign enterprises, this new state–capital formation is also active in modern large-scale projects, such as the Yangzi River Dam, the trillion dollar transnational infrastructure-building of the Belt and Road Project (一帶一路項目). On the other hand, the second entry of western and foreign capital, and the attraction/distraction it presented for Chinese state sovereign forces, opened up a space for the retrieval and renewal of an older indigenous coastal economy impulse, of small-scale family enterprises inextricably tied in with the donation impulses of popular religion, such as we find in pockets like rural Wenzhou. This indigenous and privatized commercial economy comes with a late imperial form of local autonomy and identity, kinship principles of economic formation and surpluses invested in a divine ritual economy. As in the past, this coastal economy of small entrepreneurs only persists at the mercy of the large state–capitalist complex, where state bureaucracies continue to own and manage the key industries (arms, oil, iron and steel, coal, real estate, media and banking industries) and powerful official families have quietly catapulted themselves 117

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into the world’s top multi-billionaires. Most Wenzhou private familyowned enterprises have not been able to obtain any loans from the state-owned banking system, which mainly lends to large businesses or industries owned and run by the central, provincial, prefecture or county governments. Although Wenzhou’s small businesses have mainly acquired start-up capital through loans from kin and traditional rotating credit societies, once established securely, they have been fueling the rapid revival of traditional popular religion with their generous donations. The enthusiastic movement outward that we find in places like rural Wenzhou stems from a long history of suppressed coastal economy. Thus, the arrival of the west did not introduce capitalism to China; it merely introduced an additional factor into a long history of a dynamic between agrarian sovereignty and coastal economy. Nor can representations of these recent encounters between western capital and China reduce Chinese commercialization to a single homogeneous force. As I have tried to point out here, the Wenzhou Model cannot be confused with the developmentalist state nor its state-dominated market economy, for its ritual economy and ritual expenditures offer an interesting indigenous alternative to them. Whereas imperial agrarian sovereignty has today been transformed into a state-dominated form of global capitalism which is not beholden to local communities, the renewal of imperial coastal economy in Wenzhou, with its embedded deity and ancestor cults, has been the major impetus behind local economic and social development. As Wenzhou entrepreneurs fan out across all areas of China and the world with their commercial and industrial pursuits, these modern merchants continue to make donations to their ancestor halls and temples back home in their local communities.

Notes 1 The ‘Wenzhou Model’ (Wenzhou moshi) of rural economic development in China is often contrasted with two other models of rural development: the ‘Sunan Model’ of Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang Province, and the ‘Zhu River Triangle Area’ (Zhujiang Sanjiaozhou) down in Guangdong Province. Whereas the Wenzhou Model is based on privately owned family enterprises, the Sunan Model is based on township-owned enterprises planned and invested by local governments, and the Zhu River Model is based on investment by Hong Kong and overseas Chinese capital. 2 See Timothy Brook’s The Confusions of Pleasure (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998) for an extensive discussion of the extent of commercialization and social transformation in the Ming dynasty. ‘Seeking to take over the extensive maritime trading networks that Muslims and Chinese operated before they arrived, the Portuguese plundered or

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sank almost every trading vessel they encountered between 1500 and 1520 in order to force their competitors out of the market. When the Portuguese captured the major regional trading center of Malacca in 1511, they butchered the large community of Chinese merchants living there’ (Brook 1998:122). Yang Family Elder is also called by his honorific title, Yang Family Immortal 3 Lord (杨府真君) or Yang Family Lord and King (杨府侯王).

References Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bol, Peter K. 2003. ‘The “Localist Turn” and “Local Identity” in Late Imperial China’, Late Imperial China, 24: 1–51. Braudel, Fernand. 1973. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800. Translated by Miriam Kochan. New York: Harper & Row. Brook, Timothy. 1998. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cai, Keqiao. 蔡克驕。1998.《甌越文化史》。 (Cultural History of Ouyue). 北京﹕作家出版 社 Beijing: Zuojia Publishing. Cai, Yu. 蔡榆著. 2011. ‘探秘楊府爺’ (‘Exploring Yang Family Elder’) 《溫州日 報》 Wenzhou Daily. 七月六, 十三日 (上下) (6 and 13 July; Parts I and II). Chang, Pin-tsun. 1990. ‘Maritime Trade and Local Economy in Late Ming Fukien’, in E. B. Vermeer (ed.), Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, pp. 63–81. Translated by Burchard Mansvelt Beck. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Chao, Zhongchen. 2005. 晁中辰著. 明代海禁與海外貿易》. (The Maritime Prohibitions and Overseas Trade in the Ming Dynasty). 北京: 人民出版社 Beijing: People’s Press. Chen, Guocan, and Jianhua Xi. 2003. 《陳國燦, 奚建華著. 浙江古代城鎮 史》(A History of Ancient Cities and Towns in Zhejiang). 合肥: 安徽大 學出版社. Cheng, K’o-ch’eng. 1990. ‘Cheng Ch’eng-kung’s Maritime Expansion and Early Ch’ing Coastal Prohibition’, in E. B. Vermeer (ed.), Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, pp. 217–44. Translated by Burchard Mansvelt Beck. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gernet, Jacques. 1985. A History of Chinese Civilization. Translated by J. R. Foster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamashita, Takeshi. 1994. ‘The Tribute Trade System and Modern Asia’, in Heita Kawakatsu and John Latham (eds.), Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy, pp. 91–107. London: Routledge.

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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Huang, Ray. 1981. 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Katz, Paul R. 1995. Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lin, Renchuan. 1990. ‘Fukien’s Private Sea Trade in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, in E. B. Vermeer (ed.), Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, pp. 163–215. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shen, Yeming. 2002. 沈葉鳴著。《抗倭英雄湯和》。(The Hero Who Fought Against the Japanese Pirates: Tang He). 北京﹕ 華齡出版社. Shi, Jinchuan, Jin Xiangrong, Zhao Wei, and Luo Weidong. 2002. 史晋川，金祥 榮，趙衛 羅衛東，等著。《制度變遷與經濟發展﹕ 溫州模式研究》。(Structural Transformation and Economic Development: Studies on the Wenzhou Model). 杭 州﹕ 浙江大學出版社 Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press. So, Kwan-wai. 1975. Japanese Piracy in Ming China During the 16th Century. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. von Glahn, Richard. 2003. ‘Towns and Temples: Urban Growth and Decline in the Yangzi Delta, 1100–1400’, in Paul Smith and Richard von Glahn (eds.), The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History, pp. 176–211. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wang, Guo-en, ed. 2003. 王國恩編。 《永昌堡》。(Yongchang Fortress). 香港﹕ 天馬圖書有 限公司.  Wang, Mingming. 1999. 王銘銘著。 《逝去的繁榮﹕一座老城的歷史人類 學考察》。 (A Bygone Prosperity: A Historical Anthropology of an Old City). 杭州﹕ 浙江人民出版社 Hangzhou: Zhejiang Renmin Chubanshe. Wang, Mingming. 2009. Empire and Local Worlds: A Chinese Model of Long-Term Historical Anthropology. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 1994. Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zhang, Zhicheng, ed. 1998. 章志誠主编. 《温州市志》 ，上下册 (Wenzhou City Gazetteer), Vol. 1。北京：中華書局. Zhou, Houcai. 1990. 周厚才編著. 《溫州港史》。 (The History of the Port of Wenzhou). 北京﹕ 人民交通出版社 Beijing: Renmin Jiaotong Chubanshe.

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7 SOUTHEAST ASIA IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY Early modern or what? Geoff Wade

The ‘early modern’ remains an enigmatic category, in terms of both content and periodization. Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1997) offers a very broad definition of the early modern period in Eurasia and Africa, with it extending ‘from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, with a relatively great emphasis on the period after about 1450’ (736). He sees several unifying features of the period: i) a period of geographical redefinition, with concomitant development of travel literature, new cartography and new empirical ethnographies; ii) new heightening of structural conflicts between sedentary and nomadic societies; iii) increased global trade flows; iv) rise of the slave trade; v) new cash crops; vi) ideas of universal empire; vii) ideas of universalism and humanism; viii) powerful new myths and ideological constructs relating to state formation; and ix) greater connectedness and circulations. To what degree might we see this definition applying to Southeast Asia, with perhaps the fifteenth century constituting the beginning of the early modern in Southeast Asia? We can address this issue by first examining the changes which were occurring during the fifteenth century in Southeast Asia and then examining these in the broader context of earlier developments and definitions of the early modern. Scholars who have examined fifteenth-century Southeast Asia regionally portray these changes as intense and propose a range of causes. Anthony Reid (1988, 1993a) suggests that many of the manifestations of the Age of Commerce had their roots in changes which occurred or at least were more fully manifested during this century. The commercial boom and the emergence of port cities as hubs of commerce,1 121

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he suggests, spurred the political, social and economic changes which marked the Age of Commerce in the region, extending from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Victor Lieberman (1999) sees a process of territorial consolidation in mainland Southeast Asia, resulting in a reduction in the number of polities which existed, accompanied by administrative centralization2 and strengthened social regulation (including regulation of religious organizations) by these polities. The integration was also marked by a growing uniformity of religious, ethnic and other cultural symbols, while the emergence of stronger core ethnies was a correlated phenomenon. Both Reid and Lieberman refer to the period of Southeast Asian history which begins with the fifteenth century as ‘the early modern’ (Reid 1993b, 2000a; Lieberman 1990). Does that mean we can speak of the fifteenth century as the beginning of the modern in Southeast Asia? An examination of the characteristics of the age is perhaps the first step in such an investigation.

Specific phenomena and themes of change in fifteenth-century Southeast Asia Polities One of the most obvious units of analysis of the Southeast Asian past is the polity. The early modern period saw the genesis of some of the states which have continued into our present age. Reid points to a number of new city–states created by commerce in the fifteenth century, with an obvious example being Melaka, which, being both a city and a polity, exercised some sort of suzerainty over neighboring areas (2000b: 417–29); Lieberman shows this as being a crucial period in territorial consolidation, in the wake of the fourteenth-century territorial breakdowns of what he calls the ‘charter states’ (Pagan, Angkor, Đại Việt and Champa), at least in central mainland Southeast Asia. In western mainland Southeast Asia, he shows the critical period for territorial consolidation to have been the sixteenth century. In the western part of the mainland, he notes the emergence of the Shan polities (albeit a little earlier than the fifteenth century), as well as Ava, Toungoo and Pegu. The constant battles they fought were reflected in the central mainland, with Ayudhya battling with, and then incorporating, polities to its north and east, and in the eastern mainland, with constant clashes between Đại Việt and Champa, with the former eventually vanquishing the latter. Lieberman thus sees the fifteenth century as a period over which these three regions coalesced around 122

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major polities, producing a sixteenth century where Toungoo Burma, Ayudhya Siam and Đại Việt controlled much of mainland Southeast Asia (Lieberman 2003). Lieberman also points to the administrative centralization taking place in these polities. For example, the importance of new forms of administration was a major factor in the restored Đại Việt from the late 1420s onwards after the Ming occupying forces were driven out of the polity. John Whitmore (2010) underlines precisely the importance of bureaucratic systems and what he calls ‘legibility’ in allowing the state to prosper, consolidate and expand. Preconditions for ‘legibility’ included a literate group and the establishment of functional organs staffed by members of this group who would focus on tasks required by the state. Whitmore sees the Ming as having been a powerful influence on the way in which fifteenth-century Đại Việt developed and the bureaucratic systems it developed during that century. An intimate element of this polity creation and expansion was, of course, warfare, with technology being a key determinant of success. The Ming successes in their southern expeditions against Tai polities and Đại Việt and during the maritime voyages of Zheng He and others were all supported by the supreme weapons of the age – firearms. The emergence of firearms in Southeast Asia in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century was closely linked with their burgeoning in both India and China. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, polities such as Melaka were said to have held some 3,000 pieces of artillery. Lieberman has claimed that ‘starting in the 16th century European firearms and mercenaries helped to revolutionize mainland warfare’ (1990: 87). Recent research by Sun Laichen, however, suggests that this process was going on well before the sixteenth century and that the source of Southeast Asia’s first firearms was China. The introduction of this new technology to the Southeast Asian region was to have profound effects on the evolution of the region’s polities. Sun notes that the Ming invasion of Đại Việt in the early fifteenth century and of the various polities of Yunnan from the fourteenth century onward undoubtedly involved the use of firearms. This, in turn, allowed the massive military expansions of Đại Việt during the fifteenth century, attacks which saw them smashing the Cham capital to the south and inflicting great damage on the Tai polities to their west. Sun thus speaks of this as the ‘Gunpowder Age’ of Asia and suggests that it predated that of Europe (Sun 2003). This period also saw the emergence and increased prominence of legal codes. Among these was the Undang-Undang Melaka (The Laws of Melaka), which has been the subject of a major study by Liaw Yock 123

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Fong (1976).3 The original law code appears to have been created ­during the heyday of the Melakan sultanate, with K ­ athirithamby-Wells claiming that the Undang-Undang were first compiled during the reigns of Sultan Muhammed Syah (r. 1424–44) and Sultan M ­ uzaffar Syah (r. 1445–58) and ‘used widely in the Malay world’, being ‘evidently designed with a view to ordering a society with just and equitable laws, congenial to free trade’ (1993: 130). However, the UndangUndang Melaka as they exist in manuscripts today are obviously the products of great revisions in the period between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fifteenth century also saw Islamic law introduced in various polities of maritime Southeast Asia, but not necessarily implemented with equal stringency. Louis Philipe Thomaz (1993) notes that Koranic fiqh were regarded in Melaka as a subsidiary law, but there were no traces of discriminative taxes against infidels as seen under orthodox fiqh. On the Southeast Asian mainland, we also see new legal codes being produced in Lan Na and Laos during this century, as elements of an ongoing process of political centralization. Economies There was a marked upturn in maritime trade in Southeast Asia over this century. The growth in demand for spices from Europe and from a newly emergent Ming saw demand-driven activity throughout the archipelago. The engagement of the Ming with Southeast Asia during the first reigns of the dynasty in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries was a strong stimulus to external trade, as were Southeast Asian links with Ryukyu through much of the fifteenth century (Reid 1993a: 1–53). Trading communities of diverse ethnic affiliations appear to have been major parts of the great port polities of Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century. Reid has discussed some general patterns of port cities and trade networks in his overview of the Age of Commerce (1993a: 64–7). Melaka grouped its thousands of foreign traders around four major influential communities – the Gujaratis, Tamils, Javanese and Chinese, each headed by a syahbandar. This diversity reflects the range of trade links which tied the various economies of Southeast Asia together and into the economies of southern China and the Indian subcontinent. It is possible that the links with the subcontinent may also have seen some change during the fifteenth century: as Christie suggests, a growth in agriculture with a decline in sea trade following Vijayanagar’s replacement of the 124

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Cōlas in southern India in the fourteenth century (1998a: 346). Yet, ­Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1990) sees development of a regional maritime trade network in the Bay of Bengal between Golconda-­ Masulipatnam on the Coromandel Coast and the Straits of Melaka in the fifteenth century. The Ming voyages and the associated maritime prohibitions of the fifteenth century did not markedly change major Southeast Asian trade patterns. In fact, the trade prohibitions not only resulted in Chinese ceramics being replaced by Southeast Asian ones but also opened up new markets for them. John Guy (1989) records glazed relief tiles in Pegu from the reign of King Dhammaceti (r. 1472–92), large glazed jars from Martaban, export wares being produced in Si Satchanalai and Sukothai kilns. Vietnam’s ceramic production and trade also ­obviously saw rapid growth during the fifteenth century. Guy asserts that this began in the fourteenth century, which he notes marked ‘a watershed in the development of Vietnamese ceramics – the transition from domestic production to participation in the international ceramic trade’ (1989: 50). Underglazed iron-decorated wares from Vietnam appear to have been traded to Japan as early as the 1330s. But it was the introduction of cobalt and the emergence of blue and white wares which marked fifteenth-century Vietnamese ceramics production. Some of the most advanced of such production was centered on areas near Hanoi. Wall tiles found installed in fifteenth-century Javanese mosques have also been shown to have been produced in Vietnam (Guy 1989: 53–4). Increased maritime trade also led to improvements and changes in the shipbuilding tradition in the region. A hybrid technology of shipbuilding combining characteristics of both Chinese and Southeast Asian types, a so-called South China Sea tradition, came to be widely practiced. Vessels were built from tropical hardwood joined by wooden dowels, but with supplementary use of iron nails to fasten the transverse bulkheads to frames at the hull. This type of vessel, combining hardwood with Chinese construction details, may be a result of the Ming ban against private overseas trade, as ships of this type have not yet been found prior to 1371, when the Ming ban became effective. It is possible that displaced Chinese merchants who moved to Southeast Asia at that stage might have been the first to order ships built in this manner. Apart from external trade, there was also a considerable amount of internal trade within Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century. For example, there existed a pattern of east–west exchange of goods within the Indonesian archipelago, with Javanese rice carried everywhere. 125

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The central fact of Indonesian trade was that two major ­products – pepper and spices – were located in the two extremities of the archipelago. Pepper was produced in Sumatra, Malaya, west Java and Borneo. Spices – cloves, nutmeg and mace – were available only in the eastern group of the Moluccas and Bandas. Java produced rice, salt, salt-fish and a variety of foodstuffs, as well as some cotton, thread and textiles. (Das Gupta 1987: 243) Examining the earliest lowland agro-cultural complexes he named ‘garden-farmers’, as well as the eventual succession to the wet-rice societies constituted by the Burmese, Tai and Vietnamese, Richard O’Connor (1995) suggests that these cultures moved southward towards their respective coasts. The process was certainly very much in train in the fifteenth century, with the expansion of all three major ‘agro-cultural complexes’. He remains intrigued as to whether agriculture was the cause or effect of the changes that took place in Southeast Asia through this whole process. He notes that ‘agriculture, the state and ethnicity all changed. Any one of the three might explain the other two’ (1995: 985). Vibrant mercantile economies require commonly accepted media of exchange, and one of Reid’s key claims with respect to the Age of Commerce relates to coinage and commercialization. He suggests that ‘Chinese copper cash, and local coins modeled on them, were the basic lubricant for the increasing commercialization of the region after 1400’, citing as examples the predominance of picis (Chinese copper cash) after about 1300 in Java, the use of such coins in the Philippines and the minting of coins in Vietnam (1993a: 93–107). Coins certainly were in use before that period in Southeast Asia (Wicks 1992; Mitchiner 1998). The use of smaller units of currency (and particularly copper coins) from the eleventh century in Java has been detailed by Jan Christie, who notes that the demand for currency was met by copper coins from China, and subsequently locally produced coins (Christie 1996). Reid notes the dearth of capital in Southeast Asia during the Age of Commerce and the lack of formal corporate financial bodies. The ­Chettiar and Gujarati communities, however, did play a major role in money-lending, thereby facilitating regional commerce (1993a: 107–13). One important financing channel which Reid does not examine is that of the Chinese, and it was obviously the Hokkien who were major financiers of some of the commerce. James Chin Kong (1998) examines several of the Hokkien commercial practices during the Age of Commerce in his thesis, including the financing of commerce. 126

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Ideologies Economic and political changes during the fifteenth century were almost inevitably accompanied (and often given rise to) by changes in beliefs, ideology and cultural systems. Among the most obvious of these were the changes in religion. While the introduction of Christianity falls beyond the scope of this chapter, the burgeoning of Islam in the region and of Buddhism in Burma, Siam, Laos and Cambodia were certainly manifestations of note. In his examination of Eurasian parallels, Lieberman opined that first international trade and the global spread of technology encouraged cultural integration, but as we have seen, the language and idiom of written culture within each country tended to become more self-sufficient. In other words, at the same time as long-distance material links grew stronger, those pre-eminently universal literatures and languages (Pali, Chinese, Latin) that had inspired elite acculturation during the early second millennium C.E. were either displaced or increasingly supplemented by more expressly national forms. (1999: 29) This thesis of cultural integration is continued in Strange Parallels, with Lieberman (2003, 2009) seeing the chief empires of Southeast Asia becoming more culturally integrated along two axes – ­horizontally as religions, languages and ethnic practices flowed across that region, and vertically as select elite practices were passed down to lower social strata. In describing his picture of the early modern period in Southeast Asia, Reid notes that between about 1400 and 1700, universalist faiths based on sacred scriptures took hold throughout the region. Eventually, they created profound divisions between an Islamic arc in the south, a Confucian political orthodoxy in Vietnam, a Theravada Buddhist bastion in the rest of the mainland, and a Christian outrider in the Philippines. (1993b: 9) Not all of these phenomena, of course, were to mark the fifteenth century, but there is no doubt that religious reform, in terms of a growing Islamic influence, was underway during this century. Lieberman 127

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also noted that the rulers during this period favored ‘textually-based, externally-validated . . . sources of authority over local traditions’ (1993: 224). The coming of Islam to Southeast Asia was one of the major sea changes to affect the region, and there is much to indicate that the fifteenth century was a key period of change in this respect. There is also growing evidence that this was a phenomenon which was not unconnected with increased Chinese interaction with the region (Kumar 1987). The massive purges of Muslims in Quanzhou, Fujian from the 1360s to the end of the century certainly promoted the flight of both Chinese Muslims as well as those from West Asia and the subcontinent who had been resident in that city (Fan Ke 2001: 315–17). It was this southward flight of Muslims by sea from Quanzhou and elsewhere in Fujian into Southeast Asia in the 1360s which was to greatly influence the development of Islam in the region, especially in the fifteenth century. It is more than likely that it was these refugees and their descendants whose gravestones began appearing at Trawulan and Trayala near ancient Majapahit in the 1370s and which continued well into the second half of the fifteenth century. They were inscribed with the Śaka year in ancient Javanese script on one side of the stone, and with pious Islamic inscriptions in Arabic on the other. Evidence of fourteenth-century adoption of Islam also comes from Brunei, Terengganu and north Sumatra, although the latter place had seen Islamic polities from the thirteenth century. Early in the fifteenth century, we observe ­ elaka. It was at this Islamic rulers at Samudera, Aru, Lambri and M juncture, following the coming to power in China of the usurper Ming emperor Yong-le, that another southward push from China was to occur. The voyages of the eunuch Muslim admiral Zheng He, which extended over the period 1405 to 1435, involved a huge range of ships and soldiers and appear to have been influential in shaping fifteenthcentury Southeast Asia and in connecting Southeast Asia with the Islamic polities of South and West Asia. The fifteenth century also had a special significance for the history of Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia, particularly in terms of millenarian thinking. A prophecy by the Buddha that the religion was to fall into decline within 500 or 1000 years was later extended to 5000 years, split into five stages of gradual decline, the first signs of which would become visible by the end of the second millennium, i.e., in 1456. In response, Buddhist rulers on both sides of the Bay of Bengal cooperated to avert decline by going back to the literal, moral and geographical roots of Buddhism. Notions of self-assertion, self-defense, purity of the sangha and uniformity of the textual foundations are indicative 128

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of a certain fundamentalist tendency inherent to Theravada Buddhism at this time. Sri Lanka assumed a new importance in the Theravadan worldview because of the lack of access to Bodhgaya. The new ruler of the island of Sri Lanka Bhuvaneka Bahu VI (1414–68) built a new temple for the Tooth Relic, and the rulers of Ava and Chiang Mai sent missions to the island. In the second half of the century, Dhammaceti, the ruler of Pegu, concerned about the state of the religion, also sent a group of Peguan monks to Sri Lanka to undergo reordination according to the Singhalese tradition. Then, in 1470, King Tiloka of Chiang Mai convened the eighth Buddhist Council in an effort to unify and purify the various monastic traditions which existed at the time. The political importance of such religious fundamentalism has been noted by Reid, who suggests that the alliance between Thai kingship and Buddhist ‘fundamentalism’ led to stronger states such as Chiang Mai (1993a: 192–201). Chandler also suggests that during this period, Theravada Buddhism was subversive to Angkorean cohesion, while at the same time invigorating the polities of Ayudhya and Burma (1983: 78). Historiography The newness which the Southeast Asian polities and societies themselves felt about what was happening in the fifteenth century was reflected in a new attention to history and the new forms of writing about the past in this period. These new histories were an attempt to distance or distinguish themselves from the past and a means of ­creating a more integrated society bound by a common past. In ­Vietnam, this had already begun in the fourteenth century, with the compilation of the Thiền Uyển Tập Anh (Compendium of the Outstanding Figures of the Dhyana Garden) and the Việt Điện U Linh Tập (Secret Powers of the Việt). At the same time, there was a new assertion that Đại Việt was an independent civilized country different from China, and that it had a history as long as that of China. Thus, we observe through such writing the new ways in which Vietnamese were looking at their polity during the fifteenth century. Likewise, in the Mon state of Bago/Pegu, during the efflorescence of the polity under King Dhammaceti (r. 1472–92), we see a preponderance of inscriptions, suggesting some increased concern with memory and history. Michael Aung-Thwin also suggests that it was during this period that Dhammaceti invented an earlier eleventh-century Mon Theravada Buddhist tradition of Thaton, ‘to which he then linked his reign and dynasty, thereby legitimating the pre-Pagan antiquity of “orthodox” Ramaññadesa’ (2002: 49). 129

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Another aspect which marks the histories of the period is the obvious downplaying of the Chinese presence and often military dominance. For example, the Lan Na chronicle Jinakalamali entirely omits mention of Chinese involvement in wars with Lan Na. In addition, the Chiang Mai chronicle mentions Chinese engagement with the region only in passing. Most remarkably, despite being the site of a large Chinese presence for much of the early fifteenth century, the Melakan history – Sejarah Melayu – suggests that the China factor was only important when the members of the sultanate missions to China outwitted the Chinese. Similar phenomena can be observed in the chronicles of Brunei, Patani and Java, which all cloak the Chinese input in the form of Chinese princesses or puteri Cina. Is such history writing a form of recompense for having suffered defeat or domination by Ming China? Demographics A major demographic phenomenon of human movement from coastal China into the Southeast Asian maritime realm appears to have gained added momentum during the long fifteenth century. James Chin Kong has done the most detailed study of Hokkiens overseas prior to the eighteenth century, and he notes references to Chinese traveling to Java in the tenth century, to Korea in the eleventh century and to Champa in the twelfth century (1998: 9–14). Early overseas communities of Chinese persons are also discussed by Chang Pin-tsun (1991). He notes that Zhou Da-guan described the Chinese living and working in Cambodia during the early fourteenth century. A Chinese settlement in Palembang seems to have been a product of the late fourteenth century; ‘by the early decades of the fifteenth century, however, the profile of this diaspora and of a busy Chinese trade network had emerged more clearly’ (1991: 15). Chang notes the role of the Zheng He voyages in familiarizing Chinese people with the ports of Southeast Asia and notes that the ruler of Samudera in 1439 utilized Chinese persons as diplomats in his missions to the Ming. The importance of the Chinese communities in Java is also reflected in Chinese texts of the early fifteenth century, with many Javanese envoys to the Ming clearly noted as having their origins in China. He concludes by noting that the rise of the first Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia was a historical contingency. Factors like population pressure in China, economic opportunities overseas, the Chinese historical legacy of shipping technology and commercial 130

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entrepreneurship, tribute trade and maritime prohibition, and Cheng Ho’s voyages, each played a role in contributing to the rise of this diaspora. (Chang 1991: 26) What of human movement from the Indian subcontinent into the archipelago during this period? Data is scarce, but there may have been a decline in the presence of some Indian communities. Tamil merchant community inscriptions, for example, come to an end with the fourteenth century. What does that tell us? Jan Christie (1998b) suggests that this was linked with the decline of the Cōlas and the rise of the warrior-dominated polity of Vijayanagar. However, the huge range of communities originating in the subcontinent as recorded in Suma Oriental in the early sixteenth century suggests that throughout the fifteenth century there was still frequent movement by merchants and others of many regions in India into the ports of Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia before the fifteenth century However, to what degree were the elements and characteristics of Southeast Asia detailed above new in the fifteenth century? If we shift the focus of our observations backwards and examine the period from the tenth to the thirteenth century, we can see changes which might also be considered by some to be elements of an earlier early modern. The four centuries from circa 900 to 1300 constituted a long period of expansion of maritime trade, with Southeast Asia situated at the crossroads of Arab and Indian trading and exchange networks in the Bay of Bengal (Indian Ocean) on the one hand and Chinese networks in the South China Sea on the other. Thus, the Southeast Asian economies were tied to the maritime trade in the Indian Ocean ecumene, and the trading networks played an increasingly significant role in the economic as well as political and social life of Southeast Asia. Arabs and Persians came to dominate commerce along all major routes in the Indian Ocean, turning the Indian Ocean into what Wink (1992) calls an ‘Arab Mediterranean’ during the eighth to eleventh centuries. The tenth century saw the development of further trade linkages between the Middle East and Southeast Asia through the ports of the Indian subcontinent, with Arabs, Persians and Jews trading along these routes. During the same period, there is also evidence of a growth in Islamic connections between China and Southeast Asia, developing maritime trade routes connecting the Arab lands with China, passing through southern India, Zabaj/ 131

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Srivijaya in Sumatra, and Champa in what is today central Vietnam. By the late twelfth century, the ‘southern sea trade’ was essentially in the hands of Muslim traders. André Wink suggests that ‘it is from 1200 AD that the number of emigrants from Southern Arabia to many parts of the Indian Ocean littoral, especially south India, but also, slightly later, East Africa and Southeast Asia, becomes large’ (1992: 276–77). By the thirteenth century, we begin to see the emergence of Muslim rulers in northern Sumatra. In addition to the Arab and Persian merchants, there were Tamil merchant guilds and corporations under the patronage of the Cōla kingdom which rose as a major power on the Coromandel Coast in south India in the final quarter of the tenth century and early eleventh century. The coastal region of India and northern Sri Lanka under Cōla rule provided a well-organized trading mechanism through which commodities could flow from China, on the one end of the global market, to the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean ports on the other. (Sen 2003: 158) On the other hand, in the South China Sea there was an expansion of Hokkien maritime trade into both Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia during the Song. Chang Pin-tsun suggests that some Hokkiens were traveling to Southeast Asia on Muslim ships in the late tenth century, and that great Hokkien merchants began to emerge in the eleventh century (1998: 149). There is also evidence that it was during this period that some of the Hokkien began to sojourn overseas, promoting economic development throughout Southeast Asia (Kong 1998: 14–15; Wade 2010: 366–408). The Hokkiens were also involved in the politics of the places in which they operated, including eleventhcentury Vietnam. In addition to powerful stimulatory economic policies at home, the Song also encouraged maritime trade, and to coordinate the overseas trade and its taxation, the Chinese state established maritime trade supervisorates at various ports.4 There were also frequent Southeast Asian trade and political missions to and from the Song court. Thus, this period of maritime trade boom from circa 900 to 1300 can be seen as an ‘Early Age of Commerce’ in Southeast Asian history. However, the question arises as to whether we can extend the rubric ‘early modern’ backwards in reference to this period. In considering this question, we can examine the generic changes this 132

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‘Early Age of Commerce’ brought to the polities, economies and societies of Southeast Asia during the period from the tenth to the thirteenth century. Polities The trade boom of this period encouraged the Việt state to incorporate polities closer to the sea and also to move their own political center closer to the sea. This was true of both the Lý (1009–1225) and the Trần (1225–1400). We also see a similar process occurring in Java, where the activities of the Mataram state shifted coastward into the Brantas Delta. This seems in both cases to have played a role in polity consolidation. In the Menam Valley, in the twelfth century, we observe the emergence of new polities near the coast, including Luo-hu (Lavo), Xian and Phetchaburi. We can reasonably assume that their sudden emergence at this time in a coastal location was aimed at drawing benefit from maritime trade. Further down the peninsula, Tambralinga (Nakhon Si Thammarat) provides a useful example of how the booming maritime trade of the period allowed this initially minor port to throw off the control exercised by Srivijaya and establish its own dominance over coastal polities extending from Chaiya in the north down to Pahang in the south during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. However, with the strengthening of the Menam Valley polities and the end of the Early Age of Commerce, Tambralinga lost its glory. Increased maritime competition also led to frequent conflicts. It has been suggested that, following the emergence of Angkor in the ninth century, repeated conflicts between the Khmer polity and Champa took place predominantly related to access to China trade products and control of ports (remembering that much of what is today the southern Vietnamese coast was at this time subject to the Khmer polity of Angkor). These battles appear to have ended with the closure of the Early Age of Commerce. In the Straits of Melaka, attacks on Srivijaya were initiated by Java in the tenth century and then by the Cōlas in the eleventh century. The important location and role of the Srivijayan polity on the maritime trade routes was undoubtedly a major factor in inducing these attacks. Economies One of the major commodities to be carried by the ships involved in the burgeoning maritime trade during this period was ceramics, and it was in this sphere that China enjoyed a marked technological advantage. 133

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To feed the increased demand for Chinese ceramics in Southeast Asia, more and more kilns were opened or further developed in the provinces along the Chinese coast. In addition, the influence of Chinese ceramic design and technology was felt through many of the societies of Southeast Asia during the period. The ceramic industries of Đại Việt, Angkor and Java were all essentially changed through either copying the Chinese ceramic forms, importing Chinese labor to produce local copies or both. The Cambodian ceramics from the tenth century onwards are so similar to those of Guangdong that researchers agree that there must have been intimate links between the respective producers. In the area of what is today Thailand, the kilns of Si Satchanalai developed and began to produce export wares over this period. In Java, by the eleventh century not only were shapes of professionally made pottery beginning to imitate those of the imported Chinese ceramics, but Javanese potters also seemed to have moved away from traditional paddle-and-anvil technique and adopted the potting wheel. Another of the major commodities traded extensively was textiles. Market demand commonly induces change, and the copying of the most successful textile technologies and designs of both the Indian and Chinese handicraft specialists appears to have been common in the Southeast Asian economies. Java is an obvious example, but the Chams and the Khmers were certainly affected by this trend. Of Java, Christie (1998a) informs us that from the tenth to the thirteenth century, a series of innovations occurred in the Javanese textile industry, paralleling those occurring in south India at that time. Looms were modified by the tenth century to produce finer cloth, and during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the patterns on valued textiles began to duplicate those of India from the same period. While obviously not as highly developed as it was to become under the later Age of Commerce, there is evidence that commercialized growing of rice and pepper occurred in at least the Javanese economy as a result of the growing markets opened by this new phase of maritime interactions. By the twelfth century, Java had supplanted southern India as China’s major supplier of pepper, of which much would have been grown locally. The revolution in agriculture along the south China coast during this period – involving double-cropping and new rice breeds – was also intimately tied to the Early Age of Commerce. The increased monetization of economies and trade is an obvious characteristic of this period. We see economies in Java, the Philippines, and the peninsula adopting coinage based on fixed weights of precious metals, which gave rise to the ‘sandalwood’ flower coinage, struck in silver, gold or electrum, which was used from 900 to 1300. 134

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The increase in money supply by the Song was also to have profound effects on neighboring economies, with copper cash becoming a major element in many Southeast Asian economies. Song cash had become the major currency of Đại Việt by the twelfth century and was an important component of the Champa economy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. By the eleventh century, pressure from Javanese and Balinese markets for quantities of even smaller denomination coinage than that provided by the silver coinage also led to large-scale imports of Chinese copper coinage and later local production of a similar coinage. The flourishing maritime trade across the region led to the establishment of new ports. A new port at Vân Ðồn in Đại Việt emerged in the eleventh or twelfth century as a channel through which to manage maritime trade between the Việt polity and the ports of southern China. In Champa, the new port of Thị Naị (modern Quy Nho’n) emerged in Vijaya, also in the mid-twelfth century, and it thrived on the trade between eastern Java and China, as well as through tapping the upland suppliers of forest products. In Java, the shift of the capital to the Brantas River Delta also saw new ports emerge at the modern Japara, at Tuban and at Gresik. In Sumatra, ports like Kota Cina emerged and lasted only for the period of the twelfth to the early fourteenth century. These ports became the earliest urban centers in these areas and served as links for growing interaction between the native population and the merchant communities from the Arab and Persian worlds, Indian subcontinent and southern China who were present in increasing numbers in these port cities. They experienced a hybridity and cosmopolitanism unprecedented in the region up until that time. Societies This period saw a great increase in the maritime interactions between societies of southern China, those of Southeast Asia itself and the societies of the subcontinent. Newer trade routes created opportunities for greater interaction among these societies, allowing for greater flow of not only trading goods and commodities but also ideas, beliefs and ideologies. The growing links between Champa, Cambodia, Java, Đại Việt and southern China and the direct links between Butuan and the Song, and between the various ports of the eastern seaboard of the peninsula, suggest that this was a time of great cultural flux and indeed the beginnings of the cultural cosmopolitanism which marked ports cities during Reid’s later Age of Commerce. 135

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While we lack general documentary evidence for what was happening among the mercantile elite during this period, Christie (1998b) does provide us, at least for Java, with some evidence that new forms of collecting port taxes were instituted and that the royal monopoly on trade had been revoked. Instead, privileges were assigned to highly capitalized merchants and merchant associations (banigrāma). These merchant associations are recorded in inscriptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries and appear to have had royal sanction and to have been linked to the abakul wholesalers, who were purchasers and wholesalers of agricultural produce. The Indian name suggests that these merchants had close links with the ports and mercantile guilds of southern India. It is in fact quite possible that the system derived from the intimate state– merchant structures which characterized the Cōla Empire, and further research might be conducted to examine the links between the Tamil commercial towns (nagaram) with their merchant guilds and the commercial organizational forms which emerged in Java during this period. The burgeoning of Muslim trade activities in both Southeast Asia and southern China over these several centuries meant a slow but very obvious growth in Islamic communities in these areas. The region around Quanzhou saw great Islamic influence and conversion, while Srivijaya, Champa and Kalah (likely the area around Kedah) all had thriving Muslim populations. Toward the end of the Early Age of Commerce, we observe the first Southeast Asian Islamic rulers appearing in Sumatra, not coincidentally in polities intimately tied to the maritime trade routes. Another religious phenomenon was the introduction of Theravada Buddhism into the region, particularly through links with Sri Lanka. It is suggested that Tambralinga was to play quite some role in the Theravada-ization of the peninsula during these centuries. The new wealth derived from the maritime trade, as well as access to commodities previously unavailable, would certainly have prompted changes in Southeast Asian consumption patterns. While much of this change has been lost to us due to a dearth of sources, at least in Java, there is evidence that increased state revenue over this period was ploughed not into temple construction but rather into trade-related businesses and consumption of foreign luxuries, much as on the Chinese coast. Comparative studies of Cōla society and that of Fātimid Egypt related to consumption changes during this period would be informative.

The early modern in Southeast Asia Given that we can see occurring in the four centuries from 900 to 1300 many of the commercial phenomena which have been used to define 136

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the Age of Commerce and, by extension, the early modern in Southeast Asia, can we the extend the early modern in the region back to the tenth to fourteenth centuries? This of course returns us to the definition of this category. Jack Goldstone (1998) considers that the ‘early modern’ as a category derives from ‘a particular sociological theory of history that privileges modes of production in characterizing and powering history’ (253–54), and that the belief that ‘early modern’ is a sensible adjective for the period 1500 to 1850 rests on the belief that no other term captures the period of transition between feudalism and capitalism, an era marked by the emergence of markets dominated by merchant capital and proto-industry. Should we then be looking for ‘early modern’ societies outside of Europe in markets, merchant capital and proto-industrial (e.g., household market-oriented) production? Can we point to any specific economic and technical common element to define ‘early modernity’? Obviously merchant practices in isolation, or in networks of longdistance trade, cannot be meaningfully ‘early modern’. If we assumed that they were, then evidence from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, and even much earlier, would mean that Asia, including Southeast Asia, was ‘early modern’ for centuries while Europe was still mainly feudal. Thus, the ‘early modern’ world would be something centered in Asia that Europe joined as a latecomer, not as a leader or pioneer (Goldstone 1998: 256–58). The categories of ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’ in Southeast Asian historical periodization thus remain problematic. Goldstone goes even further and claims that the term ‘early modern’ is founded on a series of errors and has no useful application to world history (261). But great change was occurring in Southeast Asia during the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, and many of these changes did have precedents over the period from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. Returning to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s definitional categories, with which we began this chapter, during neither of these periods in Southeast Asia was there ‘an obvious period of geographical redefinition, with concomitant development of travel literature, new cartography and new empirical ethnographies’, although some of these elements emerged in Song China from the tenth century onwards. We can assume the existence of a ‘new heightening of structural conflicts between sedentary and nomadic societies’ in Southeast Asia from the beginnings of the Early Age of Commerce and certainly can see ‘increased global trade flows’ and ‘new cash crops’ from the tenth century. While slavery certainly existed, there is no strong evidence for ‘the rise of a slave trade’ in Asia in any period, 137

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or ‘ideas of universal empire’ which China had long held. ‘Ideas of universalism and humanism’ certainly were seen in China but were not apparent in Southeast Asia in either of the ages we examined above. ‘New powerful myths and ideological constructs relating to state formation’ are seen from the earliest times of Indianization in Southeast Asia, well before the tenth century, and ‘greater connectedness and circulations’ were indeed in evidence during the Early Age of Commerce. Thus, we might conclude that neither Reid’s Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia or my Early Age of Commerce were early modern in any full sense. But the changes that occurred during these two periods were real and hugely influential. We might thus, it is suggested, need to answer the question posed in the title of this chapter with the latter answer ‘what’ and begin to think about how to periodize Southeast Asian history in ways which do not draw on categories created for examining the European past.

Notes Including Pegu, Arakan, Patani, Aceh, Banten and Makassar. 1 2 By which peripheral zones and autonomous enclaves were ‘assimilated’ to the status of intermediate or core provinces. 3 Liaw Yock Fang’s text is a synthetic edition based on critical readings of five principal manuscripts, none dating earlier than the nineteenth century, and reference to others. 4 The successive maritime trade port offices were established in the following order: Guangzhou 廣州 (971); Hangzhou 杭州 (989); Dinghai 定海 (992); Quanzhou 泉州 (1087); Banqiao 板橋 (1088); and Huating (Shanghai) 華亭 (1113). After the Song were pushed south of the Yangtze, a further two offices were established: Wenzhou 溫州 (1131) and Jiangyin 江陰 (1146). The majority of these offices were engaged with trade to and from Southeast Asian ports.

References Aung-Thwin, Michael. 2002. ‘Lower Burma and Bago in the History of Burma’, in Jos Gommens and Jacques Leider (eds.), The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800, pp. 25–58. Leiden: KITLV. Chandler, David. 1983. A History of Cambodia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Chang, Pin-tsun. 1991. ‘The First Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century’, in Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (eds.), Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime Trade,

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c. 1400–1750, pp. 13–27. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH. Chang, Pin-tsun. 1998. ‘The Formation of a Maritime Trade ­Convention in Minnan’, in Claude Guillot, Denys Lombard, and Roderich Ptak (eds.), From the Mediterranean to the China Sea, pp. 143–55. Wiesbaden: ­Harrassowitz Verlag. Christie, Jan Wisseman. 1996. ‘Money and Its Uses in the Javanese States of the Ninth to Fifteenth Centuries’, JESHO, 39(3): 243–86. Christie, Jan Wisseman. 1998a. ‘Javanese Markets and the Asian Sea Trade Boom of the Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries A.D’, JESHO, 40(4): 344–81. Christie, Jan Wisseman. 1998b. ‘The Medieval Tamil-Language Inscriptions in Southeast Asia and China’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 29(2): 239–68. Das Gupta, Ashin. 1987. ‘The Maritime Trade of Indonesia: 1500–1800’, in Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson (eds.), India and the Indian Ocean, pp. 240–75. Kolkata: Oxford University Press. Fong, Liaw Yock, ed. 1976. Undang-Undang Melaka: The Laws of Melaka. The Hague: Nijhoff. Goldstone, Jack. 1998. ‘The Problem of the “Early Modern” World’, JESHO, 41(3): 249–84. Guy, John S. 1989. Ceramic Traditions of South-East Asia. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Kathirithamby-Wells, Jeyamalar. 1993. ‘Restraints on the Development of Merchant Capitalism in Southeast Asia Before c. 1800’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief, pp. 123–48. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ke, Fan. 2001. ‘Maritime Muslims and Hui Identity: A South Fujian Case’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 21(2): 309–32. Kong, James Chin. 1998. ‘Merchants and Other Sojourners: The Hokkiens Overseas, 1570–1760’, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Hong Kong. Kumar, Ann. 1987. ‘Islam, the Chinese and Indonesian Historiography: A Review Article’, Journal of Asian Studies, 46(3): 603–16. Lieberman, Victor. 1990. ‘Wallerstein’s System and the International Context of Early Modern Southeast Asian History’, Journal of Asian History, 24: 70–90. Lieberman, Victor. 1993. ‘Was the Seventeenth Century a Watershed in Burmese History’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief, pp. 214–49. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lieberman, Victor. 1999. ‘Transcending East-West Dichotomies: State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas’, in Victor Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Reimagining Eurasia to c. 1830, pp. 19–102. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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Lieberman, Victor. 2003. Strange Parallels. Vol. 1. Integration on the ­Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lieberman, Victor. 2009. Strange Parallels. Vol. 2. Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mitchiner, Michael. 1998. The History and Coinage of South East Asia Until the Fifteenth Century. London: Hawkins. O’Connor, Richard A. 1995. ‘Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession in Southeast Asia States: A Case for Regional Anthropology’, Journal of Asian Studies, 54(4): 968–96. Reid, Anthony. 1988. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, Vol. 1. The Land Below the Winds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reid, Anthony. 1993a. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, Vol. 2. Expansion and Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Reid, Anthony. 1993b. ‘Introduction: A Time and Place’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, pp. 1–19. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reid, Anthony. 2000a. ‘Introduction: Early Modern Southeast Asia’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia, pp. 1–14. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Reid, Anthony. 2000b. ‘Negeri: The Culture of Malay-Speaking City-States of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in Mogens Herman Hansen (ed.), A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures, pp. 417–29. ­Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Sen, Tansen. 2003. Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1990. The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1997. ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, 31(3): 735–62. Sun, Laichen. 2003. ‘Military Technology Transfers from Ming China and the Emergence of Northern Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390–1527)’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34(3): 495–517. Thomaz, Louis Philipe. 1993. ‘The Malay Sultanate of Melaka’, in Anthony Reid (ed.), Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief, pp. 69–90. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wade, Geoff. 2010. ‘Early Muslim Expansion in Southeast Asia from 8th to 15th Centuries’, in David Morgan and Anthony Reid (eds.), The New Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. 3. The Eastern Islamic World 11th–18th Centuries, pp. 366–408. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitmore, John. 2010. ‘Paperwork: The Rise of the New Literati and Ministerial Power and the Effort toward Legibility in Đại Việt’, in Geoff Wade

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and Laichen Sun (eds.), Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor, pp. 104–25. Singapore: NUS Press. Wicks, Robert S. 1992. Money, Markets, and Trade in Early Southeast Asia: The Development of Indigenous Monetary Systems to AD 1400. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wink, Andre. 1992. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Vol. 2. The Slave Kings and the Islamic Conquest, 11th–13th Centuries. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

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Part III INDIA

8 ALTERNATIVE MODERNITIES The Odia Lakshmi Purana as radical pedagogy Satya P. Mohanty1

In the early 1500s in Odisha, in eastern India, the saint–mystic Achyutananda Das composed a short poem called ‘Bipra Chalaka’, which ends with a defiant philosophical question. A self-declared low-caste (sudra) prophet of social change, Achyutananda directs the question at the Brahminical priestly and intellectual class (the bipra) gathered around the famed temple complex in Puri.2 In the final couplet of a poem written in the vernacular, in Odia instead of the classical Sanskrit, he demands an answer to the question ‘Does dharma derive from karma or karma from dharma?’ Dharma and karma are familiar notions in Hinduism, but in medieval India, dharma referred primarily to the duty socially prescribed for individuals because of their station in life (their varna). In regional traditions, however, such as the one to which Achyutananda belonged, the word dharma also came to signify something like punya: that is, virtue or moral merit. Achyutananda’s question, framed as a dispute (chalaka) with the privileged intellectual and priestly mindset, draws attention to the tension generated by the two meanings of the word. Is karma (action, work) determined by dharma, one’s ascribed station in life? Or does an individual’s karma, or actions, determine his or her dharma (virtue)?3 Achyutananda Das’s question resonates both philosophically and politically. Identifying himself with the panchasakha – the group of poet–saints laying the groundwork for vernacular Odia literature by writing for the masses and not just for the Sanskrit-educated elite – the author of ‘Bipra Chalaka’ sees his question as contributing to a movement for social and cultural equality. Following in the footsteps of Sarala Das, the fifteenth-century Odia farmer–poet who produced vernacular renderings of the Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the 145

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Ramayana and proudly claimed the identity of sudra-muni (‘low-caste sage’), Achyutananda consolidated the public identity of the Odia writer as both sudra and revolutionary. He voiced his challenge to Brahminical authority at roughly the same time that, a continent away, a scholar–monk in Wittenberg was preparing to nail his ‘95 Theses’ on the door of his church as well as to translate the Bible into the vernacular German. This was also the time when the radical devotional (Bhakti) movement was sweeping across India (having originated in the south and spreading to the north) and Achyutananda’s cohort of mystic poets were all drawing on Odishan society’s diverse intellectual traditions (Buddhism, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, as well as Saktism and Tantrism, both mainly derived from the tribal cultures) to formulate an egalitarian pedagogical project for a society in transition.4 This chapter focuses on a popular narrative poem, a purana, written by Achyutananda’s fellow panchasakha writer, Balaram Das. Balaram was the oldest in the group and probably the most radical. He identified himself as a sudra writer and rendered the Sanskrit Ramayana into Odia, adopting the dandi meter – popularized by Sarala Das – in both that text and in the Lakshmi Purana. The dandi form used rhyming couplets with variable line lengths and hence was fl ­ exible enough for use in oral performances, especially folk plays (see C. Das 1982: 28–9); Balaram Das used a tight form of rhyming couplets with 14-syllable lines. The puranas targeted a large, non-elite audience and were written earlier in Sanskrit and more recently in the vernacular languages. Most puranas contained traditional religious and social messages, conveyed through elaborate narratives about gods and goddesses, demons and ordinary humans, tracing cosmic origins and predicting possible catastrophes. From late antiquity into the late medieval period, when Hindu society expanded its reach through new agrarian settlements and incorporation of the indigenous tribal populations, the puranas were a genre intended to domesticate and assimilate the new groups into the Brahminical ideological universe. They were, in other words, texts of the hegemonic culture.5 Balaram Das’s Lakshmi Purana, however, is a counter-­hegemonic text. As I show in the summary below and through the textual analysis, Das attempts to articulate a subaltern consciousness of the oppressed and their common identity.6 His explicitly feminist narrative centers on the actions of a strong goddess who challenges male ­Brahminical authority and advocates both feminism and caste e­ quality. Although ideologically somewhat constrained by its generic narrative framework, with its emphasis on ritual worship, the ­ Lakshmi Purana, written mainly in a colloquial, non-Sanskritized form of Odia, is ­ 146

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textually layered and often startlingly radical. It shows the process of vernacularization at work, both linguistic and cultural, as the themes of the dominant Hindu tradition are appropriated into the regional and local context and made to yield to the demands of the lowly segments of society. Its narrative gives dramatic power to the philosophical question broached by Achyutananda Das; the goddess Lakshmi has an egalitarian vision and a new conception of the value of the individual based on action, duty and work – especially traditionally devalued work. Analyzing some of the literary features of Balaram Das’s pedagogical poem, I wish to show how neglected genres like the puranas and vrata kathas can yield insights about radical social and cultural values, values that scholars have not always expected to find in medieval India. Together with studies of the Bhakti movement that have reinvigorated the study of the role of religion in producing progressive social change, this chapter will, I hope, contribute to the emerging discussion of ‘indigenous’ and ‘alternative’ modernities, one that will de-center the European version of modernity without retreating into cultural or historical relativism. Analyses of precolonial cultural production can help ‘provincialize’ the European experience and provide the grounds for a genuine comparison across cultures, building on Charles Taylor’s (2004) important intellectual archeology of the west.7 Such analyses can show how quintessentially modern values like human equality, based on the ideal of a critical and self-reflexive individual, are not necessarily Eurocentric notions, and that they have been articulated in some precolonial non-European contexts.

Traditional form, subversive content While Balaram Das’s Lakshmi Purana uses traditional literary forms and seems orthodox on the surface, it conveys a message that is anything but conventional. Das intended his narrative to become part of agrarian Odia society’s rhythm of harvest festivals and ritual worship, and so he adopted the form of the vrata katha genre. Lakshmi Purana begins with a hymn praising Lakshmi and provides details about the days devoted to her worship. People of all classes and castes, from chandala to Brahmin, worship the goddess on her holy days in the month of ‘Margashira, [which] is the essence of all the twelve months’ (35), the season of harvest, as the narrator Parashara explains to the sage Narada. The text contains an account of the ritual worship, of how the home and the heart are prepared to invite the goddess in. It contains, again in accord with the traditional form, general details about what is to be gained if the rituals are observed with devotion 147

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and what is lost if they are not. The ‘katha’ portion of the text, as is conventional, provides a narrative explaining why the goddess is to be worshipped, what boons she bestows and what powers she has. The basic tale – or the katha that accompanies the details about the ritual vrata – is simple but unusual. In the month of Margashira, on a dasami – the day before ekadasi, the holy eleventh day of the lunar calendar when the Lords fast together with all mortals – the goddess Lakshmi gets ready for her regular visit to the world outside the temple complex of Puri. This is the season when houses are cleaned and decorated with rice paste so that Lakshmi can be ritually invited in, and it gives the goddess a chance to see that women in particular are at work taking care of their homes, tending to their social duties. What Lakshmi observes is that many women are unmindful of their duties and even unmindful of the implications of the holy day devoted to her worship. Disguised as an ordinary human, an old Brahmin woman, Lakshmi advises a rich trader’s wife how to perform the ritual work (the vrata) meant for that day. Later, crossing beyond the bounds of the city proper, she arrives at the house of Sriya, the poor outcaste woman. Sriya’s hut has been cleaned and prepared for the goddess: sanctified, wiped clean with holy cow dung, the flowers arranged and the rice-paste drawings done on the walls and the floor. Pleased and impressed with the woman’s sincere devotion to work and worship, Lakshmi manifests herself in her house on the lotus flower Sriya has painted on her front porch (the lotus is the goddess’s traditional ­symbol). She blesses Sriya and grants her boons. When she returns to the temple, the two brothers prevent her from r­ e-entering because she has been in an outcaste’s house; at the angry Balaram’s insistence, the younger brother, Jagannath, tells Lakshmi that she must leave – at least, as he puts it, until Balaram can be pacified. Lakshmi reminds Jagannath of the promise he had made to allow her to go on her regular sojourns out into the world, to grace every home and feed everyone ‘from the lowliest insects to the Supreme Brahman’ (51), and leaves with the curse that the two brothers will suffer the fate that befalls anyone whom Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune and well-being, has abandoned. The middle section of the narrative may be called ‘The Lesson the Goddess Teaches the Mightiest Gods’, as she makes sure that the two brothers learn what it means to be poor, hungry and socially despised. Much of the action takes place in the city of Puri, outside the main temple complex, as the two brothers take the shape of Brahmin mendicants and go in search of food. One person after another turns them down, wary of the two strange Brahmin beggars, while others who 148

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wish to feed them discover that they cannot, for inexplicable reasons. So, they conclude that the two mendicants are to be avoided at all costs, since they must have been abandoned by the goddess of fortune. At long last the brothers arrive, unknowingly, at the new house that Viswakarma, the architect-god of carpenters and all craftspeople, has built for Lakshmi, and decide to beg for food there. The goddess instructs her maids to tell them that hers is the house of an outcaste woman. Hungry and desperate, they shed their caste pretensions and inhibitions, accept their final humiliation and agree to eat food cooked by a chandaluni (outcaste). Lakshmi cooks an elaborate and splendid feast for them and quietly reveals her identity to her husband when she sends them his favorite rice cake (podapitha). He seeks reconciliation with her, acknowledges her glory (mahima) and agrees to formally recognize the holy Thursday (Lakshmivar in Odia) that is dedicated to her worship. The goddess relents, but demands more: that the egalitarian values she has defended in the world outside be recognized inside the holiest of holy spaces, the Puri temple. She asks that, within its precincts, Brahmin and chandala, people of all castes and classes, be allowed to eat together, feed each other, every single day – and that the Lord endorse this practice. Jagannath agrees, ‘Yes, it shall be thus, dear Lakshmi; may your glory shine through the ages’ (76, translation modified). It is overwhelmingly likely that the practice of allowing members of various castes to eat together within the Jagannath temple complex predates the composition of Balaram Das’s Lakshmi Purana. Scholars have discussed the tribal origins of the deity and how tribal priests are incorporated into the highly ritualized worship in the temple (Eschmann 1978a, 1978b; Dash 1998). It is safe to conjecture that Balaram Das wrote his text to defend an antinomian practice that was already in place as a result of struggles by tribal and lower-caste devotees. Balaram Das’s purana is most probably an attempt to create an origin myth, providing divine sanction for a practice that must have been deeply offensive to Brahminical sensibilities. The narrative is inherently subversive, for Balaram Das’s Lakshmi is no ordinary goddess, and what she demands is socially unsettling as well as universal in its reach. She is not just another strong female deity who wants to protect her devotees against danger (the theme of many vrata kathas and mangalkavyas of the time – see below note 9), but is rather a goddess who will redefine our basic ethical notions: the meaning of duty, of action and, indeed, even of our identities. Balaram Das’s Lakshmi Purana is a feminist text primarily because it shows a female goddess using her personal power 149

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to challenge the way society defines identities and rewards virtue, and the way tradition – even when sanctioned by the Lord himself – understands our ascribed jati-identity and its implications for how we are to be treated.8 The Lakshmi Purana echoes Achyutananda’s poem, for it too makes varnashrama dharma, the duty that is supposed to derive from our socially ascribed identities, subordinate to our karma, our actions as individuals. Women and outcastes come together in this text to question unjustified authority, and when the Lord Jagannath and his brother Balaram are humiliated and taught a lesson, the critique is directed primarily at their arbitrary and hypocritical use of patriarchal power. It is, in short, a moral critique of how their deeds are inconsistent with their declared principles, how their actions contravene their promises. In pointing to this inconsistency, the goddess questions the claims to authority made by those who are born to it, for the implication is that authority ought in fact to derive from virtue. Without such congruence between power and principled behavior, the identities we possess because of our social privileges – of caste, wealth and status – have no ethical justification. It is clear from the bare outlines of the narrative that Lakshmi’s power is being celebrated and announced to the world. There is a tradition of powerful women characters in Indian literature, especially in the puranas devoted to tribal or local village goddesses. Tribal cultures were more egalitarian than the Hindu society, and tales of a powerful tribal or village goddess revealing her strength in a moment of crisis to save her devotees are common in eastern India, particularly in the popular traditions of Assam, Bengal and Odisha.9 But Lakshmi is no local deity; her origins can be traced back to the Vedas, and she has the sanction of the epics and the numerous puranas where she is mentioned as Lord Vishnu’s consort, the bestower of wealth, fortune and happiness, both worldly and spiritual (Upendra Dhal (1978) provides a comprehensive account). In the Odia literary tradition, Balaram draws on his immediate literary ancestor, the fifteenth-century poet Sarala Das, who invokes Lakshmi in his Mahabharata as a goddess who aids the poor and removes sorrow (daridra bhanjani; dukha binasini in the Madhyaparba – see S. N. Dash 2000: 6). Sarala Das’s Odia rendering of the Mahabharata is itself full of strong women, like Draupadi, and his Sita (in his Vilanka Ramayana) playfully challenges Rama with the assertion that he would not have been able to kill the demon Ravana without her help! Balaram, then, draws on a regional tradition that both places Lakshmi at the center of the pantheon of the gods and, more generally, worships several strong female heroines and goddesses. 150

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Balaram Das’s Lakshmi is a composite of all of these traditional images and themes, but she is above all a vernacularized goddess, an audacious local appropriation of a Vedic deity for local socio-political purposes. The colloquial Odia that Balaram Das uses identifies Lakshmi in the very first line as Vishnu’s gharani – instead of the more traditional tatsama word gruhini (both can be translated as ‘homemaker’).10 She is addressed in an informal and endearing way (just as she is in Sarala Das’s text) as Ma go – which roughly translates as ‘Mother, my dear’ – as opposed to the more traditional O, Ma! Lakshmi teases her husband when he forgets his promises to her, loves to put on her clothes and jewelry and loses her temper when Lord Balaram, Jagannath’s elder brother, judges her harshly and reveals his upper-caste prejudices against women and non-Brahmins. What we end up with in this Odia purana is a goddess who is simultaneously vernacularized – that is, reconceived in the regional and local cultural idiom – and made radical and universal. The values she comes to represent are not just socially subversive. They articulate principles – action is more important than social identity, karma more significant than varnashrama dharma – that can be exported, to the nation and beyond.11 The Lakshmi Purana invites its readers to use it as a pedagogical tool, as a text that counters the dominant pedagogy of the Brahminical elite. While Balaram Das’s purana teaches us to do our duty and thus participates in the general project of ‘civilizing’ and ‘domesticating’ (in the literal sense) the diverse members of his agrarian society, it grounds social equality and justice in principles that are not limited to the goddess’s own devotees, or even to Puri. These principles are radical because they are based on more than personal sentiment and in fact have universal reach. They call for recognition of the worth of individual human beings, of the value of work done well and of the worker as a potential agent of social transformation.12 Balaram Das’s Goddess Lakshmi criticizes local, regional customs and practices, but the ideas her narrative expresses transcend the boundaries of locality and region.

Puranic and radical pedagogy Generically, puranas were pedagogical texts and thus contained invitations, indeed exhortations, to the readers or listeners to study them regularly. Balaram Das puts his exhortation in the mouth of the Lord himself. Lord Jagannath promises that women who recite the Lakshmi Purana will ‘be righteous in this life/and will find a place in heaven’ (75). He adds: ‘If a woman explains this glorious scripture 151

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to others, the virtue she will earn will be indeed immeasurable’ (75, translation modified). While Odia women are urged to read or listen to this tale, they are also recruited as commentators on the work and as pedagogues. Recitation and explication of scriptural texts has been institutionalized in Odia culture since Jagannath Das established the first Bhagavat ghara in Puri in the sixteenth century, and today small meeting places exist in almost every Hindu village where villagers can gather at the end of the day to listen to and discuss the Bhagavat and other traditional texts (Mallik 2004: 195–96). Balaram Das has this kind of decentralized pedagogical context in mind as he makes the Lord invite ordinary Odia women to both listen to the Lakshmi Purana and to continue to talk about it, to explain – and discuss – its significance. Women are in effect encouraged – even mobilized – to take this purana into every home, to repeat its message about the duty of the homemaker and to begin to explicate, or mull over, its lessons about gender and caste relations, about the centrality of karma and the egalitarian vision of social justice. But once a reader gets down to the business of explicating and discussing the Lakshmi Purana, what will she find? What, in the text, cries out for explanation? Perhaps the most pertinent assertion of the text concerns the value of women’s work, in particular the work most women do in Das’s society: sustain the domestic world by cooking and cleaning, feeding and caring for others. The narrative turns on precisely this point, for what the Lords do not recognize at first is the value of what women do. Balaram says derisively to Jagannath: Listen to me, Govinda. . . . If your Lakshmi stays in the Temple, I will not. A wife serves a husband; she is like a shoe that adorns the foot of her husband. If I have a brother, I can always find a billion wives for him. (48, translation modified) It is this attitude that the goddess challenges. Lakshmi does not want to punish the brothers merely because she is angry; they must be taught, she insists, a social lesson. She is clear about the implications of what her husband has done, as she explains to her assistants: ‘If Lord Jagannath can abandon me, his wife; imagine what – especially in this Kali Yuga [our Age of Vice] – ordinary men will do! Men must recognize how much they need us’ (57, translation modified). The Lord’s actions reflect a common patriarchal practice in medieval India, and instead of merely condemning it, the goddess Lakshmi proceeds to show how much (among other things) the material welfare of a household – as of 152

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society – derives from the work women do. At various moments in the narrative, the two brothers are shown that they are not self-sufficient, that they need the ‘gharani’ Lakshmi. If the Lakshmi Purana teaches its female readers the domestic virtues traditionally associated with women – that of taking care of the home, of service and gracious hospitality toward guests – it does not do so in a purely traditional way. It teaches service, not servility. The devotion the goddess associates with work, duty and ritual worship is simultaneously religious and ethical. It advocates the kind of mindfulness without which even worship becomes meaningless. But mindful and loving attention to one’s home and to one’s work coexists in this text with recognition of the inherent value and dignity of the work a woman does – and hence by implication that of individual women, of workers. As we follow the narrative, we come to realize that the exercise of power – even the power of the Lord – must not contravene the contractual understanding that the existence of the household implies, that we respect the cooperative division of labor and the value of all kinds of labor. What Lord Balaram is chided (and punished) for is the arbitrary use of his patriarchal authority to deny Lakshmi reentry into the Temple. The Lord Balaram we encounter in this text is arrogant as well as stubborn, unresponsive to reason. Since Lord Balaram stands for the figure of arbitrary and arrogant male authority in this feminist text, it makes sense that he would be the target of the text’s barbs and jokes. Especially given its oral performances, we can appreciate the raucous humor with which Balaram is ridiculed by some of the women characters (Mallik 2004: 193–94; on Odia folk performances). We see him called names – ‘fatso’, for instance; we see how, driven wild by hunger, he gobbles down huge amounts of rice and is gently ridiculed by the maid who is serving him. Consciousness comes late to the male gods, who finally accept their abjection and ignore the caste prohibitions that prevent them from eating food served by an outcaste.

The construction of Identities If the education of the divine brothers is one major aspect of Balaram Das’s text and it is based on the unraveling of their patriarchal and upper-caste roles, the other aspect of the text is the creation of an alternative common identity of the oppressed. Gods and humans, Brahmins and chandalas, are all brought down to earth, as it were, and their social identities exposed as, in the end, constructed and hence contingent. While it would be too much to impute to the 153

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Lakshmi Purana the notion of the modern self-interested and acquisitive individual, disembedded from religious or spiritual community, it would not be hard to see how, for Das, the individual’s karma is a major source of value for the world as a whole. Karma is not rigidly determined by a pre-given identity; social identities are secondary.13 Nowhere does this emphasis become clearer than in the way even the goddess’s own identity is shown to be layered and complex, and in part a product of her own will and changing values. When she decides to leave the temple complex, she announces to her husband that she will give up her ascribed privileges and identify as a chandaluni. When she makes the brothers go through one humiliation after another, she does this as a self-avowed chandaluni. The real chandaluni of the tale, Sriya, cannot live within the bounds of the city of Puri, and Lakshmi – who lives at the very center of the city, in the sacred temple complex – willingly transforms herself into an outsider. She refuses the rituals of purification that her husband offers and moves to the outskirts of the city; we see the transformation of her identity most forcefully in two passages that stand out for their poetic power. The first of these describes Lakshmi putting on her ornaments and jewels, happy that she is going out to do what she loves most, to serve and feed the world’s creatures. The narrative, which is usually fast-paced, begins almost in slow motion as this passage names each resplendent jewel, proudly announcing its ‘indescribable’ beauty to the universe. She is, after all, the goddess of wealth and fortune, and her appearance is radiant as she explores and announces her own glory. Everything we have heard about her physical features has been muted and generic,14 but now, putting on her ornaments one by one, she seems to be revealing the inner glory of ‘Sri’, the divine beauty with which she is associated. But the intricate details in Das’s description are local and regional, not traditional: On the side of her nose she placed nine-jeweled rings Around her neck the four-stringed gemstone Elegant armlets and bracelets on her arms and wrists And Cat’s-eye pendants dangled from threads of gold. Ornaments with jingling bells adorned her ankles; The Mother looked beauteous with these jewels. . . Since the Mother owns the three worlds of earth, heaven, and hell, How can we describe her jewels and ornaments? (36, translation modified) 154

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The jewels and gem-stones suggest the riches of the earth and beyond, and especially for Hindu readers, who are taught by tradition to associate a stone or jewel with a particular aspect of the universe, this picture is less decorative and more suggestive of power: the awe-inspiring beauty of the goddess reveling in her power as the goddess Lakshmi. From the point of view of the narrative, however, this is no more than a hiatus, for to the world of human beings Lakshmi will look like the old Brahmin woman in whose guise she has decided to appear. So, this powerfully celebratory passage is, if anything, a moment of selfawareness, of meditative joy – not unlike the inward focus of a trained athlete right before the game begins, the suspended moment when the world has not yet made its claims on her. The passage does mark a form of display, no doubt, but it is a display of beauty and power that is as much for herself as for the world. Not unlike the beautiful frozen moments in Odissi dance, the display in this passage is yogic, where the stillness marks the gathering of inner power, the end of a long arduous process of preparing – to be. The goddess’s j­ewels are resplendent not because of their intrinsic beauty but because they are where they belong, expressing the attributes of the goddess r­eveling in herself as the goddess of wealth and well-being. The jewels and ornaments are no doubt also those of the goddess Lakshmi of the Puri temple complex, the Lord’s gharani, the beloved bahu (daughter-in-law) of a wealthy household. While there is no necessary contradiction between these two roles, that of the goddess of wealth and the gharani of a wealthy household, they are not always consistent with each other. When ­Lakshmi decides to rebel against the orthodox patriarchal attitudes of her husband and his brother, she decides to express her rebellion not simply by leaving the temple but first by dismantling one of her primary social identities, that of the dutiful Odia bahu and homemaker. In this next passage, we see her pulling off her jewels and ornaments, one by one, and tossing them on the floor. The jewels lie in a heap; they may shine, but they no longer embody the goddess’s power. In the ‘darkness’, where they are discarded, they rage like a fire, emitting a harsh light (looking dau dau), joyless because they are shorn of context and meaning. She took off the tassel of pearls from her hair And from her bosom the fine silk Embroidered with gold and gems The Mother unfastened her netted waistband of gemstones and jewels; Unhooked from her ears the large diamond danglers; 155

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She removed her jade and gold necklace. . . How can I describe the other ornaments? Piled together in the darkness, where she discarded them, They burn like a raging fire, producing a joyless light. ‘Keep them,’ she said to the Lord, ‘They are now yours, O Friend of the Destitute’. (N: 53–54/D: 738, translation modified) What these two passages emblematize, especially when juxtaposed, is a series of questions about the metaphysics of identity. They raise worries about which of our possessions and properties are really ours, which ones are essential and which ones external and adventitious. For those who believe in the sanctity of traditional identities, such passages raise troubling questions about belonging and ownership, about inner versus outer: jewels that look as natural as flowers in a garden can look like ornaments that merely decorate (or worse, even hide an inner flaw). The passages suggest that our identities are contextual, and that we have the power to make and remake them in the light of our changing ethical and political commitments. Our identities, the goddess Lakshmi suggests, can serve the dominant patriarchal order, and they can challenge it as well. The denuding, the willed discarding of jewels and ornaments, is in itself the creation of a new self. The fiery harshness (dau dau) of the discarded ornaments points to the death of one identity and to the new one that the death makes possible. Lakshmi’s action draws attention to the power involved in remaking our inner selves – the willed askesis enables the full flowering of the goddess as a fighter, the goddess who not only serves the lowliest social creatures, the chandalas, but also identifies herself as one and fights alongside them.15 The lowly creature most directly associated with the goddess is, of course, her outcaste devotee, Sriya. Her name is a derivation from one of the goddess’s most ancient names: Sri. The connotations of the name – beauty, divine grace – are visible in the way Sriya performs her social duty, since she transforms even menial work into a form of mindful worship: she ‘swept clean the streets . . . with rapturous devotion for the Lord’ (45). Before the goddess appears in Sriya’s chandala neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, she is struck by images of indolence and somnolence. Young and old women of the upper castes, half asleep, clothes in disarray, contrast sharply with Sriya, who is a model of hard work and mindful devotion. Her glory (mahima), we are told, is not yet visible (agochara) to the gods, but she works quietly and attentively. Her worship is no empty ritual, for we see in the description the stirrings of subjectivity. In the middle of her ritual 156

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worship of Lakshmi, she grows restive but then continues, arranging and decorating her altar: [Sriya] drew murals on the floor of her house with raw rice paste. She drew an intricate lotus motif with sixteen petals. She lighted an earthen lamp that had ten mouths to hold ten wicks, and placed it at the center of the mural. On this mural she placed fruits and tubers of ten colors. . . . Her mind drifted, grew restless; she went to get more raw rice and some holy duba grass. (46; translation modified, my emphasis) Sriya is depicted as a conscious and attentive devotee, with believable psychological traits. Her ritual worship is not routine or mechanical; she brings mindfulness to both work and worship and occasionally struggles to keep her mind on her tasks. This sign of human failing makes her devotion more endearing and her work more meaningful. It accentuates the attitude of willed surrender she brings to what she does, the attitude of shraddha that can transform work into worship, a routine menial job into selfless service. These are the very attitudes – humility and joy in service and work – that the goddess herself embodies in the Lakshmi Purana. This is evident in some of the most telling descriptions we have in the text: that of Lakshmi preparing her new home to serve and feed the two hungry brothers who have finally arrived at her house. Lakshmi cleaned the whole palace with her own hands. She sprinkled the house with camphor and oil of sandalwood. She assembled for her guests utensils made of gold: platters, plates, quarter-plates, bowls and quarter-bowls. She also arranged basins for the rinsing of their hands and tubs for washing their feet, as is the practice of the two Lords when they are offered the bhog. She made and spread out two mats of pure gold, where the brothers will sit and have their food. Then the Mother pleaded with her maids: Go and usher in my Lords . . . go, hurry! (69–70) 157

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This attitude of service represents more than forgiveness. It shows us how to value the work we do in our everyday lives – even the work delegated to women and the lowly classes of the world. When we see the thematic links between the goddess and the chandaluni, Sri and Sriya, the picture of women’s work points to a generalizable value. It is the valorization of the ordinary, the everyday, the socially marginal – that which is taken for granted. The goddess shows us how such work can be both humble and grand; in fact, we see this most clearly when Sri and Sriya fuse together in our line of vision. The lowly Sriya, whose mahima or glory was hitherto undetected, is elevated by Lakshmi’s divine blessings. The material blessings she asks for hesitantly (‘I don’t know what to ask for, My Goddess, since I have never learned how to ask for boons’) appear in a form that celebrates both the doer and the ideal of a deed well done. Sriya herself becomes a generative metaphor of wealth and plenty, of abundance: her hut, ‘which resembled a wasp’s burrow’, turns into a ‘palace’ made of fragrant sandalwood; the granary that had no rice is now stacked with gold; her childless home is now filled with ‘five sons’. In the course of one day in divine time, Sriya’s human world is profoundly transformed. The invisible toiler is now recognized as bhagyavati, or ‘the woman of good fortune’, her house now the blessed center of a universe of abundance. The work done by the lowly is lifted up to divine gaze, given the universal recognition it so richly deserves. The connections established between Sri and Sriya, goddess and devotee, are even more intimate. In another text, the ‘Kamalalochona Chautisa’, Balaram Das calls the goddess Lakshmi ‘Sriya’. ‘Sriyadevi’, the goddess Lakshmi, is identified as the consort of Lord Vishnu (or Jagannath). The Lord is Sriyadevinka manohara, dear to the goddess’s heart. The interchangeability of Sri and Sriya, the goddess and the outcaste woman, supports the Lakshmi Purana’s ideological emphasis on what modern feminist theory calls ‘women’s work’. Our sixteenthcentury text performs the audacious and counter-hegemonic task of valuing that which is socially invisible (agochara); it also refines our understanding of all work, all socially meaningful work, by emphasizing its subjective dimension. While on one level Das’s goddess Lakshmi speaks to the women of every Odia household about their domestic duties, on another level she directs her challenging questions at all members of Odia society, men and women, the upper and the lower castes. Hence the poetic emphasis on identities, on how they are constructed and how they are remade. In the striking passages about the goddess’s ornaments and jewelry, Lakshmi seems to celebrate her own identity as wife and goddess, and then to openly disown part of it. Her 158

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new identifications, her solidarities, are also clearly suggested: the text links her to her foremost devotee, Sriya, as well as to a whole class of lowly workers, the substratum of society. The poetic – in particular, metaphorical – connections among the various actors consolidate the philosophical redefinition of identity in terms of action rather than social ascription, or karma rather than dharma. The individual self is extricated from entanglements of caste and social station as the self of the doer and the devotee. The Lakshmi Purana may well represent a major stage in the articulation of a subjectivity that is disembedded from caste and class and is available in principle to all human agents, not limited to gods and goddesses. Part of the poetic achievement of Balaram Das’s text is that it performs a series of powerful displacements, spatial as well as political, of which Lord to outcaste is perhaps the most startling one. The typical trajectory of these displacements can be traced by following one humble word, the colloquial Odia adjective bai. It appears most prominently when Jagannath chides Lakshmi after she returns to the Puri temple. He reminds her that she is, after all, popularly known among the ordinary people of Odisha as the bai thakurani, the ‘crazy’ or ‘fickle’ goddess. Fickleness is of course the stereotype that would commonly be applied to the goddess of fortune, but what Jagannath is referring to in the context of the narrative is also her impatience, her restiveness, her desire to wander – to go beyond the boundaries of the temple complex and to cross traditional lines of separation that another goddess (any woman, for that matter) would be reluctant to violate. The colloquial Odia word bai is derived from the tatsama word Bayu or wind (from the Sanskrit Vayu), and its semantic migration to suggest restlessness, fickleness and even errancy is perfectly natural. After all, Lakshmi herself claims the right to wander: to leave the sacred space of the temples to visit the world outside where she will serve, teach and mingle – with everyone from the lowliest insect to the Lords of the world. But very soon we notice that the adjective bai itself wanders within the confines of the text. When Sriya asks for boons, the goddess lovingly chides her for being bai: ‘How can you be so bai, my dear Sriya’, she says, ‘as to want immortality, something that is impossible for me to give you?’ (She can grant boons of wealth and fame, even happiness after her death – but granting a human immortality is beyond even her power.) The slightly pejorative adjective becomes an affectionate term when used by the goddess, suggesting that the qualities it denotes are not so negative after all. It is natural for humans to want more, to ask for things that are not (yet) possible. In our human world, it 159

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may be good to stray a bit, to go beyond the bounds of what is given, what is traditionally accepted and understood. Later in the text, the adjective returns playfully, with the pejorative connotations intact, but this time attached to Lord Jagannath. When the two brothers appear at Lakshmi’s palace, hungry and desperate, Jagannath explains to the servant women how they are suffering because of what they did to his wife. The women, who know who the brothers are and what issues are at stake, pretend they do not, and mock him: ‘Don’t be bai, you old Brahmin, why should a man suffer just because he drove his wife out of his house?’ Here bai means something like the colloquial ‘daft’ or ‘silly’, and part of the point is to get the Lord to confess how much he values Lakshmi, how much he needs her. But this is achieved by transferring the adjective bai from her to him, which would be a startlingly rude thing to do to the Lord if we had not already come to hear the word used affectionately by the goddess to describe her devotee.

Remaking tradition and the individual It is in the context of such semantic and thematic displacements that we approach the radical demand at the end. When Lakshmi demands that everyone, Brahmin or chandala, be treated as equal within the precincts of the temple, and the Lord agrees to it, that newly sanctioned practice of the various castes eating together – customary even to this day in Puri – is itself the visionary product of Balaram Das’s wanderings. It is a bold statement defying caste hierarchy, and it makes the Lord invite the outcaste into the symbolically powerful inner world of the Puri temple complex. This is the political value the goddess wishes to exemplify, indeed to embody, for the world outside the temple’s boundaries, Hindu society in general. The temple courtyard where food is shared now becomes a counter-hegemonic space sanctioned by the Divine Law, by the word of the Lord. But this Law is, of course, new, and its origins can be traced not only to the word of Lord Jagannath but also to the goddess’s questioning, restive, reformative spirit. The new Law owes its existence to the community of the outcastes and women that the goddess embodies, a community of the subaltern that lies beyond the traditional purview of Brahminically controlled Divine Law. It is wandering, and even errancy, that takes us beyond the Law of tradition to produce a new and more humane Law. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that Balaram Das leaves it open whether the male Lord himself quite comprehends what is at stake in the change.16 It is enough for our purposes that the Lord will (have to) listen to us, for the Lakshmi Purana’s ultimate message is that the transformation of 160

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the world is primarily our own responsibility, primarily up to us. The Lord is humanized in the narrative, but it is the female reader (of the vrata katha) who is elevated to the status of agent, of doer. Women ask, demand, act – and that is how we get the Lord (and the Lords of the world) to change the way things are.17 In this powerful text, written some five hundred years ago, the image of Hindu tradition is transformed, since it is made accountable to the contingent present, just as male gods are to eccentric goddesses, Brahmins to bai outcastes. The transformed image of Hindu tradition can be traced in part through the semantic and ideological unsettling of the notion of karma. The Lakshmi Purana marks a certain ambiguity in the meaning of work and duty, even as it brings about a radical transformation of caste-based evaluations and perceptions by valorizing the work done by women and all lowly workers. For work done with sincerity and devotion is not enough to challenge an unjust social structure, since it may simply be ritual work devoted to one’s ascribed station in life. The new attitude to work may ensure that the unjust social system will function more smoothly, making the lowly workers content with their lot. This is why, for all her importance, Sriya cannot by herself be the central agent in Balaram Das’s narrative. It is Sriya and her goddess Sri who together form the more complete image of the new social agent and outline a new notion of karma. Dutiful work can serve the caste order of society, but the goddess suggests the principle that part of our duty is to wander, to question and to challenge – just as she challenges patriarchal will and tradition as well as her own identities. Karma thus includes the intentional act of questioning the world around us. Sri and Sriya together complete the new conception of karma suggested in Achyutananda Das’s ‘Bipra Chalaka’; dharma or virtue derives from intentional action based on a critical awareness. Just as ritual worship is made mindful through conscious effort in the Lakshmi Purana, social existence is itself made meaningful through the principle of critique. Karma and inherited social roles (the traditional meaning of dharma) are here wrenched apart; what emerges as an alternative to ascribed identity is the thinking, questioning, critical self – something close to the modern ideal of the individual, whose value does not depend on social status but rather on what she or he chooses to do, on intentional action. It should not come as a surprise that these semantic and ideological reversals would be close to the heart of Balaram Das, the self-declared sudra writer. Drawing on a remarkably diverse intellectual tradition, Balaram Das and the panchasakha saint–poets attempt a critical synthesis and envision a social revolution through their narratives, songs and dramatic performances. 161

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My analysis of the rise of the notion of a self-aware individuality (grounded in the capacity for social evaluation and criticism) in a sixteenth-century Odia text suggests that we need to reread medieval Indian vernacular literature through new lenses, looking in particular at the way traditional religious idioms are being deployed for novel explorations. New questions are being asked during this transitional period, from new perspectives, and new social values are being explored. Medieval Indian literatures reveal a picture of a dynamic society in flux, a very different image from the one we have inherited from James Mill. And the view of modernity that emerges in them is at odds with the capitalist modernity that dominates in the European context. Much work needs to be done on literary and nonliterary texts from this period before we can generalize usefully, but the central questions suggested by such analyses as mine are tantalizing ones. What would a critical and self-aware individuality look like if it were not tethered to capitalist values? The emergence of individuality in the text I have examined reveals what has been called a ‘disembedding’ from primordial commitments (see Taylor 2004); it begins to conceptualize individual actions as logically prior to, and not dependent on, ascribed social duty. Similarly, in this new perspective, self-making and remaking are fundamental to social critique. A new radical identity politics based on the solidarity of the subaltern groups challenges the hegemonic identity constructs of Brahminical ideologies, specifically of varna and caste. Is it possible to see in these new cultural imaginings a non-instrumental form of rationality, a new set of generalizable critical principles through which the poor and the marginalized challenge unjustified power and authorize their own insurgency? How do we understand the role the social struggles of oppressed groups have played in the development of such universal modern values as egalitarianism and individuality? The pursuit of these far-reaching questions calls for research that is both comparative and multidisciplinary, and I hope to have suggested through my analysis of one medieval Indian narrative that literary criticism can play a crucial role in shaping such a project.

Notes 1 A version of this chapter appeared in Diacritics, 38.3 (2008): 3–21. Mohanty, Satya P., ‘Alternative Modernities and Medieval Literature: The Oriya Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy’, Diacritics, 38:3 (2008): 3–21, John Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of John Hopkins University Press. 2 Puri’s main deity, Lord Jagannath (‘Lord of the Universe’), originated in tribal cultures but was gradually Hinduized. The temple complex we see

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today was built in the twelfth century. Puri, and Odisha in general, have been researched and written about extensively in recent decades; for a sampling of the most impressive body of work, see the collections Cult of Jagannath (1978) and Jagannath Revisited (2001). 3 This unpublished poem is quoted by Mallik (1996); see Medieval Odisha 44. The orthodox Brahminical notion of dharma as tied to varna is articulated most famously by Lord Krishna in chapter 2, verse 31 of the Bhagavad Gita. Buddhism provided egalitarian and universalist alternatives to this Brahminical interpretation of dharma, and since medieval Odishan society had a strong Buddhist cultural tradition, it is likely that Achyutananda Das was drawing on it. Santina provides a critique of Krishna’s Brahminical view of dharma and karma, as expressed in chapter 2 of the Gita. 4 For a brief account of Achyutananda Das and the panchasakha as mystics and thinkers, see C. Das’s (1951) Studies. Mallik’s (2004) Paradigms provides a more comprehensive and detailed historical account, with an emphasis on the Odia sudra-muni tradition, which began with Sarala Das. On Balaram Das, see C. Das’s (1982) Balaram. Unlike many Indian writers of the period, Sarala Das and the panchasakha did not have court patronage. They were almost all from the lower castes, and the one Brahmin in the group – Jagannath Das – sided with the lower castes in his writings. They and other Indian writers used the name ‘Das’ or ‘Dasa’ (which means slave or servant) to disown their caste identity; they saw themselves as servants of the Lord and hence less accountable to kings and priests. 5 A good brief introduction to the classical puranas is Narayana Rao’s (2007) ‘Purana’; Rocher (1986) provides extensive summaries and a comprehensive analysis of the genre. Balaram Das incorporates the traditional content of the puranas into the more focused form of the vrata katha. Since vrata kathas were meant to be read ritually by women, this choice was politically and strategically quite astute. 6 The Lakshmi Purana is not a translation or transcreation of an existing model in Sanskrit, although it may have drawn on oral traditions in Odia. Das’s Odia text is very popular and can be found on the web at: www. odia.org/books/LaxmiPurana.pdf (last accessed on 28 November 2018). No critical editions exist, but there are two translations into English. The first is an excerpt, translated by Rajendra Prasad Das (1999). The second is the complete text, published in 2007. I rely mainly on the second translation, done by Lipipuspa Nayak, modifying it in many places. When I quote from the Nayak translation without any changes, I provide just the page number. When I draw on the Das translation as well, I provide both page numbers, indicating the Nayak pagination with an N and the Das with a D (I also indicate if I have modified the translations). 7 There is a vast (and somewhat confusing) body of recent work on the notion of colonial and alternative modernities. A helpful survey of some basic questions is Dube and Banerjee-Dube’s “Introduction” to Unbecoming Modern; that collection and Alternative Modernities convey a sense of the range of issues involved. Chakrabarty’s is an influential account, and his title Provincializing Europe provides a non-nativist flag under which students from all cultures can rally. Taylor’s Modern, building on his nonrelativist philosophical approach, has cleared the ground for non-ethnocentric comparative studies.

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8 Jati is the word that corresponds to caste; the earlier word varna is closer to ‘station in life’ (based on occupation), since it is not as rigidly determined by birth (see Jaiswal 1998). 9 For a discussion of a purana devoted to Assam’s famous Tantric goddess Kamakhya Devi, see Biernacki (2007). On the mangalkavya tradition in Bengal, devoted to the local village goddesses Manasa and Chandi, see Clark (1955). In Odisha, Sarala Das wrote his Chandi Purana in the fifteenth century, but it is different in tone from Balaram Das’s text devoted to Lakshmi. The Odia Lakshmi Purana builds on the feminist genre devoted to strong tribal and tantric goddesses, but changes it drastically by focusing on a classical goddess and by developing universalist ethical notions. 10 Tatsama words, favored by the educated elites, were vernacular words derived from Sanskrit and changed only very slightly. 11 In other words, this is a vernacular formulation of ideas that are cosmopolitan in reach. Pollock (1995, 1998, 2006) has done valuable work on the idea of Sanskrit and vernacular ‘cosmopolitanisms’, and he suggests new ways to analyze vernacularization and the role of literature across regional and national contexts. 12 Even though there is no hard textual evidence, it is very likely that the Odia panchasakha writers are echoing the southern Indian anticaste movement called ‘Virasaivism’, which originated in Karnataka in the twelfth century and became a popular social force there and in Andhra. Worshippers of Lord Siva, the Virasaivas questioned notions of dharma based on social rank and emphasized the importance of work done with devotion. For a basic historical account of Virasaivism, see Desai (1968), and for a discussion of doctrine, Malledevaru (1973). On the theme of the dignity of work in Virasaiva thought, see Michael (1982). 13 Cynthia Talbot (2001) talks about the ‘fluidity of social identities’ in medieval Andhra and elsewhere (84–86 and ff.) and provides lucid discussions of issues in medieval Indian historiography (esp. 1–17; 208–15). 14 Contrast this muted description with, for instance, the Sri Sukta in the Rig Veda, the earliest invocation of the goddess, where she is described more precisely using the following Sanskrit adjectives: she is (among many other things) jvalanti, lustrous like fire, and yasti, slim and slender; she is described as padmavarna: she has the color of the lotus flower. For a complete translation and some discussion, see Dhal (1978: 47–62). 15 In my view, the willed making and unmaking of identities is often an implicitly rational response to changing contexts, and so identities, while constructed, are not thereby arbitrary. New identity choices are justified when they are based on an accurate understanding of (changing) social relations and political needs, and of the values and principles that are most appropriate for those needs. This view of the transformation of identities is similar to the approach defended in the collection Reclaiming Identity (2000) and by Babbitt (1996). This chapter on the Lakshmi Purana can be read in part as an extension of the theory of identity I have been elaborating since the early 1990s (see Mohanty 1993; 1997, chapter 7). 16 All that we hear from Lord Jagannath is that he acknowledges Lakshmi’s power and glory after having been humiliated by her; he endorses the

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practice of inter-caste mingling in the temple courtyard but says nothing about its significance (see N 74–5). 17 How much the lords of the world listen or yield to us is of course a historically contingent and contextual matter. An analysis of the changes in the practice of caste-intermixing within the Puri temple would be valuable, especially if it follows the multidisciplinary methodological model Dash (1998) provides for his analysis of struggles within the priestly community. Another valuable project would be to examine the way the Lakshmi Purana has been deployed in subaltern social mobilizations over the ages. This would also involve tracking the shifting power relations in the general polity (the British, for instance, gave more power to the Brahmin priests than the priests had before – for strategic administrative reasons; see Mubayi (2005), esp. 152–90; for an important related account, see Kulke (1993), esp. 1–136).

References Babbitt, Susan E. 1996. Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Biernacki, Loriliai. 2007. Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clark, T. W. 1955. ‘Evolution of Hinduism in Medieval Bengali Literature: Siva, Candi, Manasa’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 17(3): 503–18. Das, Balarama. 1999. ‘Lakshmi Purana’ [An Excerpt], in K. Ayappa Pannikkar (ed.), Medieval Indian Literature: An Anthology. Translated by Rajendra Prasad Das, pp. 734–38. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Das, Balaram. 2007. Lakshmi Purana: A Paean to the Goddess of Fortune. Translated by Lipipuspa Nayak. Bhubaneswar: Grassroots. Das, Chittaranjan. 1951. Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature of Odisha. Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati. Das, Chittaranjan. 1982. Balaram Das. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Dash, G. N. 1998. Hindus and Tribals: Quest for Co-Existence (Social Dynamics in Medieval Odisha). New Delhi: Decent. Dash, Surendra Nath. 2000. ‘Purbabhasa’, in Surendra Nath Dash (ed.), Balarama Dasanka Lakshmi Purana, pp. 1–24. Cuttack: Prachi Sahitya Pratisthan. Desai, P. B. 1968. Basaveshwara and His Times. Bangalore: Basava Samithi. Dhal, Upendra Nath. 1978. Goddess Lakshmi: Origin and Development. New Delhi: Oriental Publishers. Dube, Saurabh and Ishita Banerjee-Dube. 2006. ‘Introduction. Critical Questions of Colonial Modernities’, in Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube (eds.), Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities, pp. 1–31. New Delhi: Social Science Press.

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Eschmann, Anncharlott. 1978a. ‘Hinduization of Tribal Deities in Odisha: The Sakta and Saiva Typology’, in Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi (eds.), The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Odisha, pp. 79–98. New Delhi: Manohar. Eschmann, Anncharlott. 1978b. ‘Prototypes of the Navakalevara Ritual and their Relation to the Jagannatha Cult’, in Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke, and Gaya Charan Tripathi (eds.), The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Odisha, pp. 265–84. New Delhi: Manohar. Gaonkar, Dilip Parmeshwar, ed. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jaiswal, Suvira. 1998. Caste: Origin, Function and Dimensions of Change. New Delhi: Manohar. Kulke, Hermann. 1993. Kings and Cults: State Formation and Legitimation in India and South East Asia. New Delhi: Manohar. Kulke, Hermann and Burkhard Schnepel, eds. 2001. Jagannath Revisited: Studying Society, Religion, and the State in Odisha. New Delhi: Manohar. Malledevaru, H. P. 1973. Essentials of Virasaivism. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Mallik, Basanta Kumar. 1996. Medieval Odisha: Literature, Society, Economy, 1500–1600 A.D. Bhubaneswar: Mayur. Mallik, Basanta Kumar. 2004. Paradigms of Dissent and Protest: Social Movements in Eastern India, c. AD 1400–1700. New Delhi: Manohar. Michael, R. Blake. 1982. ‘Work as Worship in Virasaiva Tradition’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 50(4): 605–19. Mohanty, Satya P. 1993. ‘The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition’, Cultural Critique, 24: 41–80. Mohanty, Satya P. 1997. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moya, Paula M. L. and Michael Hames-Garcia, eds. 2000. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mubayi, Yaaminey. 2005. Altar of Power: The Temple and the State in the Land of Jagannatha Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. New Delhi: Manohar. Narayana Rao, Velcheru. 2007. ‘Purana’, in Sushil Mittal and G. R. Thursby (eds.), The Hindu World, pp. 97–115. London: Routledge. Pollock, Sheldon. 1995. ‘Literary History, Indian History, World History’, Social Scientist, 23(10/12): 112–42. Pollock, Sheldon. 1998. ‘The Cosmopolitan Vernacular’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 57(1): 6–37. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Rocher, Ludo. 1986. The Puranas. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Talbot, Cynthia. 2001. Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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9 VERNACULAR MODERNITY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF BHAKTI Purushottam Agrawal

The term modern and its derivatives are important as markers of historical time, not merely for indicating a certain point in the ongoing flow, but also for being indicative of the spread of a specific epistemological and ethical orientation. This orientation manifests itself in the emergence of a new kind of consciousness of relationship between humans, nature and society. This new consciousness privileges an acquired individual identity over an ascribed one, emphasizes the empirical nature of ‘proof’ over a ‘scriptural’ one, and endeavors to evolve a rational ethics and a culture of dialogue. Together, these can be taken as the defining characteristics of modernity, which are not confined merely to the European version. In the past few decades, the Eurocentric notion of modernity has come under scrutiny. In a recent article, Harbans Mukhia rightly underlines ‘the increasing discomfort with the received idea of modernity and therefore all its derivatives’, but he takes this discomfort a bit too far when he claims that terms like modern and early modern ‘have become more like slogans than helpful analytical categories’ (2015: 11). This increasing discomfort is obviously rooted in the fact that modernity per se, both as a historical development and a philosophical idea, became the subject of academic studies and theorization in the post-World War II west. In these studies, features like differentiation, urbanization, industrialization, communication and new collectivities bound up with nation–states were identified as the unique features of the original, i.e., European modernity (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998: 3). Underlying this identification was what Max Weber (1946) labeled ‘disenchantment of the world’. 168

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European modernity as the original modernity naturally leads to the idea of Europe being the exporter of modernization to the rest of the world through a historically progressive process, however cruel, of colonization and imperialism. Modernity outside Europe, then, by definition becomes a derivative of the original European modernity. What is being increasingly recognized and emphasized now is the contemporaneous and non-derivative character of various modernities, with European modernity being just one of them. And there is a growing interest in identifying common characteristics along with the specificity of various sites which witnessed the emergence of early modernity between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It is obviously with reference to European modernity that Bruno Latour (1993 [1991]) provocatively claims ‘we have never been modern’, in a book with the same title. Keeping in mind the Weberian notion of disenchantment, he insists that contemporary matters of public concern such as global warming, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and emerging biotechnologies mix politics, science, popular and specialist discourse to such a degree that a tidy nature/culture dualism is no longer possible. In fact, he further claims that the modernist distinction between nature and culture never existed in history. The point, however, is that this dualism is not necessarily the moving force of many moments of early modernity – which were not derivative of, but rather contemporaneous with, the moment of early modernity of Europe. Interestingly, Latour’s and other postmodernists’ method implicitly admits the uniqueness and primacy of European m ­ odernity, and automatically reduces all other historical moments of early modernities to either being derivative or inauthentic. The attempts at ­de-centering thus become the reiterations of the centrality of Europe and its history. The situation is summed up succinctly by Achille Mbembe: on key matters, the Hegelian, post-Hegelian and Weberian traditions, philosophies of action and philosophies of deconstruction derived from Nietzsche or Heidegger, share the representation of distinction between the west and other historical human forms as, largely, the way the individual in the west has gradually freed her/himself from the sway of traditions and attained an autonomous capacity to conceive, in the here and now, the definition of norms and their free formulation by individual wills. These traditions also share, to varying degrees, the assumption that compared to the west, other societies are primitive, simple, or traditional in that in them, the weight of past predetermines individual behavior and 169

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limits the areas of choice – as if it were a priori. The formulation of norms in these latter societies has nothing to do with reasoned public deliberation, since the setting of norms by a process of argument is a specific invention of modern Europe. (2001: 10–11; emphasis added) The idea of an individual freeing her/himself from the a priori limits of choice and thus attaining the ‘autonomous capacity to conceive’ new norms of perception and behavior (of course, in varying degrees) is at the crux of the notion of modernity. That is why the idea of modernity is important philosophically as well as historically. This autonomy can be achieved in different ways in different cultural contexts, and by the same logic through diverse forms of rationality. And in order to examine and compare the diverse historical sites of modernity, or even the impact of European modernity on non-European societies, it is important to revise the received theory of modernity. As Sudipta Kaviraj puts it: How should a theory of modernity cope with the historical difference? My dissatisfaction with received modernization theories has been driven by parochial interest in Indian history, just as that theory was devised by the need to understand the equally parochial interests – making sense of primarily European history. . . . It is certainly necessary to understand the history of modernity in other settings, but also to ask what shape should the theory assume if it is to deal with this expanding historical diversity. (2005: 497) Diversity does not rule out inter-connectivity. Historically speaking, the emergence of disenchantment strictly of the European variety alone cannot be taken as the prerequisite of modernity. It is also useful to remember that though intertwined, modernity and industrialization are not synonymous with each other. After all, even in Europe modernization of ideas and attitudes – ‘enlightened’ interrogation of ‘traditional’ ideas and practices – preceded the industrialization and not vice versa. Mexican historian Enrique Dussel reminds his readers of Max Weber’s ‘intuition’ that ‘if Europe [had] not been the region most prepared to carry out the Industrial Revolution, it would have been China or Hindustan’ (2006: 168). As a matter of fact, European modernity itself, far from being unique and indicating an inherent superiority, was a result of global processes. To recall the telling metaphor used by Sanjay Subrahmanyam: 170

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Modernity is historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena – the Mongol dream of world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities of Indian textile traders in the diaspora, the ‘globalization of microbes’ that historians of the 1960s were fond of discussing and so on. (1998: 99–100; emphasis in original) John F. Richards (1997) identifies several material factors to account for early modern (1500–1800) as distinct from the Middle Ages that preceded it and the modern nineteenth and twentieth centuries that followed it. These factors were the creation of global sea passages, the rise of a world economy, the growth of large, stable states, the growth of the world population, intensification of land use and diffusion of new technologies, and none of these left India untouched – hence the question and the caution: Can we infer that the circulation of people, commodities, and ideas became more dense and rapid over the early modern centuries? Surely new cultural production – manifest in the popular religious movements of northern India – increased in size, intensity, and variety. Wrapping our minds around the notion of change demands a conscious effort. Most of us still operate with an unstated assumption that precolonial India was nearly static. . . . We must put aside our knowledge of the colonial outcome and look with fresh eyes at new institutions, new social forms, new cultural expression, and new productivity in the early modern period. (1997: 208–09; emphasis added) The emergence of ‘new institutions, new social forms, new cultural expressions and new productivity’ is best evidenced through the vernacular sources in the early modernities of both Europe and India. Scholars like Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (2001), Satya P. Mohanty (2008), Allison Busch (2011), John S. Hawley (2005), David Lorenzen (2006) and Sheldon Pollock (1998, 2003, 2006) have produced exciting works exploring the process of vernacularization and the emergence of early modernity in India. Earlier, eminent Hindi critic and historian of literature 171

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Ramvilas Sharma (1961, 1981, 1996) made path-breaking contributions to the theme. But the most crucial aspect of this vernacular modernity, namely the emergence of the public sphere of bhakti (devotional theisms which became popular in early modern India; originating in South India around the eighth century, they swept over east and north India from the fifteenth century onwards), has not attracted any attention. It is through the public sphere of bhakti that the ‘cultural production – manifest in the popular religious movements of northern India’ – circulated and created impact beyond the communities and networks of bhaktas (devotees) themselves. The idea of an individual with an ‘autonomous capacity to conceive’ was articulated and reiterated in the public sphere of bhakti. The new norms of perception and behavior gradually made their presence felt in society through this public sphere. I have, for quite some time now, been arguing for the exploration of the public sphere of bhakti and its impact on the nature of vernacular modernity, particularly in north India (Agrawal 2009). There is obvious resistance to the employment of the category of public sphere as such with reference to pre-British India. C. A. Bayly, describing the indigenous public sphere in eighteenth-century India as the Indian ecumene, observes that recent polemics against the derivative character of modern Indian political ideology have not even begun to characterize indigenous political theory and practice, individuality, rationality and social communication in the Indian context. These, of course, are all essential elements in the concept of critical politics which developed in the west and they all find a place in Jurgen Habermas’s influential discussion of the ‘public sphere’. All had analogues within the north Indian ecumene. (1999: 181) Criticizing Bayly, for what he sees as an ‘absence of meaningful conceptual distinction’, Partha Chatterjee says that ‘attribution of a Habermasian public sphere to the literary world of eighteenth century north India is too quick’ (2008: 3). Another objection is also often raised: can we really employ a foreign category (i.e., public sphere) of analysis while arguing for the existence of an indigenous, vernacular or alternative modernity? It is interesting to note that this objection to the use of etic categories and insistence on using only emic notions to analyze indigenous phenomena comes from not only nativist and postmodernist quarters but also certain Marxists as well, who seem to forget their own etic status and at the same 172

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time ironically remind us of the validity of Mbembe’s observation, cited earlier. The objection is not confined to the public sphere alone. Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam note: it is claimed often enough now that no fit whatsoever existed between these and other ‘-etic’ categories of the humanities and social sciences (with their uniquely Western origins and genealogy) and the highly varied ‘-emic’ notions that may be found in different locales and times in the world of the past: a claim that is a source of anxiety for some, a source of indifference for others, and a ground for rejoicing for still others who see a positive value in ‘incommensurability’, which they perhaps view as akin to a (necessarily virtuous) claim for species diversity. (2008: 29) Let me reiterate the simple fact that when all is said and done, humankind cannot do without a transcultural notion of human values and a set of minimum expectations rooted in the same. Such a transcultural universalism can be imagined and articulated only when we explore the trajectory of interactions between various cultures and traditions instead of attributing all yearnings for universal human values to the European Enlightenment and its export to other societies through colonization. Moreover, for the purpose of analysis, there has to be some commonality of concepts and methods – of course, a nuanced one sensitive to the specificity of each case under analysis. The suitability of any category of analysis does not flow from its geographical provenance but from its capacity to illuminate the phenomenon under examination. Many interesting and thought-provoking tools of analysis are more or less capable of being disentangled from their specific social contexts; otherwise, no dialogue across civilizations could have been possible. Definitions arrived at in the context of a particular historical experience get expanded when applied to other, similar (not exactly the same) experiences. More important than the issue of etic and emic categories is the potential of a category for illuminating the phenomenon under examination. For instance, René Guénon, who is credited with developing the ‘traditionalist’ critique of the modern world and had a great influence on Ananda Coomaraswamy, used the Hindu notion of Kaliyuga (the fourth (present) age of the world, characterized by total decadence and depravity) as an analytical category to explain the decay of the modern western world and proposed Sufi Islam as an antidote to this decay.1 173

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I would not like to criticize Guénon for using a foreign category to explain the decay in the modern western world and for suggesting another foreign practice and tradition as the spiritual and social panacea to Europe. His proposals ought to be critiqued on their capacity to illuminate or lack thereof, not based on the notion of Kaliyuga and that the practice and ideology of Sufism are not indigenous to Europe. Any category of analysis needs to be context-sensitive and not necessarily context-specific. Does Kaliyuga as a category for analyzing decay meet the requirement for such sensitivity? Can it be suitably modified to fit the notions and practices native to Europe and thus help us understand the dynamics of the perceived crisis of western civilization better? To talk of the public sphere of bhakti is not to talk of a public sphere that is exactly and strictly European or even of the ‘bourgeois’ variety – a category which is the subject of Habermas’s enquiry (original German published in 1962): ‘a historical–sociological account of the emergence, transformation and disintegration of bourgeois public sphere’ (1989: xi). But, at the same time, Habermas gives a very basic definition of ‘public’ – ‘we call events and occasions “public” when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs’ – and explains further: But as in the expression, ‘public building’, the term need not refer to general accessibility; the building does not even have to be open to public traffic. ‘Public buildings’ simply house the state institutions and as such are public. The state is the ‘public authority’. . . . The ‘public sphere’ itself appears as a specific domain – the public domain versus the private. Sometimes the public simply appears as that sector of the public opinion that happens to be opposed to the authorities. (1989: 1–2) And, regarding the applicability of this concept, even in the context of Europe, Mahmood Mamdani points out, ‘critics of Habermas have tried to disentangle the analytical from the programmatic strands in his argument by relocating this movement in its historical context’ (1996: 15). He also quotes Geoff Eley: ‘the public sphere was from the very outset an arena of contested meanings’ (cited in Mamdani 1996: 15). Thus disentangled, the public sphere can be seen ­primarily as ‘the place of voice rather than of authority’, even outside the bourgeois class of an industrial society. According to Eisenstadt and Schluchter: 174

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the term public sphere . . . denotes the existence of arenas that not only are autonomous from the public order but are also public in the sense that they are accessible to different sectors of society. . . . Public Spheres tend to develop dynamics of their own, which, while closely related to that of the political arena, are not co-terminus with it and are not governed by the dynamics of the latter. (1998: 10–11) Any student of bhakti would testify that the bhakti during the early modern period was ‘open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs’, and also ‘was from the very outset an arena of contested meanings’. This contest manifested itself not only in poetic compositions but also in organized activities, institutions and practices. Diverse attempts to propagate what were, at times, conflicting ideas regarding social practices were made through the shared idiom of bhakti, wherein there was considerable contestation around terms, categories and meanings – the name Ram was the most keenly contested signifier of conflicting notions of social and spiritual ideas (Agrawal 1994). Another interesting case of ‘contested meanings’ is the category of Kaliyuga. As is well known, Kaliyuga is not only a measure of timeperiod but also a signifier of moral decay. From a certain point of view, from the Vishnu-Purana (third century) to Tulsidas in the ­sixteenth century, Kaliyuga (i.e., all round decay of social order and moral ­fabric) expresses itself through the weakening of brahminical a­ uthority and disobedience on part of the sudra and women. On the other hand, we have Pipa, the king of Gagrone (in northern Rajasthan) and a junior contemporary of Kabir, expressing his gratitude to the weaver from Banaras in these moving words: But for Kabir in this Kaliyuga The ways of the world, the force of Kaliyuga And the Veda would have destroyed bhakti forever. . . God in his mercy sent his own man Kabir Made him sing, the true light spread And this humble Pipa also got a glimpse of truth. (Callewaert 1993: 261)2 This is clearly a case of arguing contradictory positions in a shared idiom. Also note, it is an upper-caste king praising Kabir in a language which he did not employ even for his own and Kabir’s guru, Ramanand. This remarkable change in attitude and the attempt to 175

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infuse available categories like Kaliyuga with an entirely new connotation is indicative of a space which belongs more to voice than to authority. This is the public sphere of bhakti, which facilitates the dynamics of this shared idiom and enables it to come into being and spread beyond local practices, specific publics and various networks. The notion of the public sphere of bhakti is not and cannot be a replica of the public sphere of the bourgeois, but merchants and artisans most certainly play a crucial part here. The interactive dynamics of notions, ideas, institutions and practices that made possible perceptible change in attitudes and practices in early modern north India is taking place here. The public nature of the vernacular bhakti cannot be missed, but theoretical hesitation persists in the application of the notion of ‘public sphere’ to bhakti. In a recent study of Namdev, Christian Lee Novtezke (2008) restricts use of the term ‘public’ to the analysis of ‘public ­performance’ of bhakti and its ‘memory’, and in contradistinction to ‘private’. He distinguishes his own work from other ‘excellent literatures’, which are in line with his argument but ‘tend to take modernity as a prerequisite for the existence of the publics’. As opposed to such literatures, Novtezke uses the idea of public ‘without allegiance to any reigning theoretical formulation of the term but rather in whatever way it might heuristically serve to draw a clear picture of the cultural history of the memory of Namdev in Maharashtra’ (2008: 14). The vernacular bhakti was public not merely in the sense of performance of devotion but also in its intent and impact. Keeping this in view, John S. Hawley (2015), while historicizing and problematizing the category of the ‘Bhakti movement’, proposes ‘network theory’ and sees various bhakti moments in vernacular languages as the ‘networks’ consisting of temple and math (monastery) leaders, family members and even the hagiographies of various bhaktas. A major aim of his network theory is ‘to displace the illusion that individual actors are the engines of history, and this surely resonates with bhakti despite its personalist focus’ (2015: 296). Hawley is quite right in interrogating the idea of ‘movement’ and the ‘personalist focus’. The question, however, is: do the ideas of bhakti as public performance and as network(s) really satisfactorily illuminate the role of bhakti and its overall impact on the making of the early vernacular modernity of India? The most perceptive observation on both the public nature of the bhakti and its social impact in north India was made by William Crooke at the close of the nineteenth century. In his ethnographic survey of the tribes and castes of the North-Western provinces and 176

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Oudh published in 1896, Crooke had this to say about the ‘creation of ­so-called new castes’ engaged in various professions and ‘industries’: the process is facilitated by the creation of new religious groups, which base their association on the common belief in the teachings of some saint or reformer. Most of these sects are connected with the Vaishnava side of Hinduism [one of the major traditions in Hinduism along with Shaiva, Shakta and Smarta], and are devoted to the solution of the religious questions which beset the searcher after truth in western lands. All naturally aim at the abolition of the privileges and pretensions of the Brahmin Levite and the establishment of a purer and more intellectual form of public worship. (2005 [1896]: cixix) Crooke is reporting a process which had been going on for quite some time on account of the spread of commerce and the growth of purer and more intellectual forms of worship with the advent of vernacular early modernity. It is through the category of the public sphere of bhakti that the dynamics of the caste-system as it actually operated in pre-British India can be better grasped. Bayly notes that in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘Bhakti devotion bridged these divides of status, and the sects were becoming increasingly respectable and market-centered’ (1999: 211). Harbans Mukhia (2016), in his reappraisal of Abu’l Fazl’s rationality, explains that ‘his “reason” was indeed deeply embedded in another dichotomy he was postulating, one between a universal God and denominational, sectarian gods, between a universal religiosity and denominational, sectarian religions’. Comparing Abu’l Fazl’s search for universal religiosity with that of Kabir, and naturally aware of the fact that ‘it would be hard to isolate one single source or thinker that shaped the mind of such an outstanding scholar’, Mukhia underlines Kabir as ‘a major inspiration for Abu’l Fazl’ and reminds his readers of the historically important fact that this inspiration, for the ideas of ‘one of the Mughal Empire’s greatest courtier-intellectuals, came right from the ground level’. The question is: what enabled ideas ‘from the ground level’ to reach up and permeate the air of the royal court of Akbar, Abu’l Fazl’s patron? Did the idea of the Universal God as opposed to the denominational, sectarian god become so popular as to reach the royal scholar? Was it necessary for Abu’l Fazl to have directly met a guru of Kabirpanth to get an idea of Kabir’s thinking? Could the increasingly respectable and market-centered bhakti sects have played some role in this? 177

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It would be useful to recall here that Banaras, the city of Kabir, has traditionally been a major center of trade and commerce, and the Kabirpanthi maths in general were established in similar centers in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. The Kabirchaura branch of the Kabirpanth at Banaras was founded by Surati Gopal, a Brahmin believed to be a direct disciple of Kabir. The founder of the Damakheda branch of Kabirpanth, Dharamdas was a merchant and attracted a major segment of his following from the artisan and merchant caste groups. The perceptible presence of merchants can be noted among the followers of other nirgun poets (those who believe in God in an unmanifested (without form or attributes) form as opposed to the saguna, who believe in God in a manifested (with attributes) form as well. Jana Gopal, the author of Dadu’s biography Dadu Janam Lila (composed in 1620), was himself a mahajan – a merchant – and mentions at least nine other mahajans among Dadu’s disciples. Many more are stated to be engaged in commerce even though they did not belong to bania or mahajan castes. He mentions Dadu’s rejection of the Varnashrama ideology, Hindu–Muslim strife and many prevalent religious practices, but most importantly he also reports Dadu’s fierce opposition to the custom of child marriage, which had been prevalent in Rajasthan and about which the modern British Raj hardly bothered (Callewaert 1988: 109–10). At the other end of the country, we have Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, whose sampradaya (sect) treats vernacular works reporting his life and miracles as the prasthan trayi (three sources or axioms); this has created a cadre of teachers who, regardless of their background, are called goswami (literally, one who has mastered senses) and are revered as such. Bipan Chandra Pal, the great nationalist leader, writing in 1933, noted Chaitanya’s ‘modernity’ in abolishing (for the Vaishnavas) the ‘old rules against caste discrimination and the remarriage of widows’ (cited in Hawley 2015: 258). The influence of this sampradaya spread much beyond Bengal due to the organized enthusiasm and zeal of the founder and other leaders. Operating in the public sphere of bhakti, they won not only popular support but also the admiration and allegiance of the elite, so much so that in the eighteenth century, Sawai Jai Singh of Jaipur sought the approval of the Chaitnyaite goswamis for his religious reforms. His ‘reforms’, however, were not liberal and progressive, particularly with reference to Ramanandis and Radhavallabhis (Meetal 2008: 210–11, 340; Horstmann 2006: 73). The point here is, however, the extent of the reach of the public sphere of bhakti. Having consolidated their position through influence on various players 178

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in this sphere, including the powerful king of Jaipur, the Chaitnyaites could adjudicate on matters of other bhakti sampradayas. Jai Singh also fancied himself as bringing doctrinal unity among all the Vedic sects and wrote Siddhantekya Prakashika for the purpose. Here again, he wanted approval from as many pundits as possible, but more, especially, from the Vaishnavas of Bengal (Bahura and Singh 1988: vii, 182– 83). Further into Assam, Sri Sankardev is credited with initiating the Vaishnava movement in a somewhat missionary mode in the fifteenth century and establishing the institutions of satra (Vaishnavite monastery) and naamghar (prayer house). These institutions are reported to have played a social role much beyond merely religious one. In fact, they have functioned as centers of community reflection and action on issues of social and even political import (Chaliha 1998). Whatever the orientation of ideas and attitudes of a particular bhakta, sampradaya or lay follower might be, the public sphere of bhakti provided an arena of contest as well as a space of resistance – not directly involved with the political powers but not entirely indifferent to political patronage. Apart from the Bengali Vaishnavas discussed above, the Pushti-Marga of Vallabhacharya is well known for its systematic attempts to win over the support of influential political figures of the time. The public sphere of bhakti was not only an arena in which there was intense competition for patronage, but also a site of serious political reflection. The Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas contains both a social lamentation and an imagination of utopia from the varnashrama point of view, and given the number of manuscripts copied, it had become hugely popular by the seventeenth century. While there were no conscious attempts to effect a change in the political power structure, at least in some cases, as with the rise of Sikhism in Punjab and Satnamis in central India, the ideas and practices circulating in the public sphere of bhakti led to a degree of political upheaval. The public sphere of bhakti celebrated the bhaktas’ acquired identities, ignoring ascribed identities. Kabir, Dadu and Dariya of Bihar were born Muslims, but this fact did not stand in the way of all three being revered by their Hindu followers. It was only after the advent of colonial modernity that their ‘Hindu’ origin myths were popularized. It is also indicative of the notion of community then prevalent that Tulsidas, while conducting a bitter polemic against the Nirguna bhaktas, never refers to them or their kind of bhakti as of ‘foreign origin’, as did twentieth-century historians of Hindi literature. The vernacular turn in India indeed had its distinctions from Europe. As Sheldon Pollock puts it: 179

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Indian vernacular cultures demonstrate little concern for the Herderian ‘uniqueness’ over which national cultures of the present are obsessed. . . . The vernacular turn was not a quest for authenticity, nor was it informed by any kind of vision, historicist or other, of tribal unity. (Pollock 1998: 64) The impact of the vernacular bhakti went much beyond its own specific publics and networks. The media and institutions of this spread were: the panths, maths, satsangs (gathering of bhaktas, which were not just open to the public but actually tried to win it over to the bhakti worldview) and hagiographic accounts composed in the genres of bhaktmals, charits, parchais and gosthi (‘reports’ of the dialogues between bhaktas – real or imaginary). It was through the activities of the bhaktas and their admirers that the public sphere of the bhakti was created and the memory was transformed into legacy. The ecumene described by Bayly obviously consists of the most enlightened intelligentsia belonging to the elite classes but which possessed ‘a deep historical lineage in the popular critique of Brahmin pretensions in the earlier centuries’ (Bayly 1999: 211). Parallel to this ecumene of the elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the public sphere of the bhakti evolved over the preceding centuries was also quite active. The advent of the printing press made the activities taking place in the bhakti public sphere more documentable and perceptible. To cite a telling example, one can recall the publication of the Pakhand-Khandini Tika on Kabir Bijak. It was composed and published by Vishvanath Singh Ju Dev in 1868 in response to the Puran Sahib’s Trija. Trija was ‘published’ mechanically (printed) only in 1910, 42 years after the Pakhand-Khandini, but was actually written in 1837 and was ‘published in the public sphere of bhakti’, i.e., circulated among the sadhus and larger public ever since. It caused such an impact that ‘Kabir himself ordered Vishvanath Singh Ju Dev to attack this heresy – pakhand and thus save the innocent souls from the sin’ (Agrawal 2009: 229–30). What needs to be properly grasped is the fact that the bhaktas – both saguna and nirguna – were neither self-contained sadhakas (spiritual initiates or aspirants who practice a particular spiritual path to realize their ultimate ideals), indifferent to society around them, nor were they merely public performers of the act of worship, which hitherto belonged to the private sphere of household. They were trying to influence people and win followers in a society, which was quite ‘literacy aware’ (as Bayly puts it) in spite of the absence of printing technology. 180

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The contest being played out in the public sphere of bhakti clearly reflects and is related to the contradiction between normative injunctions and real everyday practices in matters of caste and other things. Due to the rise in commerce and consequent social mobility, the framework of the fourfold Varna order was under constant and ever increasing stress. As a matter of fact, the Varna order has always been just a theoretical framework, not an empirical reality. It is only in the era of Orientalist scholarship and its invention or construction of a highly textual notion of Hindu tradition that the idea of the Varna system as an eternal empirical reality gained ground. Such an invention of ahistorical India naturally distorted the reality on the ground, wherein self-conscious people were acquiring the status of individual and collective historical actors through their interactions with one another. Raymond Schwab reminded his readers way back in 1950 that, ‘unlike a unique model, India had always the same problems but had not approached them in the same way’ (1984: 6). ‘Not in the same way’ – the difference lies in the dialogic traditions of the ‘argumentative Indian’, a phrase made famous by Amartya Sen (2005). In early modern India, these traditions were being articulated and also further reinforced in the idiom and public sphere of bhakti. Not only were traditionally available names like Ram being given a new meaning, but new, interrogative versions of available Puranic narratives were also being created and propagated. The various Puranas are usually supposed to have appropriated the subaltern voices into the brahminical hegemony, but the Lakshmi Purana composed by the sixteenth-century Odia saint–poet Balaram Das is clearly a counterhegemonic text, as is shown by Satya P. Mohanty in this volume. Such contests and debates around these concepts and practices were conducted from Assam to Rajasthan through media like satsangs, maths and sampradayas. Neither all the bhaktas nor the sampradayas agreed on everything. In fact, they competed with each other to win over ordinary people and powerful persons. The competition sometimes turned bitter, even violent. The point is that while the bhaktas and their sampradayas did not have a well-defined, common goal, they certainly did have common idioms, practices and institutions through which they sought to validate their respective ideas and positions. The practice was to propose a new reading of the spiritual and social experience through the shared idiom of bhakti, in terms of adhyatama (spirituality). In fact, Banarasidas – a Jain and the author of Ardhakathanak (Half a Tale), an autobiography – also established a new panth in the idiom of bhakti, the Adhyatama Panth. The most important aspect of his life and work is a clear indication of the 181

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emergence of the notion of the individual,3 as is the case with Kabir and so many others. The texts and practices of bhakti clearly indicate the emergence of the individual as distinct from the type, but one can notice this and other such significant processes only if one looks carefully at the vernacular expressions of Indian modernity. In fact, vernacular (i.e., Deshaj in Hindi) is the most apt expression for the modernity we see emerging through the public sphere of bhakti – a space of voice, which is distinct from private space and autonomous from but not indifferent to the political arena.

Notes 1 For a fascinating account, see Mark Sedgwick (2004). 2 जौ कलिनाम कबीर न होते/तौ लोक बेद अरु कलिजुग मिलि करि भगति रसातल देत/े . . . भगति प्रतापि राखिबे कारनिनि जन आप पठाया/नाम कबीरा साच प्रकासा तहाँ पीपै कु छ पाया। 3 A very good translation along with the original text and an introduction has been prepared by Mukund Lath, Half a Tale: A Study in the Interrelationship Between Biography and History (Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharti Sansthan, 1981). For a critical appraisal of the text, see Vasudha Dalmia (2008).

References Agrawal, Purushottam. 1994. ‘Kan Kan mein Vyapen hain Ram: Slogan as a Metaphor of Cultural Interrogation’, Oxford Literary Review, 16(1–2): 245–64. Agrawal, Purushottam. 2009. Akath Kahani Prem ki: Kabir ki Kavita aur Unka Samay (An Untellable Tale of Love: Kabir’s Poetry and His Times). New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Bahura, Gopal Narayan and Chandra Mani Singh. 1988. Catalogue of Historical Documents in Kapad Dwara, Jaipur. Jaipur: Jaigarh Public Charitable Trust. Bayly, C. A. 1999 [1996]. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Busch, Allison. 2011. Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India. New York: Oxford University Press. Callewaert, Winand M. 1988. The Hindi Biography of Dadu Dayal (with English Translation). New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Callewaert, Winand M., ed. 1993. The Sarvangi of Gopaldas. New Delhi: Manohar. Chaliha, B. P. 1998. Sankardev: Studies in Culture. Guwahati: Samta Sankardev Sangha. Chatterjee, Partha. 2008. ‘Introduction: History in the Vernacular’, in Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds.), History in the Vernacular, pp. 1–14. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

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Crooke, William. 2005 [1896]. The Tribes and Castes of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. 2 Vols. New Delhi: Low Price Publications. Dalmia, Vasudha. 2008. ‘Merchant Tales and the Emergence of Novel in Hindi’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 August: 43–60. Dussel, Enrique. 2006. ‘World Systems and “Trans”-Modernity’, in Saurabh Dube and Ishita Banerjee-Dube (eds.), Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities, pp. 165–89. New Delhi: Social Science Press. Eisenstadt Shmuel N. and Wolfgang Schluchter. 1998. ‘Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities – A Comparative View’, Daedalus, 127(3): 1–18. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989 [1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. London: Polity Press. Hawley, John S. 2005. Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and Kabir in Their Time and Ours. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hawley, John S. 2015. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of Bhakti Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horstmann, Monika. 2006. ‘The Ramanandis of Galta’, in Lawrence Bobb, Varsha Joshi, and Michael Maeister (eds.), Multiple Histories: Culture and Society in the Study of Rajasthan, pp. 141–97. Jaipur: Rawat Publication. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2005. ‘An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity’, European Journal of Sociology, 46(3): 497–526. Lath, Mukund. 1981. Half a Tale: A Study in the Interrelationship Between Biography and History (Translation of Banarasi Das’ Ardhakathanak). Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharti Sansthan. Latour, Bruno. 1993 [1991]. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lorenzen, David. 2006. Who Invented Hinduism? Essays on Religion in History. New Delhi: Yoda Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Post Colony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Meetal, Prabhu Dayal. 2008. Braj ke Dharm Sampradyon ka Itihas (A History of the Religious Sects in Braj). New Delhi: National Publishing House. Mohanty, Satya P. 2008. ‘Alternative Modernities: The Odia Lakshmi Purana as Radical Pedagogy’, Diacritics, 38(3): 3–21. Mukhia, Harbans. 2015. ‘Wasn’t the World Always Modern?’ The Hindu, 4 December. Mukhia, Harbans. 2016. ‘No Conflict Between Reason and Faith: Reappraising Abu’l Fazl’s Rationality’, www.academia.edu/19023624/Abul_Fazls_ Rationality_Revisited (accessed on 16 July 2016). Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2001. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800. New Delhi: Permanent Black.

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Narayana Rao, Velcheru and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2008. ‘History and Politics in the Vernacular: Reflections on Medieval and Early Modern South India’, in Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds.), History in the Vernacular, pp. 25–65. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Novtezke, Christian Lee. 2008. History, Bhakti and Public Memory: Namdev in Religious and Secular Traditions. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Pollock, Sheldon. 1998. ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, Daedalus, 127(3): 41–74. Pollock, Sheldon. 2003. ‘Introduction’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, pp. 1–36. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Richards, John F. 1997. ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History, 8(2): 197–209. Schwab, Raymond. 1984. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, Mark. 2004. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity. London: Penguin. Sharma, Ramvilas. 2002 [1961]. Bhasa aur Samaj. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Sharma, Ramvilas. 2009 [1996]. Bhartiya Sahitya ki Bhumika. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Sharma, Ramvilas. 2016 [1981]. Parampara ka Mulyankan. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1998. ‘Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750’, Daedalus, 127(3): 75–104. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and Edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

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10 BEFORE THE GREAT DIVERGENCE The early modern South Asian agrarian economy in a global perspective Rajat Datta

This chapter is concerned with the problematic of an early modern economy from the standpoint of the South Asia’s agrarian experience during the sixteenth to eighteenth century. It will attempt to synthesize the features of early modernity and early modern globalization in the agrarian sector and assess their impact on the rural economy and agricultural production. The archival location of this exercise is Bengal in eastern India, but the problematic terrain is larger. First, this chapter wishes to indicate (and possibly correct) an imbalance in economic history which has tended to locate the genesis of modern economic relations (i.e., capitalist relations) in the urban sector. I will suggest instead that equally significant were the economic relations in the agrarian sector. These can be encapsulated by a generic term – agrarian capitalism. The second objective of this chapter is to think of an economic framework to locate and understand the dynamics of these changes. The straightforward connection between industrial capitalism and modernity, though no longer tenable, is not matched by a corresponding frame of reference to locate the nature of (prior) capitalist economic processes and early modernities. Except for the negative and regressive economic connotations associated with feudalism (though its dissolution has revolutionary economic implications, according to Marx) or with its more severely challenged sibling, the Asiatic Mode (which could only reach its point of crisis because of exogenous pressures, again according to Marx), there is no conceptual peg to hang the fabric of the early modern economy for display. 185

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Furthermore, a typically Marxian view ascribes an absence of endogenous capacities to all pre-capitalist economic formations, thus privileging the external factors as agents of dynamism in all such cases. Feudalism was dissolved by towns and trade, whereas the ­Asiatic Mode reached its point of obliteration through coercive social ­engineering (for instance, the colonial impact in India). Fortunately, such views are no longer acceptable, and one major reason for this negation is the increasing currency of an early modern economy on a global scale. In recent years, comparative economic history has taken an introspective turn over the question of why economic disparities began emerging between some countries of Western Europe and practically all Asian economies (with the exception of Japan) from the nineteenth century. The rise of the Western European economies is no longer seen as an inevitable consequence of European exceptionalism. Britain until the 1830s and other parts of Europe until the 1870s were characterized by slower rates of growth and had many similarities with certain parts of Asia. The divergence, which occurred with the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, is now seen more as a conjunctural than a structural phenomenon, an almost fortuitous occurrence originating out of Europe’s (specifically Britain’s) need to get out of certain productivity and ecological constraints (Pomeranz 2000). To these I might, following Marx, add the coercive and violent prehistory of capital accumulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which took two forms: i) the extraction of silver and gold bullion from the Central and South American mines; and ii) the massive spoliation of Western Africa through the Atlantic slave trade (Marx 1986 [1867]). Eurasian economies benefited from them through the bullion that flowed in from the mines, and from the goods, particularly textiles and spices, which were exported, some of it destined for the slave-holding fortresses on the Ghanaian coast. In terms of the preconditions of societies and cultures to breach the modernity threshold, comparative history now shows that there were no exclusive cultural preconditions enjoyed by Europe which were not available to other countries across the Eurasian complex. As Jack Goody (2006) has persuasively argued, many of the socalled ­European-specific cultural traits of modernity (rationality and an embedded individuality, for instance) existed elsewhere in equal measure before the triumph of capitalism in Europe, and much of the rationality of European economic behavior, including the so-called propensity of technological maximization, was derived from the cumulative longue durée of global economic interactions since the first 186

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millennium, if not earlier. Many of these traits were slowly incorporated and given a European ancestry, while others, like silk rearing in fourteenth-century Italy, were ‘stolen’. If European modernity was derivative, then the question arises: what sort of anterior modernity (or modernities?) did Western Europe manage to latch on to and then redirect to suit its own ends? The answer to this question will emerge from the manner in which we assess the immediately preceding, that is, the early modern period, loosely slotted between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, but with a sixteenth- to eighteenth-century global core. The early modern period was one of the most intensive phases (stretching over three centuries at least) of quantitative and convergent economic growth, at least across Eurasia. At the conceptual level, one can ascribe to this period the label capitalist without needing to prefix proto before it. An Asian model of capitalism, based on an endogenous urbanization and an intensively commercialized rice-­producing economy, is already documented in the case of Tokugawa Japan. Unlike South Asia, Japan’s ability to take an industrial turn (but only from the late nineteenth century) was facilitated by the absence of colonial impediments to the process. Nevertheless, can a case be made of a similar economic constellation for South Asia in the three centuries preceding the disjuncture of the nineteenth century? This chapter will argue in favor of such a reconsideration on the grounds that though a necessary precondition for industrial capitalism, agrarian capitalism by itself is capable of functioning as fully developed capitalism through extensive commodity production and circulation, expanded reproduction of capital in the agro-commercial economy, complex systems of private ownership and intricate divisions between capital and labor in the agro-commercial economy as well as in the export-oriented maritime economies. This may perhaps necessitate a reconsideration of modernity as an exclusively European capitalist privilege. In fact, one can argue that unlike capitalist modernity, which divided the world into geographical binaries – the west versus the rest – the Eurasian experience of early modern globalization was more coeval, participative and multi-centered along a complex set of axes. Politically, there arose through Eurasia territorial empires with huge redistributive fiscal apparatuses. There evolved a maritime system in the Indian Ocean which webbed this world together through networks of commodities and cash, leading to unprecedented levels of monetization and commercial transactions across and within countries. Rural areas no longer remained isolated as ‘proto-industrial’ combinations 187

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of commercial farming and craft production percolated deep into the countryside. Urban centers thrived with the increasing surpluses now available from expanding rural economies, and town–country divisions of labor became much more rearticulated and complex. Finally, markets and marketization processes lost their exclusively urban orientation of earlier times and gravitated into rural and intermediate zones below the urban centers.

Economic processes and early modern globalization In contrast to modern forms of globalization, which needed large doses of capitalist–colonial incorporation, early modern globalization, which refers to global interconnections during the two hundred years between 1600 and 1800 centered on Asia, followed relatively slower techniques for its dissemination and therefore required multiple points of origin and convergence (Adshead 1997: 1–23). It was polycentric, and exchanges between national economies were more multilateral than dictated or coercively redirected as in the later centuries. Since the world was not divided between manufacturing and provisioning nations, early modern globalization saw the simultaneous explosion of overlapping producers and consumers across the globe, and a massive cross-flow of goods and money across continents occurred despite the slowness of transoceanic transport and its prohibitive costs and risks. The rise and consolidation of monarchical state-systems, and the growth of cash-rich people in these societies, impacted trade flows and manufacturing. Early modern globalization was the progeny of the marriage between politics and commerce in the early modern world, but its genotype was over-determined by its commercial parent. How does one situate South Asia, especially India, in all this? As a historian of precolonial South Asia, I am amazed by the attention given to China by almost all early modernists concerned with correcting the Eurocentric bias in early modern studies. This strikes me as inexplicable, especially when one considers the fact that apart from silk, all other commodities which created the most complex exchange and consumption networks across the globe before the nineteenth century – food grains, spices, textiles (particularly cotton textiles), indigo and opium – were either sourced or redistributed from South Asia. Even in the period nearly 500 years before the European voyages of discovery, the Islamic commercial system across the globe had made India the principal source of some of the primary staples – rice, sugarcane and cotton, while most of other commodities (like sorghum, hard wheat, coconut, bananas and palms) which did not 188

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originate here passed through India on their way to the Islamic world and beyond (Watson 1983). This pre-Columbian exchange relied upon maritime routes for inter-continental transfers, particularly between Asia and Africa. It centered on the Indian Ocean and was mediated and controlled by non-Europeans (Carney 2001). Protomodern globalization profoundly affected these networks and raised them to unprecedented levels. This happened due to a host of factors. First, notwithstanding the impressive evidence of robust trading in earlier epochs, early modern globalization occurred amid a convergent expansion of overland and maritime trade and commerce which was unparalleled. Though there was some coercive rent-seeking by predatory states and warlords (of which so much is made by the proponents of European exceptionalism), the evidence of a sustained upward trend of commerce on a global scale is incontrovertible. Contrary to the earlier wisdom that the European voyages of ‘discoveries’ created these conditions of expansion, European maritime activity was only a desperate attempt to latch on to this commercial expansion for its own survival. Second, early modern globalization was based on intensive monetization of economy. The world simply started using more money than it ever had (Richards 1983). Practically all states from Japan in the east to England in the west were engaged in major fiscal reforms or were facing some sort of financial strain trying to match mounting expenses with stagnant incomes (Steensgaard 1990: 19). The reason for the global demand for silver was overwhelmingly Asian in origin, and this was largely on account of the ongoing political and commercial reconfigurations; but Europe, particularly the Iberian Peninsula, became crucial in adding massive quantities of silver and gold to the global fund of precious metals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In any case, the relationship between the countries at the vanguard of discovery of New World silver and the productive or money-using capacities of European economies was never a direct one. Spain hardly invested the treasure it acquired in the development of the Spanish economy, losing sometimes as much as 40 percent of its ­American wealth directly to the Philippines (TePaske 1983: 434, 442–45), while countries like England and Holland, which became epicenters of Europe’s economic expansion, hardly engaged in the colonial extraction of bullion. France, for instance, was scarcely affected by the excitement of New World silver. Gold was never used; bullion ­currency circulated sluggishly (Meuvret 1974). For Wallerstein (1980), all these sophisticated exchanges were inconsequential in the making of the modern world system. The Indian 189

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Ocean was entirely external to the core of the world system located in Northwestern Europe as the relationship of Europe and Asia was merely an exchange of preciosities. ‘The bullion flowed east to decorate the temples, palaces and clothing of Asian aristocratic classes and the jewels and spices flowed west. The accidents of cultural history (perhaps nothing more than physical scarcity)’, he adds, ‘determined these complimentary preferences’ (Wallerstein 1980: 41). Wallerstein is entirely off the mark, and this brings me to the third facet of this early modern globalization, viz., the great diversification of commodities sourced from Asia for global trade. While precious items for aristocratic consumption – like silks and high-end cotton textiles – definitely constituted a part of the cargoes, the commodity composition of India’s trade seems to have changed significantly between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was a phenomenal diversification of agro-based products and commodities sourced from South Asia for global trade. In the sixteenth century, spices and silks dominated the trade in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean; cotton textiles had a good market in Southeast Asia, but an insignificant one in China. In the seventeenth century, while the finer varieties of textiles – muslins from Bengal and golden embroideries of Gujarat – were being sold along with the coarser varieties of cotton piece goods in western and eastern parts of the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia was almost entirely dependent on India to clothe its spice producers, and Indian calicos were being robustly marketed in Europe and Africa. India’s rice regularly fed the hungry in Malacca, Aden and Hormuz (Dasgupta 2001: 61, 92–3). All these commodities were produced and sourced from the countryside, thereby implicating different (regional) agrarian economies in networks of global trade. Nothing on this scale had occurred before. The bullion, particularly silver, that was imported was, contrary to Wallerstein’s belief, not hoarded (though, some of it, particularly gold, may have been hoarded) but was immediately converted into money because precious metals were mediums of exchange for commodities received, and their circulation was vital in ensuring continuity in the investment and procurement of exportable commodities, including food grains. Thus, each additional unit of bullion brought into the economy resulted in an increment in India’s overseas trade and was immediately converted into money to enable merchants to raise the necessary purchasing power (Om Prakash 2001: 70), thereby fostering ‘greater monetization, rise in long-distance bulk trade, growing mobility of labor and the accumulation of capital’ (Lee 1999: 16). In addition, it led to transformation of the fiscal bases of the state, making it 190

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possible to extract enormous amounts of money from its subjects in silver currency (Richards 1980; Perlin 1987). Fourth, there was a major expansion in the activities of bankers and money-dealers throughout the length and breadth of the country, as is testified by the following description of the French traveler, JeanBaptiste Tavernier, who in 1676 noticed that in India a village must be very small indeed if it has not a moneychanger called a shroff, who acts as a banker to make remittances in money and issue letters of exchange [hundi]. In general, these Changers have an understanding with the Governors of the Provinces, they enhance the rupee as they please for paisa and the paisa for these [cowrie] shells. (1925: 24) The reference to bankers setting the exchange rates for cowries is a telling example of the pervasiveness of money-use in the early modern South Asian economy. More telling is the great convergences in the relative values of silver–cowrie ratios in early modern Bengal. From a silver rupee–cowrie exchange ratio of 1:8960 c.1515, the cowrie stood at 1:4000 c.1676 and was trading at 1:2400 in 1740 (Tavernier 1925: 25; Pires 2005: 93). As per the contemporary account of James Grant in 1789, the appreciation of cowries in respect of silver was largely due to the massive importation of silver bullion which made silver cheap compared to other precious metals, particularly copper, and constitutes one of the noteworthy developments in India’s seventeenthcentury monetary history (Grant 1917: 378). The tremors of massive changes in intrinsic and relative values of precious metal currencies were felt in ‘humble’ money and in the hut of the humblest peasant.

The Agrarian roots of the global early modern The early modern world was almost entirely agrarian. Yet comparative histories of economic development (or the search for the elusive roots of modernity) have been preoccupied with trade, technology and industrialization. None of the recent attempts to analyze global growth patterns in the past (e.g., E. L. Jones 1981, David Landes 1998 or even Jack Goody 2006) have anything to say on agricultural systems. The assumption perhaps is that modern economic growth tends to overwhelm agriculture with the industrial turn, but this assumption is erroneous. First, there was hardly any modern industrialization anywhere in the world (including Britain) before the nineteenth century. 191

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Second, life-chances and physical survival of people were directly proportional to the harvest. There were no other alternatives to ensure survival or enrichment except agriculture. One of the main gains from comparative economic history today is the increasing realization of the futility of national-level economic comparisons, and a greater dependence on regionally and spatially diverse indices to measure commensurability or divergence. I have in mind the important caveats which Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and Roy Bin Wong (1997) have introduced along these lines while comparing the relative economic performances of specific regions (relatively more advanced ones) in China with comparable European regions (like Britain), and what Prasannan Parthasarathi (2011) has recently undertaken for India. I propose to use this method from the point of view of India’s early modern agrarian experience. I compare the agricultural profile of the province of Bengal with the two most advanced regions of early modern agriculture in Europe: Britain and the Low Countries (including the Netherlands). As far as Bengal is concerned, the region had the great advantages of alluvial soils in the Ganga–Bhagirathi–Padma River basins, perennial rivers (plus innumerable rivulets), high precipitation and the largest delta in the world – almost ideal for intensive agricultural practices. It was home to about 15 percent of the subcontinent’s population c.1800 (30 million out of 210 million), most of it packed in dense clusters along its many rivers, particularly along the Bhagirathi and the Padma. Some key features of agricultural production in Bengal are outlined below:1 • Agriculture was organized around three harvests, compared to two in most parts of India: aman (winter or kharif), aus (spring or rabi) and boro (one in between). Of the three, aman and aus were considered the most important, both in terms of output and their share in the payment of revenue since all the major cash crops were grown in these two seasons. Though a food crop, the rice grown in aman season was commercially the most valuable as it was meant principally for sale. • Alluvial soil, good precipitation and favorable fluvial conditions ensured high returns from land. The seed to yield ratios for rice varied between 1:20 and 1:24. • Land was intensively cultivated. Fallowing was minimal, though not unknown. Land yielded crops, particularly the basic staple of rice, in succession through the year. The cultivation of other crops, particularly the commercial ones like sugarcane and tobacco, was done during the winter season. 192

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• The system of multiple cropping enhanced output. For instance, various kinds of lentils were grown along the intervening spaces of the sugarcane stems. Some legumes were grown together with rice, often on the same land. • Crop rotation was practiced extensively. The simplest form was the rotation of rice and lentils on relatively lower lands; rice and mustard were sown in regular succession on higher lands. Sihfasla (three harvest) lands produced either rice with two crops of oil-seeds or lentils, or successive crops of mustard, cotton and lentils in a regular annual rotation. • Francis Buchanan (1807) explicitly noted the existence of alternate cropping as a major agricultural practice to prevent soil depletion in Dinajpur and Rangpur. There was a sequential use of fodder crops and corn crops to obviate fallowing (also called convertible husbandry), and this practice had only just started spreading to the enclosed and fairly large farms in England in the late eighteenth century. • Though the farm output remained subject to the vagaries of weather, practices like multiple cropping, crop rotation and alternate cropping were rational responses to reduce the impact of such uncertainties. • On the whole, farming practices were quite dynamic and flexible, responding quickly to changes in opportunity, price and cost input. High prices of rice and lentils had peasants uprooting their mulberry trees to cultivate these on their lands. Buchanan was particularly struck by the peasants around Chittagong furiously planting betel-nut saplings on their lands in 1777 because of a sudden rise in the demand for these nuts from Burma. Cost constraints or incentives were important in determining peasant choices. For instance, tobacco cultivation became widespread since its high costs were more than offset by the opportunitycosts; but the other New World entrant, the potato, fought a losing battle among the Bengali peasants until the nineteenth century because of the higher costs involved compared to the indigenous farinaceous roots (like shakar-kand or yams). • Tenurial arrangements, or what orthodox Marxists would call relations of production, were equally complex and diverse. Anyone looking for communal forms of ownership or a moraleconomy of the Polanyi-esque kind in the countryside will return disappointed from the province, as I suspect from anywhere else in India. The peasant household was nucleated, the average family size was about five per household, the land was privately owned 193

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and other forms of private ownership and possession in resources and entitlements were prevalent in the villages. Land and usufruct rights on land were freely bought and sold, and land deals, especially in the commercial neighborhood, were quite profitable (Datta 2000). Without going into the minutiae of these various tenures, I provide here a summary picture of four great swathes of tenure arrangements. Along the great riverine basins, in central and south central parts and the delta, agriculture was organized around the zamindari system and small-peasant freeholds whose economies were deeply enmeshed with the merchants and traders of Kolkata, Murshidabad, Qasimbazar and Dhaka. In the southeastern zone, petty landlords (taaluqdars) and moneyed-men were at the helm of reclaiming lands from the marshes and swamps in order to settle marginal peasants and fishermen on these lands by providing them with credit and other capital incentives. In northern and northeastern Bengal, where frequent changes in river courses could cause great havoc, we find jotedars, the prototype of the petty-capitalist farmer who combined agriculture with a portfolio of other economic functions, including trade, money lending and rural banking; they got their jotes cultivated by sharecroppers (bargadar, adhiar). Finally, in the more densely forested areas of southwestern Bengal, we find headmen, variously called the mondol or pramanick, who used the vast reservoir of tribal labor to work on agricultural land and salt pans (khalaris). From the above description, though given too schematically, one can draw the following conclusions:   i Agricultural production and the entire gamut of social relations embedded in it were privately owned and deployed, and were market-oriented;   ii Innovative and intensive farming could produce enough surplus in the long run to feed an increasing number of towns and to meet interregional demands as well as those of an export economy; iii There were subsistence breakdowns and famine mortality, but never a sustained long-term demographic contraction, even after the biggest famine on record in 1769–70; and iv Production was characterized by a system of capital investments involving a plethora of people ranging from ‘yeomen’ farmers (the jotedars) to town-based merchants, village oligarchs, revenue farmers and all kinds of landed proprietors (the ubiquitous zamindar). 194

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This commercialized and expanding agricultural economy was integrated with the larger world of interregional and overseas trade through elaborate circuits of circulation embedded in the following: • Monetary: a money-using economy where all economic transactions irrespective of scale were undertaken and/or valorized through money; • Transactional: a hierarchic but interconnected network of markets starting from the periodic village haat to the large town-based markets (gunj); and • Fluvial: an interlinked network of mostly perennial rivers which enabled a cost-effective transportation of bulk goods over long distances from within and outside the region. The monetary aspect has already been dealt with above. The transactional networks of circulation were markets. Such networks can be conceptualized as a structure where each market place was connected to one or more higher-level centers. One thus gets to see a system with several levels, several links between levels and some hierarchically arranged administration of all the places in the system. It was the bazaar that was the main conduit through which locally produced goods were sent into the larger (maritime) arena and from where ‘imported’, that is non-locally produced goods, including goods produced in towns, entered the countryside. An important dimension of early modern Bengal economy was the great expansion of such marketing centers in the countryside, especially bazaars and haats, the periodic (usually weekly) village markets. Apart from the gunjes, which were fixed daily markets, haats were beginning to be held every alternate day in certain localities. Even in low-lying areas prone to inundation and floods by the seasonal overflowing of rivers, markets were held for four and sometimes for six months of the year, in some places on board boats (Datta 2000). Therefore, what seems to have occurred in Bengal was an accretion of markets in commercially active areas (like Murshidabad or Dhaka) or their creation in previously deficient areas (like Tiperra or Sylhet). The dispersal of non-agricultural, particularly craft, production in the countryside also accompanied this phenomenon. One can modify ­Tavernier’s description (cited above) by saying that a village in Bengal would be very small indeed if it did not include in it a shroff, along with a putwa (breeder of silkworms), chussar (weaver of silk cloths), tanti (weaver of cotton cloth) and teli (oilpresser), among ­ others (Datta 2000). Producers, both agricultural and non-agricultural, 195

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became aggregated to produce commodities for sale, thus introducing a major feature of ‘competitive market system’, and such markets differed from partially commercialized market‑places because prices and money regulated exchange directly (Hodges 1988: 62; Datta 2000: 66–8). Finally, there was the relative ease of the province’s fluvial channels of communication and its easy connectivity with production and manufacturing centers. Despite uncertainties caused by flooding, observers through these centuries and even later unanimously underscored the critical importance of fluvial interconnections in Bengal’s maritime vibrancy. In the entire belt stretching from Dhaka to Hughli, which was subject to seasonal inundations, the continuity of economic life was maintained by a seamless transfer from land to boats during the monsoon. For James Taylor, writing in 1840, the ‘abundance of the necessities of life’ in eastern Bengal was largely due to the ease with which these could be transported to the markets on boats (1840: 294). In 1893, Thomas Twining noted how the innumerable rivers and natural canals that intersected the province ‘afforded a most extensive and convenient communication through the interior in every direction’. From the ‘Jamuna to the Burrampooter’ down to the Bay of Bengal, rivers comprised a grid by which ‘the productions of Europe, of China, and of the numerous islands in the Straits of Malacca passed on to the northern parts of Hindostan destined for every part of the world’ (Twining 1893: 469). Walter Hamilton (1828) estimated that Bengal’s rivers employed more than 300,000 boatmen on a continuous basis c.1828. The numbers would be substantially higher if we factor in those rivers which were only seasonally navigable. These features ensured that the distribution of a multitude of productive and commercial functions below the level of the large city and their concentration in centers scattered over a wide variety of intermediate townships (called gunjes, much like qasbas in northern India) and further to the larger villages, which together comprised a web of interconnected production centers dotting the face of the country across interwoven trade routes. Together they gave rise to a muffusil economy that incorporated in it the village and the intermediate, or ‘rurban’ qasba economies into a composite whole. My findings from Bengal show that while cities like Qasimbazar or Dhaka continued to function as centers of high production, production centers, particularly of spinning and weaving of cotton textiles, were dispersed all over the countryside. Cotton textile production had spread out of its primary zones around Nadia in the west and Dhaka in the east to Lakshmipur and Chittagong on the eastern fringes, to 196

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Bishnupur in the west and to Midnapur on the southwestern edges of the province. Sugarcane and tobacco were grown and traded all over the province with merchants from the bigger and not so bigger towns vying with each other to purchase stocks, as they did for mopping up rice surpluses. Silk manufacture had spread out of the core Murshidabad–Qasimbazar axis to cover large areas of northern (Rajshahi) and western Bengal (Bishnupur). The expansion of overseas trade also led to a greater diversification in production. Between 1740 and 1828, indigo production centers mushroomed over central and northwestern Bengal, whereas opium cultivation took roots in the northern and northwestern margins of the province (Habib 1982; Marshall 1987). This meant that non-agricultural production tended to gravitate substantially to the rural areas. Scattered evidence indicates that, depending on the commercial importance of a locality, between 15 and 25 percent of the people living in Bengal’s countryside were artisans. Rangpur had a concentration of 207 artisans per square mile of territory at the end of the eighteenth century (Datta 2000). There was thus a new consolidation of the rural economy and its intensive commercialization. Was European agriculture more advanced or more efficiently organized? The yield ratios in Europe do not suggest that. They ranged from a measly 4:1 in seventeenth-century Poland, 5:1 in Germany and about 10:1 in eighteenth-century Netherlands and England (de Vries 1976: 36). Obviously, the agricultural performances of different countries were very diverse. Agricultural surpluses were often uncertain and depended on the vagaries of the harvest and the plethora of feudal dues, rents and tithes, except in the Low Countries and parts of England (de Vries 1976: 35). As far as the urban population was concerned, it was about 8 percent in the more advanced areas of Northern Europe (except in close proximities to major towns in England and in the Low Countries), having increased by 4 percent in the 150 years between 1600 and 1750 (de Vries 1976: 154). In England, common field systems continued with scattered holdings and an inflexible agricultural calendar, and the movement from common fields to large enclosed farms was far from over: between 1500 and 1650 only about 10 percent of farms were enclosed (Duplessis 1997: 66), and until 1700 more than half of England’s farming was still done on common fields. Also, agricultural growth did not happen seamlessly. There was an upward trend between 1660 and 1740, followed by a sharp slowdown during 1740–1790 when ‘the increase in agricultural output came to lag well behind the increase in population. Fall in levels of output and consumption per head of agricultural 197

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products ensued’ (Jackson 1985: 349). Improvements in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were uneven region wise and technologically not so radical as was earlier supposed. In England, growth in agricultural production was achieved due more to certain improved techniques than to any technological changes or advancements. In the seventeenth century, the ‘new husbandry’, especially as it evolved in Norfolk, became a more efficient way of doing old things. It included better rotation of crops, floating meadows to enhance grasslands for pasture, introduction of new crops like carrots and turnips and convertible or alternate ‘husbandry’ in which land was made to rotate between arable and pasture every few years, thereby augmenting the output of livestock and crops without diminishing either. Gradualism, or the slow extension of the Norfolk system, was the defining feature of English agriculture in the eighteenth century. E. A. Wrigley remarks: Changes in agricultural technology were perhaps less widespread and far-reaching than was once commonly supposed. The manufacture of nitrogenous fertilizers, the import of guano, the use of new sources of mechanical energy on the farm, and the widespread use of tile drainage on ‘wet’ land all lay in the future. Some of the more important innovations that were already known were still not fully exploited. Even the extensive use of legumes and turnips to support larger numbers of livestock, to improve the level of nitrogen in the soil, and to reduce the proportion of arable land in fallow, though well established in the more progressive regions, was still not universally practiced in 1800. (2006: 438) In the Low Countries and the Netherlands, agriculture was more peasant-led than in England, where large landed estates and farms were still the norm into the eighteenth century. The early growth of maritime commerce made agriculture responsive to changes in market and price (as in Bengal’s case) so that cultivators could switch from mixed cereal cultivation to livestock rearing depending on the prevailing agricultural or meat prices. An important aspect to note here is that for the first time in European agricultural history, a complete obviation of fallow through alternate husbandry – a fallowless rotation of flax, turnips, oats and clover – was achieved. Peasant cultivation in the Netherlands and the Low Countries was done on a multitude of tiny farms organized around a combination of arable farming, dairying, 198

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horticulture and raising flax, which was spun and woven at home into linen cloth (Duplessis 1997: 73). These were the constitutive elements of commercial agriculture in the Netherlands and the Low Countries. From these very brief comparisons, we can discern many similarities between the agricultural systems in two of the most advanced regions of Western Europe and Bengal. In terms of organization, Bengal’s agriculture was perhaps closer to the Low Countries, since both regions relied on small-peasant holdings and intensive commercial farming. In terms of agricultural practices, we see similarities in terms of more efficient methods of crop rotation and cropping techniques, which reduced fallows and enabled high levels of commercial agriculture. While there had hardly been any change in the level of agricultural technologies (and whatever changes were introduced, they were comparable to those of Western Europe), greater efficiencies and higher surpluses were created by introducing and experimenting with better techniques. The question is: how do we categorize these trends? For Wrigley, the major advances in England’s agriculture – in what was in many respects still the ‘old’ agriculture now became allied to institutional changes which resulted in a market-oriented capitalist agrarian system – enabled the country to cope with a conjunction of circumstances that would have spelled disaster five centuries earlier (2006: 438). For Jan de Vries, agriculture of the Low Countries ‘simply did not respond to the growth of urban markets, it reoriented itself to take advantage of the new opportunities of trade and specialized production’ (1976: 70). Why should we then think of Bengal’s (or for that matter, South Asian agriculture) as being any different? All these features provide sufficient reason to suggest that new impulses had begun surging into India’s early modern economy, and one could even go further and argue that ‘capitalist’ features, to the extent that they existed in sixteenth-century Europe, then had begun seeping into both manufacturing and farming in India through this period and later. If we can just move away from our obsession with the industrial model of nineteenth-century capitalism and its colonial manifestations, we can begin to see the more advanced economic zones of the proto-modern world (and Europe had only two such zones in my view) as clusters of agrarian capitalism of a ‘Smithian’ (i.e., marketoriented) kind, where growth was driven by increased specialization caused by the expansion of markets, geographically as well as locally. As markets expanded, each site came to specialize or diversify, depending on the stimulus, and purchased other goods from specialized producers at another site (Kelly 1997). ‘Smithian’ growth also meant that returns from specialized economic activities led to higher productivity 199

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and hence higher per capita output (perhaps incomes too) as well as total growth. These could come from specialization across different societies that accompanied increased long-distance trade, or from regional or urban/rural specialization through augmented domestic trade and urbanization, or from sharper occupational specialization accompanying expanding population densities and local circulation of goods and services. In proto-modern India, all three variables were working in tandem.

Note 1 This section is based on chapter 1 of my book, Society, Economy and Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal c. 1760–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2000).

References Adshead, S. A. M. 1997. Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400–1800. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buchanan, Francis. 1807. A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar. Edited by T. Cadell and W. Davies. London: Black, Parry & Kingsbury. Carney, Judith A. 2001. ‘African Rice in the Columbian Exchange’, Journal of African History, 42(3): 376–96. Dasgupta, Asin. 2001. The World of the Indian Ocean Merchant. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Datta, Rajat. 2000. Economy, Society and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal c. 1760–1800. New Delhi: Manohar. de Vries, John. 1976. The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600– 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duplessis, Robert S. 1997. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 2006. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grant, James. 1917 [1789]. ‘Historical and Comparative Analysis of the Finances of Bengal: Chronologically Arranged in Different Periods from the Mogul Conquest to the Present Time: Extracted from a Political Survey of the British Dominions and Tributary Dependencies in India’, in W. K. Firminger (ed.), The Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on East India Company Affairs, Vol. II, p. 378. Kolkata: R. Cambray & Co. Habib, Irfan. 1982. An Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps with Detailed Notes, Bibliography and Index. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Hamilton, Walter. 1828. The East India Gazetteer: Containing Particular Descriptions of the Empires, Kingdoms, Principalities, Provinces, Cities, Towns, Districts, Fortresses, Harbours, Rivers, Lakes, &c. of Hindostan, and the Adjacent Countries, India Beyond the Ganges, and the Eastern Archipelago; Together. . . London: Parbury, Allen & Company. Hodges, Richard. 1988. Primitive and Peasant Markets. Oxford: Blackwell. Jackson, R. V. 1985. ‘Growth and Deceleration in English Agriculture, 1660– 1690’, The Economic History Review, 38(3): 333–51. Jones, E. L. 1981. The European Miracle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Morgan. 1997. ‘The Dynamics of Smithian Growth’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 12(3): 939–64. Landes, David. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W. W. Norton. Lee, John. 1999. ‘Trade and Economy in Pre-Industrial East Asia, c.1500– c.1800: East Asia in the Age of Global Integration’, Journal of Asian Studies, 58(1): 2–26. Marshall, P. J. 1987. Bengal the British Bridgehead: Eastern India, 1740– 1828. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. 1986 [1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Meuvret, Jean. 1974. ‘Monetary Circulation and the Use of Coinage in ­Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century France’, in Peter Earle (ed.), Essays in European Economic History, 1500–1800, pp. 89–99. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perlin, Frank. 1987. ‘Money-Use in Late Pre-colonial India and the International Trade in Currency Media’, in John F. Richards (ed.), The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India, pp. 232–73. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pires, Tomé. 2005. The ‘Suma Oriental’ of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China Written in Malacca and India in 1512– 1515, 2 Vols. Edited by Armando Cortesão. New Delhi: Asia Educational Services. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Prakash, Om. 2001. ‘Global Precious Metal Flows and India, 1500–1750’, in John McGuire, Patrick Bertola, and Peter Reeves (eds.), Evolution of the World Economy: Precious Metals and India, pp. 59–76. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Richards, John F. 1980. ‘Mughal State Finance and the Premodern World Economy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23(2): 285–308.

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Richards, John F., ed. 1983. Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Steensgaard, Niels. 1990. ‘Commodities, Bullion and Services in Intercontinental Transactions Before 1750’, in Hans Pohl (ed.), The European Discovery of the World and Its Economic Effects on Pre-Industrial Society, 1500–1800, pp. 9–23. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. 1925 [1676]. Travels in India. Translated by V. Ball and Edited by W. Crooke. London: Oxford University Press. Taylor, James. 1840. A Sketch of the Topography and Statistics of Dacca. Kolkata: Military Orphan Press. TePaske, John J. 1983. ‘New World Silver, Castile and the Philippines, 1500– 1800’, in John F. Richards (ed.), Precious Metals, pp. 424–46. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Twining, Thomas. 1893. Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago, with a Visit to the United States; Being Notes and Reminiscences by Thomas Twining. London: McIlvaine & Co. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. The Modern World-System. Vol. II. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press. Watson, Andrew M. 1983. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Framing Techniques, 700–1100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wong, R. Bin. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wrigley, E. A. 2006. ‘The Transition to an Advanced Organic Economy: Half a Millennium of English Agriculture’, Economic History Review, 59(3): 435–80.

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11 REVISITING THE EARLY MODERN MERCHANT Caste, power and the politics of transition Lakshmi Subramanian

The idea of the ‘early modern’ in the context of South Asia has emerged in the last two decades as a major field of investigation. Since the intervention of C. A. Bayly (1983) in the debates around the eighteenth century and in situating the importance of scribal groups and intermediate capital in servicing the political economy of post-Mughal states, there has been a greater investment in teasing out the constituent elements of social change and economic transformation whether inspired or not by encounters with the western world. The exercise has not been without its detractors – besides the obvious problems in defining an early modern, there has been some apprehension about staking a belief in a clearly articulated teleology of change affecting the structure of economic production, of social organization or of political conceptions. On the other hand, there has been a growing interest in identifying and understanding a complex cluster of changes, which had been taking place in different parts of India, ranging from increasing commercialization to bureaucratization of the state apparatus to changes in commodity production and political values. Some of these changing registers were reflected in new cultural practices, including history writing and its articulation of political and ethical values, persuading historians and scholars to reflect on the idea of the ‘early modern’ more as a conceptual category than a chronological one. Thus, Partha Chatterjee states quite categorically that the early modern is not to be seen chronologically (2008: 7–8), but as a set of ideas that underwrote a series of practices and orientation and was in evidence between the fifteenth century and the present. Other scholars working on cultural productions who have also used the 203

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notion of the early modern to explain and analyze changing registers of art, music and literary expression and historical writing see in its use explanatory potential to analyze and deconstruct conceptual shifts in political–philosophical intention, in aesthetics and artistic conventions. We have concrete instances of late eighteenth-century courts, notably the Maratha court of Tanjore under Serfoji (Nair 2012; Peterson 1999) and that of the Raos of Kutch in Bhuj (Jaffer 2000), responding to a variety of cultural inputs appearing largely in the context of western contacts, through missionaries and sea travel, and generating impressive experiments in public life. On the other hand, the actual and concrete changes in the material context of eighteenth-century states in India meant that in the wake of greater bureaucratization and military fiscalism, new social entrants made their way up administrative and revenue structures, transforming older social relations in the process. Just how far these processes led to a substantive interrogation of deeper structures is an issue that can be productively addressed, especially through the lens of law and judicial regulation accompanying the rise of the colonial state. The newly introduced laws and regulations, in their articulation of principles of equity and fairness in the realm of commerce and judicial arbitration around commercial claims, came to define an abstract legal subject unrestrained by considerations of caste and hierarchy when it came to legal accountability. This chapter is an attempt in that direction and focuses on merchants and merchant practices, looking at them through a new set of perspectives, offered by a context that witnessed changes in India’s political economy and the emergence of early colonial power in coastal enclaves and cities. It will consider the issue of merchant response to transitional politics in an attempt to identify certain practices they adopted and that constituted a part of changing merchant rationality. The focus will be on Tarwady Arjunji Nathji as the embodiment of an archetypal eighteenth-century merchant subject whose ability to negotiate with newly emerging channels of authority was matched by his judgment of its limits. The fact that he made the rational choice to opt for the protection of the East India Company1; spoke the language of property and its safeguards; and funded its political projects suggested his understanding of a new rationality. In fact, in pursuing his business in changed conditions, he was not averse to strengthening the organizational basis of his family firm, which, despite its professed imitation of tradition, may have spelled change. This is especially evident in the way Arjunji followed new channels of arbitration set out by the Mayor’s Court and the way in which he stubbornly espoused traditional Hindu scriptural practices in the domain of private entitlement. 204

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This could be seen as part of a complex process reflecting changing configurations of caste, business priorities, property rights and even public life. The process of transition from one dispensation to another threw up complex changes and alterations in legal practice and social ­ erchant-banker perceptions, and it is in that context that the case of a m like Tarwady Arjunji Nathji of Surat becomes especially interesting. If his decision to back the Company was informed by calculations of security and an increasing investment in the ideology of rule they espoused, his invocation of traditional authority when faced with the charge of murder was reflective of the pressures that early colonial penetration brought in its wake. The banker’s trial in a sense caught the essence of the politics of transition in its first stage, just when the Company initiated the process of reorganizing the ­judicial administration that looked at castes as polities – a feature that persisted even after 1827, when new regulations were put in place. The essence of transition politics, in effect, amounted to a pragmatic disposition demonstrated by both sides. While the merchants negotiated with the whole range of new institutions and ideas and sought efficient bureaucratic management of disputes that did not entirely disavow the ideal of a uniform legal subject, the Company acknowledged the centrality of caste and status in the Indian society. Even more important was the confidence of merchants to become political agents, if not actors; here was a significant shift in the political economy of late eighteenthcentury western India, where merchants as a rule assumed important offices and even articulated a politics that competed with older ­warrior lineages.

Merchants and politics: old habits, new challenges That merchants tended to be apolitical and wary of undesirable state attention is not a new assumption, especially in relation to the experience of late medieval India. While their importance as brokers ­servicing the cash nexus of medieval political economies – especially under the Mughals and as bankers assuming minting and assaying rights – is well known and acknowledged, there is a strong countervailing impression that they tended to keep away from the corridors of power and public attention as they feared the possibility of extortion and escheat. Karen Leonard (1979) argues that there was a shift in this attitude, as merchants articulated a definite political stand when they transferred their allegiance to the new dispensation offered by the regional powers and the Company. She views the development from the prism of the ‘Great Firm’, indicating, even if implicitly, that 205

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the merchant firm assumed an altogether unprecedented influence in the emerging political economy (1979: 151–67). Subsequent scholarship has developed and complicated this position, asserting that it was merchants who underwrote assumptions of power as the merchant firm developed and became centralized over the course of the eighteenth century and at the commencement of the nineteenth century (Chatterjee 1996; Subramanian 1996). The implications of this new concentration on the actual organizational apparatus of merchant firms, or indeed on their approaches to law and property or business practices, have not yet drawn the attention of scholars. It is the contention of this chapter that the experience of transition, and the encounter with the apparatus of early Company rule with all its accouterments, may have introduced important changes into the structure of family firms and business practices. These were not always evident and were even camouflaged by a constant invocation of tradition, but, in fact, there were important elements of reciprocity in the age of partnership and/or contained conflict. As Sheila Smith (1994) suggests, Indian family firms in Bombay adapted European techniques as part of survival strategies, using civil courts to ensure inheritance rights, prevent division of estates and claim debts. Additionally, it would seem that firms began to exercise tighter control over their members and dependents and even to use traditional sources of moral legitimacy to ensure this. We could see both of these tendencies as part of a new reflection as merchant subjects grappled with the politics of transition, which included, among other things, the possibilities of new legal arbitration and adjudication. Of course, one could well argue, and with some legitimacy, that the merchants were not new to resorting to legal channels, and that under the Mughal system there were important mechanisms to facilitate resolution of disputes, as indeed the later eighteenth century experience revealed. However, what would appear to mark a major change was the discourse that accompanied Company justice as well as the perception that justice in the Mayor’s Court was achievable quickly and more efficiently. In abiding by this, merchants also began to participate in a new language of rights and entitlement. Petitions and protests, which began to distinguish merchant responses, reflected this all too clearly. Recall for instance how Tarwady Shankar, an influential banker who was extensively invested in the business of lending money to the Company establishment, remonstrated with the officials in Surat for their laxity, which had allowed the August riots of 1795 to explode: ‘I have seen Benaras, the people are all happy under the English government there; nowhere have I seen such a thing happen where you English are’ 206

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(quoted in Subramanian 1985: 237). Merchants adjusted to notions of authority that were characteristic of the Company’s position and began in their petitions to appeal to the material and moral concerns of the English – it was to the Company’s self-image that appeals were made (Haynes 1991). Time and again, petitioners insisted on their abru (honor), which translated into the maintenance of social order and religious/caste concerns but were expressed in terms of the professed values of the Company. The simple pragmatism and rationality at work came out quite starkly on both sides – merchant subjects as well as the Company. Nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in the choice that a banker like Arjunji made when he supported the Company against the Marathas and in the Company’s shamefaced endorsement of Arjunji’s highhandedness and culpability in the murder trial of 1800, simply on the grounds of his value as an indispensable intermediary and crucial ally. To appreciate the relationship between the Surat banker and the Company in the eighteenth century, we need to look briefly at the material context in western India that set the stage and space for a new kind of merchant rationality to emerge. This is not to suggest that the shift in political loyalty or in sensibility, captured by the writings of the scribal groups, karanams (Narayana Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam 2001) and munshis (Chatterjee 2010), was confined to merchants or scribes alone – but simply to look at social change and political transformation through the lens of the scribal/merchant group (identified loosely by C. A. Bayly as the gentry). The immediate political context for merchants in western India was provided by the politics of eighteenth-century successor states, of which the English trading company was an integral part. The trading region of Gujarat, arguably the most premier maritime region of Mughal India, was subject to the growing influence of the Marathas. The Marathas shared sovereignty with the declining Mughal administration and with the Company, whose claims assumed the form of extra-territorial privileges, preferential customs rates and the right to enforce English colors on local and high-seas shipping. Unlike eastern India, the western littoral in the first half of the eighteenth century suffered from political insecurity and conditions of conflict that severely impacted merchants, who were faced with declining trade prospects on the one hand and state extortion on the other. Under the circumstances, the rational option seemed to be to initiate a more proactive relationship with the Company and persuade it to resist the revenue demands of the ruling administration. 207

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The Company was seen as a viable alternative for two reasons. One was its naval strength, which did not matter much on the ground as far as subcontinental political negotiations were concerned but did count for ensuring the continuation of sea voyages and freight traffic across the ocean to the Gulf, in which almost all local merchants had substantial stakes. The other advantage lay in the Company’s own incipient political agenda of securing a toehold in local administration, so as to augment the trading activities of the Company as well as private traders. Executing this agenda was by no means easy – the finances of the Company were not adequate, and while they were prepared to resist the local administration’s claims on them or on their client merchants, they were forced to fall back on the financial cooperation of the local bankers and merchants. The dynamics of mutual reciprocity worked to the advantage of both the Company and the merchants, and it was in this context that an Anglo-Bania order emerged (Subramanian 1996). This was not, strictly speaking, a formal order, but rather one that involved a network of close and personalized arrangements between the Company authorities and substantial sections of the city’s local merchant community. The latter acknowledged and embraced the protection of the Company, which intervened on their behalf in disputes involving the local administration, the Marathas and other European traders. They not only used the judicial facilities extended by the Mayor’s Court in Bombay but also put pressure on Company officials to represent their cases before the ruling Mughal administration. On their part, the Company officials were able to draw on the credit services and financial support of local bania bankers, whose influence and prominence in the remittance business facilitated money transfers between Company establishments in India. While it is a fact that cooperation between Indians and Europeans was hardly new and had an older history, what was markedly different was the way in which merchants became political actors and, more significantly, adjusted their practices to make the most of a changing situation. The extensive use of English arbitration, whether in Surat or Bombay, was part of the new strategy and suggested a major shift in the way merchants saw their public roles, just as they appreciated their own role in the expansion and consolidation of British power in the subcontinent. The scale and significance of Arjunji’s support to the Company establishment in Bombay may be briefly spelled out as a prequel to understanding the rationale of merchant action. Arjunji emerges in the Company records as an influential shroff from about the 1750s. He had extensive business concerns with Bengal, especially in the 208

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Surat–Bengal trade in silk, which also happened to function as a major conduit of remittance. In 1759, he played a decisive role in securing for the Company the Mughal farman (a royal order) authorizing them to act as qiladar (governor of a fort or a large town) and joint rulers of Surat city. From 1759 (the year of the Castle Revolution) to 1818 (the end of the Maratha wars), he was at the forefront of the Company’s financial arrangements. Advancing loans and credit services in order to keep the channel of remittances operational, his services were especially crucial during the years of the Anglo–Maratha wars when funding military establishments on the move became especially critical. The efficacy of these arrangements depended on the pressure that the banker could exercise on the Company to keep trade routes functional, as well as on his appreciation of the mechanisms that Company rule brought in its wake. Here, the legal system was of paramount importance, for it was through this channel of adjudication that disputes related to ­commercial claims, to property and its safeguards against division and attacks, could be settled and in the process a position articulated and defended. The facilities offered by the Company’s courts in Surat and by the Mayor’s Court in Bombay not only enabled merchants to take up issues but also provided a space for representing and modifying practices, whether in the name of equity, as the Company would like to have it, or of custom, as local traders would have it, depending on the case involved. While we do not come across Arjunji as a major complainant or defendant in the cases at our disposal, what we do come across is the great attention he paid to procedure and the cooperation that he extended in the information-gathering exercise that the Company sponsored (Subramanian 2012). This intercession was invaluable for the Company, which in its attempt to streamline practices was forced to fall back upon custom and tradition if the occasion so demanded it. On the other hand, it is clear that there was a growing tendency to take recourse to the new judicial apparatus to press claims and in the process to articulate a preference for certain modalities of business transactions as well as for clearer conceptions of entitlement. The process of negotiation was an interactive one; cases before the Mayor’s Court reveal how the Court was often compelled to take cognizance of customary procedures that did not always conform to their rhetoric of fair and free trade. Furthermore, even as the idea of contract and agreement began to enter into the parlance and practice of business in Surat, merchants were not indifferent to the possibilities of exploiting the fluidity of the situation to work around parallel circuits of control. And yet, imperceptibly but surely, the benefits of a strong 209

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and uncontested regime became apparent. Consequently, merchants themselves began to move towards a unilateral system of conflict resolution, urging the Company to intervene in political disputes, to enforce the hegemony of the Bombay Marine in policing the seas and to strengthen their own authority over family firms.

Re-framing business: towards greater control and legal resolution The expansion of the firm of Arjunji Nathji – like that of other firms such as Atmaram Bhucan, or the house of Hari Bhakti and Gopaldas Manohardas – was conspicuous and visible from about the latter half of the eighteenth century. In part, this was to do with the expanding ramifications of the hundi (a bill of exchange or promissory note) business and, in part, to do with the reconfiguration of cross-country trade in Hindustan from the 1780s. The inevitable fallout of this was the proliferation of agencies and branches in widely dispersed and far-flung areas. The expanding scale of business transactions required complete control over the agents, whose loyalty and orientation had to be guaranteed all the time. Going by later and retrospective histories, it would seem quite legitimate to suggest that the firms opted for a more authoritative structure that went beyond the conventional model of a closed network where information and credit circulated in a manner that was effective against competition.2 Such control could be exercised by close supervision of all activities; by regular inspection and use of local intermediaries to keep vigilance; by assuming moral leverage by deploying caste and status; and by enforcing the right to punishment, which could even be brutal. It is in this context that the example of Arjunji assumes significance, though the information we have at our disposal regarding Arjunji is admittedly scattered and fragmentary, making generalization problematic. The question is, however, worthy of further exploration. The 1780s witnessed his emergence as a major player in the remittance operations of the Company at Fort William, which relied on hundis to send the necessary funds for the struggling Bombay establishment (Subramanian 1996: 182–90). The Company, in fact, saw his maneuvers as the much-needed counterfoil to the monopolizing tendencies of the Benaras bankers and espoused his cause consistently, so much so that his firm emerged as the principal financier of the Company in western India. In 1789, the Company authorities bypassed the Benaras bankers to approach the house of Arjunji to take charge of the annual remittance between Bengal and Bombay. His ability 210

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to bypass the competition of the banking house of Gopaldas Manohardas is especially striking, as he stepped in with more reasonable exchange rates even as he simultaneously tightened the structure of his banking operations. How Arjunji was able to do so is not easy to infer. It may well be that his participation in the cotton trade as well as in the extensive pilgrim traffic between Benaras and the Maratha country was the fulcrum around which his hundi business turned. It is also clear that he relied on the support and authority of the Company to keep tight control over his agents, even as he made routine invocations of the Company’s role as the benign and just arbiter. In 1788, we come across a letter stating that everybody enjoyed peace and justice under the wise governorship of Jonathan Duncan and how he had become well known for his solicitude for the ryots (peasant tenants and cultivators). He himself was a great admirer of the governor, and it behoved the latter to pay even greater attention to Arjunji’s business, for the business of a shroff was fragile and depended entirely on keeping to commitments (Calendar of Persian Correspondence 1953: 157–58). This meant that bills had to be honored on time and that his concerns were to be safeguarded at all times. Here was a classic case of the banker using the Company’s language of rationality and fairness even as he tightened his control over the business. It is very likely that most merchants and bankers relied on close supervision of their networks; the tendency was for bankers to extend branches and firms and place them under the control of family members. But what seems especially conspicuous is the very tight control that Arjunji exercised over his agents and how, when the crunch came, he was able to exercise complete dominance over the money market, a factor that became a crucial determinant of the Company’s success. Whether this was unique to Arjunji or whether this was a usual precedent is hard to establish; while it would seem reasonable to suppose that other business houses would have relied on the same practices, court cases on the ground seem to suggest a certain measure of laxity on the part of principles. Furthermore, Arjunji’s understanding of the Company’s apparatus or ideology was not entirely instrumental. Even as he invoked the rhetoric and language of property rights, we also find him engaging substantively with the introduction of certain modifications and new conventions. The cases we have before the Mayor’s Court and the Recorder’s Court suggest quite clearly how there was a dialogic exercise at work in relation to insurance and lending practices, and how both parties responded to practices that seemed not just merely grounded in customary usage 211

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but were actually more reasonable and able to accommodate greater distribution of risks in times of insecurity. The success and depth of Arjunji’s credit network thus has to be explained in terms of the greater success he seems to have enjoyed over its structure. It elicited the confidence of the Company authorities, who were forced to rely on Arjunji’s house for the funding of a massive military campaign against the Marathas. By the 1780s, the banker had come out openly and persistently in his support of the Company as the only bulwark against inroads on private property and security. As a signatory to the petition of 1795, and on subsequent occasions, he made his support for the Company dispensation public, a factor that had appreciable impact on the money market, persuading smaller bankers to leave the field clear for the senior banker. It was during the second Maratha war that the banker came to assume a public role and the initiative in bagging a lucrative contract to fund the Company’s forces fighting the Marathas in dispersed theatres of war. For all the earlier latitude the shroff had shown, he was adamant in insisting on certain conventions and rates before committing himself to the contract in 1805 that obliged him to supply stipulated sums to the armies on the move (Subramanian 2001). The contract by and large worked satisfactorily enough – even if minor complaints about punctuality surfaced from time to time. On virtually every occasion, the Company was careful not to try the shroff’s patience and to try and ensure by every possible means the supply of the army with cash. In February 1805, the Bombay Government expressed its hope that Arjunji would continue to supply funds and even promised him a khilat, or robe of honor, if he complied with the agreement. Arjunji kept his commitments but rarely yielded on the issue of exchange rates or protocols of payment. The success that Arjunji enjoyed in the market was in part the consequence of a particular alignment and a set of choices he had been able to make and execute. In part, it was also to do with a certain self-image that he cultivated, one that was authoritarian and grounded in his particular location as a caste Brahmin. He maintained a tight ship; his gomasthas (salaried agents or managers) had to report for duty at 9 in the morning and only leave at 9 in the evening. It was this element of control that characterized his business dealings, a version of the family capitalism that Adam Smith (2003 [1776]) talks about. In his personal and private domain, he seems to have abided by traditional notions of honor and legitimacy, even while nursing a clear understanding of the new system of adjudication that the Company introduced. This temperament speaks of a very distinct register of 212

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pragmatism and controlled coercion that constituted the eighteenthcentury early modern merchant subject. This came out forcefully, even dramatically, during the trial of 1800, in which the senior banker was involved, implicated and let off with a ritual punishment befitting not a legal subject but a caste elder.

Ritual authority versus legal interrogation The trial of the banker Arjunji Nathji revolved around a case of domestic crime and punishment that spilled into the public domain. Sometime around the second week of November 1800, on the occasion of a family wedding, a bag of jewels along with other valuables and money was found missing from the banker’s elaborately guarded premises. An old family servant, Jairam, along with his brother Raghunath and his father-in-law Puniah, were suspected of theft. They were kept in solitary confinement at the banker’s house and frequently beaten and flogged by the his security staff in order to make them admit their guilt. After a few days, Puniah managed to stage a dramatic escape. The infuriated banker instructed his servants to use more force to extract a confession from Jairam. He was so severely beaten that the next morning he died (Subramanian 2004). Thus far, the confinement of Jairam and the punishment inflicted on him by his master – who had, by his admission, seen him in the nature of a son – had remained a private affair. Jairam’s death changed matters overnight, as considerations of private righteousness and rights encountered tenets of public justice. Guilty or not guilty, murder most foul or accident were questions that had to be addressed. The Company had just entered Surat as its ruler in 1800 and appointed a magistrate to administer criminal cases. It had neither the experience nor the confidence to take on the local banker, who immediately invoked the strength of custom and scriptures and threatened withdrawal of support to the Company at a time when its position in the region was vulnerable. Thus, even as the Company’s law was set in motion and Arjunji was restrained under Section III, Regulation III of the act of 1800, Ramsey the judge stated quite categorically that he ‘wished to avoid any degree of severity that may be improper as from the considerations of the advanced age, the peculiar status of a Brahman and also his extensive concerns as a shroff’ (Surat Factory Diary 1800). What comes through clearly in the proceedings is Arjunji’s ability to deploy both community support and the Company’s self-interest in leveraging his own position. For the Company, the need of the hour was to keep the banker and his purse on their side, but equally it had 213

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to balance its commitment to notions of law and justice with acknowledgment of local customs and practices. The question of caste as a mediating entity had to be reckoned with. The trial that followed was an elaborate judicial process, involving the depositions of the relatives of the deceased, his neighbors and members of the banker’s household and security staff and extensive consultations with community elders and finally with legal experts or pundits. With minor variations, the depositions agreed substantively on several counts – that Arjunji had loved and cared for his servant and had treated him as his son; that he had instructed his staff to beat Jairam up and extract a confession; and that Arjunji had not been aware of Jairam’s deteriorating condition following the severe punishment that had been administered to him. In effect, there was little doubt that the banker’s instructions had been to extract a confession and nothing more. But what remained unresolved and difficult to determine accurately was the banker’s intention. Did the banker intend the servant’s death, and had he been, in fact, completely unaware of the seriousness of the prisoner’s situation on the night of 9 December? Further, could an act of private punishment inflicted by a Brahmin master enter the domain of the legal system the Company was trying to put in place? There were no easy answers, given the fact that the trial occurred on the cusp of transition and that social and political realities could not be ignored. Arjunji was both a Brahmin notable whose influence was as yet not subordinate to the rule of law and a banker about to bankroll the Company’s political projects, neither of which could be ignored. The enormous influence that he commanded came into immediate and sharp relief, and by 13 December, four days after the incident, financial settlement bolstered by social coercion persuaded Jairam’s relatives to withdraw the case. Arjunji’s impassioned defense invoked the notion of caste values and credit reputation, both of which he urged were at risk in the trial. He maintained that he was not guilty, that he had had no idea of Jairam’s precarious condition and that he was incapable of harboring malevolent intentions towards a person he considered as a son. There were a few dissenting voices that suggested that the banker was not as innocent as he made out to be, and also that the Company officials were aware of the robbery and detention, and even that they implicitly supported the banker’s actions. However, all this was hushed up and the verdict went in Arjunji’s favor – but not before the Company administration had labored to solicit expert opinions, mobilize community participation and enable all the procedural formalities to take place. The Court in its concluding statement stated that 214

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from the circumstances that have been proved in the course of the trial, they cannot think that the prisoner ever intended to deprive Jairam Jugdees of life, but they are decidedly of opinion that the evidence that have heard has fully established that he was privy to the very illegal punishment inflicted on the dead which was the cause of his death and originated in the prisoner’s [Arjunji’s] orders. (Surat Factory Diary 1800) Some form of justice therefore had to be forthcoming, and here the Company opted for traditional scriptural prescriptions suggested by a Hindu pundit they consulted in the city. These amounted to certain monetary payments and compensation that were seen as acts of penitence. This suited Arjunji, who had, in fact, used his leverage with the traditional social order to elicit a punishment that in no way altered his status or his sense of self-esteem and, indeed, who had simultaneously deployed his personal connections with the Company to build up his case with conviction.

Reading the trial: some reflections What did the trial actually demonstrate? Did it make even a slight dent in traditional structures of authority? Did it show up a new early modern ethos on the part of the Indian merchant? In any case, what guise did the early modern assume? How far was this case an embodiment of an ‘early modern’ moment in the evolution of merchant attitudes, especially to the new politics and the new values that undergirded the emerging dispensation? What did the period of transition, characterized by markets and merchant capital, generate in terms of evaluating traditional structures and idioms of authority? At a very basic and obvious level, what the case showed up was Arjunji’s stature and confidence in maintaining his stand by deploying the traditional idiom of caste and Dharmashastra. Do we see in this a retrograde move or a certain pragmatism that enabled him to straddle the worlds of business and of caste and social status? Was this especially new except in the fact that the very process of straddling the two domains was made more possible by the very dynamics of transition politics? The politics of transition had involved, at the level of rhetoric, an invocation of the principles of fair trade and equity that the local bania merchants found useful to invest in. This did not, however, mean that the merchants were ready to commit themselves to the notion of rule 215

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by law or give up their entitlements grounded in caste privilege. But on the other side, nor was the Company ready or interested in pressing for the idea of an abstract legal subject and an untrammeled rule of law. The principles of fair trade and equity did not automatically translate into notions of a greater public good whose security could not be diluted by considerations of caste and custom. The colonial state rested on fragile foundations, and the emerging dispensation in western India had to accommodate the dynamics of what has been called the inner politics of the city. This was configured around normative principles of the kind Arjunji invoked. For the banker whose private engagement with religion, ritual and philanthropy was built into his self-description, the reality of the political transition had not altered the ethical order in which his self and relationships were constituted. This is not to exonerate the abuse of personal power, which the banker undoubtedly exercised in relation to his dependent, but rather to reflect on the process of negotiation in an emerging colonial context. What is important, therefore, is to interrogate the validity of categories such as the early modern in understanding the range of social responses and change in which merchants were able to factor. Taking a cue from Thomas Timberg’s (2014) study on the Marwaris, one could legitimately argue that complete control over dependents within the firm and household was an important facet of business enterprise, and that when Arjunji claimed he had loved his servant and enjoyed complete rights over him as a father would have over his son, he was perhaps echoing the conventions he had been used to. It is very likely that an integral feature of his commercial practices involved complete control over his network of dependents, retainers and agents. At the same time, like all good merchants, he readily responded to the benefits of the colonial connection and retained his private practices to reinforce his self-image as a good upper caste notable of the city, which held the key to his business success as well. Trust and reciprocity, which have been identified as the keystone of efficient pre-modern enterprise, were articulated in a context of caste hierarchy and social relationships that determined status and market-worthiness. These enjoyed an institutional apparatus when the Company dispensation promised merchants certain concrete benefits and arrangements that appeared rational and conducive to expansion. For the Company, the banker had to be kept in good humor, and in 1800 there was no question of any interference in traditional modes of redress. Here, it would seem that the Company authorities tended to allow practice rather than textual traditions to determine cases – so, even in the case of the Surat banker, the customary practices in vogue buttressed notionally by the Dharmashastras 216

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would appear to have prevailed. According to Amrita Shodhan (2010), oral testimony of natives who were conversant with laws and their interpretation constituted the basis of the early judicial administration, not simply the view that dominant castes were the source of law and justice. To that extent, British action and Indian response, even at this very early stage in the articulation of colonial policy, stood for a shift in values and in the distribution of social power. On the other hand, there was no question either of giving in to demands, even symbolic, that threatened to question the Company’s political profile. For instance, in 1808 we come across a petition from Arjunji’s agent mentioning how his master had built a church in Surat at great expense, and that he was determined to affix an image there and wanted some guns fired from the Surat garrison at the time of consecrating the image. The authorities turned down this request, which was in every sense inadmissible as such indulgence was never extended by the government of which the flag still flies on the Castle and an acquiescence with it would be contemplated with horror and disgust by the most formidable part of the community. (Surat Factory Diary 1800) So where does this leave us as far as merchants, politics and early modernity are concerned? Assuming that the idea of the early modern is useful as an explanatory category to make sense of social change accompanying market expansion and the circulation of merchant capital, it is easy to see how merchants as beneficiaries of transition were quick to resort to the English system by making an increasing use of colonial legal institutions that seemed to safeguard their property and customary rights and privileges. Equally important was the fact that the Company, even as it was an exemplary modern business organization, was always mindful of the local situation and embarked on a system of understanding local practices and compiling them, thereby identifying caste empirically and not textually. The potential inherent in the idea of the early modern lay here, perhaps – that it enabled Europeans and Indians to stage the last act of partnership in an age of contained conflict, where both sides negotiated for mutual understanding and benefit when there were moments of reconciliation and of rupture. Thus, to describe the Indian merchant of the eighteenth century as an early modern subject should not involve an easy elision of the pre-modern and precolonial to the modern, for 217

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this will obscure an understanding of the conditions in which the indigenous subject had to operate. This chapter has tried to capture the conditions of transition for both state and subject that made possible a qualified embrace of the processes and features that came to stand for a new rationality.

Note After this, I use the Company in the rest of the chapter. 1 2 Official consultations of the Company in Benaras yield valuable information on the structure and control of banking firms. Cases in Moradabad or Allahabad proceedings reveal that it was a general practice for mahajans to establish branches more or less connected with their own establishments and dependent upon the credit of the old firm for their success. At the head of branches, they usually placed their relatives.

References Bayly, C. A. 1983. Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of Expansion 1770–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calendar of Persian Correspondence, Vol. VIII. 1953. Edited by B. A. Saletore. New Delhi: National Archives. Chatterjee, Kumkum. 1996. Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern Bihar, 1733–1820. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Chatterjee, Kumkum. 2010. ‘Scribal Elites in Sultanate and Mughal Bengal’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47(4): 445–72. Chatterjee, Partha. 2008. ‘Introduction: History in the Vernacular’, in Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds.), History in the Vernacular, pp. 1–14. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Haynes, Douglas E. 1991. Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jaffer, Amin. 2000. ‘The Aina Mahal: An Early Example of “Europeanierie” ’, in Christopher London (ed.), Arts of Kutch, pp. 42–51. Mumbai: Marg. Leonard, Karen. 1979. ‘The Great Firm Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21(2): 151–67. ‘Letter from Ramsay the Judge and Magistrate Dated 13 December 1800’, Surat Factory Diary, 51(1): 41. Nair, Savithri Preetha. 2012. Raja Serfoji II: Science, Medicine and Enlightenment in Tanjore. New Delhi: Routledge. Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2001. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800. New Delhi: Permanent Black.

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Peterson, Indira. 1999. ‘The Cabinet of King Serfoji of Tanjore: A European Collection in Early Nineteenth Century India’, Journal of the History of Collections, 11(1): 71–93. Shodhan, Amrita. 2010. ‘Caste in the Judicial Courts of Gujarat, 1800–60’, in Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia (eds.), The Idea of Gujarat History, Ethnography and Text, pp. 32–49. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Smith, Adam. 2003 [1776]. The Wealth of Nations. London: Bantam Classics. Smith, Sheila. 1994. ‘Fortune and Failure: The Survival of Family Firms in Eighteenth Century India’, in Geoffrey Jones and Mary Rose (eds.), Family Capitalism Studies in Business History, pp. 44–65. London: Routledge. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 1985. ‘Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795’, Modern Asian Studies, 19(2): 205–37. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 1996. Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 2001. ‘Arms and the Merchant’, South Asia, 24(2): 15–23. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 2004. ‘A Trial in Transition: Courts, Merchants and Identities in Western India, circa 1800’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41(3): 269–92. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 2012. ‘Reaping the Risks of Transition: Merchants and Trade in Western India’, in Om Prakash (ed.), The Trading World of the Indian Ocean (History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, Vol. III Part 7), pp. 285–310. New Delhi: Pearson. Surat Factory Diary 51(1). 1800. Mumbai: Maharashtra State Archives. Timberg, Thomas A. 2014. The Marwaris: From Jagat Seth to Birlas. London: Penguin.

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12 MODERNITY AS RENEWAL MECHANISM Alternative(s) to modernity in India Avadhesh Kumar Singh

I would like to outline a different understanding of modernity based on Indian systems of thought. In societies like India, modernity is an ongoing process of questioning the regnant logic of the self, society and its institutions. Certain logic may be valid at a certain point of time and play its role in understanding various phenomena in the society and sustaining it in the process. Over a period of time, people find fissures in the existing logic and question its validity. This refutation leads to the construction of a new logic that replaces the prevailing logic, hitherto rendered ‘old’. The new logic becomes modern until such time that it is replaced by a newer logic. In this process, there is never any disjunction with the past as had been the case in the west. This is how the renewal mechanism of Indian civilization works wherein the Indian society can be likened to a tree that renews itself in different seasons, year after year. When the autumn comes, it sheds off old leaves, and new ones sprout that thrive for the given time, to be replaced by still newer ones in the course of time. The old leaves that fall down mingle with the earth and become a source of energy to their new counterparts. It may best be understood by turning to a term punarnava, used by Acharya Hazariprasad Dwivedi as the title of one of his novels. In this manner, the journey of modernity as renewal mechanism goes on in Indian society. Modernity thus is sat (truth as fact) and rt (truth as value) as well.1 The term punarnava may be roughly translated as ‘renewability’. The term used for modernity in many Indian languages is adhunikta. Adhunikta usually refers to a mythical moment when ‘now’ began. But adhunik is derived from the root adhuna, which is ‘today’ or ‘these 220

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days’. Hence, adhunikta would be ‘today-ness’ or ‘thesedays-ness’. In Indian practice, ‘new’ in relation to the old is more central than ‘now’ in disjunction with the ‘then’ of yesterday. The term for it may be navyata (newness), for modernity replaces the old logic or structures. If it is concerned with renewal mechanism, as in the case of India, the term for it should be punaranavata. Also, this punaranavata is multi-layered with intersections and interconnections, as it may have its variants in different times and spaces. Even within the same time and space, there may be multiple logics. Hence, the punaranavata, the term for modernity, is to be seen in relation to antar-punaranavata (intermodernity) and antahpunaranavata (intramodernity) in India, for pluralistic traditions resist singular modernity. One of its versions may be central for a certain period of time, but it attains energy and legitimacy through its interaction with other collaborative or confrontational traditions. Many Indian thinkers and authors have discussed strategies to be employed in different periods. For instance, Kalidasa in his play Malvikagnimitra (Act 1, Scene I, Shloka 2) resolved this dilemma by making his Sutradhar state that all that is old does not make it good just because it is old, and just because something is new does not make it bad. Wise people accept something after examining it, and the fools follow others indiscriminately. In the bhakti period, Tulsidas in his Ramacharitmanas voiced it thus, ‘Sangrah tyagu na binu pahchane’ (‘Neither acquisition nor rejection be done without due recognition of their value’). In the twentieth century, Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala warned against acceptance or rejection without due knowledge of what is involved: ‘Bhram mein jo liya gyan mein lo tum gin gin/ Bhram mein jo diya gyan mein do tum gin gin’ (‘Whatever you took in ignorance, take them in knowledge carefully/whatever you gave in ignorance, give them in knowledge carefully’). This is how Indian society renewed its tradition and continued it through processes of questioning, rejection and acceptance and synthesis. Let us now move towards a brief appraisal of the Indian discourse of modernity in light of the preceding discussion. The Vedas and Upanishadas provided their logic in the dense mahavakya (profound utterance) tradition about self, society, time, cosmos and forces that act as primum mobile. The drift from the source of their origin led to ritualization of these ideas, the meaning of which was also lost to most of their practitioners in the course of time. Philosophical mysticism and ritualism prospered and the logic behind them suffered. In response, there arose various Indian schools of thoughts (like materialists such as Lokayatas or followers of Charvaka) which questioned the validity of the Vedic logic. Some of these schools are 221

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referred to in the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. For instance, Rama during the course of his exile visits ashramas (hermitage) of various rishis (sages; seers), each one representing a unique school of thought and conduct. Among different seers Rama goes to see is Jabali, a skeptical sage. He debunks the shastras by saying, ‘the injunctions about the worship of gods, sacrifice, gifts and penance have been laid down in the shastras by clever people just to rule over [other] people’. Jabali questions the religious beliefs about the other world by saying that ‘there is no after world, nor any religious practice for attaining that. O Rama, be wise, there exists no other world but this, that is certain! Enjoy that which is present and cast behind thee that which is unpleasant’. He tells Rama to be guided only by his observation and experience, not by any shastra: ‘Follow what is within your experience and do not trouble yourself with what lies beyond the province of human experience’ (Sen 1989: 174–5). Jabali’s proposition is an alternative school of thought to ritualistic, shastric or scriptural injunctions and religious beliefs. Jabali’s thoughts prefigure Charvaka’s Lokayata philosophy, which was materialist in nature. Charvaka’s materialism questioned and rejected spiritual and nonmaterial modes and perceptions for accepting the existence of things like heaven and hell. However, it needs to be admitted here that alternative views or schools of philosophy like those of Jabali and Charvaka remained minority discourses. These alternative views become a full flowing river Ganges in Buddha. He was the first revolutionary who rejected the authority of the Vedas and shastras and other givens by all other external authorities – religious heads, priests or social leaders. He underscored the primacy of one’s reasoning, experience and observation. He replaced falsehood of faith, life of dreariness and esoteric austerity with indispensability of satya (truth), prem (love) and karuna (compassion) and explained the problems of life in terms of reasoning. He recognized the existence of suffering in the world and questioned its cause, which, he asserted, was desire. He further posited that suffering can be eliminated by removing the cause of suffering, i.e., desire. Since it is not possible for human beings to get rid of all desires, he suggested madhyama marga (the middle path). Later, over a period of time, Buddha’s teachings too were reduced to ritualism, idol worship, tantra (esoteric modes of worship and meditation in Hinduism and Buddhism) and vamachara (left-handed practices associated with tantra) due to internal degeneration and external influence. The other shramanic tradition (referring to a variety of renunciate ascetic traditions from the middle of the first millennium 222

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BCE) represented by the Jainas suffered a similar fate. Consequently, a socio-cultural-religious movement gathered momentum on an unprecedented scale in human history in the Indian subcontinent in the form of bhakti after the seventh century in Tamil Nadu, where it was a reaction against Buddhist and Jaina sects. The Naths and Sufis prefigured the Bhakti movement in the northwestern India with their rejection of the logic of shastras and domination of upper castes on the lines of the Charvakas, and spoke in the languages of loka or common people. In the course of time, it became a sweeping pan-Indian movement with the participation of people from different regions, races, religions, languages, castes and classes.2 The Bhakti movement emerged as an (alter)native to the abstract, esoteric, ritualistic and decadent orthodoxy of Indian society. Bhakti discourse appeared as a new logic in the exhausted Indian society – decadent Buddhism, ritualistic Brahmanism and oppressive caste system. It was a period of vernacularization of knowledge. It rejected the hegemony of shastras and democratized knowledge by making it accessible to common people (loka) in the language of people. It was a new modernity that questioned Indian social order based on the caste system, and religious degeneration. As a state of mind, it questioned given structures with its own rationality or reason or logic. The new logic of bhakti subverted the caste system, gender, institutions of marriage and religion. It popularized the personal god, thereby bringing spirituality to the common folk irrespective of their caste or class. On the one hand, it had the devotion of Meera, who rejected rigid social confines of the clan and sang and danced to celebrate her unconditional love for her divine lover Lord Krishna. On the other, it had the intellectuality of Kabir, which attained the simplified form of common sense. It transcended logic in ulatvansis (upside down sayings; inverted statements). With common people from different regions, religions, castes – lower and higher – participating in it, the Bhakti movement became a unique national or Indian subcontinental movement marked by polyvalence and local habitations. Bhakti saint–poets proposed a new cosmology or world order that may also be termed as utopia. For Tulsi, it was the Ramarajya, and for Raidasa it was Begumpura. Raidasa charted it thus: The regal realm with the sorrowless name: they call it Begumpura, a place with no pain, No taxes or cares, nor own property there, No wrongdoing, worry, terror or torture. Oh my brother, I’ve come to take it as my own, 223

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my distant home, where everything is right. That imperial kingdom is rich and secure, where none are third or second – all are one; Its food and drink are famous, and those who live there dwell in satisfaction and wealth. They do this or that, they walk where they wish, they stroll through fabled palaces unchallenged. Oh, says Ravidas, a tanner now set free, Those who walk beside me are my friends.3 (Hawley and Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of India, 2005: 32) His Begumpura has no discrimination on the lines of caste, religion, class or gender. There is no sorrow, jealousy, dissatisfaction, unrest or unjustifiable taxation in it. Social harmony, equality, prosperity, peace and political stability prevail. Though utopias are not instances of modernity, they contain contours of a new social order. Though the Bhakti was the longest lasting cultural movement in the world, it would be erroneous to over-read Bhakti, as it was not a panacea for all social, cultural and intellectual degeneration in the Indian society. The movement and its logic became feeble after the seventeenth century. The nineteenth century in India was marked by the questioning of self in the light of clashes of civilizations or knowledge systems. Political subjugation led to cognitive colonization in the period. The jolt awakened India from its slumber and led to its reawakening, revival, reformation, reassertion and recognition of self by constructing a new logic.4 During this period, the continuity in Indian inter-­altermodernity, i.e., ‘interconnected other modernities’, may be discerned in many thinkers, social reformers and leaders. Swami Vivekananda’s is a case of cultural assertion, rejection and alternativization in the age of subjugation of Indian self and society. His stress on action in different fields of life, rather than on mere renunciation, in the form of his advocacy of rajayoga without discounting bhakti and jnana yoga (the Vedanta lays down four paths of yoga – bhakti, karma, jnana and raja) was based on the Gita. His Vedanta is a restatement of the thought from the Upanishadas and Shankaracharya from a new ‘scientific’ standpoint. He replaced metaphysical Vedanta with practical Vedanta and vouched for scientific temper but rejected competition as an evil on which modernization stands. His practical Vedanta was the foundation and spirit of his new logic. It offered a synthesis of the finest in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, as the idea of Vedanta according to him was ‘to harmonize all’ (Vivekananda 2002: 59). 224

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As Buddhism provided an alternative to degenerated Hinduism by questioning it, Swami Vivekananda had questioned both Hinduism and Buddhism. Buddhism degenerated into gross forms of superstitions and perpetuation of the very practices – like ritualism and idol worship – in innumerable sects against which Buddha had reacted while critiquing Hinduism. Rather than being antithetical, for Vivekananda Buddhism and Hinduism were complementary. He considered Buddhism the fulfillment of Hinduism. With Vedanta as an alternative to a world ridden with religious and other strife, he compared the relationship between Hinduism and Buddhism as similar to Judaism and Christianity. Buddha was born a Hindu and Christ was born a Jew. Both of them modernized their parent religions and founded an alternative religion. Sri Aurobindo continued the work initiated by Swami Vivekananda. One of the defining characteristics of modernity is a belief in the supremacy of rationality. Truth is sought – by philosophers and scientists alike – by means of the intellect. All other ways of k ­ nowing – intuition, imagination, inspiration and revelation – are lumped ­ together and seen as essentially inferior. Sri Aurobindo challenged the belief that reason should be the rightful basis of a truly mature civilization by asking whether the future of humanity lies in a culture founded solely upon reason and science. He answered it in the form of questions and assertions: Is the progress of human life the effort of a mind, a continuous collective mind constituted by an ever changing sum of transient individuals, that has emerged from the darkness of the inconscient material universe and is stumbling about in it in search of some clear light and some sure support amid its difficulties and problems? And does civilization consist in man’s endeavor to find that light . . . in a rationalized knowledge and a rationalized way of life? An ordered knowledge of the powers, forces, possibilities of physical Nature and of the psychology of man as a mental and physical being is then the only true science. An ordered use of that knowledge for a progressive social efficiency and well-being, which will make his brief existence more efficient, more tolerable, more comfortable, happier, better appointed, more luxuriously enriched with the pleasures of the mind, life and body, is the only true art of life. All our philosophy, all our religion – supposing religion has not been outgrown and rejected – all our science, thought, art, social structure, law and institution must found 225

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itself upon this idea of existence and must serve this one aim and endeavor. This is the formula which European civilization has accepted and is still laboring to bring into some kind of realization. It is the formula of an intelligently mechanized civilization supporting a rational and utilitarian culture. (Sri Aurobindo 1997: 241) Sri Aurobindo was presenting counter-logic to the western definition of modernity that rested on reasoning and intellect. Like his predecessor Swami Vivekananda, he emphasized the role of intuition, inspiration, imagination and revelation. Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo countered the western logic in spiritual and philosophical terms, and Mahatma Gandhi did so in political terms. His Hind Swaraj (2010 [1909]) is a manual of constructing alternatives. Hind Swaraj deals with most of Gandhi’s central concepts and concerns, like satya (truth), satyagraha (truth force, life force and soul force), swaraj (rule over/by self), swadeshi (indigenous) and sarvodaya (welfare of all). It problematizes the notions of development, modernization, education and especially civilization, and by proposing their alternatives, it disturbs the intoxicated proponents of modernization in India and abroad even now, as it did at the time of its publication. Gandhi was against the modern western civilization, built on greed, crass materialism, exploitation, brute force and injustice. He did not accept the validity of the enlightenment or teaching mission of the colonizers, at least in case of India, for it had nothing to learn from the colonizers. In this sense, the text is like a mirror in which we see and recognize ourselves. And for everything rejected, he proposed his own model with his own terms and tools. For instance, decolonization and independence are possible only through Swaraj, which, for him, stands for ‘Rule Thyself’. Moreover, it can be sustained only through swadeshi and satyagraha. He did it logically like Buddha, who acknowledged that there is suffering in the world. And the cause for suffering is desire. In the elimination of the cause is the end of the suffering. Likewise, Gandhi accepted the fact that there is colonization/exploitation in the world/India. The cause lies in the colonized’s inability to resist the colonizer, for which satyagraha emerged as the means of freedom from colonization, and the sustenance of freedom from colonization would depend on swaraj and swadeshi. Gandhi gives a new direction and purpose to humanity in crisis, in India in particular and the world in general. The ultimate purpose of human life in the Vedic and Upanishadic period was realization of the Brahma, the Ultimate and Infinite through meditation and 226

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penance, which in the course of time was taken over by ritualism. Buddha brought about a paradigm shift by insisting upon realization of truth on the basis of rationality and replaced penance with love and compassion. The bhakti poets and mystics replaced rationality/ intellectuality with prem (love) in its various manifestations as nirguna and saguna, and extended it to bhakti (devotion). Gandhi, pained at discrimination, exploitation and suffering, replaced the Ultimate and Narayana (the Lord) with daridranarayana (literally, the Lord of the poor; serving the poor is like serving the God) and practiced seva (service) of the suffering poor and tyaga (renunciation) for the sake of others as the highest Indian values with no discrimination. In the process, he recontextualized old yet somewhat overlooked practices and terms of Indian culture, like the concepts of prem, seva, lokasangraha (welfare of all), satyagraha, swadeshi and swaraj, and gave them a new meaning.

Is the project of alternativization feasible, or condemned to be ever incomplete? In Indian cultural grammar, there is no singular number. So, the alternatives to modernity will be multiple in India, and no one alternative can be the ultimate model. However, the question that remains to be answered is: if societies like India had its modernity in plural in different periods, why did it not lead to modernization or material development like the western modernism achieved through science and technology? This question needs to be seen in light of the fundamental difference between the two traditions: in the western tradition, the end of knowledge is domination and exploitation of nature, but in India, the end of knowledge is liberation from the cause of suffering, i.e., mukti, which is an ontological category achievable through subscription to purushartha chatushtaya (four goals of life in Hinduism), i.e., dharma (righteous conduct), artha (material well-being through proper means), kama (physical gratification through righteous means) and moksha (liberation from the cause of suffering). First of all, with its consequential adverse impact leading to exploitation of resources, the ugly fangs of development have been exposed. Also, if the ultimate end of human life is inner happiness and larger good of human beings, it is possible that a tribal, not living in so-called modern conditions, may be happier than many living in modern conditions. However, the question asked at the beginning of the paragraph needs to be studied in the Indian context. Indian modernity was also based on the spirit of questioning, logic and rationality. The astika (believer) and nastika 227

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(nonbeliever) traditions, different schools of Indian philosophy, the Buddhists and Jainas, the Lokayatas and Bhaktas and modern thinkers used rationality. However, they did not use it for scientific and technological developments because the basic purpose of knowledge was mukti (freedom from the cause of suffering). In this sense, the main objective of knowledge in India was to know man, universe and man’s place in the universe, and not to intervene in the ways of the universe or bend nature to suit human ends. To sign off, it needs to be iterated that western modernity in practice has been an aggressive hegemonic discourse and is essentially interventionist in nature. The Punarnava model of modernity might appear slow and less tangible in terms of outcome but is a viable alternative, as it is non-interventionist and relies on the inner resources and logic of a society and has space in it for ‘little’ and other modernities within and outside. Human civilization, from its prism, is not a discourse of binarism but a continuum of inter-altermodernities to be followed by eclipse and rise of others like the waves of the ocean.

Notes 1 The term rtu, which means ‘season’ is derived from the root rt. 2 For a discussion of the Bhakti movement in India, see Avadhesh Kumar Singh (2008). 3 Begumpura shahar ko naun, dukhu amdohu nahi thihi thauh Na tasavis khiraju na malu, khaufu na khata na tarasu jwalu. Ab mohi khub vatan gah pai, uhan khairi sada mere bhai.Kayamu dayamu sada pata sahi, dom ne sem ek so ahi. Abadanu sada mashur, uhan gani basahi mamur. Tiu tiu sail karahi jiu bhavai, mehram mahal na kau atkavai. Kahi Raidas khalas chamara, jo sahari su meet hamara. (Jagdish Sharan, Raidas Granthawali, 181) 4 For its discussion, see Avadhesh Kumar Singh (2004).

References Gandhi, M. K. 2010 [1909]. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Annotated and Edited by Suresh Sharma and Tridip Suhrud. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Hawley, John S. and Mark Juergensmeyer Songs of the Saints of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sen, Makhanlal, trans. 1989. Ramayana: From the Original Valmilki. Kolkata: Rupa.

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Sharan, Jagdish, ed. n.d. Raidas Granthawali. Ghaziabad: Sahitya Sansthan. Singh, Avadhesh Kumar. 2004. ‘Indian Renaissance Self-(Re)fashioning and Colonialism: A Comparative Study of the 19th Century Gujarati and Hindi Renaissance Prose Writings’, South Asian Review, 25(1): 48–60. Singh, Avadhesh Kumar. 2008. ‘In Their Own Words and Worlds: Women Saint Poets and Their Poetry’, in Avadhesh Kumar Singh (ed.), The Voice of Women: Gargi to Gangasati, pp. 1–53. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld. Sri Aurobindo. 1997. The Renaissance in India: With a Defence of Indian Culture: The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volume XX. Puducherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department. Vivekananda, Swami. 2002. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume II. Kolkata: Advaita Ashram.

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INDEX

abakul 136 abru 207 Abu’l Fazl 177 Academia Sinica 82 Aceh 138n1 Achyutananda 145 – 7, 161, 163n3, 163n4 Aden 190 adhiar 194 adhuna 220 adhunik 220 adhunikta 220, 221 adhyatama 181 Adhyatama Panth 181 aesthetics 66, 204 Afro-Eurasia 121, 122, 124, 126, 132 – 8 Age of Exploration xxxvi agochara 156, 158 Agrawal, Purushottam xxxiv, xxxvii, 168 agro-cultural 126 Akath Kahani Prem Ki: Kabir Ki Kavita Aur Unka Samay xi akhadas 12 Akka Mahadevi 70 Allahabad 218n2 alternativization 224, 227 – 8 aman 192 Amaterasu 35 Ambedkar xxxiv, 68, 70 Ambedkarite Buddhism xxxiv, 71 Andhra 164n12, 164n13 Angkor 122, 133, 134 Angkorean cohesion 129 Anglo-Bania xxxix, 208

antahpunaranavata 221 antar-punaranavata 221 anticaste xxxvii, 164n12 anti-clockwise 46 anti-commercial 113 anti-communist 90 anti-communist ideology 90 anti-democratic 84 anti-hierarchical 71 anti-imperialist 37, 104 anti-modern 15 antinomian 149 anti-rationality 66 Arakan 138n1 archaeology 115 Ardhakathanak 181 artha 227 Aru 128 Aryabhata 47, 57n7 Aryabhatiya 47 ashramas 222 Asia-centrism xxviii Asiatic Mode xx, 37, 115, 116, 185, 186 askesis 156 astika 227 astrolabe 52 Atmaram Bhucan 210 Aufklarung 4 aus 192 Ava 122, 129 avant la lettre 14 Ayudhya 122, 123, 129 Ayudhya Siam 123 Bago 129 bai 159 – 61

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INDEX

bai thakurani 159 Banaras/Benaras 13, 175, 178, 206, 210, 211, 218n2 Banaras Hindu University xvii Banarasidas 181 bania 178, 208, 215 banigrāma 136 Banqiao 138n4 Banten 138n1 bargadar 194 Bayu 159 bazaar 195 Begumpura 224, 228n3 behoved 211 betel-nut 193 Bhagavad Gita 163n3 Bhagavat 152 Bhagavat ghara 152 Bhagirathi 192 bhagyavati 158 bhakta 70, 73n12, 179 bhakti xxv, xxxiv, xxxvii, xxxviii, xl, 69 – 71, 73n10, 73n12, 73n14, 146, 147, 168 – 82, 210, 221, 223, 224, 227, 228n2 bhaktmals 180 Bharatiya Janata Party 9, 15 Bhubaneswar 12 Bhuj 204 Bhuvaneka Bahu VI 129 Bible 3, 146 Biblical 3 Bihar 178, 179 bio-power xxxii biotechnologies 169 Bipan Chandra Pal 178 bipra 145, 161 Bipra Chalaka 145, 161 Bishnupur 197 Bodhgaya 129 boro 192 Brahe 48 Brahma 226 Brahmanism 20, 223 Brahmin 9, 20, 147 – 9, 155, 160, 163n4, 165n17, 177, 178, 180, 212, 214 Brahminically controlled Divine Law 160 Brahmo Samaj 18

Brantas Delta 133 Brantas River Delta 135 Bronze Age xliin4, 28 Brunei 128, 130 Burma 31. 123, 127, 129, 193 caesura 64 Calendar of Persian Correspondence 211 calico 54 cassia 54 cell-phone 95 Central Asia 31, 104 central mainland Southeast Asia 122 Chaitanya Mahaprabhu 178 Chaitnyaite 178 Chaiya 133 chalaka 145 Cham 123 Champa 122, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136 chandala 147, 149, 156, 160 chandaluni 149, 154, 158 Chandi 164n9 charits 180 Charvaka 221, 222 Chettiar 126 Chinese-ness 83, 93 chintz 54 Chittagong 193, 196 Christendom 6, 21, 43 chussar 195 City God temples 106 civilizationally 32 Civil Rights movement 19 Cōla Empire 132, 136 Cold War xxi, xlii communism xlin2 Communist Revolution 113 Confucianization 85 Confucianized 90 conquistadors 4 Coromandel Coast 125, 132 corvée 112 cosine 48 co-sociality 63 counterfoil 210 counter-hegemonic 146, 158, 160 counter-imaginaries 60 – 73 counter-logic 226

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INDEX

counterpart 13, 14, 220 counterpoint 12 counter-traditions 71 countervailing 205 cowries 191 cross-country 210 cross-cultural 34 cross-fertilization xxviii cross-flow 188 crossover 16 cross-pollinating 12 Cultural China xxxiv – xxxv, 81 – 101 Cultural Revolution 107 Dadu 178, 179 Đại Việt 122, 123, 129, 134, 135 Damakheda 178 dandi meter 146 Daoism 91, 110 daridra bhanjani 150 daridranarayana 227 Dariya 179 Dasa 163n4 dasami 148 dau dau 155, 156 de-centering 71, 169 de facto 87, 97 demagogues 16 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 88 De Revolutionibus 44, 46 Deshaj 182 de-Sinicize 89, 92 destinarian 6 Destroy the Four Olds 107 detranscendentalization 25 Dhammaceti 125, 129 Dharamdas 178 dharma 145, 150, 151, 159, 161, 163n3, 164n12, 227 Dharmashastra 215 dialogues xxxiv, 13, 15, 97, 100, 168, 173, 180 Dinajpur 193 Dinghai 138n4 disembedded 62, 154, 159 Draupadi 150 Dube, Saurabh 163n7 dukha binasini 150 dungaree 54

dynasty xxxvi, 20, 30, 31, 84, 102, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118n2, 124, 129 Early Age of Commerce 132 – 4, 136 – 8 early modern xxxvi, xlin4, 121 – 38; Eurasia 27 – 35; India 172, 181; South Asian agrarian economy 185 – 200 East Africa 30, 50, 51, 132 East Asia xxxv, 30, 34, 35, 81, 104 Eastern Europe 81 eastern India xxxviii, 145, 150, 185, 207 East European Communism xxi ekadasi 148 electrum 134 epicyclic models 45 episteme 4 equant 44 – 6, 57n4 ethnies 122 ethnocentrism 6, 7 Eurasia-centric 43 Eurocentric xxxi, xxxvii, 42, 43, 50, 51, 55, 56, 104, 147, 168, 188 evocating 89 extra-territorial 207 farinaceous 193 farman 209 Fātimid 136 fatso 153 fiqh 124 firearms 123 fluvial 192, 195, 196 Four Asian Tigers 103 Four Books 89 Four Mini-Dragons 81, 82 French Revolution xxxii, 8, 23, 26 Fujian 90, 106, 109, 128 Fujian Province 109 full-scale 107 fuse 158 Fuzhou 109 Gagrone 175 gai tian 57 Ganga–Bhagirathi–Padma River basins 192

232

INDEX

gazetteers 113 gem-stones 155 geocentric model 44, 45 geocentrism 45 – 6 geo-heliocentric astronomy 47 – 9 geopolitics iii gharani 151, 153, 155 Gita 163n3, 224 Gitagovinda 70 global geopolitical environment 94 goddess Lakshmi 147, 148, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158 goddess of fortune 148, 149, 159 gods of earth and grain 145 Golconda-Masulipatnam 125 gomasthas 212 gonglun 100 Gopaldas Manohardas 210, 211 gosthi 180 goswami 178 Greater China 84, 86 Gresik 135 gruhini 151 Guandi 93 Guangdong 93, 106, 118n1, 134 Guangdong Province 93, 118n1 Guangzhou 138n4 Gujarat 13, 33, 34, 178, 190, 207 Gujarati 126 gunj xxxviii, 195, 196 Guomindang 36, 114 haat 195 Hangzhou 109, 138n4 Hardt 104 Hindi Sarai: Astrakhan via Yerevan xi Hind Swaraj 226 Hinduized 162n2 Hindustan 170, 210 Hokkien 126, 132 Hongwu 110, 113 Hormuz 190 hu 106 Huaren 86, 90 Huating 138n4 Hughli 196 hundi 191, 210, 211 hun tian 57n5 hypostatized xx

Ibn al-Haytham 45 Ibn al-Shatir 45 identitarian 27 Indianization 138 Indian Ocean Trade Ecumene 33 Indic 13, 15 Industrial Revolution xix, 28, 42, 43, 49 – 55, 170, 186 insofar 12, 72 intemporal 24 inter-altermodernity 224 inter-caste 164 – 5n16 inter-connectivity 170 inter-continental transfers 189 internet 95, 99 interregional xxvii, 194, 195 interregna 32 inter-subjective xxxiv, 70 intraconsistency 115 intramodernity 221 intraregional xxvii inverse-cosine 47 iron moldboard plough 53 Islamic Belt 4 Jabali 222 Jacobinism xxi, 63 Jacobinist 63 Jagannath 148, 149, 151, 152, 158 – 60, 162n2, 164n16 Jain 13, 15 Jaina 223 Jainism 13 Jaipur 178, 179 Japara 135 jati 164n8 jati-identity 150 Javanese 124, 125, 128, 134, 135 Jiajing Reign 106 Jiang Jingguo 89 Jiangnan region 113 Jiangsu 118n1 Jinakalamali 130 Jinxiang Township 106 jnana 224 jotedars 194 jotes 194 Jurchen 32 jvalanti 164

233

INDEX

Kabir 70, 175, 177 – 80, 182, 223 Kabir Bijak 180 Kabirchaura 178 Kabirpanth 177, 178 Kabirpanthi 178 Kabir: Sakhi Aur Sabad xi Kalah 136 Kalidasa 221 Kaliyuga 173 – 6 kama 227 Kamakhya Devi 164 karanams 207 karma 145, 150 – 2, 154, 159, 161, 163, 224 Karnataka 13, 164 karuna 71, 222 katha 147, 148, 161, 163 Kedah 136 Kerala School 48, 49 khaki 54 khalaris 194 kharif 192 khilat 212 Khitan 32 Khmer 133 Ko Hung 46 Kolkata 194 Koranic 124 Kota Cina 135 Krishna 70, 163, 223 Kuomintang 36 Kutch 204 lacquerware 108, 109 Lakshmipur 196 Lakshmivar 149 Lambri 128 Lan Na 124, 130 Laplace 57 large-scale 13, 71, 106, 117, 135 lateen sail 52 Lavo 133 Legalist School 111 Leibniz 48 Liang 111 life-cycle 105 life style 69 lingua franca 31 Lishui 106

Lohmar 76 loka 223 lokasangraha 227 Lokayata 222 Lombard, Denys 139 London, Christopher 218 longue durée 32, 103, 186 Longwan District 106 Lord of General Guan 93 Lord of the Earth 93 Lord Vishnu 158 Lord Yang 106 low-caste 145, 146 Low Countries xxxviii, 192, 197 – 9 Luo-hu 133 Luzon 108, 109 Lý 133 Madhava 48 madhyama marga 222 Madhyaparba 150 Ma go 151, 222 Mahabharata 145, 150, 222 mahajan 178, 218 Maharashtra 13, 176 Maharashtra State Archives 219 mahavakya 221 mahima 149, 156, 158 Ma Huan 31 Mainland China xxxiv, 82, 83, 93 – 6, 99 Mainlanders 90, 93 mainland Southeast Asia 122, 123 maitri 71 Majapahit 128 Makassar 138 Malacca 119, 190, 196 Malvikagnimitra 221 Manasa 164 Mandate of Heaven 89 mangalkavya 149, 164 Manohar 166, 182, 200 Maragha School 45 – 7, 49 Maratha court 204 Marathas xxxix, 207, 208, 212 Marg 218 Margashira 147, 148 Maritime Silk Route 33 market-places 195

234

INDEX

Martaban 125 Marwaris 216 Mataram state 133 math 176 May Fourth Movement 85 Mayor’s Court 204, 206, 208, 209, 211 Mayur 166 Mazu 106 Mazu cult 91 Meera 223 Melaka 122 – 5, 128, 130, 133 Menam Valley 133 Mencius 89, 100 meta-narrative 4, 6 meta-trap xxxii, 3, 4 micro-history xxxv Midnapur 197 millenarianism xxvii, 35 Ming dynasty xxxvi, 31, 106, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118 Mingzhou 109 minjok 36 Minnan 90 Mirabai 70 mission civilisatrice xx missionizing 6 Mohr 76 moksha 227 mondol 194 moneyed-men 194 Mongol 30 – 3, 50, 110, 111, 171 Mon state 129 Montesquieu xxi Moradabad 218 Motilal Banarsidass 182 Mou Zongsan 88 muffusil 196 Mughal xxxix, 9, 14, 36, 177, 203, 206 – 9 mukti 227, 228 mullahs 98 multi-billionaires 118 multi-centered xxxv, 97, 187 multicultural 34, 86 multidisciplinary xxxvii, 162, 165 multi-ethnic 86 multifaceted xl multilateral 188

multi-layered 221 multilingual 86 multi-linguistic 15 multinational xxxv, 116, 117 multi-party xxxiv, 88, 92, 96, 97, 99 multi-religious 86 multiscalar 28 multivocality xxviii multi-volume 1 München 75 munshis 207 Murshidabad 194, 195, 197 naamghar 179 Nacohus xi Nadia 196 nagaram 136 naïve 87 Nakhon Si Thammarat 133 Namdev 176 Narada 147 nastika 227 Nathdwara 12 Nathji, Tarwady Arjunji xxxix, 204, 205 Naths 223 Nationalist Party 36, 89 National Socialism xxi navin xl navinata xl navyata 221 Nehruvian 9 Neo-Confucianism xxv, 101, 109 neo-liberal 15, 71, 105 New Left xli New World 4, 5, 22, 189, 193 Nij Brahma Vichar: Dharma SamajAurDharmetarAdhyatma xi Nijhoff 139 Nilakantha 48 Ningbo 109 Ning Village 106, 107 nirguna 179, 180, 227 non-agricultural 195, 197 non-Brahmins 151 non-capitalist xviii non-Chinese 90 non-elite 146 non-Europe xix, xx

235

INDEX

non-European xxv, xx, xxx, xxxvii, 147, 170 non-governmental 90, 95 non-hegemonic xxviii non-historical 20 non-instrumental xix, 162 non-interference 10, 92, 99 non-interventionist 228 non-linear 20, 29 nonliterary 162 non-locally 195 nonmaterial 222 non-modern 71 non-Ptolemaic 57 non-religious 71 non-Sanskritized 146 non-secularization 67 non-sovereign 22 non-temporal 25 non-threatening 87 nonviolent 19 non-west xviii non-western xxiii, xxiv, xxvi, 2, 7, 37, 105 non-westerners 37 Northeast Asia 35, 132 Northern Europe/northern European xxvi, 8, 29, 227 Northern Song dynasty 108 north India xxxvii, xxxviii, 172, 176 North Mountain 106 Northwestern Europe 55, 190 North-Western provinces 176 nutan xl O, Ma! 151 Odia xxxvii, 145 – 7, 149 – 53, 155, 158, 159, 162 – 4, 181 Odishan 146, 163 Odissi dance 155 oilpresser 195 Old World 4, 104 ongoing 66, 124, 168, 189, 220 Oudh 177 outcaste 148 – 50, 153, 156, 158 – 61 over-determined 188 over-read 224 Padma 192 padmavarna 164

Pagan 122 Pahang 133 Pakhand-Khandini 180 palanquin 106 Palembang 130 pan-Asian 54 panchasakha 145, 146, 161, 163, 164 pandas 12 pan-Indian 223 pan-regional 15 panths 180 papermaking 109 Parashara 147 parchais 180 particularism 95 Patani 130, 138 patrie 24 Pax Mongolica 30, 50 pedagogues 152 Pegu 122, 125, 129, 138 Peguan 129 per se xxiii, 168 Phetchaburi 133 Picador 39 picis 126 Pipa 175 Pires 191 plough 53, 136 podapitha 149 Polanyi-esque 193 Pole Star 45, 46, 57 portolans 34 postcolonial xxi, xl, xli, 65 post-facto xxiv post-Hegelian 169 post-Mao xxxv, 103, 105, 107, 117 post-Maoist xxxv postmodern 63, 65 postmodernists 169, 172 post-Mughal 203 post-Renaissance xxxi, 5 postwar 37, 103 post-World War II 168 pramanick 194 prasthan trayi 178 pre-British 12 – 16, 172, 177 pre-capitalist 186 preciosities 190 precolonial xxxvi, xxxvii, 12, 69, 71, 147, 171, 188, 217 pre-Columbian 189

236

INDEX

pre-Copernican 44 predestinationism 3 pre-existent 51 pre-given 154 pre-industrial 3, 8 prem 222, 227 pre-modern xx, xxx, xxxvi, xxxvii, 15, 20, 29, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72, 100, 216, 217 pre-national 20, 25, 27 pre-Pagan 129 pre-Ptolemaic 45 Pre-Qin 101 primum mobile 221 problématique xxxii, 27, 63, 64, 71 pro-democratic 84 proto-environmentalism 18 proto-industrial 137, 187 proto-industry 137 proto-modern xxx, 199, 200 pseudo secularism 9 psycho-cultural 93 Puducherry 229 punaranavata 221 Puniah 213 punya 145 purana/Purana 145 – 65, 175, 181 Puranic/puranic 12, 20, 151 – 3, 181 Puran Sahib 180 Puri 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 163, 165 purushartha chatushtaya 227 Pushti-Marga 179 puteri Cina 130 putwa 195 pyjama 54 qasba 196 Qasimbazar 194, 196, 197 qi 46, 57 Qi Jiguang 106 qiladar 209 Quanzhou 109, 128, 136, 138 quasi-divine xxxii, 26 quasi-evolutionary xli, 66 Quy Nho’n 135 rabi 192 Radhavallabhis 178 Raghunath 213

Raidasa 223 raja 224 rajayoga 224 Rajkamal Prakashan 182, 184 Rajshahi 197 Rama 150, 222 Ramacharitmanas 221 Ramanand 175 Ramanandis 178 Ramarajya 223 Ramayana 146, 150, 222 Ramcharitmanas 179 Rameswaram 12 Rangpur 193, 197 Ranikhet 182, 184, 218 Raos 204 Ravana 150 re-arrange 115 rearticulate 71, 188 re-articulation 42 rearview 6 re-center 71 re-emerged 87, 117 re-entering 148 re-establish 61 re-frame 72 re-framing 68, 210 – 13 reinscription xxxv religio-ethical xxxiv, 68 re-phrasing 68 resignifying 66 rightwing 11 Rig Veda 164 Rishikesh 12 rishis 222 Rodopi 76 Roman Empire 5, 26, 31, 116 romanized 36 rotary winnowing machine 63 Rotherham plough 63 Rousseau xxi rt 220, 228 rtu 228 rurban 196 ryo sai ̄ kembo 36 ryots 211 Ryuku Kingdom 109 Ryukyu 124 Sacred King of the Three Ports 106 sadae 36

237

INDEX

sadhakas 180 sadhus 180 sage-kings 25, 35 saguna 178, 180, 227 Sahitya Akademi 165 Sahitya Sansthan 228 Śaka year 128 Saktism 146 samaj 11, 18 Samarkand 50 Samkalin Alochana Vimarsh xiv sampradaya xxxii, 11, 12, 178, 179, 181 Samta Sankardev Sangha 182 Samudera 128, 130 samvats 20 sanatana xl sangha 20, 128 Sanlian Shudian xliii Sanskrit Alochana ki Bhoomika xiv Sanskriti: Varchaswa Aur Pratirod xi Santiniketan 165 sanyasin 69 sanyasin-hood 69 sarvodaya 226 Sassanid 45 sat 220 Satnamis 179 satra 179 satsangs 180, 181 satya 222, 226 satyagraha 19, 226, 227 Sawai Jai Singh 178 Scientific Revolution 42 – 50, 55, 56 Sedgwick, Mark 182 seed-drills 53 Sejarah Melayu 130 semi-colonial 37 Sen, Makhanlal 228 Serfoji 204 seva 227 Shaivism 146 shakar-kand 193 Shan 122 Shanghai 138 Shankaracharya 224 Shanxi Province 106 sharecroppers 194 shastra 222

shastric 222 shi bowu 108 Shiji 20 shipbuilding 109, 125 Shloka 221 shraddha 157 shramanic 222 shroff 191, 195, 208, 211 – 13 Siddhantekya Prakashika 179 sihfasla 193 Sikhism 13, 179 Sima Qian 20 Sine 47, 48 Singhalese 129 Sinicization 85 Sinocentric 104 Si Satchanalai 125, 134 Sita 150 Siva 164 skyrocketing 108 small-scale 117 socio-cultural xxx, 223 socioeconomic xxx, xxxiv socio-political 151 socio-spatial 115 Song dynasty 105, 108, 111, 116 South Asian xxxvii, 185 – 200 South China/south China 125, 131, 132, 134 Southeast Asia xxxiv, xxxvi, 30, 31, 35, 50, 51, 63, 90, 121 – 38, 190 southeastern 91, 103, 105, 106, 194 southern 31, 50, 51, 55, 123, 132 southern China 124, 135, 136 Southern Europe xxiii southern India 125, 131, 134, 136, 164 Southern Song 108 south India 12, 13, 132, 134, 172 spoliation 186 Sri Sankardev 179 Sri Sukta 164 Srivijaya 132, 133, 136 Srivijayan 133 Sriya 148, 154, 156 – 9, 161 Sriyadevi 158 Sriyadevinka manohara 158 stahlhartes Gehäuse der Hörigkeit xxii

238

INDEX

straitjacket 71 Straits of Melaka 125, 133 subcontinent xxv, 8, 11, 13, 15, 30, 124, 128, 131, 135, 208, 223 subcontinental 208, 223 sub-contractor 104 sub-processes xx, 60 Subrahmanyam xxvi – xxviii, xxxix, 33, 34, 121, 125, 137, 170, 171, 173, 207 sub-regions 34 sudra 145, 146, 161, 175 sudra-muni 146, 163 Sufis 223 Suhrkamp 74 Sukothai 125 Sultan Muhammed Syah 124 Sultan Muzaffar Syah 124 Sunan Model 118 supervisorates 132 supra-regional xxvii Surat 178, 205 – 9, 213, 215 – 17 Surati Gopal 178 Sutradhar 221 suzerainty 122 swadeshi 226, 227 swaraj/ Swaraj 226, 227 syahbandar 124 Sylhet 195 taaluqdars 194 tabula rasa 116 Tai 32, 123, 126 Taizhou 106 Tambralinga 133, 136 Tamil Nadu 223 Tamils 124 Tana, Li xiv Tang He 106, 107 Tangun 36 Tangut 32 Tanjore 204 Tankha, Brij xvii tanti 195 tantra 222 Tantrasamgraha 48 Tantrism 146 Tarim Basin 109 Tarwady Shankar 206 tatsama 151, 159, 164

Teesra Rukh xi teli 195 telos xxxi, 4, 37 Telugu 16 Terengganu 128 Thaton 129 theatres 212 the Company [East India] xxxix, 8 – 11, 51, 204 Theravada Buddhism 128, 129, 136 Theravada-ization 136 Theravadan 129 Thiền Uyển Tập Anh 129 Thị Naị 135 Three Teachings 91, 93 Tiloka 129 Tiperra 195 Tokugawa xxv, 34, 187 Tongzhi Restoration 21 Tooth Relic 129 Toungoo 122 Toungoo Burma 123 trajectorism xxxi, xxxii, 3 – 5, 7, 8, 16 trajectorist xxxii, 6 Trân 133 Transcendentalists 18 trans-contextual 66 transcreation 163 transcultural xxvi, xxviii, xxxi, xxxiii, 173 trans-local xxviii trans-regional 12 – 13 Trawulan 128 Trayala 128 Tribe, Keith 40 Trija 180 triumphalism 3 Tuban 135 Tübingen 76 Tulika 44 Tulsidas 175, 179, 221 Tusi couple 45, 57 tyaga 227 ulatvansis 223 Undang-Undang Melaka 123, 124 Upanishadas 18, 221, 224 Upanishadic 226 Upendra Dhal 150 Urdi lemma 45, 57

239

INDEX

Ur-form 26 US 67, 104 usufruct 194 Uttar Pradesh 178 Vaishnava 177, 179 Vaishnavism 146 Vaishnavite 179 Vallabhacharya 179 vamachara 222 Vân Ðồn 135 Varanasi 58 varnashrama 178, 179 varnashrama dharma 150, 151 varna/Varna xxvi, 145, 162 – 4, 181 Vayu 159 Vedanta 224, 225 Vedas 18, 150, 221, 222 Vedic 151, 179, 221, 226 versine 47 versus xix, 8, 10, 19, 156, 174, 187, 213 vice 4, 170 Vichaar Ka Ananta xi Việt 122, 123, 129, 133 – 5 Việt Điện U Linh Tập 129 Vijaya 135 Vijayanagar 131 Vilanka Ramayana 150 Virasaiva 164 Virasaivism 164 Vishnu-Purana 175 Vishvanath Singh Ju Dev 180 Visva-Bharati 165 Viswakarma 149 Vitoria, Francisco De 22 Vivekananda, Swami 224 – 6 vrata 148 vrata katha 147, 149, 161, 163 wangmin 96 Warring States 21 well-being 87, 90, 93, 96, 148, 155, 225, 227 Wenzhou xxxv, 103 – 10, 112 – 14, 116 – 18, 138 Wenzhou Model xxxv, 105, 116, 118 Wenzhou moshi 118 West Asia 30, 31, 128

Western Europe xxi, xxxviii, 22, 23, 73, 116, 186, 187, 199 western India xxxix, 13, 205, 207, 210, 216 western mainland Southeast Asia 122 Westphalian–Vattelian 22 widespread 193, 198 Wiesbaden 139, 167 Wittfogel 116 wokou 112 worldview 63, 67, 72, 129, 180 worldwide 4, 9, 19 worshippers 93, 164 wu 109 Wu Chengming 36 Xi 89, 108, 109 Xian 133 xianqi liangmu 36 xibu kaifa 117 Xining reign period 108 Xinjiang Province 117 Xuan Ye School 48 Yamato 35 Yang 106 Yang Family Elder 119 Yang Family Immortal Lord 119 Yang Family Lord and King 119 Yang Jingyi 106 Yangtze 138 Yangzi Dam 117 Yaruba Imamate 33 yasti 164 Yellow Emperor 35 Yiguandao 91 yogic 155 Yongjia School 109 Yong-le 128 Yuan 106, 113 Yuan dynasty 30, 110, 111, 116 Yuan Zuzhong 106 Yunnan 31, 123 Zabaj 131 zamindar 194 zamindari system 194 Zhejiang 31, 106, 109, 110 Zhejiang Province xxxv, 103, 105, 108, 109, 118

240

INDEX

Zhejiang Renmin Chubanshe 120 Zhejiang University Press 120 Zheng Chenggong 33 Zheng He 31, 34, 123, 128, 130 Zhongguoren 86, 90 Zhou Da-guan 130 Zhu 110, 117 Zhujiang Sanjiaozhou 118

Zhu River Model 118 Zhu River Triangle Area 118 Zhu Xi 89 Zhu Xi School of Neo-Confucianism 109 Zhu Yan 93 Zhu Yuanzhang 110, 111, 117 Zuojia Publishing 119

241