Himadri Lahiri, Asia Travels: Pan-Asian Cultural Discourses and Diasporic Asian Literature/s in English (Bolpur: Birutjatio Sahitya Sammiloni, 2021). i-xxiv+1-272 pages, INR 650.
Himadri Lahiri’s book Asia Travels: Pan-Asian Cultural Discourses and Diasporic Asian Literature/s in English provides a clear view of how some literary texts, written mostly in English by authors of Asian origin, can be approached from the perspectives of pan-Asianism and the diaspora. Although diaspora has been a widely used methodology for analyzing literary texts in recent decades, looking at it through the lens of pan-Asianism is quite novel. The two discourses, however, are not necessarily one and the same. While pan-Asianism appeared as a political and civilizational discourse towards the end of the nineteenth century and became a powerful force in the early decades of the twentieth, ‘diaspora,’ which as a discourse had been in circulation in the academic field for about five decades, refers to the phenomenon of transnational migration of people and their settlement in alien lands, a process that involves scattering and gathering of displaced people.
Lahiri, interestingly, shows that both involve travel, actual and metaphorical, and, if viewed through the prism of the travel motif, they can converge on a common ground for the purpose of critical discussion. He states that the twin themes of ‘travel’ and ‘Asia’ (as a spatio-cultural location) do “intersect and interweave conceptually.” The introductory chapter of the book opens with the statement that projects the central spirit of the book: “The book is about travel, dwelling in travel, and sharing transnational solidarity with fellow travellers from the same continent – Asia. It is about going beyond national identity while on the route (in both literal and metaphorical senses) and on discursive reflections regarding what it means to be ‘national’ and ‘transnational national’” (vii).
Travelers and the Baggage of Pan-Asianism
Like the diasporas, pan-Asianism as a discourse developed out of an interaction between Asian intellectuals who traveled beyond the nation and initiated cultural, and often political, dialogue. The immediate reason for the consolidation of a pan-Asian solidarity, both in the Asian continent and elsewhere, had to do with the European imperialist ambition of territorial expansion and colonialist oppression in many parts of Asia. Japan and the United States were the two nodal points of pan-Asianist activism. Students, intellectuals, and exiles from Asia who traveled to the United States during the early decades of twentieth century often established political platforms for anti-colonial activities which generated pan-Asianist sentiments. Japan, too, played a similar role.
In his book From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Allen Lane, 2012), Pankaj Mishra describes how Japan, in its self-interest, provided shelter to activists from different Asian countries who gathered in Tokyo. He refers to the radical revolutionary and pan-Islamist scholar, Maulvi Barkatullah (1854-1927), an Indian Muslim who edited the magazine, The Indian Socialist, from Tokyo and revived The Islamic Fraternity which had been closed down earlier under British pressure. The Indian nationalist, Rash Behari Bose (1886-1945), also took refuge there after he escaped from India. Lala Lajpat Rai, too, visited Japan in 1915 and at a reception organized in his honour by Bose and the Japanese Pan-Asianist thinker, Ōkawa Shūmei, requested them to “work for the liberation of Asia” (Mishra 232). The Chinese nationalist leader, Sun Yat-sen, and the reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao fled China, spent useful years in Japan, and met revolutionary thinkers from around Asia. The Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chau (1867-1940) was also an exile in Japan and serialized articles in a newspaper edited by Liang, which were later published as a book entitled, History of the Loss of Vietnam (Mishra, 170).
Lahiri briefly discusses some such activities in his introductory chapter. He, for instance, refers to the revolutionary Taraknath Das, who, hounded by the British Indian police, traveled to countries such as Japan, China, and the United States, trying to build up a network of pan-Asianist activities (Lahiri, xiv and xxii). Lahiri’s contribution to the study of pan-Asianism lies in the fact that he extends it to the Asian-American literary activism in post-Civil Rights America and discusses some relevant literary texts with reference to the activist movements. In his introduction Lahiri explores the historical context mentioned above and discusses the relevance of the concepts involved. He analyzes the contributions of pan-Asianist thinkers such as Sun Yat-Sen, Okakura Tenshin, and Rabindranath Tagore, and provides an overview of the chapters. The historical trajectory of migration of Asians during the colonial and postcolonial periods is also analyzed by Nilufer E. Bharucha who in her Foreword to the book writes about the pan-Asian political and socio-economic bodies such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation.
This book is divided into three sections preceded by a Foreword and an Introduction, followed by twelve chapters including a Conclusion. Interestingly, it also presents, in its ‘Appendices’ section, five book reviews relevant to the thrust area of the book that were published earlier in academic journals. The first section of this book entitled “From Home to the World: Pan-Asianism and Diaspora” contains four chapters which dwell on theoretical aspects of pan-Asianism and diaspora. The first three chapters here explore pan-Asianism in particular, and the fourth (“Crossing Borders: In Search of Aesthetics”) covers the dynamics of diaspora from the perspective of what Amitav Kumar states in his book Away: “The writers in the diaspora are a product of movement. They embody travel” (qtd. in Lahiri, 57). The first chapter, “Pan-Asianism and its Prospects through the Cultural Lens,” discusses how Asia is otherized in the Western imaginary, how Asians in America forged an Asianist alliance in the post-Civil rights period to confront white racism, and established an Asian American literary and cultural tradition. It also explores the possibilities of how this example can be followed in Asia to project ‘visions of Pan-Asian dialogues,’ and how cultural exchanges can foster fraternity in the continent. Two short stories—Mahadevi Verma’s “Chini Pheriwala” and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Kabuliwala”—have been analyzed to show how popular perception of ‘foreignness’ as associated with travelers from Asian countries can be effectively contested. The second chapter, “Tagore’s Pan-Asianist Discourse: Reception and Resistance,” discusses Tagore’s belief in the intersections in Asian civilizational ideas. He explores this topic in the context of the poet’s journeys to two different socio-cultural spaces—Southeast Asia (Java) and East Asia (China). Lahiri reads “Letters from Java: Rabindranath Tagore’s Tour of Southeast Asia” (Java Jatrir Patra), and other available accounts of Tagore’s visits to China, to argue how the visits generated two opposite patterns of response from the two geo-cultural spaces. He explains this discrepancy in terms of the contemporary socio-political conditions prevalent there. “Asian American Literature: Problems and Possibilities” (Chapter Three) moves on to the American scene, exploring the emergence and development of Asian American literature which he views in terms of a broad-based pan-Asianist understanding among the different Asian communities.
The Struggles of Asianness Under Western Hegemony
The title of Section II (“Shadows in the Nations: Diasporic Perspectives”) conveys the idea that the pan-Asianist understanding is indeed fragile, and that it tends to collapse under the pressure of Western military aggressions or due to internecine conflicts. It includes four chapters. “Pearl Harbor Echoes: Japanese American Internment Experience in Monica Sone and Hisaye Yamamoto” (Chapter Five) explores Sone’s fictional autobiography, Nisei Daughter (1953), and Yamamoto’s short fiction, “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1951), to show the devastating effect of Japanese internment on the Japanese immigrant characters, many of whom were American citizens. The U.S. government decided to incarcerate these innocent Japanese in the wake of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Chapter Six entitled, “Insane Characters, Innocent Child Narrators: Partition in Ranbir Sidhu’s ‘Border Songs’ and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man,” concentrates on the issue of the Partition of India (1947), and the riots that preceded and followed the cataclysmic event. He drives home the point that “[i]ncidents like this block all attempts at achieving inter-community understanding, friendship and reconciliation” (xix), affecting relationship between neighboring nations for a long time. In the same vein the next chapter (“The Nation in Peril: Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner”) examines how internal conflicts that resulted in the wake of American intervention in Afghanistan affected the common people of the country and disintegrated the nation. The eighth chapter, “Diaspora from the Himalayan Region: Nation and Modernity in Select Literary Works,” is an important contribution to diasporic studies as it explores, from literary points of view, migrations from a less explored region. Here Lahiri concentrates on some less explored literary texts such as Kunzang Choden’s The Circle of Karma (2005), Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight (2010), Prajwal Parajuly’s The Land Where I Flee (2014), and some other texts written by exiled Tibetan writers.
The last section of the book, “Settling Down: Response of the Authors in Diaspora,” shifts to the phase of travel when weary passengers choose to settle down. Staying in an alien country and settling down there involve questions of acculturation and assimilation. The process of looking back and looking forward generates intense crisis in characters, particularly in the context of inter-generation relationship. The quest for new identity necessarily means departing from familiar cultural norms. Mothers do not always endorse their daughters’ ways of life. The problematic mother-daughter relationship in the diasporic space has been explored in the first chapter of the section, “On Their Immigrant Mothers’ Trails: Chinese American Daughters’ Search for Identity in Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston” (Chapter Nine). Lahiri focuses on Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), and Tan’s The Joy Lucky Club (1989) to explore Chinese immigrant life in the United States from women’s point of view. “Nation, Nationalism and Cultural Citizenship in Bharati Mukherjee” (Chapter Ten) deals with Mukherjee’s literary oeuvre, particularly her novel Jasmine (1989). Through an analysis of these works Lahiri investigates Mukherjee’s idea of ‘Americanness’ which basically consists in a “composite culture.” In Chapter Eleven, “Family as Space in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Short Stories,” Lahiri examines some of the short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri and shows that the family as a social unit turns out to be a problematic space where characters display distinct signs of individualism which may lead them away from the Asian concept of family as a cohesive space where individual differences are usually sacrificed at the altar of family honor.
The Conclusion of the book explains how pan-Asian fervor ceases to be a compelling force in the face of Globalization, the growing trend of assimilation and acculturation, and greater visibility of Asian faces in global cultural, administrative, and political institutions. Yet, one cultural area where pan-Asian activism seems to be still alive is the field of anthology production. Lahiri critically maps the publication scenario of South Asian and Asian American anthologies and examines the factors that lead to this phenomenon. He sounds positive when he mentions the defeat in the recently held American presidential election of a racist political leader like Donald Trump, and the election of a colored woman, Vice-President, Kamala Harris, when he speaks of the global cooperation particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic situation (for instance, scientists’ effort to invent vaccines). He signs off with the comment: “By all available evidence, the felt urgency of building up pan-Asian platforms has indeed been on the wane in the new millennium. We have to wait for some more time to see whether this trend is confirmed” (207).
This reviewer wishes that there could have been some representation of works from West Asia. The same holds good in the case of Southeast Asia which is represented only by a book review. Despite this gap, this book is a significant contribution to Asian Studies as it approaches the issue of pan-Asianism mainly from a broad literary-cultural perspective. The author takes a novel approach by including Asian American activism and literature within the purview of pan-Asian studies. This book will surely be helpful to students and teachers of literature and social science, particularly those specially interested in diasporic and Asian studies.
Koushik Goswami teaches English at Malda College, West Bengal. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Earlier, he completed his MPhil in English from the University of Burdwan. He received a JU-RUSA doctoral fellowship and was a Humanities Visiting Scholar at Exeter University, United Kingdom. He was invited by the College of Humanities, Exeter University, and the University of East Anglia to deliver talks on his PhD topic and for academic discussion. His articles and interviews have also been published in national and international journals such as World Literature Today, The Temz Review, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities and Muse India. Some of his recently published articles are: “Cool Texts, Cold Wars: Singapore and Tibet in Historical Fiction of Small States,” in The Calcutta Journal of Global Affairs; “The Politics of Fencing and Exchanges of Enclaves: A Study of the Indo-Bangladesh Border,” in Border, Globalization and Identity, Cambridge Scholars Publishing; “Violence as Spectacle: Manjula Padmanabhan’s Treatment of Ethical Responsibility in Lights Out,” in Apperception, Visva-Bharati; and “Nation and Diaspora in Manjushree Thapa’s Select Stories,” in Borders and Border Crossing: Reading Partition, Reading Diaspora, University of Burdwan Press. He has presented research papers at international and national level seminars. His areas of interest are South Asian Literature, Diaspora Studies, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Literature.
