Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. 385 pp. US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-36541-4.
This 11-essay collection is testimony to the remarkable industry of Ramachandra Guha, one of India’s most spirited and widely read writers. The book grows out of Guha’s long interest in biography and his quiet campaign to redress the fact that “for many years, the biographical method was disparaged by academic historians” (10). One aim of the book is to highlight the value of “biography as history” and the “superb showcase” that twentieth-century Asia provides to demonstrate such potential (10).
People love lists, and the book invites browsers to think about who ranks as a “maker of modern Asia.” Here is Guha’s line-up (with the name of each essay’s author in parentheses):
M.K. Gandhi (Ramachandra Guha)
Chiang Kai-shek (Jay Taylor)
Ho Chi Minh (Sophie Quinn-Judge)
Mao Zedong (Rana Mitter)
Jawaharlal Nehru (Ramachandra Guha)
Zhou En-lai (Chen Jian)
Sukarno (James R. Rush)
Deng Xiaoping (Odd Arne Westad)
Indira Gandhi (Srinath Raghavan)
Lee Kuan Yew (Michael D. Barr)
Z.A. Bhutto (Farzana Shaikh)
That means four from China, four from South Asia and three from Southeast Asia. The absence of a Japanese figure is explained by the argument that “it is hard, if not impossible, to name even one major Japanese politician who has provided an autonomously developed idea of his country’s place in the world” (13). But what about Emperor Hirohito? Not a politician or thinker, but what a symbol and survivor! How did such a life unfold in the tortured times of modern Japan? “Modern Asia” cannot be imagined without Japan. The office of emperor, which Hirohito occupied from 1926 to 1989, provided the symbolic glue that enabled Japan to carve its remarkable path—industrializing, terrorizing, crumbling, rebuilding.
I would have had two others on my list. Jose Rizal of the Philippines probably missed out because he died in 1896, executed by the Spanish. But Rizal was a forerunner of all the others in attacking European imperialism with intellectual weapons of Europe combined with deep connection to his own culture. The other figure who would be on my list is Bhim Rao Ambedkar, activist, writer, and today, patron saint of 180 million “ex”-untouchables in India. An “untouchable” himself, Ambedkar contended with appalling prejudice, yet left a legacy that inspires, and is fought over, throughout India today.
Guha begins the book with Mahatma Gandhi—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—and calls the essay “Gandhi, India and the World.” Implicit in the positioning as the first essay, and explicit in the title, is the fact that of the eleven leaders in the book, only Gandhi advanced a program that claimed global applicability and that still attracts millions of sympathizers. (To be sure, there are “Maoists” to be found elsewhere, not least in India, but admiration for Mao is small in comparison to the global esteem of the Gandhi legend).
Guha is writing a big biography of Gandhi, the first volume of which was published in 2013 (Gandhi before India). As an admirable archival historian, he is able to draw on details that knit this short essay to the “Asian” fabric of the book. He points out that during Gandhi’s first major civil disobedience campaign in South Africa, some of his most ardent backers were more than a thousand Chinese, who also suffered from the discrimination of the British regime. And he points out that Liu Xiabao, the imprisoned Chinese Nobel Laureate, has often referred to Gandhi in his writing.
The longest essay in the book deals with the leader of least significance: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the disastrous Pakistani prime minister and president of the 1970s, who was executed by the general he had appointed commander-in-chief. Farzana Shaikh makes an able and engaging attempt to convince readers that Bhutto was a political visionary “in pursuit of an Asian Pakistan.” But Bhutto comes across more as a well-heeled dilettante capable of picking up catchwords and repeating them resoundingly. His legacy appears to have been to leave Pakistan with both an entrenched military dictatorship and a family political dynasty of the kind common in South Asia (not to say elsewhere).
Three other representatives of dynasties are treated in the book: Jawaharlal Nehru, who didn’t mean to leave a dynasty (Guha assures readers); his daughter, Indira Gandhi, who did; and Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), who certainly did (given the ideas about genetics and race attributed to him by author Michael Barr) (246–7, 249, 262). For me, Barr’s essay on LKY and Srinath Raghavan’s on Indira Gandhi are two highlights of the book. Barr’s provocative essay profits from the fact that LKY and the city-state of Singapore are bound together uniquely. Because Singapore is so small and the People’s Action Party so all-pervasive, there is no part of the Singapore pie in which LKY has not had a finger. Barr is not impressed: “I realize that Singaporeans could have done much worse, but personally, I think they deserved better” (266).
Raghavan’s essay surprised me. I expected to be a bit bored by a story I thought I knew well. But Raghavan, like Guha, works in the archives like a beaver in a forest. And he too writes well. He provides as insightful and fast-moving account of India from the 1960s to the 1980s as one will find.
The other essay that especially appealed to me was the shortest: Deng Xiaoping by Odd Arne Westad. Deng’s Hakka/southern China background (like Lee Kuan Yew), the seven years in France from the age of 16, and the long experience as a guerrilla and administrator from the 1930s (plus the ups and downs experienced in Mao’s China) make the life of Deng worthy of a soap opera.
This book will appeal to varied audiences. Curious travellers in Asia will find it a friendly and invaluable introduction to countries they visit and names they encounter. Scholars will relish the invitation to measure their judgements against those of Guha’s expert authors and to muse over Guha’s arguments about the importance of biography as “history.” And teachers will find tight, well-written essays that may entice students into questions about what “making modern Asia” may mean.
Robin Jeffrey
National University of Singapore, Singapore