Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities 9789048527472

Table of contents :
Table Of Contents
1. Eurasian Encounters
Part I Artistic Spaces
2. The Museum At Aundh
3. Exhibiting The Nation
4. Parallel Tracks
5. Bauhaus And Tea Ceremony
Part II Missions And Education
6. Schooling A Missionary In Early Twentieth-Century Eastern India
7. The Catholic Church In China In The First Half Of The Twentieth Century
Part III Shared Trajectories, New Subjectivities
8. Indigenizing Cosmopolitanism
9. Fighting For The Soviet Empire
10. Shared Origins, Shared Outcomes?
Index

Citation preview

Eurasian Encounters

Publications The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a research and exchange platform based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote (inter)national cooperation. IIAS focuses on the humanities and social sciences and on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia Scholars. Its main research interest are reflected in the three book series published with Amsterdam University Press: Global Asia, Asian Heritages and Asian Cities. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing together various parties in Asia and other parts of the world. The Institute works as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, the construction and support of international networks and cooperative projects, and the organization of seminars and conferences. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Europe and Asia. IIAS Publications Officer: Paul van der Velde IIAS Assistant Publications Officer: Mary Lynn van Dijk

Asian Heritages The Asian Heritages series explores the notions of heritage as they have evolved from European based concepts, mainly associated with architecture and monumental archaeology, to incorporate a broader diversity of cultural forms and value. This includes a critical exploration of the politics of heritage and its categories, such as the contested distinction ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ heritages, the analysis of the conflicts triggered by competing agendas and interests in the heritage field, and the productive assessment of management measures in the context of Asia. Series Editors Adele Esposito, Research Fellow, CNRS, URM Architecture Urbanism Society Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University Editorial Board Sadiah Boonstra, Postdoctoral Fellow, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Chiang Min-Chin, National University of the Arts, Taiwan Hui Yew-Foong, Hong Kong Shue Yan University Aarti Kawlra, Indian Institute of Technology Ronki Ram, Panjab University, India

Eurasian Encounters Museums, Missions, Modernities

Edited by Carolien Stolte and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: ‘Orient Calls’. Travel advertisement poster designed by Japanese artist Satomi Munetsugu in 1936. Japan: The Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. Lithograph in colours, 100 x 64 cm Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 90 8964 883 9 e-isbn 978 90 4852 747 2 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789089648839 nur 657 © Carolien Stolte & Yoshiyuki Kikuchi / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

1 Eurasian Encounters

Cross-border Intellectual and Cultural Exchange, 1900-1950 Carolien Stolte and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi

7

Part I  Artistic Spaces 2 The Museum at Aundh

25

3 Exhibiting the Nation

47

4 Parallel Tracks

73

Reflecting on Citizenship and the Art Museum in the Colony Deepti Mulgund

Cultural Flows, Transnational Exchanges, and the Development of Museums in Japan and China, 1900-1950 Shu-Li Wang

Pan Yuliang and Amrita Sher-Gil in Paris Sonal Khullar

5 Bauhaus and Tea Ceremony

A Study of Mutual Impact in Design Education between Germany and Japan in the Interwar Period Helena Čapková

103

Part II  Missions and Education 6 Schooling a Missionary in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern India 123 Indrani Chatterjee

7 The Catholic Church in China in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 155 The Establishment of Zhendan University and Furen University Cindy Yik-yi Chu

Part III  Shared Trajectories, New Subjectivities 8 Indigenizing Cosmopolitanism

179

9 Fighting for the Soviet Empire

207

10 Shared Origins, Shared Outcomes?

231

Shifting Metropolitan Subjectivities in Twentieth-century Colombo Anoma Pieris

War Propaganda Production and Localized Discourses on Soviet Patriotism in Uzbekistan during the Second World War Boram Shin

Transcultural Trajectories of Germany and Japan during the Asia-Pacific War Andrea Germer

Index 257

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Eurasian Encounters Cross-border Intellectual and Cultural Exchange, 1900-1950 Carolien Stolte and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH01

Introduction The chapters in this volume were first presented at a joint IIAS-ISEAS international conference entitled Asia-Europe Encounters: Intellectual and cultural exchanges 1900-1950, which was held at the Museum of Asian Civilizations in Singapore. The conference attracted a particularly interesting mix of scholars – junior and senior academics, from universities across the globe, whose research covered the length and breadth of Europe and Asia. The present collection of essays builds on the results of this conference. The editors hope to have succeeded in maintaining the diversity that made the conference so dynamic. This volume therefore contains chapters by leading researchers in the field as well as early-career scholars, and covers a range of countries from India and Sri Lanka to China, Japan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Germany, and France. The conference had been convened to explore the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe that occurred during, and were formative of, the political and social changes over the first half of the twentieth century. As the original call for papers stated, the first half of the twentieth century saw some of the most intense political and social changes experienced thus far in world history. Shiraishi Takashi’s coinage of the 1910s and 1920s as an ‘age in motion’ in Southeast Asia might be extended as a reference to Asia-Europe relations during the half-century more generally.1 It was an age in which high imperialism began to unravel

1 Shiraishi, An Age in Motion.

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and global power shifted. The period around 1950 marked the ending of one age of Asia-Europe interactions and the beginning of another. This volume explores the intellectual and cultural flows between Asia and Europe during the momentous political and social changes of the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, it situates those flows in a context of an increased mobility of artists, writers, educators, and missionaries, as well as an increasingly global consciousness among those who worked or wrote from home. While cultural and intellectual exchange in the larger area of Eurasia was by no means a new phenomenon, it was in the first half of the twentieth century that these interactions were marked by an unprecedented increase in transnational traffic and in the development of cosmopolitan subjects, resulting in new collocations of ideas and cross-cultural influences. None of the authors of this volume arrest these flows into a frame of impact and response, a persistent historiographical model that is clearly a product of imperialism and nationalism.2 The narratives presented here all focus on human agencies, interactions, and hybridities. Collectively, they show how all corners of Eurasia interacted in artistic, academic, and religious spheres through new cosmopolitanisms and subjectivities. Earlier studies in the field of internationalism and global associational life in the early twentieth century have tended to focus on individuals and groups in Asia who sought inclusion in forums such as the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization and other Western-dominated institutions.3 These studies tended to overlook individuals and groups who rejected or acted outside of that particular international stage, seeking either to change the terms of interaction or to change the international stage itself by creating new religious, educational, and artistic institutions. In this sense, the volume connects to the most recent work in the field, which sees the early twentieth century as a polycentric and multi-layered world. The proliferation of highly mobile organizations (and their members and ideologies) in this era has been well documented in recent scholarship.4 2 For the impact-response model, especially in the context of modern Chinese history, see Teng and Fairbank, China’s responses to the West. For a critique of this framework, see Cohen, Discovering History in China. 3 These studies are particularly important for demonstrating that these institutions were, in fact, global ones. For recent examples, Laqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured; Herren (ed.), Networking the International System; De Haan et al. (eds.), Women’s Activism; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. 4 Raza, Roy and Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment, 2014; Ramnath, Haj to Utopia; Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.

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Mindful of the fact that the years after the First World War can also be regarded as a period of de-globalization, we note that the chapters presented here focus primarily on the increase of mobilities of people and ideas at the non-state level.5 They highlight spaces in which these multiple layers were particularly visible (artistic, religious, and intellectual spaces respectively) and which reached far across the borders of empires and nation states. The papers presented at the conference clearly demonstrated that the intellectual and cultural currents of this age affected all corners of both continents, and that people and ideas often moved to (or took root in) unexpected places.6 The editors therefore decided to use the term ‘Eurasia’ in its broadest possible sense: as a physio-geographical expression indicating a large zone of interaction, rather than the more narrow definition common in international relations and security studies.7 The use of this term invites the inclusion of historical connections that were lateral rather than hierarchical. It also accommodates the inclusion of areas that are not normally incorporated in analyses of the late colonial period, as well as the inclusion of interactions that took place, self-consciously or not, outside of imperial frames. The chapters by Boram Shin, Helena Čapková, and Andrea Germer for instance, who bring this analytical framework to bear on Russian-Uzbek and German-Japanese interactions respectively, demonstrate that the dynamics of Eurasian interaction in the first half of the twentieth century were certainly not limited to or determined by the networks and communication lines of colonial empires alone. The setting of Eurasia is inspired, in part, by Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith’s call to think about interaction in an Asian setting broadly, and to interrogate assumptions about the symbolism and substance of regions and sub-regions.8 The long dominance of oceanic perspectives, for instance, has tended to obscure Central and North Asian connections and links. Thinking broadly about the geographic zone in which these interactions took place allows us to include both the highroads of empire and the less conspicuous routes.

5 On post-1914 deglobalization, see Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp. 464-487. On the point that this does not exclude a contemporaneous growing sense of interconnectivity, see Arsan, Lewis and Richard, ‘Editorial’, p. 157. 6 For a sample of an increasing body of inspiring work, see Framke, Delhi-Rom-Berlin; Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora; Pennybacker, Scottsboro to Munich. 7 On varying definitions of Eurasia, see Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents. 8 Harper and Amrith, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.

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Central Themes This volume seeks to build on histories of transnational and translocal ideas and practices within Eurasia in a broad sense, taking as a starting point the notion that artistic, religious, and political expressions are more likely to move around than stay in place.9 It also takes inspiration from Enseng Ho’s call to be attentive to different geographical scales: people and institutions can be embedded in local relations and yet have intimate knowledge of, and connections to, distant places.10 The encounters forged through these movements do not, as the following chapters demonstrate, neatly follow the communication and transport routes of empire one would intuitively expect in a period often described as ‘late’ or ‘high’ colonial. They also do not necessarily conform to classifications of anti-imperialist traffic, and to define their existence as ‘in contravention of’, ‘against’, or ‘in spite of’ empire unnecessarily subordinates their dynamics to imperial histories. Instead, the chapters in this volume follow historiographies of vernacular cosmopolitanism, localization, hybridity, adaptation, and translation.11 The attempt is not to reconcile ‘an oxymoron that joins contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment’, but to expose travels and encounters that lie beyond the purview of deracinated elites and notions of European universalism (although the latter two do make an appearance).12 The chapters in this volume are demonstrative of many coexisting and overlapping affinities, as well as attempts to reconcile and domesticate them. Cosmopolitanism and its limits Attempts to reconcile the global and the local come to the fore with particular poignancy in encounters with supralocal forces that are not colonial empires in the classic sense. In the chapter by Cindy Yik-yi Chu, the extraneous force that is co-opted and localized into a specific Chinese format is the universal Catholic Church. In the case of Indrani Chatterjee’s 9 Rodgers, ‘Cultures in Motion: an Introduction’, pp. 1-8; Gupta and Ferguson, ‘Beyond Culture’, p. 9. 10 Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 31. 11 On these types of cosmopolitanisms, see in particular Bhabha, Location of Culture; ix-xxv; Pollock et al., ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, pp. 1-14, Brennan, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, pp. 40-50; Manjapra, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-10; Van der Veer, ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 165-169. 12 On vernacular cosmopolitanism as a possible oxymoron, see Bhabha, ‘Unsatisfied Notes’, and Werbner, ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, pp. 496-498.

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chapter, it is the Protestant mission in north-eastern India – albeit a mission that follows roughly the same racial and power dynamics of the empire in which it operates, which accounts in no small part for the untranslatability of the encounter she describes. In the case of Boram Shin’s contribution, it is the wartime Soviet Union and the questions the war raises of what it means to be ‘Soviet’ in Asia. To some extent, all chapters in this book are histories of cosmopolitan ideas and practices. But crucially, they are also histories of the limits of cosmopolitanism, both as lived reality and as a category of analysis useful to historians of the early to mid-twentieth century – the importance of which Tim Harper and Sunil Amrith have demonstrated in their volume Asian Interactions.13 Not all scholars have been equally positive about cosmopolitanism as a frame of analysis. Will Hanley’s call to scholars to ‘confront the anti-nationalist teleology and secularizing, bourgeois fantasy at the heart of cosmopolitanism as it is currently used’ is an important warning to keep in mind.14 Hanley’s critique pertained to the fact that cosmopolitanism as a category of historical analysis is applied mostly to cultural elites, and not as a lived reality for all but a very small minority. In addition, it is usually laced with nostalgia for a perceived more tolerant past. This is especially the case in Hanley’s own field of Middle Eastern studies, but can be extended to many corners of the globe that have seen a turn to more aggressively nationalist politics. Finally, he considers it a catch-all term that actually camouflages ‘productive difference’.15 The contributions in this volume employ the cosmopolitan lens in ways we believe to be productive as well as sensitive to such critiques. As is clearly demonstrated in Sonal Khullar’s contribution, a focus on cosmopolitan lives and practices can be a useful method through which to foreground the lives of those who would otherwise remain obscured, in this case female Asian artists in early twentieth-century Europe. In Boram Shin’s contribution, it serves to foreground the complexity of articulations of Uzbek identity at the periphery of the Soviet Union – and in the geographical heart of Asia. Further, Anoma Pieris analyses cosmopolitan practices with a highly complex relationship to perceived ‘nostalgic pasts’: the Buddhist revivalism underlying the institutions and infrastructure of late-colonial Colombo she examines, served to articulate racial and religious collectives that could later be employed in exclusionary policies. 13 Harper and Amrith, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 14 Hanley, ‘Grieving Cosmopolitanism’, p. 1346. 15 Ibid.

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Producers of Culture Cosmopolitan intellectuals, although not necessarily the deracinated ones who are the subject of definitions of elite cosmopolitanism, figure prominently in this volume. As historical actors, they are the connectors between different collectives and communities. They cross and move past lines of (perceived) difference, both in their travels and in their work. As graphic designers and journalists, they make an appearance in Andrea Germer’s contribution. She situates the cultural production of avant-garde photojournalism in Japan and Germany within transcultural movements between Europe and Asia between the late 1920s and the late 1940s. As authors, they figure in Boram Shin’s chapter. She views them as producers of culture who locate themselves in larger worlds and worldviews, and who bring those wider perspectives to the public that reads their work. As artists, we encounter them in the contributions by Sonal Khullar and Helena Čapková. The painters and craftspeople they describe, inhabit the cosmopolitan world of the early twentieth century in which movements, groups, and schools of art emerged in centres as far apart as Paris and Shanghai, or Berlin and Tokyo. In doing so, they add to an ongoing examination into the global, in this case Asian, roots of early twentieth-century modernisms, arguably started by David Summers and continued by Rupert Arrowsmith and others.16 Kobena Mercer has put this most succinctly: her call to address the limitations of our knowledge of modernism’s multicultural and cross-cultural past, stems from the deceptively simple starting point that ‘artists all over the world responded to the changing conditions of twentieth-century life by approaching their work with a questioning attitude’.17 Translatability The theme of translatability runs through all chapters in this volume. If the act of travel or of rooting yourself in a new locale transformed individuals, it certainly transformed ideas and concepts. At the institutional level, this transformation becomes particularly visible, as can be seen from the contributions by Shu-Li Wang, Deepti Mulgund, and Cindy Yik-yi Chu. In her examination of the museum in East Asia, Shu-Li Wang deals with 16 Summers, Real Spaces; Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms; Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum. 17 Mercer, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.

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translation in the most direct sense: she not only looks at the ways in which the museum as an institution becomes part of the cultural fabric of East Asia, but also how the term itself was domesticated by ‘recycling’ archaic Sino-Japanese vernacular words for the translation of the Euro-American museum. Deepti Mulgund likewise looks at the adaptation of the museum to a new locale, in this case a princely state of Aundh in British India. It is important to note the different ways the presence of the museum in Aundh might be translated given the rising tide of nationalism in the same period – is it a marker of modernity that assists in the creation of citizens and in preparation for self-rule? Or is it an anachronism, a by-product of imperialism that educates visitors about European art in an essentially European setting? Similarly complex cases of institutional translation can be found in Helena Čapková’s chapter on the historical and cultural confluences that created a remarkable translatability between German and Japanese artistic education in the interwar years, and in Cindy Yik-yi Chu’s contribution on the ‘glocalization’ of the Catholic Church in China. In both cases, and in spite of such confluences, ‘translation’ was far from straightforward. The appropriation of ideas was at least partly based on the need to create a national identity in Japan and China, and on the personal tastes of institutional ‘translators’. The volume also contains important counterpoints to the various creative ways in which these cultural expressions are translated and become part of much-expanded worlds and worldviews. From the church, to the classroom, to the art museum: all chapters also contain elements that do not translate well, and these elements are as much part of the negotiations involved in long-distance transplantation as the elements that do find a new home. The chapters by Indrani Chatterjee and Boram Shin deal explicitly with the theme of untranslatability. In the case of Chatterjee’s chapter, we are dealing with a double mistranslation: the failure of missionaries to understand local anxieties, as well as subsequent historians’ failure to grasp the worldviews behind those concerns. In Anoma Pieris’ contribution, finally, we see the limits of the translatability of urban spaces as Orientalist legacies converge with new nationalist expressions.

The Chapters Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Artistic Spaces’, explores the transcontinental travels of the museum, both as an idea and as an institution. Deepti Mulgund, in

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her contribution entitled ‘The Museum at Aundh: Reflecting on Citizenship and the Art Museum in the Colony’, chronicles a local history with global implications. Focusing on the establishment of an art museum by princely state ruler Balasaheb (1868-1951), she shows how the relationship between the art museum and modern subjecthood changes when the colonial context is taken into account. The museum signifies a relationship between citizen and the state as ‘patron’, and a negotiation between art and patrimony: it is constitutive of particular forms of citizenship. If we take the power dynamics of colonial rule into the equation, a museum established by an indigenous ruler can serve to anticipate self-rule. This is more than an additive exercise into ‘distant modernity’, Mulgund argues: it casts the art museum in a different role. And this role is a complex one: if the museum is a European export, presented as part of a Western modernity, what does that mean for its instructive role? Given that most of the collections in Indian museums at the time, including the one at Aundh, featured copies of European art, what message did they teach? Mulgund analyses Aundh as a museum that showcases ‘fine arts’ in a localized form, and as such can show us a microcosm of shifting power relations towards the end of empire. Shu-Li Wang likewise delves into the transplantation and subsequent transformation of the museum, this time in China and Japan. In her chapter ‘Exhibiting the Nation: Cultural Flows, Transnational Exchanges, and the Development of Museums in Japan and China in 1900-1950’ she demonstrates how the museum, both as an idea and as an institution, was translated to East Asia, and teases out the cultural and political dynamics through which this translation was negotiated. What makes this chapter particularly interesting is that here the cultural flow is not only between Europe and East Asia but also within East Asia, i.e. between Japan and China. Because of their shared vernacular letters, classical texts, and other cultural heritages, the development of museums in Japan and China was in many ways entangled, borrowing translated terms and concepts from each other. However, according to Wang, there were also crucial differences due to the different historical and political contexts in which the concept of the museum was proselytized. In Japan, on the one hand, it was in the mid-nineteenth century around the Meiji Restoration (1868), when Japan was integrated into the economic and imperialist world order, that the Japanese term for the museum, hakubutsukan, was popularized. In China, on the other, it was during the early Republican period (1911-1949) that the movement to establish museums to preserve and display Chinese civilizational pasts really took off together with the reconceptualization of wenwu.

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In the case of Sonal Khullar’s chapter, it is not the institution that travels and transforms itself, but the artist. In her contribution entitled ‘Parallel Tracks: Pan Yuliang and Amrita Sher-Gil in Paris’ she showcases the mobile and transnational lives of a Chinese and an Indian female artist in Paris. She argues that we should view their lives as part of a rich history of longdistance artist mobility, but that this history remains obscured by the way museums have become nationalized and organized. Citing the same processes that Deepti Mulgund and Shu-Li Wang chart in their contributions, she notes that it is not only exhibitions, but also curatorial departments and academic programmes that structure art in regional or civilizational categories that are hard to cross. Links are made diachronically by location (classical influences on Italian art), but only rarely transregionally (Indian artists in Italy). Connecting to recent studies of modern cosmopolitanisms, Khullar compares and contrasts Sher-Gil and Pan’s lives. Critical of universalizing accounts of ‘the woman artist’ and of ‘Asian art’, she highlights the connections between the two artists but also – and perhaps more importantly – the disjunctions. Both influence the way these two artists are remembered today, and illuminate the fraught and uncomfortable interrelations of nationalism and feminism in China and India as well as the complex place Asian women occupy in the history of modern art. The tools in the art critic’s toolbox, in other words, insufficiently explain the global movement’s affinities that have shaped modernity. In ‘Bauhaus and Tea Ceremony’, Helena Čapková likewise focuses on the long-distance mobility of artists – in this case between interwar Germany and Japan. She examines the various ways in which this mobility was consolidated and institutionalized in design education. The key point in Čapková’s contribution is that this is emphatically not about one-way influence of the German Bauhaus on Japan, but about two-way traffic. The modern design promoted by the Bauhaus and other institutions in the interwar period contained its fair share of Sino-Japanese cultural elements due to prior waves of japonisme in Europe. This partly explains the remarkable translatability between art education in Germany and Japan. It also explains why Japanese students in the Bauhaus who were well versed in traditional cultural practices such as tea ceremonies, like Yamawaki Iwao, felt resonance in their experience of Bauhaus and modern art in Germany. With Indrani Chatterjee’s chapter we move to the second part of this volume, ‘Missions and Education’. The educational element in her ‘Schooling a Missionary in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern India’ has a deliberate double entendre, with the missionary introduced in the chapter being the person in need of schooling. Unlike the negotiated translations of museums

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and artistic institutions examined in the preceding chapters, Chatterjee raises the issue of untranslatability in other forms of encounter. She gives us a narrative not of success but of failure twice over: first, the missionary organization’s failure to respond adequately to local protests over a young missionary teacher’s inappropriate sexual conduct. Second, the failure not only of the missionary and church elders to comprehend the collective will and expectations of monastic conduct that lay behind the local complaints, but also the failure of historians to analyse these dynamics properly. As Chatterjee writes, ‘Most scholarship on inter-racial sex in colonial Indian history has romanticised the European men who initiated these relationships, and failed to account either for the conditions within which patently unequal relationships were initiated, or the conditions of inequality that were extended by these apparent cross-overs’. But more importantly, they also routinely fail to interpret such relationships from other starting points than the codes of post-Reformation Christianity. Chatterjee offers an alternative framework of analysis: that of non-Christian monastic codes of conduct. Expectations of a novice in Bonpo, Buddhist, Vaisnava, and Saiva Hindu traditions were certainly part of the complaint. If we fail to understand the context of the complaint and the religious dimensions of the worldviews behind it, we inscribe European values back onto Asian pasts and mistakenly characterize them as ‘local’. Next, Cindy Yik-yi Chu examines the establishment and development of two institutions of elite higher education in ‘The Catholic Church in China in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’. Both Zhendan and Furen Universities were established under the guidance of foreign Catholic missionaries. Chu continues the theme of missions, but in a very different cultural and political configuration and against the backdrop of the rise of Chinese nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century. As is clear from her reference to the metaphor of ‘two-way mirrors’, Chu recognizes the difficulty and frustration of missionaries and local actors in interpreting each other in each other’s terms. As Chu writes, while foreign Catholic missionaries were in communion with the Vatican and the Universal Church and ‘adopted a global identity’ in preaching Christianity, Chinese intellectuals were primarily concerned with ‘looking for Western ideas to modernize their society’ in the hope that this way ‘their country could obtain a respectable position in the world setting’. That said, Chu’s message is ultimately an optimistic one, with emphasis on ‘glocalization’ and the process of adaptation, adjustment, and transformation on both sides of the encounter. The volume’s third and closing section is entitled ‘Shared Trajectories, New Subjectivities’. This part of the volume explores the myriad ways in

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which the ebb and flow of empire influenced the emergence of new identity politics, transnational and transcommunal solidarities, as well as new antagonisms in local societies. ‘Empire’ is here used in its broadest sense: from British, to Soviet, to Japanese. Anoma Pieris epitomizes this theme in ‘Indigenizing Cosmopolitanism: Shifting Metropolitan Subjectivities in Twentieth-Century Colombo’ by looking at early twentieth-century manipulations of nationalist sentiment against a backdrop of changing cosmopolitan and regionalist configurations. Pieris pairs contradictory terms such as ‘indigenization’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, dissociating them from the nationalist polemic: her ‘indigenization’ of Colombo is a manifestation of cosmopolitan attitudes, understood here as affiliations across and over caste identity to articulate racial and religious collectives. Pieris argues that as decolonization gathered momentum, the involvement of British architects in designing new institutions laid bare a specificity of the Asia-Europe encounter during this last phase of European colonialism: an Orientalist legacy converging with nationalist expression. The adaptation and transformation of colonial areas by indigenous elites was a complex negotiation between colonial structures and local cultural practices, resulting in ironies and hybridities mirrored in the cosmopolitan attitudes of the period’s intellectuals and their institutions. Pieris shows that both cultural and urban spaces were contested via a Buddhist revival, resulting in cosmopolitan institutions with vernacular roots, which in turn prompted other indigenizations as well. But it also caused a deeper cultural polemic. The self-conscious recreation of architectural subjectivities also produced the national subject that would be disputed in Sri Lanka’s long and bitter civil war. Consequently, the rejection of colonial values, the indigenization of institutions, and the marginalization of minorities have to be located in the institutions of the early twentieth century. The next contribution shows us another Asia: the Asia inside ‘the red block’. In her chapter entitled ‘Fighting for the Soviet Empire: War Propaganda and Localized Discourses on Soviet Patriotism in Uzbekistan during the Second World War’, Boram Shin complicates mid-twentieth century Asian notions of imperialism, freedom, and nationhood. In highlighting Soviet Central Asia, she shows how cultural elites were enlisted both to showcase the emancipation and other benefits conferred upon them by socialism to the rest of Asia, as well as to travel Asia and bring home stories of their Asian brothers suffering under persisting hegemonies as well as the new imperial power: the United States. With the onset of the Cold War, the question as to whether the Central Asian Soviet Republics were in fact colonies of the Soviet Union had become politically volatile. Central Asia

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itself, meanwhile, did not call its unequal position in the union in question until the 1950s. Taking the Uzbek cultural and literary scenes as a starting point, Boram Shin demonstrates that one of the results of the Second World War was the formation of a new Uzbek identity politics, which caused a shift away from strict Soviet ideology, to a combination of Soviet universalism and localized Central-Asian identity. In her examination of the dynamics between Uzbek texts on the ‘periphery’ and their Russian reception in the ‘centre’, the issue of untranslatability re-emerges, with underlying power dynamics that are reminiscent of Chatterjee’s imperial missionary: should translators treat Uzbek poetry as ‘their own’ or would this project Russianness onto the Uzbek voice? Andrea Germer’s contribution ‘Shared Origins, Shared Outcomes? Transcultural Trajectories of Germany and Japan during the Asia-Pacific War’ likewise examines the influence and consequences of propaganda initiatives for empires, but over longer distances: she looks at the intricate links between two wartime overseas propaganda journals, NIPPON and Signal. Germer focuses on the publishing activities of the German-Japanese couple Natori Yōnosuke and Erna Mecklenburg for the NIPPON. Like Čapková, Germer highlights the importance of transnational cultural flows, and in particular the substantial influence of Japanese architecture and material culture upon Bauhaus and New Vision modernist aesthetics. In addition, Germer sheds light on the highly politicized uses of such aesthetics for wartime nationalistic propaganda in both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. However, it would be misleading to read too much contradiction into collaborations between ‘modernist’ aesthetics and ‘reactionary’ regimes. As made clear by what Jeffrey Herf called ‘reactionary modernism’ and by the work of historians of science, such as Hiroshige Tetsu and Mizuno Hiromi, both Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan tried strenuously to mobilize science and technology for the Empire. They sought to project themselves as technologically advanced ‘modern’ nations, while emphasizing their deep roots in the past. For Japan at least, these collaborations had longer-term ramifications for postwar science and technology policies, according to Hiroshige and Mizuno.18 This comparison between the mobilization of photojournalism and that of science and technology more generally invites a look into the afterlife of Germer’s case study as well. Taken together, the chapters in this volume illuminate new aspects of the history of cultural, artistic, and religious mobilizations in modern 18 Herf, Reactionary Modernism; Hiroshige, Kagaku no shakaishi; and Mizuno, Science for Empire.

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Eurasia. All essays examine either the various ways in which supralocal forces interact with cultural and political expressions at the local level, or how long-distance cross-cultural travel transformed ideas, concepts, and institutions. The chapters examine museum exhibitions, art and artists, architecture, travelling texts, and secular and religious landscapes. In doing so, they illuminate a world of circulation that cut through both the physical borders of empires and the upheavals of the world wars – although, as the chapters demonstrate, they were influenced by both. As a whole, this volume connects to a growing body of scholarship that is freeing the history of ideas in twentieth-century Europe and Asia from the national and imperial frameworks in which they have long been contained.19 Finally, an editorial note: this volume brings together a wide range of regional perspectives, based on an equally wide range of sources. In order to facilitate the reader, all terms and phrases have been romanized with a minimum of diacritical marks. This includes the use of pinyin and Hepburn transliteration for Chinese and Japanese words, and the (modified) Library of Congress system for the romanization of Russian and non-Slavic Cyrillic languages. The editors would also like to thank the authors for collaborating on this project, and the International Institute for Asian Studies for facilitating the publication of this collection.

Bibliography Arrowsmith, R.R., Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Arsan, A., S.L. Lewis and A.I. Richard, ‘Editorial – The Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment’, Journal of Global History 7:2 (2012), pp. 157-165. Aydin, Ç., The Politics of Anti-Westernism: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Bayly, C.A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2003). Bhabha, H.K., The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). —, ‘Unsatisfied Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, in P.C. Pfeifer and L. Garcia-Moreno (eds.), Text and Narration: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), pp. 191-207. Brennan, T., ‘Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism’, in D. Archibugi, (ed.), Debating Cosmopolitics (London & New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 40-50. Cohen, P., Discovering History in China – American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Edwards, B., The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 19 Harper and Amrith, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.

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Framke, M., Delhi-Rom-Berlin. Die indische Wahrnehmung von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus 1922 – 1939 (Darmstadt: WBG, 2012). Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology 7:1 (1992), pp. 6-23. Haan, F. de et al. (eds.), Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London: Routledge, 2012). Hanley, W., ‘Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies’, History Compass 6:5 (2008): 1346-1367. Harper, T. and Amrith, S., ‘Introduction’, in Harper, T., and S. Amrith (eds.), Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas, Networks and Mobility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1-9 [first appeared as a Modern Asian Studies special issue, 2012]. Herf, J., Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Herren, M., Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014). Hiroshige, T., Kagaku no shakaishi: Kindai Nihon no kagaku taisei (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1973). Ho, E., The Graves of Tarim: Geneaology and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007). Laqua, D. (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured. Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (London: I.B. Taurus, 2011). Lewis, M.W. and K. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Manela, E., The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Manjapra, K., ‘Introduction’, in S. Bose and K. Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1-19. Mercer, K., ‘Introduction’, in K. Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Mizuno, H., Science for the Empire: Scientific Nationalism in Modern Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Pennybacker, S.D., From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeto University Press, 2009). Pollock, S., H.K. Bhabha, C.A. Breckenridge, and D. Chakrabarty, ‘Cosmopolitanisms’, in C.A. Breckenridge et al. (eds.), Cosmopolitanism (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 1-14. Ramnath, M., The Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Raza, A., F. Roy, and B. Zachariah, ‘Introduction: The Internationalism of the Moment – South Asia and the Contours of the Interwar World’, in A. Raza, F. Roy and B. Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-1939 (New Delhi: Sage, 2014), xi-xli. Rodgers, D.T., ‘Cultures in Motion: An Introduction’, in D.T. Rodgers, B. Raman, and H. Reimitz (eds.), Cultures in Motion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 1-20. Shiraishi, T., An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Summers, D., Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London & New York: Phaidon Press, 2003).

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Teng, S. and J.K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Veer, P. van der, ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’, in S. Vertovec, and R. Cohen (eds.), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 165-179. Werbner, P., ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’, Theory, Culture & Society 23:2-3 (2006), pp. 496-498.

About the Authors Carolien Stolte is a University Lecturer in History at Leiden University, interested in histories of anti-imperialism, decolonization, and regionalism in Asia. She studied history and South-Asian studies in Leiden, Paris, and Geneva, and was a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow at the History Department of Harvard University in 2014-2015. Her book on the Indian and Persian career of Dutch artist Philip Angel was published in 2012. Carolien is also a co-editor of the book series Dutch Sources on South Asia, published by Manohar Press, as well as editor-in-chief of the Cambridge University Press journal Itinerario. Yoshiyuki Kikuchi was trained as a historian of modern science and technology at the University of Tokyo and the Open University, Milton Keynes, where he was awarded a PhD. He has held postdoctoral positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. Kikuchi has published extensively on the history of Japanese science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its global contexts. He is the author of Anglo-American Connections in Japanese Chemistry: The Lab as Contact Zone (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan.

Part I Artistic Spaces

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The Museum at Aundh Reflecting on Citizenship and the Art Museum in the Colony Deepti Mulgund* Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH02 Abstract The birth of the museum in India takes place in the context of colonial modernity in the early nineteenth century. A significant body of scholarship has developed around the dynamics between colonialism and the museum. However, both art museums and museums established by Indians have received far less attention. The paper focuses on the Shri Bhavani art museum in the princely state of Aundh in colonial India, established by its last ruler, Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi in 1938. In that same year, Balasaheb made the declaration of ‘giving away’ his ruling powers to his subjects, a socio-political movement retrospectively called the ‘Aundh Experiment’. Aundh’s art museum and Balasaheb’s declaration are both emblematic of the rising tide of Indian nationalism during the Second World War. Through its establishment as well as through the nature of its collections, the museum was more than a simple reflection of this nationalism. Rather, as this chapter demonstrates, the Museum was actively engaged in the task of producing citizens out of subjects for the Indian nation to come.

This chapter focuses on the establishment of an art museum, the Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya (art museum) in the former princely state of Aundh, in present-day Maharashtra, India. The museum was founded * This chapter is drawn from the author’s M.Phil dissertation entitled, The Museum at Aundh: Experiments in Art and Self-Rule (2012), submitted to the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, under the supervision of Dr. Kavita Singh.

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in 1938 by its last royal ruler, Bhawanrao Pant Pratinidhi alias Balasaheb (1868-1951, ruled 1909-1948), ten years before Aundh merged with the newly independent Indian state. In the same year, Balasaheb initiated what is now known as the ‘Aundh Experiment’, in which he ‘handed over’ his ruling powers to his subjects. Balasaheb was not the first or only ruler to establish a museum in his principality, but Aundh’s museum is interesting as one of the earlier Indian museums that self-identifies specifically as an art museum. At the time, the dominant model of the museum in the colony was the encyclopaedic or general-survey type of museum.1 The art museum, when it emerged in the European context, has been understood as ‘inculcating bourgeois civic values that served the needs of the emerging nation state and the dominant interests within it’.2 In the Indian subcontinent, the institution of the museum was a European export making its way into India under the impress of colonial modernity in the early nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the museum seems to have suggested itself to some Indians as a potent institution. As the struggle for Indian independence was underway, a ruler like Balasaheb turned to the institution of the art museum as part of a programme of creating self-ruling citizens for a nation that was yet to be free. However, the Aundh Museum has remained on the margins of Indian art history, as evidenced by the absence of in-depth scholarly work, perhaps due to its rural location and its establishment by the native ruler of a small principality rather than the colonial state.3 When it did come to the notice of art-historians such as Partha Mitter, it was described as: a rich assortment of European antiques in copies, sculptures and paintings of old masters, and a very substantial collection of contemporary Indian art. Founded to improve the taste of Balasaheb’s subjects such a 1 By the survey type museum, I refer to museums that included collections of natural history, science, economic geography, industrial arts, archaeology, and other collections – a contrast to museums devoted solely to the arts. 2 Witcomb, Reimagining the Museum, p. 14. 3 To my knowledge, no in-depth studies of the museum’s collection or of Balasaheb’s artistic practice and patronage exist, though various other aspects of the Aundh state’s social experiment and on Balasaheb have been written about. See Rothermund, ‘The Aundh Experiment’. See also books by his son Apa Pant, A Moment in Time and An Unusual Raja. Aundh also finds mention in some scholarship on the painter Raja Ravi Varma since the museum contains three of his works: ‘Malayalee Lady’ (1892); ‘Sairandri’; and ‘Damayanti’ (1894). See Chawla, Raja Ravi Varma; Parimoo, The Legacy of Ravi Varma. The Museum itself has been briefly discussed by Mitter, Art and Nationalism.

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large museum of European art at the height of the nationalist movement seemed to be delightfully oblivious to the writing on the wall. 4

The comment above frames Aundh’s museum as anachronistic, given its large collection of copies and casts of Western classical art at a time when calls for Indian independence were echoing throughout the country. This chapter posits that the conditions of founding the museum, its founder, collections, and the aesthetic experiments in the museum merit a closer examination. It will highlight the constitutive role of the art museum within the imaginary of the incipient nation, as it was worked out in the colony. The museum, which emerged as the Indian movement for independence gathered momentum, was emblematic of the shifts in colonial power relations that were taking place in Aundh. It was also part of a larger programme, the ‘Aundh Experiment’, which symbolically overturned colonial tropes about Indians’ ability for self-rule. This chapter will highlight the constitutive role of the art museum within the imaginary of the incipient nation, as it was worked out in the colony. Aundh’s museum engaged with both ideas – the institution of the art museum as well as ‘fine arts’– in a robust and localized fashion. In examining some of the narratives of artistic merit, heritage, locality, and nation that were playing out in this museum, the chapter locates the museum within the broader currents of nationalism to understand how art and the art museum served this small principality and its ruler. The chapter suggests that the Aundh Museum’s collections offer a way of reading into the relationship between nationalism, art, and public institutions as a vision directed to the desired future. It is concerned with addressing not just colonial power but also with creating a particular kind of citizen for the nation to come, through the institution of the art museum. By reflecting on an art museum established by an Indian ruler rather than the colonial state, this chapter will contribute to two understudied areas within South Asian studies and art history: Indian states and their rulers’ negotiations with modern institutions, and the art museum in the colony. This will add to an understanding of the relationship between the art museum and the nation state. In doing so, it offers a case study outside the Euro-American context from which the majority of such work has emerged.5 4 Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p. 23. 5 Preziosi, through a historiography of museum studies and art history has demonstrated the foundational links between the European nation state, the concept of art, and the institution

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This chapter first considers the relationship between the nation state and the art museum as described by scholars studying institutions emerging in Europe. It argues against the assumption that all art museums reflect their polities in a similar fashion, and opens up the question of the art museum in the colony. A brief account is given of the conditions under which the first museum in the colony came to be formed. Museums established by Indian rulers are discussed in the context of their negotiations with modernity, their adoption of modern institutions, and as a reconfiguration of their traditional role as patrons of the arts. Situating the Aundh museum within this broader landscape of colonial museums and those established by Indian rulers, the chapter then examines the collections of the museum at Aundh. Next, the chapter briefly considers its founder who, in his capacity as the ruler of this small principality was able to effect many changes within Aundh’s polity in addition to establishing this art museum. His ambitious project as an amateur artist – a series on the Indian epic Ramayana – is examined. Two of his projects as a cultural patron are analysed: his support of a critical edition of the Mahabharata at the Bhandarkar Memorial Institute from 1918 onwards, and his patronage of a local Aundh sculptor, Mahadev Patharvat, who created marble sculptures for the museum’s collection. Through a discussion of his artistic projects, the chapter posits the museum as the site of Balasaheb’s dialogue with Western art and with larger ideas of history. His interest in the arts, I argue, became a tool for negotiating the colonial encounter and eased his assimilation into the British social milieu. In its final section, the chapter focuses on the ‘Aundh Experiment’, and argues that the museum and its refined programme of patronage needs to be read alongside his larger programme of anticipating self-rule in Aundh and all of India.

of the art museum. See Preziosi, ‘Collecting/Museums’. Duncan, using the context of American museums, has suggested the ‘secular ritual’ to describe the art museum’s role within social and national life. See Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Scholarship on the universal survey museum has examined the relationship between the emerging nation state and the institution of the art museum. Wallach and Duncan in their early work on the universal survey museum posited the museum as an ideological space whose spatial itinerary confirms the values and beliefs of the state. They contend that while claiming universal values, the universal survey museum, in fact, embodies the state. See Wallach and Duncan, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’. Also see McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. Pierprzak’s work on the art museums of Morocco belongs to a small set of works from a non-Western context. See Pieprzak, Imagined Museums.

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The Art Museum and the Nation State The art museum’s relationship to the nation state and its association with the democratization of art was perhaps demonstrated most clearly when the Museum Central des Arts was opened by the new republican government in the Louvre in 1793. The Louvre was not the first royal collection to be opened to the public. However, it was the government’s designation of the former palace as a ‘public’ institution and its display of the royal collection as collective patrimony that emphasized the principle of equality. Carol Duncan in her study of the art museum in the West has marked it as a space of secular ritual. In noting the Louvre’s hang and the resultant shift in the meaning of objects, Duncan remarks, as a new kind of ceremonial space, the Louvre not only redefined the political identity of its visitors, it also assigned new meanings to the objects it displayed and qualified, obscured or distorted old ones. Now presented as public property, they became the means through which a new relationship between the individual citizen and the state as benefactor could be symbolically enacted.6

In speaking of the Louvre’s dramatic enactment of the ‘ritual of citizenship’ through the recasting of the artworks’ meaning, she highlights the powerful ties between the art museum and the nation. In the epistemological work on the art museum by Donald Preziosi, a link is established between modern subjecthood, the nation state, art history, and the museum. Preziosi suggests that the paradigm, ‘to every nation its art’, is indicative of the status of art as one of ‘the most effective ideological instruments for the retroactive rewriting of the history of human societies’.7 However, the idea that the art museum is a universal institution with uniform effect needs to be opened up. The contours of the engagement between the art museum and the nation state need to be understood in greater detail, for which the museum in the colony raises important questions. If the museum has been understood as one of modernity’s most significant institutions, inaugurating a new visual regime, the museum in the colony is a rich site for examining the relationship between modern subjecthood, the art museum, and the nation state. Understanding the constitutive role of colonialism within modernity allows for an exploration of the intertwined 6 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals, p. 24. 7 Preziosi, ‘Collecting/Museums’, p. 416.

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histories of the colony and the metropole.8 From the position of postcolonial interest in South Asia, a study of the museum in the colony needs to be more than an additive exercise, in which the non-West becomes a set of ‘interesting but ultimately distant modernities.’9 Therefore, this study of the art museum at Aundh is directed towards opening up the potential of the art museum as its founder in colonial India saw it. The following section zooms in further to understand the backdrop against which this art museum was established and the significance of such a gesture.

The Museum in the Colony The first public museum in India was established in 1814, roughly two decades after the opening of the Louvre. The museum in the colony took shape through the scholarly endeavours of the Royal Asiatic Society, founded by Orientalist and pioneering Sanskritist Sir William Jones in 1784. This society of Western scholars and Orientalists set out to collect ‘all articles that may tend to illustrate Oriental manners and history or to elucidate the peculiarities of art and nature in the east’. This resulted in a collection comprised of ‘ancient monuments, sculptures, coins, and inscriptions, to utensils, tools, weapons, and musical instruments, to animals (dead or alive), plants, minerals, and metals’.10 Starting out as a collection for study by a small group of scholars, it was to take on a more public role when the Society persuaded the government to take it over. The latter converted it into an imperial museum through the Indian Museum Act of 1866. A drive for all-encompassing and exhaustive knowledge about the colony thus guided the creation of the museum in India. This marked the museum as a significant site for disciplinary formation in the colonial period. The de facto format for the museum in the colony was governed by Western scholarly interest in the colony. The museum became a repository for all manner of materials, including scientific and ethnographic collections and ‘antiquities’– a term itself emblematic of the motley nature of museum collections and which came to mean, as Tapati Guha-Thakurta has noted, 8 About the presence of the non-West within the history of the West, Timothy Mitchell notes that ‘the significance of allowing the non-West to disrupt the history of the West is to show that the West has no simple origin, despite its claims to uniqueness, and its histories cannot adequately be gathered into the form of a singular narrative’. Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, p. 24. 9 Brown, ‘Response’, p. 556. 10 Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, p. 47.

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‘whole monuments to the smallest architectural fragments, from manuscripts to sculptures, coins, and inscribed slabs’.11 Numismatic collections, texts, schools of sculpture, arms and armoury, specimens of geology, botany, natural history, and a number of ‘peculiarities,’ all these would have commanded the viewer’s attention; over time, the corpus of materials came to be despatched to dedicated museums of natural history, geology, etc. An art museum, whether of Indian or Western fine arts, continued to be elusive. This early history of the museum and its scholarly beginnings shaped the museum’s framing within South Asian history. The foundational scholarship of Bernard Cohn has tracked the various modalities of colonialism such as the historiographic, observational/travel, survey, enumerative, surveillance, and finally, the museological modality, to map the emergence of bodies of knowledge and institutions in the colonial period. Of these, the last modality is of particular interest to this study. The museological modality in particular, builds a relation between Europe’s past and colonial material culture, making India, as Cohn notes, ‘a vast museum, with its countryside filled with ruins, its people representing past ages – biblical, classical, and feudal; it was a source of collectibles and curiosities to fill European museums, botanical gardens, zoos, country houses’.12 Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s larger project has been to chart specific moments and institutions that laid the foundations of disciplinary formations in the colonial period, to understand the framing of India’s past and its contemporary reverberations. Within this framework, her work on the establishment of the Indian Museum in Calcutta has been key in placing the museum within the larger colonial knowledge-gathering project. However, at least two lines of critique open up the idea of the museum as part of the imperial archive. Paralleling the Indian Museum’s formation through the Royal Asiatic Society’s endeavours, the establishment of museums in the Presidency towns of Madras (now Chennai) and Bombay (now Mumbai) was also taken up by interested scholars, antiquarians, and other members of civil society, as well as by the native elite. Handed over to the colonial state only at a later period of time, they are characterized as ‘foundlings thrust upon it for its care’ by Kavita Singh.13 Singh therefore questions the idea of the totalizing nature of the imperial archive, of which museums may be understood as a significant part. The motley nature of their collections – ethnographic, zoological, botanical, and historical artefacts and 11 Ibid., p. 3. 12 Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, p. 9. 13 Singh, ‘Material Fantasy’, p. 43.

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curiosities jumbled together – which were also dependent on members’ donations and interests, the availability of archaeological finds, further attests to this reading. The museum in the colony faced another crisis when, in its role as a public institution, its collections encountered the native gaze. Colonial museum administrators’ accounts are replete with frustrated narratives about native ignorance of the scientific and didactic project of the museum. Historian Gyan Prakash has analysed one such account by Edgar Thurston, Superintendent of the Government Central Museum, Madras (Chennai, served 1885-1910), whose ethnographic activities led to a proliferation of accounts about the purpose of Thurston’s study. Hereupon, the scientific and ethnographic ambitions of the museum and its collections were dragged into the realm of humour and sport. Gyan Prakash points out, ‘the history of the museum as a Western institution is not, and never was, a closed issue; it is riddled with points of crisis and openings that threaten to make the West “go native” and frustrate the desire to seize the native in all his nakedness’.14

Princely States and the Institution of the Museum If, as Gyan Prakash notes, the history of the museum as a Western institution was never a closed issue, another way of opening up this history is to consider museums established by Indians. What possibilities did this modern institution suggest to colonial subjects? Within the small set of writings about the museum’s early steps in India, museums established by Indians have received far less attention than the museums established by colonial authorities. This presents an incomplete picture of the museum landscape in India. In fact, several such museums existed, established both by individuals and the rulers of princely states, who exercised limited sovereignty under British paramountcy. Some recent scholarship has examined the nature of collecting by Indian rulers in different areas of study.15 Through these museums, I suggest, Indian rulers carried forward their traditional roles as patrons of the arts. It also marked their engagement with modernity, allowing them to address their subjects and enabling them to make a statement of progressivism in the context of colonial power 14 Prakash, ‘Museum Matters’, p. 212. 15 See Tillotson, ‘The Jaipur Exhibition’; Codell, ‘Ironies of Mimicry’; Peterson, ‘The Cabinet of King Serfoji’; Nair, ‘Native Collecting and Natural Knowledge’; Jaffer, Made for Maharajas; Nair, Mysore Modern.

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relations. While continuing some older forms of arts and cultural patronage, this traditional role was reconfigured within the new colonial context. This included upkeep of monuments and archaeological preservation, establishment of archives, funding the training of artists at colonial art schools, loaning works to and supporting exhibitions nationally as well as internationally, and the building of institutions such as museums and art schools. One such early effort was by the Jaipur rulers, Ram Singh II (r. 1835-1880) and Madho Singh II (r. 1880-1922). The former established the School of Art at Jaipur in 1868, while the latter was the patron of the Albert Hall Museum, which opened out of its temporary premises in 1881. Colonial art schools, at Bombay and Calcutta, were initially aimed at training artisans. However, the curriculum adopted was an admixture of methods suitable to the training of studio artists and what were believed to be necessary skills of draughtsmanship required for Indian artisans.16 The art school at Jaipur avoided this confusion of stated aims, curriculum, and practised methods. Through its well-defined curriculum aimed at training artisans for contemporary production, the art school met its goal of attracting a class of craftspersons. The museum was opened at the suggestion of T. Holbein Hendley, a champion of preserving Indian crafts, and accumulated fine examples of Indian crafts from all over the country. Together with the Art School, the Albert Hall Museum was instrumental in pushing Jaipur crafts and craftsmanship to worldwide attention. The museum served as a resource for artisans as well as a means of accessing high quality Jaipur craftsmanship, thus successfully intervening within contemporary craft production. If the Jaipur maharajas privileged crafts, the progressive ruler of Baroda, Sayajirao III Gaekwar (r. 1875-1939) established a Picture Gallery in 1921, meant to be an instructive course in the development of Western art. The Baroda Museum, which opened in 1897, had preceded this Gallery. Sayajirao’s collection of Western art in the Gallery was not based on personal choice, but was a didactic project to aid Indian artists in grasping the evolution of Western art. This was meant to inspire and encourage the creation of a distinctly Indian idiom amongst native artists, rather than the blind imitation of European art.17 The Baroda ruler entrusted an English art critic, 16 Partha Mitter elaborates on the process of development of the curriculum of colonial art schools in India in the section titled, ‘Art Education and Raj in Patronage’. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism, pp. 27- 63. 17 Codell, ‘Ironies of Mimicry’, p. 136.

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Marion Spielmann, with the task of creating a collection for the Picture Gallery. Travelling from Europe after the First World War, this collection was already acclaimed by the Royal Academy in London before it could be installed in Baroda. This augmented the prestige and value of the collection while widely publicizing it as a gesture of royal generosity. Several museums housing local archaeological finds and occasionally, local crafts were created in princely states in the latter half of the twentieth century. For instance, the state of Bhopal maintained an archaeological museum at the Buddhist sacred site of Sanchi.18 In 1935, the ruler of the state of Travancore, Sree Chithira Tirunal established the Sree Chitra Art Gallery within the compound of the Napier Museum. This Museum had been established as early as 1857 and was named after the governor of Madras, Lord Napier. The Gallery contained a large body of works by the pioneering Indian artist, Raja Ravi Varma, thus honouring the artist whose native state was Travancore. It is in the context of these institutions, created by Indian rulers, that we need to situate the museum at Aundh. It must also be seen in the broader context of Sayajirao’s rule, which was aimed at making his subjects economically independent and socially progressive: Sayajirao enunciated modern India through art collecting, museum building, and scholarly publishing.19

The Museum Collection at Aundh In 1938, Balasaheb’s art collection opened to the public as the Shri Bhavani Chitrasangrahalaya (art museum). The Aundh museum’s collections included fine art in the form of paintings and sculpture, as well as the industrial arts (as they were then called), which included metal, sandalwood, and ivory carving. The museum’s most famous exhibit is perhaps ‘Mother and Child’, a 1931 work by the modernist sculptor Henry Moore. The sculptures in marble and bronze included several copies of classical sculptures in marble, casts of sculptures from Pompeii, etc. The numerous examples of the Venuses and the Mercurys found in the collection attest not only to the preponderance of these objects in the period but also to Balasaheb’s preference towards classical themes and figures. Similarly, copies of Western paintings by artists such as Titian, Raphael, and Rembrandt – including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa – make up a large part of the collection. Landscapes 18 Markham and Hargreaves, Report, p. 10. 19 Ibid., p. 141.

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and seascapes bought abroad on Balasaheb’s travels also form part of the collection. Such a collection, with its emphasis on Western classical works, reproduced as casts and copies, was fairly common in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Making their way into India through the colonial encounter, Western art objects –originals as well as copies – began to appear in elite Indian homes by the eighteenth century. As Guha-Thakurta notes, academic art, with its attendant hierarchies of genres and periods began to percolate into the Indian milieu and a taste was cultivated for Western art as it had developed after the Renaissance. Neo-classical artists as well as copies of earlier works, and common classical themes and figures such as Venus, Cupid, Psyche, and Apollo were widely seen.20 Despite this emphasis on neoclassical art from the West, Balasaheb’s expansive collection also included some excellent samples of Indian ‘high art’, such as miniature paintings from different courts and regions of India. The portfolios of miniature painting include the Deccani School, a rare set of Maratha miniatures, and a fine set called Kirat Arjun attributed to the famed seventeenth-century miniaturist Molaram, in addition to Ragamala paintings. Stone sculptures found from nearby sites of archaeological and historic interest also found their way into Balasaheb’s collection and were sizeable in number. The Aundh museum contains several galleries of works by Indian artists who trained in and practised the Western idiom of academic painting. These artists studied in the various colonial art schools in Bombay or in private academies, acquiring proficiency in oil-painting techniques. This new crop of studio artists, products of the colonial art teaching system and the wider shifts in tastes marked above, modelled themselves on Western artists. In addition to traditional painting styles, Balasaheb’s patronage extended to these contemporary artists. Of these, pioneering Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma is represented through three original works in the collection as well as numerous copies of his paintings. Works from other well-known artists from Western India, such as Mahadev Vishvanath Dhurandar, Abalal Rahiman, Baburao Painter, Savalaram Laxman Haldankar, Archibald Herman Mueller, M.R. Chaphalkar, S.P. Agaskar, and Laxmanrao Taskar are also part of the collection. The Bengal School of painting, a nationalist and revivalist movement in Indian art of the early twentieth century, is represented in Balasaheb’s collection with works by the Ukil brothers, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy. Another section of the collection comprised of copies of the paintings of Ellora, a historic site in the state 20 Guha-Thakurta, Making of a New Indian Art, pp. 53-54.

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of Maharashtra with rock-cut architecture dating from 600 CE onwards. Balasaheb led a team of artists to document some paintings from the Ellora caves, using optical instruments to get accurate images. Balasaheb’s patronage also extended to his immediate environs. One example was his support of Barmappa Kotyalkar – a local potter whose painting and compositional skills were honed by Balasaheb’s mentoring. A self-taught amateur artist himself, Balasaheb’s works are found scattered in different sections of the museum, including a set of fifty-four smallformat watercolours of scenes from the Indian epic Ramayana. The rest of Balasaheb’s oeuvre as an artist was similarly oriented towards epic themes, mythology, and Indian history painting. The Museum’s collection, born out of Balasaheb’s eclectic patronage to artists and styles from different time periods, reflects his personal tastes as they developed through his artistic practice and an investment in the idea of what art ought to be. The following sections consider the role that art played in Balasaheb’s life as an artist, a patron, and a ruler in colonial India.

Balasaheb the Artist: Seeking the Authentic Epic Balasaheb’s interest in art was evident from an early age. He taught himself to paint by copying the paintings of various gods and goddesses on the walls of his childhood home. His parents encouraged him through commissions – mainly the rendering of religious figures and themes – to adorn temples patronized by the family.21 It was perhaps a matter of proficiency as well as proclivity that Balasaheb’s oeuvre was entirely focused on mythological paintings and portraits. His medium of choice was oil painting; enamoured by the plasticity of the medium and its ability to render true-to-life images, Balasaheb worked at mastering it through guidebooks and much experimentation. His choice of subject matter and medium make it easy to understand his deep appreciation for his contemporary Raja Ravi Varma’s life and practice. In 1894, Balasaheb began to frequent Varma’s studios in Bombay. Inspired greatly by watching the senior artist at work, Balasaheb took up some ambitious projects within the genres of mythology and history painting, lack of artistic training notwithstanding. One such project is the Chitra Ramayana (Picture Ramayana) series, started in 1902, in which Balasaheb attempted to depict the epic choosing synoptic scenes from various sections of the text. His effort with the 21 Pratinidhi, Atmacharitra, p. 349.

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Ramayana was geared towards depicting an ‘authentic’ version of the text by showing appropriate costumes, body types, mannerisms, etc. He struggled with finding visual references to the ornaments and clothing styles of this ancient past and turned to Valmiki’s Ramayana, reading it nearly seven times, gleaning details such as whether women covered their upper body, the kinds of headgear, shields, weapons, etc.22 With this, he distinguished his project from his role model, Raja Ravi Varma, who, as Balasaheb noted, attired his characters in modern outfits while depicting figures from the ancient or mythic past. These small-format watercolours show Balasaheb’s lack of training, for instance, through the awkwardness with which musculature is depicted. His ambitions as an artist, however, are evident; he chooses highly charged and complex scenes and attempts to highlight the dynamism of the moment mostly through exaggerated facial expressions. Balasaheb’s privileging of certain genres in his own artistic practice as well as his attempt at depicting an ‘authentic’ Ramayana are markers of a desire to create what may be called the ‘mythic authentic’. Partha Chatterjee, in his analysis of the writings of nationalist writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, points to the author’s stress on the historicity of Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu in the Hindu pantheon, as an exemplary modern character.23 In a similar vein, Balasaheb’s efforts with the Chitra Ramayana were directed at the demonstration of the epic’s historicity. The Ramayana needed to be rendered in an authentic fashion by recouping images from literary sources. The epic has been a subject of choice for many painters through the ages and within various styles of Indian painting. However, Balasaheb seemed to reject this visual corpus in favour of textual sources, emphasizing the hierarchy between the written word and the painted form, as had been the discourse of nationalist art history with its emphasis on canonical Indian texts. However, his conception of the visual medium’s ability to intervene within history writing is seen in the emphasis that he placed on pictorial fidelity of the epic. This demonstration of historicity is geared towards the present: the Ramayana becomes a text with contemporary relevance, meant to serve as a guide for life in colonial India as much as the distant past. Printed in 1925 with colour illustrations, Balasaheb’s version of the Ramayana seems to position itself alongside a singular, original version.24 Balasaheb’s convictions about art’s potential 22 Ibid., p. 438. 23 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 59. 24 Pratinidhi, Chitra Ramayana, 1925.

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to effect change within historiography as seen in his personal artistic project of the Ramayana also extends to his support of other artists and cultural projects.

Balasaheb the Patron: Recuperating a(n Art) History If the Chitra Ramayana was his most significant project as an artist, supporting a research volume on the Mahabharata was perhaps the most prestigious of Balasaheb’s projects as a patron. Though ruling over a small resource-scarce state, his artistic patronage was ambitious and directed towards projects that articulated a larger Indian imaginary. Persuading the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (then called the Bhandarkar Memorial Institute) to begin work on an annotated edition of the Mahabharata in 1918, Balasaheb donated a seed fund to begin the project and also offered to raise funds through other rulers and British officials. The project entailed the collating and annotating of Mahabharata manuscripts. Balasaheb employed an artist to create illustrations for the edition and took charge of printing them, importing special equipment to do so.25 Balasaheb’s autobiography allows for an understanding of his interest in these projects of recouping the past through material sources – either by collating them, as in the case of Mahabharata, or reconstructing them visually by referencing literary sources, as in the Chitra Ramayana series. Maratha history, opined Balasaheb, was based on conquests and courage but not much had been attempted in terms of the fine arts. He further commented that none of the Maratha kings had taken the effort to reinterpret and thereby revive the Sanskrit ragas and raginis, as had been done by the Mughal emperor, nor did they build monuments such as the Gol Gumbaz or the Taj Mahal.26 Ignoring the large body of fortifications and material artefacts left behind by the Marathas, Balasaheb seems to have rued the absence of monuments that made it into the canon of art history, and not merely history. Balasaheb conflated the terms of ‘art’ and ‘history’: to possess an ancient art form would be to possess history in the form of an enduring legacy, as in classical music or monumental architecture. Such an operation – the twinning of ‘art’ and ‘history’ – brings to mind what Donald Preziosi has called ‘the totalizing notion of art’. His formulation 25 Pratinidhi., Atmacharitra, p. 447. 26 Ibid., p. 512.

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however, does not take into account the strategic deployment of these ideas within the colonial paradigm – at the individual level and as traditional leaders and rulers. Balasaheb’s approach to the arts becomes part of an endeavour through which the past is actively imagined and visualized and brought forward forcefully to negotiate the colonial encounter. If Balasaheb tried to authentically depict the Ramayana with his painstaking research into literary sources, he supported the methods and tools of modern historiography for the scholars of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in the Mahabharata project. The absence of recorded history or of fine arts served as the basis for many colonial assertions about lack of civilization. Through his investment in these intellectual and cultural projects, privileging the visual arts to bring alive a vision of history, Balasaheb seemed to build a strong position to negotiate the present.

Civilizational Dialogue: The Case of the Aundh Sculptor Through different means, Balasaheb’s involvement with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata was directed towards the larger project of historicity. In the discussion that follows, Balasaheb’s patronage of a local sculptor turns dialogic with respect to Western art. With his patronage of local artists in Aundh, Balasaheb was able to effect artistic experiments that played with the codes of location, medium, and genre. Two of the sculptors patronized by Balasaheb were Pandoba Patharvat and his son, Mahadev, traditional artisans who initially worked with clay and perhaps local stone to fashion deities for worship. Balasaheb’s inventive patronage of these traditional idol-makers pushed them beyond their traditional proficiency with clay and local stone to take up the new medium of marble.27 This patronage ensured that local talent was able to work with marble, that material of high art and classicism, to produce images and objects that confound easy categorizations. They occupy niches in the temple of the family deity, which is located on the same hill as the Museum; they depict Hindu gods and goddesses, and historical figures in the academic style, perhaps inspired by Varma’s forays into academic art with Indian subject matter. As mentioned above, marble’s association with classical art would have been impressed upon Balasaheb, and his collections of Western art contained several examples of marble sculpture. Within this framework, perhaps, one of the most significant commissions that Mahadev Patharvat 27 Ibid., p. 347.

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undertook was the making of six marble statues, each depicting a different season of the Hindu calendar. They include Vasant (spring), Grishma (summer), Varsha (monsoon), Sharad (winter), Hemant (pre-winter) and Shishir (autumn). Balasaheb’s daughters modelled for these figures. This project seems to be Balasaheb’s take on the classical Greek theme of depicting the Horae, goddesses of the seasons and natural portions of time. The presence of these locally produced marble sculptures in the museum stands in contrast to the usual circulation of Western-art objects in Indian museums. With his exercises in patronage, commissioning local talent to work with the medium of marble, Balasaheb attempted to set up a dialogue with the canon of Western art and created a localized response. Patharvat’s work, made in the same idiom but with different content and sitting alongside the Western copies and casts, presents another narrative within the museum – one which offers, as it were, a mode of speaking back to the canon of Western art. Thus, the museum’s collections offer a response to classical Western art, engaging in a dialogic exercise within and outside of the museum. It may be understood as a site from which these creative experiments offered non-metropolitan visitors insights about the terms on which the West might be addressed. At the same time, Balasaheb’s larger patronage, directed towards the modern institution of the art museum, the work of local artists in Western mediums such as oil painting and marble sculpture, and its play with the codes of Indian and European high-culture, also addressed contemporary British officialdom. Even before coming to the throne, Balasaheb’s artistic engagements played an important role in building social ties with British officialdom, connecting him to other British amateurs. His proclivities, disposition and conduct seemed to be speaking to a number of Victorian virtues and values, in contrast to the lives of dissipation and indolence that marked the lives of a number of minor royals and whose ‘usefulness’ to society was a constant question for the British administration.28 Balasaheb’s artistic endeavours, in addition to his education, became a means of negotiating colonial power relations, as discussed in the section below.

28 In his book on the Rajkumar College in Rajkot, which was opened especially for the ruling princes and other royals, Khan, an alumnus of the college, details the life of the minor royals and remarks on the kind of indolent and dissipated lifestyle to which their social rank left them susceptible. Khan seeks to prove that the education provided to the princes at the college was making them ‘useful’ members of society. See Khan, The Ruling Chiefs, p. 64.

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Art and Life: Balasaheb as a Native Ruler in Colonial India Painter, photographer, littérateur, keen wrestler, a champion of the suryanamaskar (‘sun salutation’), devout king, an obedient son, and an administrator who seemed to gauge which way the winds of power would blow, Balasaheb’s life was one of privilege. More importantly, however, it was cultivated with care as an exemplar of moral rectitude. Balasaheb was never first in line to the throne of Aundh. Perhaps, with this knowledge, he pursued his education with seriousness and zeal, obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the Deccan College in Pune, a feat that distinguished him from the other minor royals and his own siblings. By 1902, Balasaheb and his family were forced to leave their ancestral house in Aundh as his elder brother assumed the throne and a trying period began in their lives. In the following period, he was forced to frequently interact with British officials, urging them to influence his brother to pay his full share of the inheritance. The seven years Balasaheb spent outside his home in Aundh left him with a keen sense of the ways in which he could accrue influence with British officials, during which he developed tools to negotiate the colonial encounter. With a great deal of self-reflexivity, Balasaheb in his autobiography comments on the value of seemingly marginal means of accruing influence within the British social milieu: entertaining, building social ties on the basis of his education, and his passion for art which he shared with other British amateurs. As an obvious instance, Balasaheb notes how the series on the Ramayana was appreciated by the Governor-General and other high officials and their wives, many of whom were amateur artists themselves.29 By 1909, Balasaheb’s integration into the elite British milieu was so successful that when his nephew was deposed on grounds of misconduct, Balasaheb was invited by the British to assume control of Aundh. Balasaheb, the cultured, artistically inclined royal with his piety and erudition, having absorbed the finer points of the British civilization, such as Western education and art, while seemingly remaining rooted to his milieu of Aundh, impressed British administrators as the appropriate ruler for Aundh.

Anticipating Self-Rule: The Aundh Experiment Balasaheb, as his autobiography helps us understand, seemed to view his very life as a work of art, to be crafted with care and according to the 29 Pratinidhi, Atmacharitra, p. 441.

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injunctions of dharma (broadly translated as ‘moral law’). A concern with appropriate moral conduct and an awareness of one’s role within family, community, and the nation, pervades the text and emerges as a key trope in Balasaheb’s writing. As the ruler of Aundh, he seems to have similarly interpreted kingship and citizenship through the lens of dharma as he understood it. This world view, combined with his astute reading of the political situation, resulted in an experiment in self-rule in advance of Indian independence. On 23 November 1938, Balasaheb, who had been ruling this treaty state of the British since 1909, renounced all his powers in favour of his subjects, thus inaugurating the ‘Aundh Experiment’. Essentially, the declaration was geared towards a process of decentralization of power that treated the village as an autonomous unit in nearly all areas of administration and encouraged public participation in every sphere of state policymaking, including tax revenue and the judiciary. This was guaranteed through the adoption of the ‘Swaraj (self-rule) Constitution’ in January 1939. Beyond these measures, it generated energy and enthusiasm due to the widespread literacy campaign that preceded it. Balasaheb’s rule had been characterized by measures that had increased public participation through representation in the administration as well as social reform, such as the establishment of schools, providing a fillip to local industry. However, by 1937, the nationalist political climate demanded much more from the indigenous rulers than mere reformist measures and the ‘Aundh Experiment’ must be read within this context as well. The immediate inspiration for this ‘transfer of power’ was a draft declaration giving full freedom to the people of Aundh written by Maurice Frydman or Swami Bharatananda, a friend of Balasaheb’s son Apa Pant and an associate of M.K. Gandhi who was staying at Aundh at the time. Frydman or Swami Bharatananda was instrumental in setting up a meeting between the Pant Pratinidhi and Gandhi. Balasaheb’s experiment in decentralization emerged in part due to his consultations with Gandhi, who had long propagated the idea of gram-rajya or village republics. Aundh’s small size and its rural base suggested the possibility of trying out ideas about self-sufficient village republics. Balasaheb capitalized on the unique set of circumstances: the small size of the state, the outbreak of the Second World War, his relations with the British, and the support of his subjects, to inaugurate this moment of self-rule. The happenings at Aundh were viewed by critics with a mix of scepticism and distrust about the raja’s motives. When questioned by the Agent of the Governor General to the Deccan States at Kolhapur about his meeting with Gandhi, Balasaheb explained:

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For the last thirty years I have been trying to help the people of Aundh stand on their own feet, and be self-supporting in every respect. I consider it my duty to make them capable of governing themselves. In the course of doing my duty, I have always sought the blessings of my goddess. It is with her inspiration that I went to meet the Mahatma, so that I could receive the best advice in the land; I’d already decided to hand over all my powers to my people. I do not think I have done any wrong in either deciding to hand over all my powers to my people, or in seeking the advice of Mahatma Gandhi.30

Balasaheb’s statements point to the continuum he perceived between his role as a ruler and in making his subjects capable of self-rule. Enabling self-rule, therefore, was part of his duty as a ruler. In reality, Balasaheb was ‘giving away’ power in excess of what he possessed, since the state was under treaty with the British and had accepted British paramountcy. Given the limited sovereignty of the state, Balasaheb’s declaration and the Constitution adopted by the state seemed a gesture towards wresting authority from the British administration and dispersing it among ‘the people’. It would seem that only his personal friendship with the local British agent as well as his excellent relations with the administration prevented his deposition; having invited him into their social milieu and to the throne of Aundh, the official machinery found itself thwarted and reacted cautiously to this symbolic challenge to their rule.31

Conclusion In its examination of a seemingly provincial and rural museum and its founder, this chapter has analysed some parts of the collection to demonstrate small but clearly directed programmes of patronage. Balasaheb’s patronage of contemporary artists extended not only to artists trained in colonial art schools from presidency towns like Bombay, but also to the local artisans of Aundh who were encouraged to respond to the collection of Western classical art, present in the form of copies in the museum. His engagements with the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata were meant 30 Pant, An Unusual Raja, p. 64. 31 Pant’s book details some of the responses of the Bombay Government through the Deccan States Agency to the ‘Aundh Experiment’ and his father’s handling of the situation. See Pant, An Unusual Raja.

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to offer a glimpse into his conceptions of art and history, and his methods of negotiating these categories. Aundh’s museum has remained largely on the margins of Indian museum studies, itself a nascent area of study and out of the global history of the art museum. But rather than performing a merely additive role to the larger canon, the museum at Aundh is meant to begin a discussion around the many possible art museums that may exist and the varying terms on which they address the nation state. The discussion about the ‘Aundh Experiment’ has served to frame his larger political programme, articulating a vision for the state that included self-governance as well as the creation of a new kind of citizen. Within this vision, the art museum occupied a significant place, a site suggesting new possibilities and roles to enable the transition from subjects to citizens. Bringing different parts of the collection in dialogue with each other, rather than merely showcasing them, Balasaheb suggests a future Indian citizen capable of engaging in a dialogue with Western civilization, equipped with tropes of Indian thought and high culture. The preceding incremental changes made within the Aundh administration, coupled with the various social reform initiatives undertaken by Balasaheb point to his long-standing interest in the state’s uplift. Directing his personal and state resources to building the museum speaks of the association he made between this project of social uplift and the art museum. Undoubtedly, Balasaheb’s own interest in the arts played a large part in this choice, but the art museum was not merely reflective of this interest. Balasaheb’s elite status and subjectivity as a royal in colonial India, offered him a vantage point from which to carry out a ‘synthesis’ of the best of East and West.32 The establishment of the museum and the institution of self-rule mechanisms were part of his paternalistic attitude towards his subjects, as a means to demonstrate the possibilities of being modern on particular terms. Balasaheb’s art museum is therefore part of the larger discourse of the art museum as a space for the democratization of art, engagement with cultural values, and its potential for individual and social transformation. Further, Balasaheb’s negotiations with British society made him conscious of the value of establishing an institution such as the art museum, with its associations with progressive rule. The terms of this ‘progressive’ rule, however, were not blindly imitative of the West. This chapter, in focusing on the Aundh museum as an art museum established by an Indian ruler, examined how this institution, ostensibly 32 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 73.

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a Western export, was adopted in the colony and this chapter has sought to particularize the art museum of the colony through Aundh’s example. The strategies adopted by the Aundh museum’s founder will contribute to an understanding of the art museum’s potentialities as it was grasped in contexts far removed from the ones in which the institution first emerged. My aim here has been to draw attention to the art museum’s role within the larger movement for self-determination and within the nationalist movement as it took place in a small principality in rural India. The museum and the Aundh Experiment were part of the move towards decolonization that was underway as the Second World War occupied Europe and signalled the decline of the British Empire. It addressed itself not just to the embattled present as Indians sought to wrest control away from the Empire but also at a future moment, which would belong to the Indian nation.

Bibliography Brown, R.M., ‘Response: Provincializing Modernity: From Derivative to Foundational’, Art Bulletin 90:4 (2008), pp. 552-557. Chatterjee, P., Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986). Chawla, R., Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India (New Delhi: Mapin, 2010). Codell, J.F., ‘Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collection of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern India’, Journal of the History of Collections 15:1 (2003), pp.127-146. Cohn, B., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). Duncan, C., Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, (New York: Routledge, 1995). Guha-Thakurta, T., Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). —, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jaffer, A., Made for Maharajas: A Design Diary of Princely India (New York: Vendome Press, 2006). Khan, N., The Ruling Chiefs of Western India and the Rajkumar College (Bombay: S. Claridge and Company, 1904). Markham, S.F. and H. Hargreaves, Report on the Museums of India (London: Museum Society, 1936). McClellan, A., Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Mitchell, T., ‘The Stage of Modernity’, in T. Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1-34. Mitter, M., Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Nair, J., Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region Under Princely Rule (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011).

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Nair, S.P., ‘Native Collecting and Natural Knowledge (1798-1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as a “Centre of Calculation”’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15:3 (2005), pp. 279-302. Pant, A., An Unusual Raja: Mahatma Gandhi and the Aundh Experiment, (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1989). —, A Moment in Time (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974). Parimoo, R., The Legacy of Raja Ravi Varma: The Painter (Baroda: Maharaja Fatesingh Museum Trust, 1998). Peterson, I.V., ‘The Cabinet of King Serfoji of Tanjore’, Journal of the History of Collections 11:1 (1999) pp. 71-93. Pieprzak, K., Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Prakash, G., ‘Museum Matters’, in B. Messias Carbonell, Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.), 2004. Pratinidhi, B.P., Atmacharitra, 2 vols. (Pune: D.T. Joshi, 1946). —, Chitra Ramayana (Aundh: Self-published, 1925). Preziosi, D., ‘Collecting/Museums’, in R.S. Nelson et al. (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 407-418. Rothermund, I., The Aundh Experiment: A Gandhian Grass-roots Democracy (Bombay: Somaiya Publications, 1983). Singh, K., ‘Material Fantasy: Museums of Colonial India’, in G. Sinha (ed.), Art And Visual Culture In India (1857-2007) (New Delhi: Marg Publications, 2009), pp. 40-57. Tillotson, G., ‘The Jaipur Exhibition of 1883’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 14:2 (2004), pp. 111-26. Wallach, A. and C. Duncan, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, in B. Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2nd ed. 2012), pp. 46-61. Witcomb, A., Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, (London: Routledge, 2003).

About the Author Deepti Mulgund is pursuing her PhD on the formation of art publics in colonial Bombay (1850-1930s) at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. In 2015-2016, she spent a year of doctoral study affiliated to the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt University, Berlin, with a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Her MPhil dissertation ‘Experiments in Art and Self-Rule: The Museum at Aundh’ was submitted to JNU in 2012. Her research interests include art reception and publics, the institution of the art museum, the contemporary life of museums, and curation.

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Exhibiting the Nation Cultural Flows, Transnational Exchanges, and the Development of Museums in Japan and China, 1900-1950 Shu-Li Wang* Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH03 Abstract The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed an increasing transnational exchange of ideas between Europe and Asia. Institutions akin to European public museums, which do not merely collect and categorize, but also display with the aim of transmitting knowledge, appeared in China and Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. But the specific incarnation of the museum in China, as well as the use of bowuguan as the Chinese translation of the term ‘museum’, actually reflects a transnational exchange between China and Japan. Both countries imported the European museum concept, while adapting museum practices to suit their own social and cultural milieux. This chapter explores the evolution of China’s museum industry over the first half of the twentieth century – from adopting museological ideas from the West and emulating Japan, to incorporating its own cultural traditions – as an arena of cultural flow and transnational exchange between Europe, Japan, and China.

The history of the early twentieth century is one of major political, social, and economic transformation. On the one hand, the unprecedented scale of the two world wars led to instability in Europe and the rebalancing of political power in the global arena, resulting in the decline of the West and development elsewhere. On the other hand, new technological and * The author would like to thank Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, Anatoly Detwyler, and Kong Lining for their advice, and Janice Su for proofreadting the English.

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scientific progress, as well as the emergence of mass media, brought with them possibilities for cultural flows and international contacts that had never existed before. In Japan, this was a period that witnessed the rise of imperial power. After the Meiji Restoration (1868), the country successfully transformed itself from one that imitated China, to one that emulated the aggressive imperial ambitions of the West. China’s early twentieth century also saw a major political transformation, as it moved from an imperial system under the Qing dynasty to a republic in 1911, and then from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It was a period marked by constant exposure to the outside world. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed increasing cultural flows between Europe and Asia, but also a transnational exchange of ideas within Asian societies. How did East Asian societies such as China and Japan respond to these changes? As Western ideas were introduced to Asia, the coining of neologisms captured and encapsulated this new knowledge. It is a period that reflects a series of encounters and ongoing cultural translation. In Chinese, for example, new terms such as economy ( jingji), society (shehui), nation (guojia), philosophy (zhexue), literature (wenxue), novels (xiaoshuo), democracy (minzhu), science (kexue), library (tushuguan), and museum (bowuguan) all came into being during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is interesting to note that these terms used the same written characters in both Japanese and Chinese, especially since their usage from one country to another required various tools of translational negotiation, depending on their new historico-linguistic environment. These new terms mediated between the source and target languages. This phenomenon of appropriation also reflects ongoing processes of intercultural transfer between Japan and China. This chapter takes early twentieth-century museums and exhibitions, in the context of institutional appropriation, as an arena within which to explore translation and transnational exchange between Europe, Japan, and China. Sweeping changes in Chinese society in the first half of the twentieth century triggered the crises of both modernity and identity. Debates ensued over whether to follow Western modernization, Japanese reformation or to retain Confucian traditions. How did late-Qing intellectuals arrive at the idea of establishing modern museums? What would the nationalist policy be towards the creation of museums and the opening of the Forbidden Palace to the public (1925) with regard to its political projects of constructing a Chinese cultural identity on the mainland? Meanwhile, in Japan, both exhibitions abroad and museums domestically were used to present images contrasting Japan and its colonies. How did these East

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Asian societies ‘domesticate this somewhat exotic transplant’ into their own socio-political contexts?1 In China, the museum as a concept was imported from Great Britain, France, and Japan. The contemporary usage of the English term ‘museum’ is translated as hakubutsukan in Japanese and bowuguan in Chinese (both of which are, again, written using the same characters). The Japanese came to understand hakubutsukan through their participation in World Exhibitions, where images of progress and economic development were emphasized. Meanwhile, the Chinese understanding of bowuguan was transmitted through travel writing by various late-Qing intellectuals who had visited museums in Europe and the United States, as well as through the lens of Japan’s adoption of museologial practice. The result was the establishment, after 1911, of various archaeological and historical museums that were primarily focused on the preservation and presentation of artefacts. How might the European-type museum be seen to have taken root within its new milieux? How does the idea of the modern museum encounter translational negotiation in the East Asian world? Lydia Liu explores various historical interactions among China, Japan, and the West, revealing the role played by historical translation in modernization and globalization processes.2 The notion of translingual practice describes how loan words were appropriated in Japan from ancient Chinese canons, then imported back into China as modern Japanese words. She describes the seminal moments of translingual practice in early twentiethcentury China and suggests that the Chinese learned about modernity not only from European texts but also from Japanese translations of both European and Chinese works. Both museums and museological practice are products of transnational exchange processes occurring in East Asia at that time. This chapter examines the development of the modern museum in China, using the situation in Japan as a point of reference. Following Liu’s seminal approach, the contexts of both the Chinese and Japanese iterations of museological terminology like bowuguan/hakubutsukan (museum) is laid out, followed by an investigation into how museums evolved to meet various political expectations in twentieth-century China and Japan, with a particular focus on the Chinese concept of wenwu (relics, cultural objects). My intention is to open a window between European and Chinese museological traditions by examining these very basic notions of cultural heritage, and supply a better context for the future research on the study 1 Kahn, ‘Domesticating a Foreign Import’, p. 226. 2 Liu, Translingual Practice.

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of East Asian museology. Secondly, the paper will briefly investigate how these notions of cultural heritage have affected the foundations of museums in Chinese and Japanese societies.

Rethinking Museological Practice in East Asia: Collecting versus Displaying The historical roots of the European museum can be traced to the Mouseion, the Temple of the Muses, in third-century BCE Alexandria; the cabinets de curiosités in the sixteenth century; citizen- and civil society-making processes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the construction of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In an effort to demonstrate the colonial power and consolidate national identity, many national museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, were established in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Smith has pointed out that ‘the sense of the new Modern Europe was to be expressed in the monuments that were to be protected and managed for the edification of the public and as physical representations of national identity and European taste and achievement’.3 In this context, museums developed as a method of demonstrating progress and rationality, and of conserving material objects, as well as governing social and national identity. 4 In the European tradition, visibility has long been linked to modernity through such mechanisms as the museum, the exhibition, the arcade, and the department store. In the heightened form as the ‘exhibitionary complex’ and its institutional bedfellow the museum, authors such as Anderson and Bennett have linked modern forms of vision to those most modern products, colonialism and the nation. Anderson has connected the concept of modern museums to the creation of nation states.5 Using a Foucauldian approach to space and power, Bennett, furthermore, points out that the opening of public museums has created public spaces for the state to display power, to organize ‘a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry’, and are places for visitors to see and to be seen.6 Bennett discussed the concept of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe, where museums, 3 Smith, Uses of Heritage, p. 18. 4 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum; Walsh, The Representation of the Past; Smith, Uses of Heritage. 5 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 6 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, p. 63.

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department stores, World Fairs, and theme parks, all suggest a kind of visual control of space and contribute to the power apparatus of the nation.7 Duncan went further to refer the experience of visiting museums to a ritual that informs conceptions of civilized behaviour in public space.8 My point of departure is the very concept of ‘display’ in the creation of a national space. Institutions akin to European public museums, which do not merely collect and categorize but also display artefacts with the aim of transmitting knowledge, appeared in China and Japan at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the idea of systematically organizing objects with the aim of showcasing them to the public was a European introduction to China. Although China has a long history of collecting relics, modern museums in the role of public trustees did not appear in China until the late Qing period.9 It is noteworthy that the Qing court even rejected the invitation from the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition, considering China not to have a contribution. Following a zealous request from Austria, the Qing court later agreed that civil merchants could go of their own volition.10 The term World Exhibition was translated into Chinese as Xuanqihui or Saiqihui, meaning ‘competition of the rare’ or ‘competition of the exotic’. These translations reflected how the Qing court conceptualized world exhibitions at that time. It was not until the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that European forms of museums as places to collect, preserve, and present collections were adopted in China. In premodern China, what was the purpose of collecting and conserving things? What indeed did people collect? Where did they store collections? Historically, in China and Japan, temples had played an important role in the preservation and display of cultural objects in a way comparable to museums and churches in the West. In fact, ‘the museum institution has repeatedly been compared to a religious temple; museum objects to religious relics; and the museum experience as a whole to a ritual, where museum visiting might be paralleled to a form of pilgrimage’.11 For the case of China, the scholar Su Donghai described the Temple of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong Province, as a proto-museum.12 This was actually Confucius’ home; it was converted into a temple after his death in 479 BCE and his belongings were preserved as sacred objects. Similarly, the Tokyo National 7 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. 8 Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. 9 See Zhang, ‘Editorial’, p. 5; Wang, ‘The Qing Imperial Collection’. 10 Ma and Ai, ‘Zhang Jian and the World Exposition’, pp. 2-3. 11 Varutti, Which Museum for What China?, p. 54. 12 Su, ‘Museums and Museum Philosophy in China’, pp. 61-80.

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Museum, the first museum in Japan, which was established in 1872, had been a Confucian temple built in 1632, but later became a place to store objects that had been collected and displayed there and then at the Vienna Exhibition the following year.13 East Asian societies have long been characterized by their continuous relationship with the past. Material heritage, such as ritual utensils, has been intentionally reproduced in archaic styles and linked with social and political status, historical pedigree, and the cultural heritage of its current owners. Archaizing imitation of bronzes and jades were found in Anyang Yinxu, a Shang-period site in Henan, through archaeological excavations. In the lineage temples of the Western Zhou capital, various archaistic bronze vessels for the purpose of commemoration were found.14 For Chinese political rulers, collecting antiquities was a means of asserting political power. For example, Wu Hung discussed jiuding, the nine ancient bronze tripods that were a symbol of royal status and competed for by ancient kings. Since the Shang dynasty, bronze vessels had been used by the ruling elites to signify their religious rituals and political roles. These portable pieces of material heritage were appreciated and collected by later generations because they held the spirits of ancestors and symbolized the past. Since the Song dynasty, when scholarly collecting and the antiquities market came to flourish, cultural objects also began to be appreciated for their aesthetic value and used for scholarly investigation. In China, material objects from the past are not merely taken as curiosities, scientific specimens, religiously charged relics or treasures, they are associated with personhood and, moreover, with one’s virtue. Among the objects collected, calligraphy was placed at the top of the hierarchy of arts in China.15 Von Falkenhausen discusses the concept of wen in the ancient Chinese ancestral cult. In Chinese thought, handwriting was a reflection of a person’s inner self and character. As noted by von Falkenhausen,16 the Confucian idiom gewu, to study the nature of things or to investigate things, is a way of augmenting one’s virtue. The practice of gewu was propagated by scholar officials in the Song period as a basic foundation for being a Confucian moral person. In this sense, Song scholars did not merely learn from the textual canons, as material objects provided other paths to knowledge. Aesthetically pleasing objects were believed to turn 13 Chen and Wang, Xiaoshi De Bowuguan Giyi, p. 107. 14 Von Falkenhausen, ‘Antiquarianism in East Asia: A Preliminary Overview’, p. 46. 15 Wu, Monumentality; von Falkenhausen, ‘Inscribed and Decorated Objects’. 16 Von Falkenhausen, ‘Antiquarianism in East Asia: A Preliminary Overview’, p. 50.

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the owner into a morally better person. This is very likely to suggest that the thriving of a philosophical school that promotes gewu further resulted in a boom in private collecting and a flourishing of the antiquities market during this period. In this chapter, I would like to go on to argue that in premodern China and Japan, in the possession of temples, the imperial court and individual elites, collecting was viewed as a form of self-cultivation and of maintaining relationships with the past. It is possible to suggest that Chinese attitudes towards the past are more concerned with wenwu, or cultural objects, which symbolize power or contain inherent value connecting individuals to their ancestors. In contrast, this motivation for collecting is thus different from that of Europeans collecting the exotic curios that formed the major part of European collections in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Europe, collecting was a way to showcase one’s own wealth, and the display case – cabinet des curiosités – was taken as the proto museum of Europe. Furthermore, in Chinese tradition, objects are appreciated according to their historical and cultural value, as well as their power to connect the past and present. Thus, in many circumstances, cultural relics were stored or hidden in ancestral shrines, and precious objects were often wrapped and placed in decorated boxes. This different attitude towards collections and the reasons for collecting perhaps shed light on why the notion of institutionalizing a system of displaying objects came late to China despite its long history of collecting and commodifying antiquities. In the following, I will examine how the Western idea of the museum found its way into both China and Japan. The contemporary Chinese term bowuguan and Japanese hakubutsukan, as translated from ‘museum’ in English, appeared in the nineteenth century, and while written using the same characters, the histories of their introduction differ. As most midnineteenth-century Japanese intellectuals were versed in Chinese classics, many Japanese neologisms were coined using characters from ancient Chinese canons. The term bowu originally referred to a fine understanding of the reasons for things and has its root in the Chronicle of Zuo (Zuozhuan) from around the fifth century BCE and the Historical Records (Shiji) of the second century BCE. In Imperial China, the term bowu was used in various accounts and meant ‘worldly matters’.17 Today, the character bo means ‘wide and big’, wu means ‘objects’, and guan means ‘house/mansion’; therefore, the term bowuguan refers to a house that stores a wide range of objects.

17 Chang, ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Musealization’, p. 17.

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The Introduction of Museums to China and Japan In late-Qing China, many Chinese intellectuals began to take notice of the concept of a modern museum, whose nature was to display objects and artefacts in a systematic way.18 Knowledge of the concept extended to the Chinese public by means of three factors. The first was through travel accounts by Chinese intellectuals of their trips through Europe, the United States and Japan. Through their studies abroad these intellectual and Qing officials came in contact with the European form of modern museums, and many returned to write their impressions.19 Between 1873 and 1899, more than thirty articles were written about Western museums.20 As a consequence, many museological neologisms appeared in the late nineteenth century. A variety of terms that refer to the modern concept of museum were used in the accounts of late-Qing intellectuals, such as jungongchang ( factories of military feats), guwanku (houses of antiquities), jigulou (houses of ancient objects), jiqiguan (houses of exotic objects), wanzhongyuan (courtyards of ten thousands of things), huage (attic of paintings), jibaoyuan (courtyards of treasures) and junqilou (houses of millatary equipment).21 By the 1890s, more and more Chinese scholars had begun to use the term bowuguan to mean a museum. Wang Tao’s (1828-1897) visit to Europe in 1867, resulted in publication of his travel writing in 1890, titled Manyousuilu. It is thought that widespread recognition of the term bowuguan can be traced to this work.22 Interestingly, other terms to describe museums, including fangguyuan and youqiguan, were also used in reference to museums in Manyousuilu.23 The migration of knowledge through cultures is a complex process. The wholesale adoption of a new term reflects not only translational negotiation but also knowledge appropriation. When the Chinese and Japanese initially encountered Western museums, they described them differently. In Japan the term hakubutsukan was not initially used. The word was gradually adopted into the Japanese lexicon by the 1870s, and the Chinese lexicon by the 1890s. As we will see, the complex processes through which these terms were internalized in the two countries lasted over time, with Japan 18 Shao, ‘Exhibiting the Modern’. 19 Chen, Bowuguan Sanlun; Wu et al., Yizhi Bowuguan Gailun; Chang, ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Musealization’. 20 Wu et al., Yizhi Bowuguan Gailun, p. 36. 21 Chang, ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Musealization’. 22 Wang, Fuzangyouji, II, p. 89. 23 Ibid., pp. 87; 112.

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initiating its museum practices by the late nineteenth century whilst China’s first museum boom occurred in the 1920s-1930s. Earlier scholars believed that the Japanese used the characters that form hakubutsukan to refer to museums, and that Chinese scholars later followed Japan’s translation.24 However, recent findings have shown that the term bowuguan appeared as early as 1841 in Chinese geographic treatises.25 The Qing scholar and official Lin Zexu (1785-1850), of First-Opium-War fame, compiled Sizhouzhi (The Four Continents), a translation of Hugh Murray’s (1779-1846) Encyclopaedia of Geography (1836), which includes the text, ‘There is a library and a museum (bowuguan) in London’.26 This account is the earliest known usage of bowuguan. In his Huanyou tiqiu xinlu, late-Qing scholar Li Gui adopted the term in 1876.27 Several newspapers from the 1880s, also adopted the term bowuguan. However, there was still no consensus on a translation linking the terms ‘museum’ and bowuguan. Sizhouzhi later was included in Wei Yuan’s geographical treatise Haiguotuzhi, published in 1842. Although Haiguotuzhi did not become popular in China, the work had spread to Japan by 1851 and has been reprinted as many as eighteen times.28 As Japan was in a period of seclusion from the outside world (1633-1854), many Japanese intellectuals, such as Sakuma Shōzan (1811-1864) and Yoshida Shōin (1830-1859) came to understand the world through this book.29 The Japanese hakubutukan first appeared around 1860 and was popularized by Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) in his 1866 book Seiyō Jijō (Conditions in the West).30 In 1867, the term was officially adopted to designate objects that ‘had been exhibited at the Universal Exhibition held in Paris (as hakubutsukan)’.31 In Japan, the concept of a public national museum first appeared around the Meiji Restoration (1868), at a time when Japan aimed to revitalize its economy and preserve its cultural objects. It is important to note that the terms for exposition (hakurankai) and museum (hakubutsukan) were brought into the Japanese language at the same time, all part of the 24 Chen, Bowuguan Sanlun; Shiina, Nihon Hakubutsukan Seiritsushi; Chang, ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Musealization’. 25 Chen, ‘Hanyu Bowuguan Yici De Chanshen Yu Liuchuan’. 26 My translation from Chen, ‘Hanyu Bowuguan Yici De Chanshen Yu Liuchuan’. 27 Wu et al., Yizhi Bowuguan Gailun, p. 34. 28 Wang, Jindai Zhongri Wenhua Jiaoliushi, pp. 33-4. During the period of 1896 and 1911, 956 Japanese textbooks were translated into Chinese. During the period between 1912 and 1937 that number was 1759. However, only 16 works were translated from Chinese to Japanese, among which the book Haiguotuozhi was reprinted as many as eighteen times. 29 See, for example, Masuda, Japan and China, pp. 23-33. 30 Chen, Bowuguan Sanlun, pp. 14-15; Varutti, Which Museum for What China?, p. 118. 31 Varutti, Which Museum for What China?, p. 118.

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pro-colonial and industrialization policies of the Meiji Period (1868-1912).32 Even before it began to participate in world fairs and to establish modern museums, commercial fairs where medical products and exotic goods were exhibited were a part of the eighteenth-century Japanese landscape. In other words, Japanese were prepared to absorb the concepts of exposition and museum quickly and simultaneously. The appearance of the Japanese term hakubutsukan came in 1860, but was used to describe the United States Patent and Trademark Office in Washington, where the institute collected ethnographic data about patent information.33 Among the writings by Japanese representatives travelling abroad there were adapted terms, such as kinjû sômokuen and kikaikyoku hyakubutsukan, to refer to museums. According to the Eiwa taiyaku shūchin jisho, an English-Japanese dictionary published in 1962, the term hakubutsukan even referred to academic institutions.34 In his book Seiyō Jijō (Conditions in the West), published in 1866, the influential Enlightenment thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi had already pointed out that ‘big cities in the West host exhibitions every few years so that novel products, machines and exotic arts from different countries are showed to the world’.35 Fukuzawa adapted the term hakubutsukan to get across the concept of museums. In 1867, Japan first officially participated in the Fifth World Exhibition in Paris and, together with travel accounts, the Japanese understanding of the idea of the modern museum developed from there.36 In addition to the early travel accounts, a few museums had been built early on by Europeans in China, particularly by missionaries in coastal regions. In 1868, the French missionary Peter Heude (1836-1902) built the first modern museum, the Siccawei Museum (Sujiahui bowuyuan, which later became Musée de Heude), in Shanghai.37 This museum displayed Heude’s collection of natural specimens. It was not until 1905, that the Chinese politician and educator Zhang Jian (1853-1926) established the Nantong Museum in his hometown in Jiangsu Province, which marks the beginning in earnest of the museum industry in China.38 32 Chen and Wang, Xiaoshi De Bowuguan Giyi, p. 121. 33 Chen, ‘Hanyu Bowuguan Yici De Chanshen Yu Liuchuan’, p. 215. 34 Chen, ‘Riben Zuichu Shiyong Bowuguan Yici de Shijian’. 35 Nagai, Fukuzawa Yukichi, pp. 377-378. 36 Chen, ‘Hanyu Bowuguan Yici De Chanshen Yu Liuchuan’, p. 215; Varutti, Which Museum, p. 118. 37 Chen, Bowuguan Sanlun, pp. 27-28. 38 Ibid.; Shao, ‘Exhibiting the Modern’. Before Nantong, there were several small-scale museums opened by Chinese. However, in 1956, the annual meeting of the museum association

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Although several Chinese travelogues and essays from the nineteenth century described European museums, and although a few museumtype display rooms had been established by missionaries in China, the public did not internalize their significance, not to mention that there were no consistent translations of the term. It was not until the 1890s, that Chinese intellectuals began to associate museums with Western economic development, and to furthermore connect this to the idea of reformation of China. In the late Qing period, a politically motivated attempt to cultivate Western science and technology led to the unsuccessful Hundred-Day Reformation Movement of 1898, during which some Chinese elites proposed the establishment of a national museum system. For example, in 1898, the late Qing politician, intellectual, and the leader of the Hundred-Day Reformation Kang Youwei (1858-1927) petitioned the emperor with the document Datongshu, in which he suggested the opening of museums.39 Due to the failure of the Hundred-Day Reformation Movement, however, the court never adopted the proposal and Kang Youwei fled to Europe. In 1904, he visited Italy and wrote the travel account Yidali youji wherein he reaffirmed that ‘it is necessary to build up museums (bowuguan) from the central to the local government’. 40 Kang also noted the importance of heritage conservation. He described how there were museums in every county of Italy and noted that ancient architecture was preserved, which was made possible by the fact that Italian architecture was constructed out of stone. As that was not the case in China, he continued, the preservation of ancient architectural heritage would be more challenging. 41 As will be discussed in greater detail below, China began to recognize the importance of heritage conservation in the 1930s. The third means by which China absorbed the notion of the modern museum was through the lens of Japan’s museum practice, which was part of the successful reforms of the Meiji Restoration. In 1903, Japanese ambassador Amano invited Chinese politician and educator Zhang Jian to Japan for the Fifth National Industrial Exhibition in Osaka. 42 At the expo, Zhang visited the China exhibition and wrote in his diary that the Chinese objects displayed the past, recommending that they be sent to suggested Nantong Museum as the first modern museum built by Chinese in China, and other scholars have since concurred (Su, ‘Nantong Bowuyuan Dansheng De Lishixing Gongxian’, p. 1). 39 Hur, Staging Modern Statehood, pp. 31-32. 40 My translation from Kang, Yidaliyouji, X, p. 118. 41 Kang, Yidaliyouji X, pp. 87; 118. 42 Zhang Jian, ‘Private Diary of the Trip to Japan’, p. 25.

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a museum in China. Zhang was of the opinion that China lagged behind Japan because it did not develop exhibitions and museums. In his diary, he details visits to Japanese museums, schools, facilities, and institutions, all of which were credited as successes of the Meiji Restoration. He also acquired practical knowledge about expositions. 43 Zhang considered museums to be an efficient instrument for educating the public, and thus a means by which to save a nation. He twice proposed that China construct national museums to the Qing court; in his 1905 petition, titled Proposal to Nanpixiangguo for the Establishment of An Imperial Museum, proposed the establishment of an imperial museum (bolanguan) combining a museum and library, and suggested that the imperial collections be displayed to the public. Zhang even referenced the Imperial Museum in Tokyo: ‘The Imperial Museum in Japan is different from other countries. The museum displays various collections from its government as well as donations from its citizens, making all available to the public. I suggest that we establish our own imperial museum in the capital’. 44 In addition to this achievement, he also suggested that museums gradually be established in every province. In Qing jingshi jianshe diguo bolanguan yi, Zhang pointed out that museums were the modern contributions of the nation and had the capacity to construct a civilizational history for the country. 45 After the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911, Zhang petitioned the new government again for the construction of national museums. In his article Guojia bowuguan tushuguan guihua tiaoyi (Plans for a National Museum and National Library), Zhang suggested that, firstly, the Imperial Palace should be opened to the public, and secondly, that ‘all imperial collections should be displayed to the public’. He believed ‘museums and libraries could be the best way to supplement formal education for teaching ancient past and present knowledge’. 46 Zhang Jian returned to his hometown after the trip in Japan and built up the Nantong Museum on his own, given the reluctance of the Qing court to establish national museums in China. The Nantong Museum had a garden, exhibition rooms, and a library, and its collection included artefacts and natural-science specimens. The museum also stored private collections including natural specimens to cultural objects. Zhang even solicited Japanese assistance, and Chinese students who studied in Japan 43 44 45 46

Ma and Ai, ‘Zhang Jian and the World Exposition, pp. 7-9. Zhang, ‘Proposals’, p. 273. Ibid., pp. 278-280. Ibid., p. 280.

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were recruited to work in the Nantong museum. It is noteworthy that the Nantong Museum was the result of both an attempt to adopt European culture and an emulation of the Japanese Meiji Restoration. The establishment of the Nantong Museum is the result of one individual’s patriotic passion for saving his country. In addition to the Nantong Museum, Zhang Jian also developed other industries in his hometown, including a salt works, a fishery, an agriculture and herding company, a pencil company, etc., as well as running several schools. Following Zhang’s successful 1903 Osaka Exposition visit and his opening of the first non-state-established modern museum in China, the Chinese government realized the importance of World Exhibitions. Thus, in 1905, the Qing court issued its ‘General Regulations for Going Abroad for Exposition’. Prior to that, for example, the Qing court had exhibited reluctance to travel abroad for the 1873 Vienna Exposition, considering it nothing more than an occasion to collect treasures and display oddities, which is in marked contrast to the Japanese attitude towards world exhibitions. 47

World Expositions and the Development of Museums in Japan The history of the World Exposition can be traced back to the 1851 Great Exposition in London wherein various industrial products were exhibited at the Crystal Palace. The exhibition successfully packaged England as a centre of imperial power, industrial advancement, and technological achievement – ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’. 48 Since then, world expositions have been viewed as national showcases for wealth and technological achievement. There have been many large-scale exhibitions, like the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Many of these were later repackaged as museums. For example, the Science Museum, Natural History Museum, and Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, London, are all direct products of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851. 49 It is noteworthy that the opening of the first museums in Japan was linked to world expositions. It was their participation at the Vienna Exposition in the nineteenth century which showed the world Japan’s cultures, and from which the Western notions of display and exhibition 47 Ma and Ai, ‘Zhang Jian and the World Exposition’, pp. 2-3. 48 Macdonald, Behind the Scenes. 49 Ibid.

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were originally imported to Japan. Prior to this, as early as the seventeenth century, there had been various product fairs such as Yakuhin or Hakubutsu-e for the display of medical products, exotic and rare objects, etc. During the Meiji period, one government policy was to utilize natural products and preserve old relics. A Museum Bureau, Hakubutsukyoku, was set up under the Ministry of Education and several antiquarians were appointed to office. The first government-sponsored bussane (exhibition of natural products) was organized by the Museum Bureau at the Shōkonsha Shrine, which displayed various kinds of natural products and curious objects from the West.50 Later, in 1872, the second government-sponsored hakurankai (exhibition) was set up at the Confucian shrine Taiseiden in Tokyo, where a total of six hundred old and rare objects from private collections were displayed. Following the success of the hakurankai, the Museum Bureau organized a large-scale treasure hunt in the Ise, Kyoto, and Nara regions.51 The European forms of display exemplified by the world exhibitions were thus not wholly foreign or difficult to comprehend for the Japanese.52 In 1873, Japan attended the Vienna World Exposition with great success, and the Meiji government, therefore, adjusted its policy to utilizing old objects for encouraging industry. With this change in policy, however, several antiqurians such as Uchida Masao, Ninagawa Noritane and Machida Hisanari resigned from off ice.53 During the Meiji Period, the notions of both museums and expositions were incorporated into political campaigns such as ‘Bunmei kaika’ (Westernization) as well as ‘Fukoku kyōhei’ (Enrich the country and strengthen the military) and ‘Shokusan kōgyō’ (Encourage new industries). Japan’s first few expositions and museums were motivated by the desire to both display its traditions and promote modern technology. Since the 1873 World Fair in Vienna, Japan has attended a total of 44 international exhibitions, including sixteen world expositions.54 At the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition in the USA, the size of Japan’s budget was second only to that of the host country. Additionally, several scholars suggested setting up modern museums in Japan.55 Many temporary exhibitions were thus turned into permanent museum displays. The first museum was constructed for the purpose of storing objects collected and displayed at the Vienna Exposition in the 50 The present-day Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo. 51 Suzuki, ‘Ninagawa Noritane and Antiquarians in the Early Meiji Period’, pp. 417-418. 52 Kuni, Hakurankai to Meiji No Nihon, pp. 22-25. 53 Suzuki, ‘Ninagawa Noritane and Antiquarians in the Early Meiji Period’, pp. 417-418. 54 Ma and Ai, ‘Zhang Jian and the World Exposition’, p. 2. 55 Chen and Wang, Xiaoshi De Bowuguan Giyi, p. 107.

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Yushima Temple, which was done with the idea of educating the public about the objects’ uses. Japan has since held many expositions, including the first National Industry Exposition in Ueno Park in Tokyo in 1877, and the Osaka Exposition series. During the Meiji Period, the idea of social evolution was introduced and the country aimed to develop itself as a ‘civilized’ country by introducing Western knowledge. The idea of ethno-racial superiority and the identity politics of cultural and ethnic assimilation were co-opted in support of a project of colonial expansion. Taiwan (1895), south Sakhalin (1905), Korea (1910), and the Manchuria region of China (1932), respectively, were forcibly brought under Japanese dominion.56 In this historical context, Japan’s eager participation in world expositions served as a kind of political legitimization process, as many scholars have pointed out.57 Expositions were a world stage on which Japan could exhibit itself to be a modern colonial force on par with its Western counterparts. In 1903, Japan successfully hosted the Fifth International Exposition in Tennōji, Osaka. The exhibition lasted for four months and hosted over 5,300,000 visitors.58 At the Osaka Exposition, one corner was dedicated to the Jinruikan (translated as World’s Native Building), a display of the Japanese empire’s native peoples such as the Ainu, Taiwanese aborigine, and Koreans, as well as other indigenous peoples from around the world.59 Initially, the Chinese were also included in the Jinruikan, but this idea triggered major criticism and protest both from China and from Chinese students in Japan. The images of Taiwanese aborigines and Koreans depicted them as barbarians in need of education. While Zhang Jian, who had been invited to visit the exposition, was positively impressed by the event in general, he was disappointed by the negative depiction of China by Japan. World exhibitions were an ideal stage on which to perform such imperial strategies, as other Western nations had done throughout the nineteenth century.60 In other words, Japan skilfully utilized expositions and museums to legitimize its colonial efforts, and to construct a colonial knowledge system. These portrayals were promoted within the Japanese empire as well; for example, Taiwanese aborigines were portrayed as primitives in need 56 Hudson, ‘Pots Not People’. 57 Chen and Wang, Xiaoshi De Bowuguan Giyi; Lu, Exhibiting Taiwan; Hur, Staging Modern Statehood. 58 Ozawa, ‘Osaka International Exposition’. 59 Hur, Staging Modern Statehood, p. 59. 60 Ibid., pp. 55-72.

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of civilizing at the Taiwan General Government Museum.61 In an exhibit at the Korea General Government Museum, Koreans were taught that they were of the same ethnic origin as the Japanese, but a decayed branch of this lineage. And at the Guandong Museum, the people of north-eastern China were taught that they were historically independent from central China.62 The first few museums in Taiwan were set up by the Japanese during the fifty years of Japanese Occupation. These museums, such as the Taiwan General Government Museum (now National Taiwan Museum) and several exhibition halls, served to showcase Japan’s colonial power. Museums were used to demonstrate the effective legitimacy of Japanese colonizers and to establish a colonial knowledge system.63 Different exhibition strategies were adopted to target Japan’s colonial power to various audiences.64 While Japan’s modernization process was initiated during the Meiji Period, many scholars were still concerned about the preservation of Japanese tradition.65 In 1871, Japan’s Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties (Koki Kyūbutsu Hozonkata) was passed, and what might be described as a Japanese version of the British Museum was established, wherein exhibited relics would demonstrate its power and tradition. From 1888 to 1897, a nationwide search for treasures was undertaken and about 210,000 objects with different levels of artistic or historical value were evaluated and catalogued.66 This implies the legitimation of imperial power through positioning objects in a royal hierarchy of historical and aesthetic merit. The opening of the Imperial Museum to the general public in 1889 further strengthened royal power. This process differed somewhat from that surrounding the opening of the Louvre in France, which, apart from celebrating colonial grandeur also symbolized the decline of royal power domestically, or that of the British Museum in England, which additionally symbolized the emergence of British civil society.67 We can suggest that the initial motivation for opening national museums in Japan was to encourage industrial development, but that later museums in Japan were established with the motivation of consolidating and preserving Japanese tradition. 61 Hu, ‘Bolanhui Yu Taiwan Yuanzhumin’; Qian, ‘Zhimindi Bowuguan Yu Tazhe Yixiang De Zaixian’. 62 Qian,‘Zhimindi Bowuguan Yu Tazhe Yixiang De Zaixian’. 63 Liu Yi-ch’ang, pp. 14-15; Hu Chia-Yu; Chen Qi-nan 2006, 2009. 64 Among others, Lu, Exhibiting Taiwan; Hu, ‘Bolanhui Yu Taiwan Yuanzhumin’; and Qian, ‘Zhimindi Bowuguan Yu Tazhe Yixiang De Zaixian’. 65 Choi, ‘Meiji Restorations’. 66 Yamamoto, ‘The Protection of Cultural Properties in Japan’. 67 Chen and Wang, Xiaoshi De Bowuguan Giyi.

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Differing Paths As discussed above, China and Japan began actively introducing Western knowledge during the second half of the nineteenth century. The late-Qing reformation and Meiji Restoration are both marked by attempts to learn from the West, and the development of a museum industry was viewed as a step on the path towards Western-style modernization. During the Meiji period in Japan, a total of eighty-five museums were established; during the Taisho period (1912-1925) as many as another 115 were opened. However, as the late-Qing reformation failed, it was not until the 1920s that China’s museum boom began.68 The transfer of collections from imperial possession to national museums marked the rise of public ownership. The once sacred and precious historical objects became not only accessible to the general public, but were owned by the people. This notion of public ownership was later reinforced when the communist party took power China in 1949. This historical context partly explains the differences not only between Japanese and Chinese museums, but also between European and Chinese ones. As described earlier, the idea of the museum has undergone several conceptual transformations in Europe. Western museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been branded with the epithet ‘the Imperialism of Art’, linking them with the aggressive plunder of artistic objects by colonialists. The British conquest of Benin in 1897 is one of the most infamous examples of imperialism through art.69 Among the objects looted were the Benin bronzes, a collection of more than a thousand brass plaques, which are today housed in the British Museum. During the Second World War, Germany began a large-scale project of appropriation or destruction of works by Jewish artists. In Sweden, the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities hosts a large number of Neolithic and Bronze Age artefacts from China. Most of these were procured during founding director Johan Gunnar Andersson’s (1874-1960) archaeological missions during the 1920s.70 It is worth noting that while in China objects collected are mainly restricted to Chinese antiquities, in Europe objects collected are diverse and exotic in nature. As I will describe in detail in the next section, in China, objects and inscriptions came to be viewed as historical evidence in constructing national history in the late Qing and early Republican eras. Museums were established to construct a national lineal history for China 68 Su, ‘Bowuguan Yanbian Shigang’. 69 Merryman, Imperialism, Art and Restitution, p. 6. 70 Fiskesjo and Chen, China before China.

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by displaying Chinese antiquities. In contrast, with the rise of nation states in Europe, national museums showcased exotic objects acquired abroad through colonialism and imperialism. Walking into the British Museum in London, we see Britishness constructed through juxtaposition to the Other, such as Egypt, the Near East, the Americas, China, etc. The same applies to the Louvre Museum in Paris. As discussed below, in China, museums were mainly engaged with collections from China and in China. To understand why, it is important to focus on how the European concept of ‘relic’ and the Chinese concept of wenwu, both corresponding to the museological ‘object’, differ.

Rethinking Museological Terminology: Object, Relic, and Wenwu In English, the term ‘relic’ comes from the Latin reliquiae, which means ‘remains’. In Christianity, relics literally refer to the bodily or material remains of saints. Not only are they ‘venerated as signs of [the saints’] continued presence in the world’, they are also implicitly miraculous.71 Similarly, in Chinese, wenwu is the term for relics, and yichan is the term for heritage. Wen refers to ‘literate’ and wu refers to objects. The term wenwu first appeared in the Chronicle of Zuo, in which it referred to the rite system, but by the twentieth century the term could be used to describe any object made by human hands that was of historical or aesthetic significance.72 Early wenwu objects such as bronzes were held to justify the political power of the emperor. It was not until the Tang and Song dynasties (7th-13th centuries) that, as studying antiquities became more popular among intellectuals, the meaning of wenwu expanded to cover ancient objects. By the Ming and Qing dynasties (14th-20th centuries), wenwu had been replaced by the terms guwan (ancient curios) and gudong (ancient treasures).73 Use of the terms gudong and guwan may be an indicator that collections were flourishing in Ming and Qing society. During the republican era, use of the term guwu (ancient objects) was widely adopted. The ‘Law of Cultural Relics’ (Guwu baocun fa) issued by the Nationalist Party in 1930 used the term guwu; at around the same time, the term wenwu reappeared. Contemporary Nationalist-Party documents pertaining to cultural relics were the first to formally define the term wenwu, and the definition they employed has 71 Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology. 72 Li, Wenwu Baohufa Gailun; Yu and Wang, Zhongguo Wenhua Yichan Baohu, p. 35. 73 Yu and Wang, Zhongguo Wenhua Yichan Baohu, p. 35.

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remained in use to this day. Other documents and references from the period show that wenwu referred not only to antiquities or ancient treasures but also to ancient buildings. Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the term wenwu has been used officially in all government documents, and refers to all historical remains. Conversely, gudong and guwan refer to objects in private collections. It is important to note that the term for museum (bowu) was not restricted to cultural objects, but implied the diversity of objects, whilst wenwu referred strictly to cultural objects. This appreciation of cultural objects in Chinese tradition later played an important role in the establishment of the national museum system in China. In Imperial China, imperial collections symbolized power and were used during rituals of ancestral worship. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imperial collections underwent a transformation as the Chinese understanding of wenwu underwent several transformations in meaning. With private collections flourishing during the Ming and Qing dynasties, wenwu came to refer to objects to be appreciated aesthetically. Wenwu were therefore not only symbols of the imperial glory but were for the appreciation of the public at large (in theory, though in practice this was limited to wealthy intellectuals). In early twentieth-century China, wenwu were used to construct national history. According to Wang Cheng-Hua, in the early twentieth century (a time of political crisis in the Qing court and of the invasion of colonial powers), wenwu became contextualized as the accumulation of national learning (guoxue), representing China as a whole.74 For those treasures lost abroad, wenwu were imbued with symbolic meaning supporting the construction of a discourse of national humiliation through which Chinese citizens were meant to learn lessons of colonial invasion. After 1949, wenwu were used to serve as scientific evidence for Marxist evolutionary ideology while objects were used to quantify the progress of historical periods.75 In the next section, I discuss the development of museums in early twentieth-century China by analysing how wenwu were structured in museum narratives over time. What was the ideology behind the opening of national museums in China? How did the once sacred, privately owned imperial collections end up in national museums? This requires an exploration of the meaning of cultural objects, artefacts and collections in the Chinese context.

74 Wang, ‘The Qing Imperial Collection’. 75 Fiskesjo, ‘Politics of Cultural Heritage’.

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Wenwu and the Development of Museums in China With the fall of the imperial system and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911, concern emerged over the re-evaluation of traditional culture and the preservation of tradition. During the period from 1911 to 1925, wenwu were reconceptualized with regard to the formation of national heritage and the construction of national history.76 There were already a number of history museums in the country, which significantly influenced the transition from the imperial to the republican system. Moreover, the transformation of the Imperial Palace into a public museum in 1925 symbolized the demolition of the old system; ordinary people are now allowed access to the sacred royal collections, which had once been regarded as symbols of imperial power.77 This represented not only a transition in ownership from the emperor to the people, but a symbolic transformation from being tools of empire, to national heritage. During the republican era, the Nationalist Party aimed to demolish imperial feudalism and to recast China as a nation state.78 This period saw the rise of the modern disciplines of history and archaeology in Chinese universities and institutions, resulting in various attempts to establish a lineal national history of China. During that time archaeological research and expeditions were supported by the Nationalist government, among which were the first ever state-led archaeological excavations undertaken at Anyang Yinxu since 1928, and Peking Man (Sinanthropus pekinensis) was unearthed near Beijing in 1929. While excavations were being carried out all over China, many archaeological museums were being set up to store those unearthed objects over China. The government embraced the country’s history and tradition, preventing relics from being exported; instead, the nation transformed the objects’ ideology and justified retaining them as cultural relics. The first few museums set up by the Nationalist Party were established as a way to justify the country’s civilizational origins through the display of archaeological findings and to establish a discourse narrating a continuous and glorious Chinese history. The National Museum of History was thus opened within the Forbidden City. This period also saw the opening of archaeological museums that preserved artefacts from excavations. For example, the Henan Provincial Museum in Zhengzhou was opened to store artefacts 76 Wang, ‘The Qing Imperial Collection’; Fiskesjo, ‘Politics of Cultural Heritage’. 77 Wang, ‘The Qing Imperial Collection’. 78 Duara, Rescuing History; Shen, ‘The Myth of Huang-Ti’; Fiskesjo, ‘Politics of Cultural Heritage’.

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excavated at Anyang Yinxu during the period from 1928 to 1937. The findings were also appropriated towards the consolidation of an official national history; in other words, the construction of archaeological museums was not merely about storing findings, but also about state propaganda through education initiatives. In the early republican period several museums were opened, and the 1930 Law of the Preservation of Cultural Relics was passed in response to concerns over the imminent threat of losing Chinese cultural heritage abroad.79 This focus on archaeological and historical artefacts in China thus became a nationwide trait of museums in China. In sum, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, museums in China not only shaped some of the core ideas of the modern era, such as progress and nationalism, but also its scientific and technological frontiers, artistic tastes and public behaviour. It is estimated that more than 200 museums existed in China before the Japanese invasion in 1937.80 In Japan, museums were cultivated as part of economic development efforts during the Meiji period. In contrast, Chinese intellectuals emphasized the role of museum display with exhibiting technology as a means of educating the general public on civilized behaviour and transmitting knowledge, although the Qing court responded belatedly to this notion. It was the Meiji restoration that successfully turned Japan into a modern country and the Osaka Exposition that successfully showcased the social and economic advances of Japan that made the Qing and later nationalist governments realize the importance of museums. In other words, the early twentieth-century trend in China towards building national museums was to catch up with Japan’s modernization process. This ideology also motivated the shift in the role of museums in Chinese society from studying collections to educating the people, and from a collection-oriented to a visitor-oriented approach. It is noteworthy that in early twentieth-century China, when collections were moved from ancestral shrines or imperial palaces to museums, their sacred, spiritual dimensions were lost. In turn, museum collections were studied and appreciated for their scientif ic and aesthetic values rather than their spiritual values. This became the reason why the concept of public display took over as the main purpose for museums in China. Since museums were introduced to China in the early twentieth century, they have been viewed as important social institutions that work in tandem with schools to foster patriotic attitudes.

79 Li, Wenwu Baohufa Gailun, 2002; Wang, ‘The Qing Imperial Collection’. 80 Shao, ‘Exhibiting the Modern’, p. 700.

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Conclusion The first half of the twentieth century saw worldwide political and social changes that resulted in people’s increased mobility and the stimulation of unprecedented forms of intercultural interaction. This chapter has investigated practices of translation and transnational exchange between China and Japan in the process of institutional appropriation. This is exemplified in World Expositions and museums, both of which are focused on the collection and display of knowledge. New forms of the museum also arose in Europe through the influence of world expositions, while original national museums such as the British Museum underwent transformations and were enlarged to accommodate the addition of art seized from other parts of the world. Later on, the Japanese used these translations as they introduced these same Western ideas domestically. The success of the Meiji Restoration and China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, in turn, prompted China to later follow Japan’s pathway to modernization. Since then, the museum industry in China has been expanding continually and rapidly. In other words, the Chinese learned museum practices not through a Western encounter, but through the lens of Japanese practice. Although Japan already had comparable exhibition forms since the seventeenth century, it learned through its participation in world expositions how to link such exhibitions to the idea of civilization and advancement. Thus, the museumification processes in both China and Japan were the product of constant interaction and cultural exchange. In Taiwan, once a Japanese colony, the Japanese set up the first few museums. Museums were used to demonstrate the effective legitimacy of Japanese colonizers and to establish a colonial knowledge system. It is of great importance to future research to understand how Japan internalized museological discourse in its own practice and transmitted its understanding to neighbouring countries in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century East-Asian society. In the late nineteenth century, in the midst of debates over whether and which path it should follow towards modernization, Japan chose to open its doors to the West (the Meiji Restoration) at the same time the Qing court of China was closing its doors (the failed Hundred-Day Reformation Movement). Japan participated in Universal Expositions to showcase the success of its modernization project, which later resulted in the establishment of the modern museum. Meanwhile, missionaries from the West established the first few museums in China. It was not until the early twentieth century that Chinese elites founded museums based on the Western model and opened the Imperial Collection to the public. The practice of collecting objects was

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not initiated with the opening of the first few National Museums in China. The Japanese museological tradition reflects a process of showcasing the country’s wealth, which it accomplished in part by attending and hosting various expositions to further promote economic interaction. Interestingly, in addition to nation building, the economic role played by museums and expositions was very much emphasized by Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Meanwhile, the opening of museums in the early twentieth century reflected the trend of China embracing its history and tradition by justifying its rights to artefacts, and taking measures to prevent artefacts from being removed from the country. The first few museums established during the republican era served this function, justifying the country’s civilizational origins through the display of archaeological findings. One can argue that the opening of public museums in Europe corresponds to the rise of modern civil society. In Japan, the national treasure survey and the opening of the royal collections to the public were intended to reinforce the royal hierarchy and its colonial needs for purposes of political legitimation. In China, the opening of the Forbidden City was part of a symbolic effort to demolish imperial domination, which also motivated the transfer of the imperial collections to public ownership through the establishment of national museums in the early twentieth century. In both cases, the meanings assigned to these collections have been influenced by the social and political forces of particular historical moments.

Bibliography Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London: Verso, 1991). Bennett, T., The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995). Chang, W., ‘A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Musealization: The Museum’s Reception by China and Japan in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Museum and Society 10:1 (2012), pp. 15-27. Chen, H., ‘Riben Zuichu Shiyong Bowuguan Yici de Shijian’, Zhongguo Bowuguan Tongxun 11 (1987). Chen, J., ‘Hanyu Bowuguan Yici De Chanshen Yu Liuchuan’ in Chinese Museum Association (ed.), Huigu Yu Zhanwang: Zhongguo Bowuguan Fazhan Bainian (Beijing: Zijinchengchubanshe, 2005), pp. 211-8. Chen, Q., and Zunxian Wang, Xiaoshi De Bowuguan Giyi: Zaoji Taiwan De Bowuguanshi (Taipei: Yaikai Publishers, 2009). Chen, Y., Bowuguan Sanlun (Taipei: Guojia Publisher, 1995). Choi, D., ‘Meiji Restorations: Defining Preservation, Education, and Architecture for Modern Japan’, Preservation Education & Research 2 (2009).

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Duara, P., Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Duncan, C., Civilizing Rituals (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Falkenhausen, L. von, ‘Antiquarianism in East Asia: A Preliminary Overview’ in A. Schnapp (ed.), World Antiquarianism – Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), pp. 35-66. —, ‘Inscribed and Decorated Objects’ in R.S. Greenwood (ed.), Down by the Station: the Los Angeles Chinatown, 1850-1933 (Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Archaeology, 1996), pp. 147-163. Fiskesjo, M., ‘Politics of Cultural Heritage’ in Y. Hsing and C. Kwan Lee (eds.), Reclaiming Chinese Society. The New Social Activism (New York: Routledge, 2010). —, and Chen Xingcan, China before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China’s Prehistory (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 2004). Hu, C., ‘Bolanhui Yu Taiwan Yuanzhumin – Zhimin Shiqi De Zhanshi Zhengzhi Yu Tazhe Yixiang’, The Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology (2005), pp. 3-39. Hudson, M.J., ‘Pots Not People: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Postwar Japanese Archaeology’, Critique of Anthropology 26:4 (2006), pp. 411-434. Hur, H., Staging Modern Statehood: World Exhibitions and the Rhetoric of Publishing in Late Qing China, 1851-1910 (PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012). Kahn, D.M. ‘Domesticating a Foreign Import: Museums in Asia’, The Museum Journal 41:4 (1998), pp. 226-228. Kang, Y., Yidaliyouji, X: Zouxiangshijie Congshu, edited by Shuhe Zhong (Changsha: Yuelushudian, 1985). Kuni, T., Hakurankai to Meiji No Nihon (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2010). Li, X., Wenwu Baohufa Gailun (Beijing: Xueyuan Chubanshe, 2002). Liang, Q., Xindaluyouji, X: Zouxiangshijie Congshu, edited by by Shuhe Zhong (Changsha: Yuelushudian, 1985). Liu, L.H. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900-1937 (Stanford University Press, 1995). Lu, S., Exhibiting Taiwan: Power, Space and the Image of Colonialism (Taipei: Maitian Chubanshe, 2011). Ma, M. and Ai Xianfeng. ‘Zhang Jian and the World Exposition in the Early Years of the 20th Century – an Inter-Cultural Historical Observation’ in author, Trans-pacific Relations Conference (Princeton: publisher, 2009). Macdonald, S., Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (London: Berg, 2002). Masuda, W., (transl. J.A. Fogel), Japan and China: Mutual Representations in the Modern Era (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000). Merriman, J.H. (ed.), Imperialism, Art and Restitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Nagai, M. (ed.), Fukuzawa Yukichi (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1969). Ozawa, Y., ‘Osaka International Exposition in 1903 and Zhang Jian’s Trip to Japan’, Manager’s Study 14 (1971). Qian, X., ‘Zhimindi Bowuguan Yu Tazhe Yixiang De Zaixian – Sange Riben Zhimindi Bowuguan De Fenxibijiao’ (M.A., Taipei: National Taiwan University, 2006). Shao, Q., ‘Exhibiting the Modern: The Creation of the First Chinese Museum, 1905-1930’, The China Quarterly,179 (2004). Shen, S., ‘The Myth of Huang-Ti (the Yellow Emperor) and the Construction of Chinese Nationhood in Late Qing’, Journal of Taiwan Sociology 28 (1997), pp. 1-77. Shiina, N., Nihon Hakubutsukan Seiritsushi: Hakurankai Kara Hakubutsukan (Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 2005). Smith, L., Uses of Heritage (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006).

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Su, D., ‘Museums and Museum Philosophy in China’, Nordisk Museologi 2 (1995), pp. 61-80. —, ‘Bowuguan Yanbian Shigang’, Chinese Museum 1 (1998), 12-25. —, ‘Nantong Bowuyuan Dansheng De Lishixing Gongxian’, in Chinese Museum Association (ed.), Huigu Yu Zhanwang: Zhongguo Bowuguan Fazhan Bainian (Beijing: Zijinchengchubanshe, 2005). Suzuki, H., ‘Ninagawa Noritane and Antiquarians in the Early Meiji Period’ in A. Schnapp (ed.), World Antiquarianism – Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), pp. 404-422. Varutti, M., Which Museum for What China? Museums, Objects, and the Politics of Representation in the Post-Mao Transition (1976-2007) (PhD Dissertation, Université de Genève, 2008). Walsh, K., The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1992). Wang, C., ‘The Qing Imperial Collection, Circa 1905-25: National Humiliation, Heritage Preservation and Exhibition Culture’ in H. Wu (ed.), Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Chicago: Chicago, 2010). Wang, T., Fuzangyouji, II: Zouxiangshijie Congshu, edited by Shuhe Zhong (Changsha: Yuelushudian, 1985). Wang, X., Jindai Zhongri Wenhua Jiaoliushi (Taipei: Zhonghuashuqu, 1992). Wu, H., Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Wu, Y., Shuping Li, and Wenli Zhang (eds.), Yizhi Bowuguan Gailun (Xi’an: Shaanxi Renmin Chubanshe, 1999). Yamamoto, T., ‘The Protection of Cultural Properties in Japan: Characteristics and Problems’, ACCU NARA (2006). www.nara.accu.or.jp/elearning/2006/cultural.pdf. Yang, Z., ‘Bowuguan Yu Zhongguo Jindai Yilai Gonggong Yishi De Kuozhan’, Fudan Journal (1999). Yu, H. and G. Wang, Zhongguo Wenhua Yichan Baohu (Jinan: Shandong University Press, 2008. Zhang, J., ‘Private Diary of the Trip to Japan (Dated April 25)’, Liu Xi Cao Tang Diary (Taipei: Taipei Wenhai Press, 1967). —, ‘Proposals for Establishing Imperial Exhibition Building’, Complete Collections of Zhang Jian’s Work (Jiangsu: Shangsu Guji Chubanshe, 1994). Zhang, W., ‘Editorial’, Museum International 60:1-2 (2008).

About the Author Shu-li Wang is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University College London and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Heritage and Society at Leiden University. Her research interests lie in critical heritage studies, museum anthropology, anthropology of nationalism, archaeological ethnography and cultural memory. Her PhD thesis ‘The Politics of China’s Cultural Heritage on Display – Yin Xu Archaeological Park in the Making’, investigates the aspects of heritage conservation and presentation, place-making, local perceptions of place, as well as the state discourse of nation-building in the movements towards urbanization and modernity in China.

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Parallel Tracks Pan Yuliang and Amrita Sher-Gil in Paris Sonal Khullar* Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH04 Abstract This chapter examines two artists, Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) and Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), whose careers exemplify crucial paradoxes of modernism, nationalism, and feminism in the twentieth century. Both worked in Asia and Europe to varying degrees of success and both have been reclaimed in recent years as feminist models and women artists. They have hitherto not been compared to each other even though they trained with the same teacher, Lucien Simon, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter uses the metaphor of parallel tracks to characterize Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers. Parallel tracks suggests a comparative method that opposes universalizing accounts of the woman artist or Asian art, while being attentive to connections and disjunctions in artistic lives and practices across geographic areas.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast Ernest Hemingway, to a friend, 1950.1

* Doris Ha-Lin Sung generously helped me think through Pan’s career and assisted in securing permission from Chinese repositories to reproduce Pan’s work. This article could not have been completed without her ideas and encouragement. Ralph Croizier and Sasha Welland graciously provided feedback on an early draft. 1 This passage was published as the epigraph to Hemingway, A Moveable Feast.

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In the modern world the practice of art and pursuit of travel seem to go hand in hand. Art historian Linda Nochlin writes: Artists traditionally have been obliged to travel, to leave their native land, in order to learn their trade. At one time, the trip to Rome was required, or a study-voyage in Italy; at other times, and in special circumstance, it might be Munich or Spain or Holland or even North Africa; more recently Paris was where one went to learn how to be an artist in the company of one’s peers; and after New York stole the heart of the art world from Paris, it was here that ambitious young practitioners came to immerse themselves in action2

Despite Nochlin’s reminder of this well-established artistic tradition, the discipline of art history, with its commitment to national cultures, struggles to accommodate the peripatetic lives and transnational careers of artists from James Whistler to Zarina Hashmi.3 Museum exhibitions and displays are organized around national or civilizational (Western, Asian, Islamic, African, etc.) frameworks with dedicated curators and departments for each. University courses and academic positions are constructed around mutually exclusive categories such as Asian art and Western art, or fields such as Indian studies and Italian studies, which are tasked with covering and connecting modern and ancient materials (Indus Valley seals with Mughal painting, Roman sarcophagi with Arte Povera) under the implicit rubric of the nation state (India, Italy). When art historians attend to travel, exile, diaspora, or migration, they often focus on Western artists – Europeans in Mexico City or Americans in Paris, as Nochlin does in the essay quoted above – or contemporary practice – as though travel, exile, diaspora, and migration were the effects of globalization in the 21st century and not results of long histories of war, colonialism, and displacement. 4 Consider the list of modern masters Nochlin provides to situate itinerancy and rootedness:

2 Nochlin, ‘Art and the Conditions of Exile’, p. 37. 3 Recent art-historical studies address the question of transnationalism directly. See, for example, Brockington (ed.), Internationalism and the Arts; Ikegami, The Great Migrator; Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia; Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism; and Pesenti (ed.), Zarina. 4 Notable exceptions, which take problems of colonialism and postcoloniality as central to their inquiry, include Mercer (ed.), Exiles, Diasporas, and Strangers; Mathur (ed.), The Migrant’s Time; Demos, The Migrant Image.

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For every Constable enamored of the very slime of the logs of his native landscape, the few miles of the river Stour near his father’s mill, for every Courbet finding his subjects in the people and landscapes of his native Franche-Comte or Cézanne repeatedly embracing the Montagne Ste. Victoire, we can point to a Sargent triumphantly catering to an international clientele; a Picasso finding himself and his modernism in Paris rather than in Barcelona; a displaced Mondrian inventing Broadway Boogie Woogie in New York rather than in his native Holland.5

Each of the artists she names – Sargent, Picasso, and Mondrian as indeed Constable, Courbet, and Cézanne – is male, Euro-American, and canonical. Yet we could add to her list the names of female artists like Lygia Clark, Yayoi Kusama, and Leonora Carrington, who forged careers in Paris, New York, and Mexico City. Less well known are artists who worked in Moscow, Shanghai, and Bombay, although recent studies of cosmopolitan modernisms are changing that situation.6 This chapter takes its cue from these studies and examines two artists, Pan Yuliang (1895-1977) and Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), whose careers exemplify crucial paradoxes of modernism, nationalism, and feminism in the twentieth century.7 Pan and Sher-Gil worked in Asia and Europe to varying degrees of success and both have been reclaimed in recent years as feminist models and women artists. They have never been compared to each other even though they trained with the same teacher, Lucien Simon, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. Sher-Gil has been compared to Mexican artist Frida Kahlo as a woman of mixed racial origins who developed modernist art in a colonial context and deployed feminine masquerade and folk art to mark postcolonial difference.8 However, Kahlo’s 5 Nochlin, ‘Art and the Conditions of Exile’, p. 37. 6 See, for example, Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms; Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions; Gough, The Artist as Producer; Ashton, Russian Modernism; Gabara, Errant Modernism; Taylor, Painters in Hanoi; Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow; Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia; Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum; Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism; and Mitter, ‘Decentering Modernism’. 7 This chapter is indebted to a collaboration I began in 2010 with Sasha Welland, an anthropologist who studies contemporary Chinese art. Under the rubric ‘New Geographies of Feminist Art’, we traced transnational feminist affinities and disparities across artists and artworks in Asia. In 2012, we organized a conference at the University of Washington, ‘New Geographies of Feminist Art: China, Asia, and the World’, to discuss how existing scholarship on feminist art practice might be enriched by comparative and multidisciplinary approaches. 8 Kapur, ‘Body as Gesture: Indian Women Artists at Work’, p. 173; Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, p. 226.

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direct relationship to the Euro-American modernist avant-garde, by way of André Breton and Diego Rivera among others, and her subsequent status as an international icon are not equivalent to Sher-Gil’s more modest claims to membership in avant-garde circles and relative obscurity in art-historical studies.9 This is not to say that aesthetic and political affinities between Kahlo and Sher-Gil do not exist but the case for these affinities requires explication and qualification. It also requires openness to difference and discontinuity encapsulated by the idea of parallel tracks that I use to characterize Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers. Parallel tracks suggest a comparative method that opposes universalizing accounts of the woman artist or Asian art while being attentive to connections and disjunctions in artistic lives and practices across geographic areas. In the case of Pan and Sher-Gil, these connections and disjunctions illuminate the vexed relationship of nationalism to feminism in China and India and the no less vexed place of Asian women in the twentieth-century art world. Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers reveal the limits of art criticism and art history in accounting for global movements and postcolonial imaginations that have shaped modernity. They suggest new directions for histories of cosmopolitanism, expanding the range of figures examined by Rustom Bharucha, Prasenjit Duara, Çemil Aydin, and Pankaj Mishra, who focus on the nationalism and Pan-Asianism (or Pan-Islamism in the case of Aydin) of Okakura Tenshin, Rabindranath Tagore, Sun Yat Sen, Shinpei Goto, Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Mustafa Kamil, Abdurreshi al Ibrahim, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.10 Feminist scholars have combined cultural history and critical biography to consider forms of cosmopolitanism practised by women and their imbrications with projects of nationalism in East and South Asia.11 While visual artists have not been the focus of this scholarship, there is a tradition of mobilizing biography among feminist art historians

9 Mathur, ‘A Retake of Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitian’. Mathur’s revisionist art history places the artist at the centre of early twentieth-century debates on Orientalism, primitivism, and modernism (p. 516). She poses the rhetorical question: ‘How could art history have missed this painting [Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitian], so deliberate a citation of art-historical precedent?’ (p. 515). Thus, Mathur confirms how Sher-Gil is little known or unknown within Western canons and contexts. 10 Bharucha, Another Asia; Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism; Duara, ‘Asia Redux’; and Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire. 11 De Mel, Women and the Nation’s Narrative; Welland, A Thousand Miles of Dreams; Burton, Postcolonial Careers; Judge and Hu (eds.), Beyond Exemplar Tales; and Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism.

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who have examined Western figures and practices.12 My study of Pan and Sher-Gil draws on and brings together diverse threads of scholarship on cosmopolitan modernisms, Asian nationalisms, and feminist art history to intervene in art-critical and art-historical writing which has tended to focus on their lives at the expense of their art. I analyse striking affinities in the historical and contemporary reception of Pan and Sher-Gil’s work and equally striking disparities in their artistic style and subjectivity. These affinities and disparities offer insight into a feminist cosmopolitanism that challenges nationalist and modernist ideals of art and the artist and invites reflection on scholarly methods in art history and area studies. In their lifetimes and afterlives, Pan and Sher-Gil defied proper notions of femininity and nationality and their work tested the norms of the art world and nation state. Their failures point to the limits of artistic and political freedoms for Asian women in the modern world. A feminist art history must be attentive to such failures: to lack and loss as much as to freedom and flight, to forms of stillness and stasis as much as acts of sailing and soaring, to difficulty and uncertainty as much as to solidarity and identity. After all, it is from wrecks that one excavates futures as Anne M. Wagner, citing Adrienne Rich’s ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (1972), reminds us: ‘We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/ back to this scene/carrying a knife, a camera/a book of myths/in which/ our names do not appear.’13

Give Me France Sailing to France was a common quest for artistic elites in the twentieth century and this journey took on special meaning for women artists. Here is Nochlin again: ‘For some artists, getting away from home and its restrictions has been the sine qua non of a successful artistic career. “After all, give me France”, said the great American artist Mary Cassatt, writing to Sarah Hallowell. “Women do not have to fight for recognition here, if they do serious work”’.14 Yet, as the careers of Pan and Sher-Gil attest, such 12 See, for example, Wagner, ‘Lee Krasner as L.K.’ and Higonnet, Berthe Morisot. There is also a tradition of feminist art history that insists on the impossibility of the woman artist as a historical subject or category of analysis. See Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ and Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses, pp. 67-71. 13 Rich, Diving into the Wreck, p. 24. Wagner, ‘The Feminist Future’. 14 Quoted in Nochlin, ‘Art and the Conditions of Exile’, p. 38. Nochlin quotes N.M. Mathews, Mary Cassatt, p. 217.

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recognition was not always granted to non-Western women even as they sought freedom from the ‘restrictions of home’ in France like their Western peers. Nor did their artistic ambitions and orientations receive recognition in Asia during their lifetimes. Nochlin rightly calls attention to the ways in which gender mattered for artistic careers unfolding at home and abroad; women artists historically did not enjoy the same privileges as their male peers. However, I propose we also consider how race, class, sexuality, and nationality bear upon the metaphor of France as freedom. How did France function differently for Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, and James Baldwin? On what terms were the freedoms of France available to artists and intellectuals from Asia? Despite Sher-Gil’s immersion in and citation of Western painting as a student in Paris, peers and teachers there viewed her work as exotic and Oriental. In the May-1934 issue of the Paris-based women’s journal Minerva, artist Denise Proutaux, a friend and fellow student at the École des BeauxArts, described Sher-Gil as ‘an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu [Indian] princess’, whose ‘soft blue silk sari brings out the amber and ochre skin that conjures up the mysterious shores of the Ganges’.15 Proutaux commended Sher-Gil for the ‘exceptional vigor of her brush and the sharp realism of her subjects’.16 Sher-Gil’s teacher, Simon, pronounced her ‘rich colouring’ to be ill-suited to ‘the grey studios of the West’, and encouraged her to find ‘its true atmosphere in the colour and light of the East’.17 The East proved no more hospitable an environment to Sher-Gil’s painting, which was received in India during the 1930s as ugly, crude, and modernist.18 It was also, in the opinion of many critics, insufficiently nationalist. For Madras-based Govindaraj Venkatachalam, Sher-Gil and her art belonged to a deracinated ‘Society Set’, who did not know their heritage and viewed their country through ‘alien eyes’.19 In 1935, a critic in The Illustrated Weekly of India described Sher-Gil’s exhibition at the Simla Fine Arts Society as ‘typical of the modern French schools of painting’ and having ‘nothing in common with the Indian tradition’.20 In India, Sher-Gil struggled to make a living as a professional artist and find an audience for her art. In 1938, 15 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 25. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 32. 18 Princely elites in Hyderabad and Travancore declared Sher-Gil’s paintings ugly, crude, and modernist, and therefore unsuitable for their collections. Amrita Sher-Gil to Indira Sundaram from Trivandrum, dated 5 January 1937, reprinted in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 100. 19 Venkatachalam and Thacker, Present-Day Painters of India, p. 103. 20 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 40.

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she wrote to the collector and scholar Karl Khandalavala: ‘I am starving for appreciation, literally famished. My work is understood and liked less and less as time goes on’.21 Pan too faced a troubled reception in East and West. Her 1937 move to Paris, where she lived until her death in 1977, was prompted in part by the censure she faced in China during the 1920s and 1930s for controversial depictions of the female body amid rising tensions between nationalists and communists over feminine virtue and morality.22 Painting nudes in China during this period, as Pan did, was a bold gesture, especially for a woman.23 According to Kuiyi Shen, ‘social stigma attached to her early life’ may also have contributed to her departure from Shanghai.24 Pan practised art in the Yiyuan studio in Shanghai and taught at the Shanghai Art Academy and later at the National Central University in Nanjing with the artist Xu Beihong, a former classmate from the École des Beaux-Arts who would become president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.25 Contrary to her popular image as rebel and iconoclast, Pan was well connected to artistic elites of the time. Her career in China was marked by institutional acceptance and professional assimilation as much as social rejection and cultural disapprobation. She faced particular difficulties as a woman from a lower-class background and because of her predilection for painting nudes. Yet she was also admired and recognized for her work in Shanghai. To understand Pan’s career, and indeed Sher-Gil’s, we must account for the ways in which their personhood and production were internal and external to, both of and apart from, the art world. Myths of the artist as solitary genius notwithstanding, Pan and Sher-Gil’s work was deeply embedded in artistic 21 Amrita Sher-Gil to Karl Khandalavala from Saraya, probably February or March 1938, reprinted in Sundaram (ed.,) Amrita Sher-Gil: Essays, p. 125. 22 Andrews, ‘Art and the Cosmopolitan Culture of 1920s Shanghai’. For a history of shifting notions of feminine talent and virtue in China, see Judge, The Precious Raft of History. See also Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism and G. Hershatter, The Gender of Memory. In the Indian context, the woman question has received considerable scholarly attention since the 1980s. See Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’ and Sinha, Specters of Mother India. For a comparative approach, see Seth, ‘Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China’. 23 Sher-Gil painted nudes as a student in Paris but gave up that practice in India. Nevertheless, her portraits such as The Bath (1940), executed in India, echo the formal strategies of Torso (1930), executed in France, with its strong depiction of the female body. In her late paintings, the artist also devised innovative strategies for representing female sexuality and subjectivity as in Woman Resting on a Charpoy (1940), which owed to her study of traditional Indian painting. 24 Shen, ‘The Lure of the West’, p. 178. 25 Ibid.

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and cultural debates in twentieth-century China and India and reflected a sophisticated understanding of their position as artists and women. Born Zhang Yuliang in Yangzhou in 1895, Pan was sold to a brothel in Anhui at the age of fourteen, married provincial custom officer Pan Zanhua, studied art in Lyon, Paris, Rome, and Shanghai during the 1910s and 1920s, and was active in artistic circles in China during the 1920s and 1930s.26 In France, she studied first at the Institut Franco-Chinois and the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon (1921-1922) and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1923-1925) on a Chinese government scholarship. In Italy, she studied at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Rome with Umberto Coromaldi and learned to sculpt. In 1928, she returned to Shanghai where she pursued a career as an artist and teacher until her departure for France in 1937. She settled in Paris, teaching for a time at the École des Beaux-Arts, her alma mater and Sher-Gil’s. Although she exhibited work regularly in various salons and her work was collected by prestigious institutions including the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National Fund for Contemporary Art, Pan struggled to find commercial representation in France and was often typecast as a Chinese artist and Oriental woman.27 During her lifetime, she remained a marginal figure in the Parisian art world. In 1977, her art was shown at Musée Cernuschi, a museum of East Asian art, in a group exhibition alongside that of three other artistes Chinoises contemporaines (contemporary Chinese women artists), a category that generalized diverse forms of practice and neglected Pan’s particular contributions to the visual arts, not least her distinctive trajectory as an oil painter and sculptor.28 Born in 1913 to a Sikh father and Hungarian mother in Budapest, Sher-Gil spent a childhood shuttling between India and Europe.29 Between 1929 and 1934, she trained with Pierre Vaillant at the Académie de la Grande 26 For biographical information on Pan, I rely on Sung, ‘Pan Yuliang and the Rewriting of Women’s Art in China’. Other useful English-language sources on the artist are Shen, ‘The Lure of the West’; Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, pp. 70; 106. 27 Sung, ‘Pan Yuliang’, pp. 16-17. 28 Quatre Artistes Chinoises Contemporaines: Pan Yu-Lin, Lam Oi, Ou Seu-Tan, Shing Wai, Paris, Musée Cernuschi, 1977. The other artists shown in this exhibition were ink painters. 29 For biographical information and a basic chronology of Sher-Gil’s artworks, I rely on Sundaram, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil: Life and Work’ in Sundaram (ed.,) Amrita Sher-Gil: Essays, pp. 5-38, and Sundaram (ed.), Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writing. Biographies of the artist are invaluable because of primary sources to which the authors had access. See Khandalavala, Amrita Sher-Gil; Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil; and Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil. Sher-Gil has not been the subject of a scholarly monograph, although she is a key figure in Archer, India and Modern Art; Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism; and Khullar, Worldly Affiliations.

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Chaumière and Lucien Simon at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1934, she returned to India choosing to make her career there until her death in 1941. During her time in Paris, Sher-Gil acquired a reputation for being a fine portraitist. Her friends included a number of artists who were associated with Forces Nouvelles, a group committed to a reconstructed humanism and new realism after the First World War.30 Sher-Gil’s painting in India can be understood within this paradigm as she sought to create an ‘art of the soil’ and give representation to ‘the people of India’.31 Her representations of women, children, and the village as signs of the nation-to-come were in critical dialogue with those of male colleagues such as Jamini Roy and Nandalal Bose.32 Unlike these colleagues, Sher-Gil insisted that Indian modernity could be rendered in oil and with reference to Western idioms. This strategy attracted its share of supporters and detractors in the 1930s and beyond. Sher-Gil’s exhibitions in Simla, Delhi, Allahabad, Bombay, and Lahore met with mixed reviews, the terms of which would define critical writing on the artist for almost a generation after her death. While Sher-Gil was unusual in pursuing a career as a professional artist in India during the 1930s, Pan’s career exemplifies opportunities that became available to women artists in China during the 1920s and 1930s. As Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen argue, ‘by the time of the Japanese invasion of 1937, women in China’s urban centres were thoroughly integrated into the fabric of Chinese art and culture’.33 They attribute this development to how ‘in the context of China’s national emergency of the 1930s, art was displayed as a statement of patriotism and national pride’.34 The rise of modern education, art schools, and artistic associations in the first decades of the twentieth century, along with the importance placed on nationalist art during this period, enabled women to join the ranks of the art world in China in a manner that was impossible until much later in India. Nevertheless, Pan’s life and work stands at a distance from her peers in the Women’s Calligraphy and Painting Society, founded in 1934 in Shanghai. Many of its organizers came from ‘prominent artistic or cultural backgrounds’.35 The lack of social capital and an artistic style that did not fit nationalist demands of ‘Chinese painting’ likely led Pan to leave Shanghai; the Japanese invasion of China 30 Katalin Keseru situates this emphasis within the context of a return to figuration between the First and Second World War. Keseru, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 18. 31 Khullar, ‘National Tradition and Modernist Art’. 32 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, pp. 36-64; Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, pp. 69-73. 33 Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, p. 106. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

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in 1937 may also have played a role in Pan’s decision.36 While the exact circumstances of Pan’s permanent departure for Paris remain unclear, popular accounts of the artist’s life emphasize how her work was vandalized and she was forced out of China by conservative viewers and biased colleagues, who resented her style and subjectivity.37 A great irony of this move is that her art grew more conservative and ‘Chinese’ in Paris. Although never formally trained in ink painting, she produced pictures citing the guohua (national painting) style during the 1950s and 1960s.38 The dreamy, demure, and well-clad female subjects of paintings such as Dance with Masks and Fans (1953) or Meditation (1962) contrast with the forceful female figures of her oil paintings from the 1940s. While the subjects of Dance with Masks and Fans or Meditation may not have been elegant or proper by the standards of Chinese audiences for ink painting, they could be located within Orientalist frameworks in Paris. By the standards of contemporary modernist painting in the West, Pan’s pictures would have seemed soft, feminine, and traditional, judgments borne out by the 1977 exhibition Quatre Artistes Chinoises Contemporaines at the Cernuschi to which I shall return. Although Pan continued to paint nudes in Paris, such as Four Beauties After Bath (1955), they lacked the vigour and experimental quality of her early pictures. The subjects of these later paintings were invariably Chinese instead of the African, Eastern-European, indigenous, and complexly racialized subjects she had painted before. Her self-portraits from the 1940s and early 1950s negotiate identity and agency with portraits of diverse étrangers (in the sense of being both outsiders and foreigners, alien and estranged). Pan works out an artistic self through these others much as did Sher-Gil in her paintings of the 1930s. Sher-Gil’s self-portraits of 1930-1934 perform femininity – and also race, class, and nationality – as masquerade. In these paintings, she tries on various identities for size: wild bohemian, bourgeois lady, soulful artist, coy seductress, Parisian intellectual, Tahitian model, Indian princess, and Hungarian villager.39 36 I thank Welland for this insight. 37 Sung, ‘Pan Yuliang’, p. 12. Sung cites widely circulating reports of a 1936 exhibition in Nanjing at which Pan’s painting of a male nude was defaced. She has been unable to verify this story of the artist’s rejection by Chinese audiences. 38 According to Sung, Pan informally studied ink painting with artists Huang Binhong and Zhang Daqian before departing for France (p. 15). 39 Vivan Sundaram’s Re-take of Amrita (2001), an artwork based on an archive of family photographs, reveals this performative logic in Sher-Gil’s art and in the photographic practice of her father Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. See Sundaram, Re-take of Amrita.

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Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers display strong affinities despite their decisions to practise art in Europe and Asia respectively. Both women painted in oil or the Western style, integrated elements of Eastern painting into their art, and introduced new modes of depicting female sexuality. They were recognized and criticized for these choices in China and India, where oil painting came to be associated with the West and modernity, and a turn to precolonial traditions of visual representation was an anti-colonial gesture and nationalist strategy. 40 Pan and Sher-Gil’s experiments with national traditions of miniature painting and ink painting were informed by an intimate knowledge of Western art and its conventions, especially surrounding the representation of women and Orientals. Paintings such as The Bath (1940) and Reader (1954), (fig. 1-2), acknowledge those conventions even as they carve out a novel space, pictorially and materially, for female desire and pleasure. The work of these paintings was prefigured by self-portraits Sher-Gil and Pan executed in Paris (fig. 3-4). A shared Beaux-Arts idiom is visible in the forms and figurations of their dark, brooding selves. Neither portrait presents an idealized self. Their female subjects are keenly aware of the contradictions of occupying the position of artists and models, women and professionals, Asians and expatriates. Sher-Gil’s Self-Portrait as Tahitian (1934), shown at the Salon de Tuileries before the artist’s departure for India, theatricalizes the relationship of French masters to Asia and male artists to female models, placing these relationships before a screen and under stage lights, illuminated and animated for our consideration. The artist’s Tahitian alter ego stands against a backdrop of ‘Oriental’ – likely Chinese judging by their dress and hairstyle – figures floating on a screen in the background.41 She is framed by a strange, green-grey shadow, which looms over the image and suggests the presence of a male viewer. Elongated arms crossed over her body indicate vulnerability and resolve. Her averted gaze and furrowed brow suggest distance and anxiety, contradicting the allure of her full lips and nude torso. This 40 For a discussion of the turn to ink painting in China, see Andrews and Shen, The Art of Modern China, pp. 93-113. For a critical history of the turn away from oil painting in India, see Guha-Thakurta, The Making of an ‘Indian’ Art; and Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India. 41 Although the figures in the background Self-Portrait as Tahitian have been discussed in the context of Japonism, close analysis of their costume and ornaments suggests they are derived from Chinese sources. One possible source, which would have been known in artistic circles in France in the 1920s and 1930s, is the famous handscroll attributed to Gu Hongzhong, The Night Entertainments of Han Xizai, c. 943 CE. For a history of this handscroll and its reception, see Sullivan, The Night Entertainments of Han Xizai, and Lee, The Night Banquet. See also Wu, The Double Screen, pp. 29-71.

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Figure 1 Amrita Sher-Gil, The Bath, 1940, oil on canvas

National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

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Figure 2  Pan Yuliang, Reader, 1954, ink on paper

Anhui Museum, Hefei Artwork and image courtesy of the Anhui Museum, Hefei

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Figure 3  Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as Tahitian, 1934, oil on canvas

Collection of Navina and Vivan Sundaram Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of Vivan Sundaram

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Figure 4  Pan Yuliang, Self-Portrait, 1945, oil on canvas

National Art Museum of China, Beijing Artwork and image courtesy of the National Art Museum of China, Beijing

pensive self-figuration, a response to Paul Gauguin’s Edenic vision of Tahiti, is no triumphal rejoinder to the colonialist sexual fantasies of the French master. Instead there is both recognition and refusal of the representational conventions by which women, models, and Orientals are represented. Pan’s self-portrait presents the artist in the space of her Paris studio where a book and vase with yellow flowers stand on a table. She appears

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f ierce and fragile as she gazes directly at the viewer clad in a dark fur jacket and bright candy-striped shirt. Her posture is at once assertive and tentative as one arm rests casually on the table behind her and the other arm hangs protectively across her body. Through this self-portrait, Pan stakes claim to a style and selfhood that is modern and feminist. Her painting cites a tradition of portraiture that has a long history in Western painting, from Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas (1656) to Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio (1854-55), and was subject to radical revisions in self-portraits by artists such as Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) and Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). The subject of Pan’s painting, like SherGil’s Tahitian, speaks to that tradition and understands herself as standing apart from it because of the history of European colonialism in Asia. 42 As sunlight dimly filters through the grey interior, she looks perturbed suggesting that the Asian artist’s position in Europe is fraught rather than free. Pan and Sher-Gil’s self-portraits represent an uneasy embrace with France, which functions as convention, confinement, and constraint in these works. While Sher-Gil’s self-portrait cites specific European traditions of painting, sculpture, print, and theatre that produce the Oriental woman as the object of art, Pan’s self-portrait presents particular social and material conditions – salons, schools, and studios – that produce the European artist as the subject of art.

Take Me to the Palace of Love A contemporary artwork by Rina Banerjee, Take me, take me, take me… to the Palace of Love (2003), (f ig. 5), installed at the Musée Guimet in Paris in 2011, provides a compelling lens with which to view the national and international afterlives of Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers. Established in 1879 as a museum of Asian religion in Lyon and relocated to Paris in 1885, the Musée Guimet is the national repository for material-cultural finds from French colonial expeditions and excavations such as those to Afghanistan and Cambodia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Banerjee’s work was on view at the Guimet as part of the museum’s multi-year effort to display contemporary art in galleries filled with premodern Asian art. Her installation, Chimeras of India and the 42 Unlike India, China was never formally colonized by European powers but scholars have theorized modern China as a semicolonial society. See Shih, The Lure of the Modern, and Shen, Cosmopolitan Publics.

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Figure 5  Rina Banerjee, Take me, take me, take me… to the Palace of Love, 2003, mixed media

Installation view, Chimères de l’Inde et de l’Occident, Musée Guimet, Paris, 2011 Artwork © Musée Guimet and the artist; image courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris Bruxelles

West, transformed the stable and solemn view of Asia at the Guimet, emblematized by the monochromatic display of early Han and Liang dynasty chimeras, Gandharan Buddhas, and a painted cupola from Kakrak in the second floor galleries, into a funny and fantastical vision of East and West. It suggested how Asia and Europe are bound together through colonial and postcolonial encounters. Banerjee’s art materialized these encounters through the tropes of cages, nets, and traps, evoking a rich anthropological literature on the agency of art and technology of enchantment. 43 Take me… recreates the Taj Mahal, a white marble mausoleum built by Mughal emperor Shahjehan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, as giant souvenir and miniature dream world, replete with mock minarets fashioned of metal and polyester. In Banerjee’s version, the monument to love is a diminutive tent, bursting with bright pink fruit and flowers, 43 Gell, ‘Vogel’s Net’; Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment’; and Thomas, Entangled Objects.

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a strange bounty that metaphorizes the spoils of empire. Since the 1990s, Banerjee, a Brooklyn-based polymer engineer turned artist, has created installations and environments with materials like shells, feathers, textiles, lightbulbs, suitcases, and umbrellas. In her exhibition at the Guimet, India and the West emerge as phantasms and the museum as a space of transaction and transmutation. The artist’s miscegenated methods, what she has called ‘corrupting fine art’, invite us to rethink origin, derivation, genealogy, and geography. 44 They return us to problems of feminism and nationalism that Pan and Sher-Gil engaged through figures of convention, constraint, and confinement. Banerjee’s subjects and objects want to break free but are bound, often with rope, thread, wire, plastic weeds, and metal vines. They seek the Palace of Love and find themselves in a Parisian museum instead. They look for the East (Asia) and land in the West (Europe). Their journeys East and West also take them North and South as Banerjee’s art, like Pan’s and Sher-Gil’s before it, cites and traverses other continents (Africa and the Americas). In another work installed at the Guimet, Banerjee conjures a shipwrecked Ganesha (fig. 6), a female migrant from Bangladesh to Bidesh (abroad) who sports black buffalo horns made of American and Kenyan gourds. 45 This sculpture presents a perspicacious vision of modernity constituted by the slave trade, indentured labour, plantation economies, extractive industries, mercantile capitalism, and settler colonialism. These globalizing processes entailed the binding and shipping of persons and things and indeed the binding and shipping of persons as things. Bodies were placed in boxes or cast in cages, traps, and nets. The cages, traps, and nets Banerjee evokes are physical and epistemological as her art takes its place in the space of the European museum to show how our categories of thought are bound up – entwined, entangled, and ensnared – in a violent history of modernity. The Khmer sculpture that surrounded Banerjee’s pop-up palace in the recently renovated galleries of the Guimet are likely the objects to which Sher-Gil referred in a famous letter of 1934. In that letter to her parents, the artist explained her decision to make her career in India: Our long stay in Europe has aided me to discover, as it were, India. Modern art has led me to the comprehension and appreciation of Indian painting 44 ‘Rina Banerjee, as told to Zehra Jumabhoy’. 45 Ganesha is the name of the male, elephant-headed Hindu god who removes obstacles and is invoked at the beginning of a new enterprise.

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Figure 6  Rina Banerjee, She was now in western style dress covered in a part of Empire’s ruffle and red dress, had a foreign and peculiar race, a Ganesha who has lost her head, was thrown across sea until herself shipwrecked. A native of Bangladesh lost foot to root in Bidesh, followed her mother full stop on forehead, trapped tongue of horn and grew ram-like under stress, 2011, mixed media

Installation view, Chimères de l’Inde et de l’Occident, Musée Guimet, Paris, 2011 Artwork © Musée Guimet and the artist; image courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris Bruxelles

and sculpture. It seems paradoxical, but I know for certain, that had we not come away to Europe, I should perhaps have never realized that a fresco from Ajanta or a small piece of sculpture in the Musée Guimet is worth more than the whole Renaissance! In short, I wish to go back to appreciate India and its worth. 46 46 Amrita Sher-Gil to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil and Marie Antoinette Gottesman from Paris, dated September 1934, reprinted in Sundaram, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 92. Emphasis in the original.

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This passage presents France as the pivot for a return to India and the Parisian museum as the site of cognition of and estrangement from the self. Sher-Gil’s values, whereby the Renaissance was the pinnacle of human achievement, are destabilized as she comes to know Asia in and through Europe. For Sher-Gil as for Pan, being in France revealed possibilities and limits of artistic expression and national-cultural identity. In the 1930s and afterward, Pan and Sher-Gil painted sensuous women with unfulfilled desires and interrogated the national consensus on ideal femininity. Nationalist movements in China and India upheld women as the key to anti-colonial resistance and anti-Western critique, which in turn would be the basis for modernity and sovereignty. The status of women as backward and oppressed in both societies was viewed as a sign of national failure and progress was measured with respect to ‘the woman question’. In nationalist discourses and practices, women were valorized as wives, mothers, and citizens. However, as Sanjay Seth has argued, nationalists in China were much more radical in their critique of the Chinese past and tradition than their Indian counterparts and boldly challenged historical arrangements of conjugality and family. 47 In India, the figure of woman was associated with domesticity, spirituality, and tradition, and functioned as a bulwark against Western modernity, so anti-colonial nationalists there were more cautious in their critique of gendered roles and embrace of feminist politics. 48 Seth attributes this difference to divergent experiences and engagements with the West and anti-colonial nationalist political discourses in China and India. This difference notwithstanding, intense preoccupation with the woman question did not yield freedom from gendered expectations and patriarchal norms in either society. The recovery of Pan and Sher-Gil as figures of freedom – with Europe as the ground of their free encounter, exploration, and expression – for contemporary feminism and nationalist art history is laden with contradictions and ironies. Moreover this narrative of freedom overlooks the ways in which factors such as class and race mediated their professional lives. Whereas SherGil belonged to a privileged family and circulated with ease among social, political, and cultural elites in India, Pan was denied many of the privileges and protections granted to elite women in China, including a formal art education in calligraphy and ink painting, because of her beginnings as an illiterate prostitute. Sher-Gil’s Hungarian family enabled access to certain European circles of connoisseurship and scholarship; her uncle Ervin Baktay 47 Seth, ‘Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China’, p. 275. 48 Ibid., p. 286.

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was a well-known Indologist and she painted for a time in the artist’s colony of Zebegeny near Budapest.49 Pan did not have the benefit of such connections. Sher-Gil’s mixed race background and European training unsettled nationalist critics and historiographies of art. Her style and subjectivity were perceived in India during her lifetime and beyond as ‘foreign’ though she understood her project in national terms.50 She wrote to Professor R.C. Tandon in May 1937: ‘I know my work is a challenge to Indian artists and I am content that it should be so, not because I consider myself a European (I do not) but precisely because I feel my present work is more Indian than theirs and that I feel more intensely Indian than most of them’.51 Tandon, who organized an exhibition of Sher-Gil’s work in Allahabad earlier that year and wrote an introduction to the catalogue, had claimed that her art ‘did not show signs of assimilation to the traditions which belong to this country’.52 Aesthetic and intellectual disparities in the artists’ work are as striking as affinities in their historical and contemporary reception. Both artists broke away from their Beaux-Arts training in distinctive ways. Sher-Gil’s art grew more modernist – flat, bold, and abstract – over time, while Pan’s work grew more Oriental – delicate, diffuse, and linear. While the former was perceived as being masculine in her style of art, the latter was perceived as being feminine. The terms modernist and Oriental, as I use them here, correspond to the period reception of their art rather than to any absolute values or essential properties; they are effects of discourse. Critics in India and France used these terms to describe Sher-Gil and Pan’s art and their use suggests how modernism and Orientalism were associated with masculinity and femininity respectively. In 1935, critic Rabindranath Deb responded to an exhibition of Sher-Gil’s work in Allahabad thus: ‘The one quality which one meets in all of these paintings is the vigor of drawing and a masculine strength which shows the immense intellectual quality of the artist. Indeed this quality of strength gives her art a rare native vigor – a very rare quality in the art of woman’.53 In 49 The artist’s colony in Zebegeny was part of an anti-industrial artistic movement led by Istvan Szonyi. It origins can be traced to the Nagybanya painters who rebelled against academic art and modelled themselves on the Barbizon school. These links are discussed at length in Keseru’s study of Sher-Gil’s French and Hungarian artistic connections. Sher-Gil’s uncle Ervin Baktay studied painting under Simon Hollosy, one of the key figures in the Nagybanya school. Biographers mention his early encouragement of Sher-Gil’s talent. See Wotjilla, Amrita Sher-Gil and Hungary, pp.11-12, and Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 26. 50 Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, pp. 52-4. 51 Quoted in Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 99. 52 Ibid., p. 84. For details on the Allahabad exhibition and its reception, see Sundaram (ed.), Amrita Sher-Gil: A Self-Portrait in Letters and Writing, pp. 335-339. 53 Singh, Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 87.

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1977, curator Vadime Elisseeff noted Pan’s ‘gentillesse’ (kindness) and ‘modestie’ (modesty) and commended her dedication to a ‘domain classique chinois’ (classical Chinese domain), where she had found her vocation as an artist despite her Western training.54 Thus the artist came to embody feminine virtues and her art the traditional values of Chinese culture: grace, harmony, and classicism. While Pan’s pictures may not have enjoyed this reception in China, where her female figures would likely have been perceived as strong and even vulgar by the criteria of traditional ink painting, they fell within established parameters for Oriental art and femininity in Paris. In contrast, Sher-Gil’s art was received as masculine, strong, intellectual, and improper in a milieu where the painting of the Bengal School, which claimed to represent Indian tradition, dominated art-critical discourse.55 Such judgments about Pan and Sher-Gil’s complex relationship to modernism and nationalism and discourses of masculinity and femininity have been largely overlooked in their posthumous reception and revival. Pan came to art-historical and critical attention in the 1980s when four thousand of her works were repatriated to China from France through the efforts of her former students.56 Pan left her work in the custody of the Chinese government, a move that has a parallel in Sher-Gil’s career. The majority of the younger artist’s work was sold to the Indian government by her father, Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, and came to form the core of the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, established in 1954. A 1982 biography by Shi Nan, a librarian from Anqing, Anhui won popular acclaim and was adapted into different genres of theatre including a huangmei opera (regional opera of Anhui) in 1985.57 Huang Shuqin made a 1995 feature film based on this biography titled Huahun (A Soul Haunted by Painting).58 It stars Gong Li and narrates the artist’s rise from lowly origins to European arrival, dwelling on the artist’s romantic relationship with Pan Zanhua and her early life as a prostitute. The film casts the artist’s inability to fit into prescribed roles of mother and respectable woman as tragic. Her career is glamorized and made over into melodrama, manifest in scenes of 54 Quatre Artistes Chinoises Contemporaines, no page numbers. 55 The Bengal School denotes the group of artists who were associated with Abanindranath Tagore in Calcutta during the first decades of the twentieth century. These artists rejected oil painting and naturalistic drawing as a colonial imposition and sought to revive Indian tradition by painting historical and mythological subjects with water-based pigments. For a critical history of these developments, see Guha-Thakurta, The Making of an ‘Indian’ Art, pp. 226-312. 56 Sung, ‘Pan Yuliang’, p. 5. 57 Ibid. 58 Hua Hun (A Soul Haunted by Painting).

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her being taunted by male colleagues in Shanghai and her artwork being vandalized in salons and studios there. The myth of the artist was also taken up in a television drama series with the same title as Huang’s film directed by Stanley Kwan in 2003.59 According to Doris Sung, it emphasized Pan’s sexuality over her artwork. She argues: ‘These [televisual] productions not only played an important role in perpetuating the legend of Pan, they also contributed to the increased interest for her work on the art market’.60 With greater circulation in auctions and the popular imagination, Pan’s work received more recognition in academic circles. Nevertheless, by Sung’s account, ‘the majority of the research on Pan failed to address the changing social-cultural circumstances for women at the turn of the twentieth century in China, especially the importance of the institutionalization of art education and the new education for women that led to seismic changes to modes of cultural production for women’.61 Art-critical and art-historical writing on Sher-Gil too has suffered from an inability to see her work in relation to that of her peers and period.62 Take critic Richard Bartholomew’s view: ‘Amrita Sher-Gil was a pioneer. She introduced vision in an age of nostalgia and sentiment […] In an age of effeminate painting, she was singularly masculine in her approach […] Amrita Sher-Gil in India must stand alone’.63 Not much has changed in the fifty odd years that have elapsed since Bartholomew’s assessment. Contemporary accounts of Sher-Gil’s career continue to isolate the artist’s achievements and many histories of modernism in India exclude her from 59 Ibid. 60 Sung, ‘Pan Yuliang’, p. 5. 61 Ibid., p. 6. 62 Mitter relates Sher-Gil to artists like Jamini Roy and Rabindranath Tagore in India, who represented ‘the most compelling voice of modernism in India’ and exemplified a ‘heroic age of primitivism’ in the 1920s and 1930s. Mitter, Triumph of Modernism, p. 226. Yet he also argues that Sher-Gil’s paintings, unlike those of Roy and Tagore, reflect her personal struggles with identity rather than engagements with larger social or political projects. Sumathi Ramaswamy locates Sher-Gil’s realist Mother India (1935) in a visual history of Bharat Mata (Mother India) but declares the picture tantamount to ‘sacrilege’ within that history (p. 241). She writes: ‘if it were not for the naming of the painting as such I would probably not include [Sher-Gil’s] Mother India in a visual history of Bharat Mata’ (p. 239). Ramaswamy understands Sher-Gil’s proto-feminist picture as an anomaly in the context of contemporary visual-cultural practices and discourses in modern India. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation, pp. 238-42. I propose that Sher-Gil’s formal and social preoccupations with women, the village, and the masses are characteristic of a turn to realism in the 1930s. Sher-Gil’s concerns were shared by peers such as Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy even if her representational strategies and pictorial resolutions are unique. Khullar, Worldly Affiliations, pp. 66-73. 63 Bartholomew, ‘On Modern Indian Painting’, p. 18.

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their purview, beginning their narrative with the heroics of the all-male Progressive Artists Group established in Bombay in 1947. Since the 1990s, interest in Sher-Gil has grown exponentially in India and abroad. This growth can be traced to the intersection of various artistic, academic, commercial, and curatorial agendas: the institutionalization of feminism and multicultural identity politics in the visual arts, a burgeoning art market fuelled by neoliberal economic reforms in the 1990s, a national stock-taking of cultural achievements on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence from the British in 1997, and the archive-based contemporary art of Sher-Gil’s nephew Vivan Sundaram, whose The Sher-Gil Archive (1995) and Re-take of Amrita (2001) accompanied Sher-Gil’s paintings in exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2006) and the Tate Modern in London (2007).64 In the critical writing, biographies, and exhibitions that ensued, Sher-Gil was figured as a feminist icon, exercising difficult choices in pursuit of personal and professional liberties and forging a path for future generations of women artists.65 This reclamation of Sher-Gil as woman artist par excellence was ironic given her belief that women tended to be ‘sentimentalists’, incapable of producing good art.66 She counted Valadon among the few ‘women who can paint’.67

The Plath Problem The parallels between Pan and Sher-Gil’s artistic trajectories and critical reception thus extend far beyond their training in Paris. Writing on Sher-Gil has tended to focus on the artist’s body or biography narrowly understood, conforming to the logic of what one scholar of American literature denoted as the ‘Plath problem’.68 This term referred to how the reception of Sylvia Plath’s work was overshadowed by a preoccupation with her life (and death by suicide) and her sexual and psychic states were emphasized, even pathologized, at the expense of her literary imagination and production.69 64 Amrita Sher-Gil: eine indische Kunstlerfamilie. 65 See, for example, Sheikh, ‘Amrita Sher-Gil’; Sinha, Self and World; Sen, Feminine Fables; and Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil. 66 Amrita Sher-Gil to Karl Khandalavala from Trivandrum, dated 17 January 1937, reprinted in Sundaram (ed.), Amrita Sher-Gil, p. 102. 67 Ibid. 68 Personal communication with Saidiya Hartman, 21 October 2005. 69 For a critique of biographical approaches to Plath’s career that pathologize her sexuality, see Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, pp. 11-28.

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Such a focus on particular aspects of women’s lives and the neglect of others has plagued modern artists from O’Keeffe and Kahlo to Pan and Sher-Gil, though feminist scholars have offered revisionist historiographies of these careers.70 A feminist retelling of Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers as parallel tracks has significant implications for Asian studies and histories of cosmopolitanism. A comparative approach to artistic careers within Asia and across the globe would follow Gayatri Spivak’s call to pluralize Asia, that is, to invent a critical regionalism against identitarianism and to challenge received notions of culture and globalization.71 It would materialize what Pheng Cheah has called ‘universal areas’ whereby the non-Western and bounded area of Asian studies becomes ‘a part of the universal, not just as a check to a preformulated universal, but as something that actively shares in and partakes of the universal in a specific way’.72 The careers of Pan and SherGil, then, are not particular cases of marginalization or exclusion – minor exceptions to the rule of France – but universal lessons on the freedoms and failures of the art world and nation state. The critique of area studies by Spivak and Cheah opens up the possibility of exploring areas against the logic of discrete world regions corresponding to East, South, Southeast, Central, and West Asia. It invites examination of areas that fall outside these boundaries and of connections between areas such as the ones Banerjee explores at the Guimet. The image of parallel tracks suggests lateral journeys across space rather than forward movement in time. Resisting linear narratives of progress, it resonates with Bruce Robbins’ theorization of ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanism, not a lofty ideal and lived experience accessible only to elite Euro-American men (or elite Asian men for that matter).73 Neloufer de Mel and Antoinette Burton revise Robbins’s formulation of lateral cosmopolitanism to analyse the lives of South Asian women who were writers, actors, activists, and poets in the twentieth century.74 Their cosmopolitanism was neither centred in the West nor did it aspire to Western norms. It was not always successful. De Mel characterizes the feminist struggles of Annie 70 See, for example, Mulvey and Wollen (eds.), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti; Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women. 71 Spivak, Other Asias. 72 Cheah, ‘Universal Areas’, p. 62. Emphasis in the original. 73 Robbins, ‘Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism’, p. 1. 74 De Mel, Women and the Nation’s Narrative, p. 10, and Burton, Postcolonial Careers, pp. 36-37. For discussions of postcolonial and feminist cosmopolitanism, see also Breckenridge et al. (eds.), Cosmopolitanism; and Werbner (ed.), Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism.

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Boteju, Marcia Anil de Silva, and Jean Arasanayagam in twentieth-century Sri Lanka as ‘long and arduous’; their positions in national histories remain ‘limina[l]’ and their cultural projects incomplete.75 The cosmopolitanism of Santha Rama Rau, Burton writes, was ‘uneasy’ and ‘ambivalent’.76 De Mel and Burton highlight the troubled relationship of feminists to nationalism and modernism and emphasize an ongoing quest for artistic and political freedoms. What room might we make, then, in our feminist histories for awkward and anxious habitations of the world? For artists like Pan and Sher-Gil, who do not easily fit existing categories and narratives of modernism and nationalism? Their feminist cosmopolitanism was neither a position that transcended the nation nor was it a project that could be contained by nationalism. Instead it enabled particular articulations of place and identifications with others. Pan and Sher-Gil’s careers contradict narratives of smooth arrival and seamless belonging in Paris, France, and freedom. Their struggles encourage us to write histories with rough edges and unfinished endings and to craft futures from failed beginnings and fitful starts.

List of illustrations Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5

Amrita Sher-Gil, The Bath, 1940, oil on canvas Pan Yuliang, Reader, 1954, ink on paper Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as Tahitian, 1934, oil on canvas Pan Yuliang, Self-Portrait, 1945, oil on canvas Rina Banerjee, Take me, take me, take me… to the Palace of Love, 2003, mixed media Figure 6 Rina Banerjee, She was now in western style dress covered in a part of Empire’s ruffle and red dress, had a foreign and peculiar race, a Ganesha who has lost her head, was thrown across sea until herself shipwrecked. A native of Bangladesh lost foot to root in Bidesh, followed her mother full stop on forehead, trapped tongue of horn and grew ram-like under stress, 2011, mixed media

75 De Mel, Women and the Nation’s Narrative, p. 20. 76 Burton, Postcolonial Careers, pp. 36; 55.

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About the Author Sonal Khullar is Associate Professor of Art History at the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research and teaching interests include global histories of modern and contemporary art, the anthropology of art, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Worldly Affiliations: Artistic Practice, National Identity, and Modernism in India, 1930-1990 (University of California Press, 2015). She is currently researching a book, The Art of Dislocation: Conflict and Collaboration in Contemporary Art from South Asia, which examines how collaborative art practice has emerged as a critical response to globalization since the 1990s.

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Bauhaus and Tea Ceremony A Study of Mutual Impact in Design Education between Germany and Japan in the Interwar Period Helena Čapková Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH05 Abstract The impact of the Bauhaus teaching methods, particularly Johannes Itten’s (1888-1867) Preparatory Course, reached far beyond Germany. Conversely, Japanese sensibility permeated the Bauhaus throughout its history until its closure in 1933, springing from the japonisme of individual professors, and most notably from Itten’s interest in Japanese and Chinese art and philosophy. Contemporary Yamawaki Michiko described the Japanese atmosphere in the Bauhaus in her book The Bauhaus and the Tea Ceremony. The energetic activity of expatriate Japanese artists in Berlin and other central European cities has otherwise received relatively little attention. However, these Japanese artists provided the channel for promoting the Bauhaus in Japan, and it did not take long for several schools, including Jiyū Gakuen and the New Bauhaus, founded in 1932 in Tokyo, to adopt Bauhaus methodology. This chapter analyses the mutual impact in design education between Germany and Japan in order to shed new light on this tightly knit network of associations connecting Japan and Europe in the interwar period.

Introduction The impact of the Bauhaus teaching methods, particularly Johannes Itten’s (1888-1967) Preparatory Course, has been lasting and extensive. In the 1920s and 1930s, Germany had one of the leading progressive art scenes in the world. Avant-garde groups and galleries, as well as the Bauhaus and other similar art schools, such as the Itten-Schule and Reimann-Schule, appealed

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to large numbers of international students, including Japanese, and created a transnational network around them. Prolific thinker and architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938) commenced his lecture Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture, presented in Japan in 1936, with the statement that ‘the exotic no longer exists in Europe for Japan, or in Japan for Europe’.1 In other words, in the period between the two world wars, Japan had already lost its exotic charm and Japanese culture had become relatively common as a subject of interest. Japanese artists took an active part in artistic dialogue internationally, and intelligentsias all over the world contemplated Japanese aesthetics and philosophical ideas. This chapter will analyse the mutual impact of design education between Germany and Japan in order to shed new light on this tightly knit network of associations connecting Japan and Europe in the interwar period. The foundation of the contemporary avant-garde in Central Europe was a combination of diverse sources such as the English Arts and Crafts movement and japonisme.2 The ‘oriental’ or Japanese element in modern design, promoted by the Bauhaus and other modernist institutions in the interwar period, has yet to be studied in greater detail. In the context of the Bauhaus and other progressive schools the Japanese element lived in ink-painting exercises, prinicples taken from calligraphy practice, and in the layers of inspiration prompted by Asian spiritualities and specific arts, such as tea ceremony. The Japanese students noted the uncanny feeling in relation to the Bauhaus modernist space and architecture. It reminded them of Japanese traditional architecture and the taste of tea culture, tea environment. It is worth noting that the understanding of tea culture, tea world and even teasim was communicated to Euroamerica and to great extent was coined by the art curator and thinker Okakura Kakuzō (18921913) in, for example, one of his well-known works The Book of Tea some years before the Bauhaus was founded.3 The prevailing approach to examining the European avant-garde and its relationship with the Japanese art scene has been to explore the one-way ‘influence’ of these schools, such as the Bauhaus, on Japan. This study offers a new perspective, which emphasizes mutual transnational exchanges within a network of progressive educational institutions located in Europe and Asia. Moreover, it will map the energetic activity of expatriate Japanese artists in Berlin and other central European cities that has so far received 1 Taut, ‘Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture’. 2 Alofsin, When Buildings Speak, p. 56. 3 Okakura, The Book of Tea.

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relatively little scholarly attention. In doing so, it becomes clear that these Japanese provided the channel for promoting the Bauhaus style in Japan and it did not take long for several schools, including Jiyū Gakuen and the New Bauhaus in Tokyo, founded in 1932, to adopt Bauhaus methodology. This process had significant cultural as well as political implications, which, for the period of 1930s, are explored by Andrea Germer in chapter 10 of this book. In Japan the enormous destruction of the Tokyo urban landscape caused by the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 is considered a turning point in Japanese modernism and in fact as its true starting point. The disaster provoked a concrete realization of new imaginings that lead to new building activity for a new lifestyle. The interwar period saw several new states established in Europe. These changes in the map of Europe gave rise to the development of new artistic centres. Dynamic advances in technology dramatically changed methods of communication between centres and peripheries, both nationally and internationally. Arguably it also contributed to the frantic transnational dialogue of artists that in many cases significantly impacted on their creative process. An aspect of this fairly common phenomenon, caused by new technological inventions, that is typical of the situation in Central Europe, is that participants in this transnational communication were people with multiple national and cultural identities.

The Bauhaus Pedagogical Approach The Bauhaus (1919-1932) was designed as a modern educational institution. It epitomized a modern design institution that consciously focused on functionality, simplicity of form, and use of modern materials. The Bauhaus found a place in the informed public’s consciousness as a seed of new practice in art and culture, using form to impose order on life. Not long after its foundation the Bauhaus became the centre of an international modernist network. It was a model for many artists in Europe and America.4 It had its rules and fixed ideas, but its success lay in the concentration of exceptional individuals in one place. Under the umbrella of unity and integrity, the individual approaches to teaching and creativity of the three Bauhaus directors and faculty (Meisters in Bauhaus terms) varied. Therefore, expressions such as Bauhaus style and Bauhaus pedagogy are clichés as there is no unity amongst them. 4

Teige, ‘Ten Years of Bauhaus’, p. 317.

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Nonetheless, within this variety of styles and ideas, the presence of a Japanese element is significant. Inspiration from Japanese art and culture was present at the Bauhaus from its foundation to its closure, as it was interwoven with the rich tapestry of Bauhaus creative activities. This Japanese quality of the Bauhaus has roots in the wave of japonisme that had affected generations of artists in previous decades. The certain, superficially obvious Japanese quality of Bauhaus design can be therefore understood as the concentration of a tendency that had already existed in the work of an international body of artists active in the institution. This tendency was encouraged and became a bold component of modernism. The process of layering and intensifying japonisme manifested in the perception of the Bauhaus as a place for tea, with the professors as tea-ceremony practicioners and tea masters. Walter Gropius (1883-1969), architect and the founding director of the Bauhaus, created the school as an art institution that was directly linked with industry, and that used new teaching methods. Reform-Pädagogik (Reformed Pedagogy), a term often used in relation to the Bauhaus and other progressive schools of the time, was an education based on the modern philosophy of education through practice. Gropius’ concern with the problem of German education mainly centred on the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, where he attempted to restructure the central educational body and transform it according to modern criteria. His plan for the Bauhaus was to teach all of the subjects under one roof, as had been the case in the workshops of the Middle Ages. This he promoted under the motto Art and Technology – a New Unity. The plan would later be positively received. One requirement that was incorporated into the Bauhaus curriculum was, that students should spend an equal amount of time in lectures and in the workshop. It could be said that this approach was the result of a long debate on, and dissatisfaction with, a mostly academic way of teaching art. The aim of the Bauhaus was to train students to be qualified as both artists and craftsmen. Johannes Itten, an artist and teacher who drafted the modern and innovative teaching methods at the Bauhaus, was the living example of an unusual combination of interests, such as Gothic mysticism, Japanese, and Chinese art. Itten was the son of a teacher from rural Switzerland. In 1916, he was invited to Vienna to set up an art school where he could fulfil his ambitions as an artist and teacher.5 Itten, who studied esoteric 5 Moholy, Johannes Itten, Werke und Schriften , pp. 166-169.

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teachings and yoga, came to understand the need for balance between outward-oriented thinking and inward relaxation, and believed that there was no difference between an artist and craftsman; an artist was, for him, a more intense craftsman. Itten’s teaching was also inspired by the wave of mysticism that swept Germany in 1920-1, during which time mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jakob Böhme, as well as the teachings of Buddha and Laozi, were widely read and studied.6 In 1919, Itten was invited to Berlin to help Gropius with the teaching structure and methodology of the Bauhaus. Itten’s main task was to create a Vorkurs (Preparatory course), which was obligatory for all Bauhaus students.7 This original part of the Bauhaus curriculum also reformed education in other countries besides Germany. Itten set three objectives for this course that were subsequently followed by his successors in the teaching of the preparatory course, László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and Josef Albers (1888-1976). These objectives were: to develop creative abilities and artistic potential, free from all conventions; thorough knowledge and feeling for materials, gained from personal experience; and to learn the basic rules of artistic creative process, including colour and form theories.8 In explaining the rhythm of the brush, lines, and composition, Itten used examples of Japanese and Chinese ink paintings, especially from the Nanga School (‘literati painting’, from the Japanese nanshūga, ‘Southernstyle painting’, also termed Bunjinga, ‘scholar painting’) and Zen Buddhist monks.9 Zen paintings were, in his opinion, an ideal example of art that operated not with formal but spiritual values. Itten made his students draw abstract feelings, moods and seasons such as rain or spring. In fact, he did not teach mimesis but about unity with the painted object. Perhaps based on Itten’s activities, Claudia Delank concluded that ‘it is safe to state that the eyes of the Bauhaus student were trained in a Far Eastern painting’.10 The impact of Itten’s preparatory course has been considerable. To quote Henry P. Raleigh: ‘Today, there is barely an art program at any level of education that does not, in greater or lesser degree, contain some remnant of the old preliminary course’.11 6 Von Erffa, ‘The Bauhaus before 1922’, p. 16. 7 Frampton, Modern Architecture, p. 123. 8 Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus, p. 10. 9 Ibid. 10 Delank, Das imaginäre Japan in der Kunst, p. 152. 11 Raleigh, ‘Johannes Itten and the Background of Modern Art Education’, p. 302.

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Japanese Students at the Bauhaus Vital creativity and spontaneity of expression were not the sole preserve of the masters; their presence at the Bauhaus was also due to the great diversity and cosmopolitan nature of the Bauhaus students, which included a truly colourful group of both talented young people and mature students, graduates from various fine art schools in Europe as well as already established artists. A milestone in the life of the Bauhaus was the move from Berlin to the new buildings in Dessau tailored for the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius. In 1922, the architect Ishimoto Kikuji (1894-1963) and the artist Nakada Sadanosuke (1888-1970) arrived at the gates of the Bauhaus in Weimar where Nakada enrolled as the first Japanese student.12 Upon his arrival back home, Nakada wrote an article entitled ‘the State Bauhaus’, based on imported material for the magazine Mizue in 1925, which inspired many students. Yamawaki Iwao, an architect who studied at the Bauhaus later in the early 1930s wrote: ‘Young Japanese architects were fighting to buy, for example, vol. 14 of the Bauhausbücher Von Material zu Architektur by Moholy-Nagy in 1929’.13 Perhaps as a result of the sudden closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, only a few Japanese students actually attended the school, which did not correspond to the excitement Bauhaus ideas were generating in Japan. Yamawaki Iwao (1898-1987) and Michiko (1910-2000) arrived in Germany in 1930 and entered the Bauhaus in Dessau as the 469th and 470th student, respectively, and stayed for two years. Although Yamawaki Michiko claimed in her book Bauhausu to Chanoyu (Bauhaus and Tea Ceremony) that she had no interest in design prior to meeting Iwao, her life and sense of taste were formed by her family’s refined home and her father’s tea ceremony practice, which later resonated with her experience of the Bauhaus and the modern art she encountered in Germany.14 Every student had to go through the Vorkurs, or Preparatory course, which included modules on materials, abstract composition, and design, as well as mathematics, physics, and gymnastics. The aim was to provide the students with an opportunity to deepen their understanding of objects, to provide basic training for creative design, and to help open up new ways of working with materials. Lectures were taught in German, which was not easy for Michiko whose German was basic at the time, and she gratefully noted that Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was kind enough to give the 12 Yamawaki, ‘Reminiscences of Dessau’, p. 56. 13 Ibid. 14 Yamawaki, Bauhausu to chanoyu, pp. 10-11.

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Yamawakis extra time after lessons and explained difficult or important parts of his lectures in English.15 Iwao remembered when Kandinsky would pile up various objects, including chairs and even muddy bicycles belonging to the students, and then he would have the students concentrate on the assemblage until they were able to see simple shapes, what he termed the Spannung [tension] of form. Michiko remembered Josef Albers being especially kind and that his lectures in the preparatory course were the most interesting. She also noted that Albers looked and dressed like someone who performed the Japanese tea ceremony.16 After completing the preparatory course Michiko started studying in the weaving workshop under the supervision of Gunta Stölzel (1897-1983) and Annie Albers (1899-1994). The Yamawakis promoted the Bauhaus very energetically upon their return to Japan and invited their teachers and friends to visit the country. One of their most significant friends and fellow students was Kurt Kranz (1910-1997). Kranz’s work will also be mentioned in Andrea Germer’s chapter in relation to the Bauhaus photography technique and the Nippon magazine. The Yamawakis could not complete their degrees due to the sudden closure of the Dessau campus in 1932. They decided to return to Japan instead of continuing in pioneering modernist architect Mies van der Rohe’s (1886-1969) privately operated Bauhaus in Berlin. An article about the Bauhaus closure published in the magazine Kokusai kenchiku (International architecture) was illustrated by what is probably Iwao’s most famous work: the photomontage Attack on the Bauhaus – a work he could not exhibit in Germany, which anticipated the closure of the Bauhaus by the Gestapo. Two other Japanese students studied at the Bauhaus, although not much is known about their experiences of it. Architect Yamaguchi Bunzō (1902-1978) was one of them. So was textile designer Ōno Tamae (1903-1987), who is perhaps the least well known of the Japanese Bauhaus students (see fig. 1). Born in the Nagano prefecture, Ōno travelled to Berlin with her husband Ōno Shunichi and lived in Berlin from May 1932 to October 1933. She studied at the Bauhaus weaving atelier during her stay. Her works, mainly woven carpets, were accepted eight times by the Nitten official salon exhibition. The Nitten salon evolved from the Bunten (abbreviation of Monbushō Bijutsu Tenrankai, or Ministry of Education Art Exhibition), an art exhibition modelled after the French Salon established by the government in 1907. The exhibition was divided into Nihonga (Japanese style), Yōga (Western style) and sculpture sections. The Bunten provided Japanese artists with an opportunity to 15 Ibid., p. 39. 16 Ibid., p. 45.

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Figure 1  Yamawaki Michiko with Ōno Tamae in Ōno’s Berlin apartment

Michiko Yamawaki, Bauhausu to chanoyu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995), p. 85

compete on a national level, while making the public more conscious of art. The exposure at the Bunten, and subsequently at the Nitten (Nihon Bijutsu Tenrankai or Japanese Art Exhibition) was associated with social prestige, and intensified the rivalry among the different groups of artists. Ōno had studied with the painter Nakagawa Kigen (1892-1972) before studying at the Bauhaus. Nakagawa himself had studied with Henri Matisse whilst in Paris from 1919-1921. Ōno’s work remained indebted to Nakagawa and his abstract works for the rest of her career. Ōno has managed to elude many researchers focusing on the Bauhaus and Japan, perhaps because she only studied at the Bauhaus for about four months. But her work was included in the 1994 exhibition entitled The Bauhaus Revolution and Experiment in Fine Arts Education at the Kawasaki Art Museum. Upon their return to Japan, the Yamawakis joined circles that promoted a modern and Euro-American lifestyle and lectured widely in both formal and informal settings (Nakada Sadanosuke’s apartment is an example of the latter). Thanks to Michiko’s father, the Yamawakis settled in an appropriately modern apartment in the Tokuda Building on Ginza, which had just been completed to a design by Tsuchiura Kameki (1897-1996). They rented the third floor and half of the fifth floor, where two looms were placed, and which Michiko used as her workshop. The fifth floor apartment became the new location for a large number of designed objects made by designers at the Bauhaus, books and even simple furniture from the school canteen. It

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Figure 2  Yamawaki Michiko’s loom, 1933

Yamawaki, Bauhausu to chanoyu, p. 135

served the Yamawakis as a location to reconstruct the Bauhaus atmosphere and its pedagogical teaching methods in Japan. The apartment became an important meeting place for architects. Frequent guests included Natori Yōnosuke (1910-1962), who was a photojournalist and will be discussed in detail in Andrea Germer’s text in this book, and Kawakita Renshichirō (1902-1997), founder of the Japanese Bauhaus. He invited both Yamawakis to teach in his school, the Shinkenchiku kōgei gakuin (New Architecture and Design College), which was known as the Japanese Bauhaus and was located in the Mitsuki building on Ginza. In 1934, the school added new courses to its curriculum. Michiko became the head of the weaving course, and her colleague Kageyama Shizuko became head of Western fashion design (see fig. 2). Both courses were advertised in the contemporary women’s magazine Fujin gahō in the newly formed Centre for Weaving and Fashion Design. In addition to Michiko’s work as an instructor, Yamawaki Iwao was also active as a teacher from 1949 until his retirement in 1971 at the Nihon University College of Arts and acted as a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Education, the antecedent of

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today’s Tsukuba University. In his teaching, he incorporated concepts he had learned from Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky.17 Both Michiko and Iwao published accounts of the Bauhaus – Yamawaki Iwao in Bauhausu no Hitobito (People of the Bauhaus) in 1954. Previously, in 1943, he had published reflections about his work, the Bauhaus experience, and photography under the title Keyaki (The Zelkova Tree). Thirty years later he published an expanded version, which included a number of essays on aesthetics, modern design, architecture, and the legacy of the Bauhaus under the title Keyaki shoku (The Zelkova Tree Series). Michiko published her memories of the Bauhaus in the book Bauhausu to chanoyu edited by Kawahata Naomichi, in which she gave detailed insights into the Bauhaus, as well as into the world of modern boys and girls, the so-called mobo and moga in Tokyo of the 1930s. It is surprising that none of these books, which are important first-hand accounts of the Bauhaus experience, have been translated. Michiko’s childhood centred on tea culture, which may have given her a special sensitivity towards the Japanese quality she later encountered at the Bauhaus. In particular, she felt an affinity with the Bauhaus ideas of simplicity, functionality and a deep interest in materials, their quality and use. While studying at the Bauhaus she felt as she had re-entered the world of tea that she knew intimately from her childhood. The concept of tea aesthetic resonated with the idea of the contemporary Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk (comprehensive artwork).

The Itten-Schule Looking back through Michiko’s account of the Japanese quality of the Bauhaus, we shall return to Germany and to Johannes Itten’s activities upon his departure from the Bauhaus. In 1923, Itten returned to the Swiss town of Herrliberg. After spending three years there, he went back to Germany where he exhibited at Herwarth Walden’s gallery Der Sturm. In September 1926, he founded the Moderne Kunstschule Berlin. The curriculum of the Itten-Schule aimed to teach a wide range of artists, from painters to architects. As at the Bauhaus, it aimed to develop the individual creativity of the students using modern methods. Many of the teachers were from the Bauhaus: Georg Muche, Umbo, Fred Forbat, Friedrich Köhn, and Lucia Moholy. Exhibitions that showed works by Bauhaus students and teachers further strengthened the link with the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius often sat 17 Yamawaki, ‘Reminiscences of Dessau’, p. 57.

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on the panel during architecture examinations. The school was heavily promoted in the press, and exhibitions of students’ work travelled around Germany in the early 1930s. Kaneko Yoshimasa wrote in great detail about the Itten-Schule and its contacts with Japan. His main source in doing so was the diary of Johannes Itten from 1930-1931, which is held in the Kunstmuseum Bern. Entries in the diary report on the visit of a Japanese delegation to Europe, which included the three painters Komuro Sui’un, Mizukoshi Shōnan, and Hiroshima Koho. They came to Berlin on the occasion of the Contemporary Japanese Painting Exhibition (Ausstelung von Werken Lebender Japanischer Maler) held in the Prussian Art Academy in 1931. Mizukoshi Shōnan (1888-1985), one of the painters from this Japanese delegation, gave several lectures on the subject of ink painting, mainly that of the nanga school at the IttenSchule. Mizukoshi also lectured at the house of Alekisan (Alexander) Nagai, who served as the commercial attaché of the Japanese Embassy in Berlin. Nagai himself was an amateur painter and an active promoter of Japanese art, who organized numerous seminars in Germany. Nagai served in the Japanese Embassy in Berlin for two decades until the end of the Second World War. Perhaps because of his own personal history, he became known as an effective facilitator of transnational cultural dialogue, as well as a key formulator of Japan’s policy of tolerance towards the Jews. He personally warded off German demands to change it. Nagai was the son of notable Japanese organic chemist and pharmacologist Nagai Nagayoshi and his German wife, and was both bilingual and bicultural. In Tokyo, his mother Therese née Schumacher became a professor of German language at the Japan Women’s University. Alexander Nagai is remembered not only as a networker and supporter of the Japanese in interwar Germany, but also as a member of the group of Japanese diplomats that resisted intolerance toward Jews. His role in this resistance was analysed in the book by Pamela Sakamoto.18 The Itten-Schule was also visited by the successful education reformer and founding director of the progressive Tamagawa Gakuen School in Japan, Obara Kuniyoshi (1887-1977), who made a visit during his study trip to Europe and America. Obara visited Mizukoshi’s lectures at the Itten-Schule and noted that he attempted to explain to the students the necessity of understanding the essence of a painting object. Obara states that Mizukoshi was hired to teach ink painting for six months. According to these records, Mizukoshi taught ink painting in a unique, philosophical 18 Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees.

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manner, characteristic of the Nanga school. For example, he explained to the students how to paint the essence of the object, and explained that the whole picture should have a rhythm, as in music. Itten became Mizukoshi’s private student, as Itten also recounts in his diaries. Study at the Itten-Schule was divided into two parts, the preparatory course and specialist courses that a student could enter only after finishing the preparatory course. According to the curriculum of 1932-3, the preparatory course included principles of light and dark, contrast theory, and also the Sino-Japanese method of brush painting, which was added to the curriculum after Mizukoshi left the Itten-Schule. The daily routine at the Itten-Schule, as well as at the Bauhaus, commenced in the morning with thirty minutes of physical exercise and singing in order to harmonize body and mind. This was followed by thirty minutes of free painting with a brush and ink (Japanese sumi-e). This morning routine was aimed to prepare the students for the rest of the day. Itten put great emphasis on regular breathing practice, which he hoped would help students to identify with plants and grass. All of these practices taken together would seem to point towards a clear influence of Japanese ink-painting traditions on instructional methods at the Itten-Schule. A little later at the Japanese embassy, Itten met another Japanese painter, Takehisa Yumeji, and employed him at the school from February to June 1933. Yumeji published two texts during his stay that were translated into German by the already mentioned Alexander Nagai, The Concept of Japanese Painting (Der Begriff der Japanischen Malerei) and On Lines (Über die Linien). These texts were devoted to a vast array of subjects, ranging from a general exploration of Japanese culture, to comparing European and Japanese painting, as well as to more specific issues such as the role of emptiness in Japanese painting.

Jiyū Gakuen Students in Europe After Obara’s visit, the Itten-Schule strengthened its bonds with Japan, especially with the Jiyū Gakuen (Freedom College) school. In 1932, Jiyū Gakuen students came to study at the Itten-Schule. By the mid-1930s, the most influential art schools in Japan, such as Tokyo University of the Arts, had projects that came from various Bauhaus workshops.19 According to the scholar Suga Yasuko, design or kōgei played an important role in creating a Japanese national identity in the twentieth century. Issues related to feminism and gender also began to be more prominently 19 Thornton, ‘Japanese Posters: The First 100 Years’, p. 11.

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discussed at this time.20 As a result of these trends in modern Japanese society, Hani Motoko (1873-1957), a tireless Christian activist and the first female journalist in Japan, established the Jiyū Gakuen together with an affiliated design research institute in 1921. Curiously, it can be observed that all these tendencies, together with the revived interest in japonisme in Europe and the United States, jointly allowed for new opportunities within the development of Japanese design. Upon the establishment of a design department at the Jiyū Gakuen, two students of the department, Imai Kazuko and Yamamuro Mitsuko, came to Europe for eighteen months to gather new perspectives on teaching modern design.21 Imai and Yamamuro went to Prague in 1931, where they settled for half a year.22 Yamamuro enrolled at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design and took classes with Jan Beneš, who taught drawing and painting, but she resigned from the school on 1 March 1932. Imai found The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague too traditional. They wrote back to the College that, like Japan, Czechoslovakia had yet to produce design that would be appropriate to modern times. They subsequently travelled to Vienna, where they visited Josef Hoffmann. From there, they went to Budapest, Frankfurt, Munich, and Halle, before arriving in Berlin. They intended to study at the Bauhaus, and thus contacted the Yamawakis. However, due to some administrative issues they decided to study at the Itten-Schule instead. The Itten-Schule was dramatically different from the academic style of teaching they had experienced in Prague. Itten himself showed great interest in Japanese art, and the three kept in touch following their departure. Itten remained very influential to Imai and Yamamuro even after their arrival back in Japan. Imai Kazuko bought a copy of Itten’s published diaries and used it as teaching material. It could be said that new pedagogical methods, which were created by merging psychology and philosophy with ‘Oriental’ philosophies and teachings, came full circle back to Japan. Imai also attended the Reimann-Schule founded in 1902, which, unlike the Bauhaus and the Itten-Schule, taught fashion sketching and drawing, shop window design, and other skills. The school was very popular, especially 20 Suga, ‘Modernism, Commercialism and Display Design in Britain’, p. 137. 21 Ibid., p.140. 22 According to Czechoslovak police documentation, Imai Kazuko (b. 30 June 1910 in Tokyo) lived on Praha II č.p. 1748 Václavská ul. 33 in Pension Žena from 25 August 1931 (signed off in Berlin on 15 March 1932). Yamamuro Mitsuko (b. 18 March 1911 in Tokyo) lived at the same address and was signed off at the same place and time.

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among female students. Imai attended classes at the Reimann-Schule every day after lessons at the Itten-Schule for three months. There she took classes in stage design, textiles, and window design. She was most impressed with the treatment of a product as a craft or design piece, an idea later promoted by Jiyū Gakuen.23 Imai and Yamamuro visited the Bauhaus several times, once accompanied by the founder of Jiyū Gakuen, Hani Motoko and her daughter Keiko. Ruth and Eva Kayser studied with and befriended Yamamuro and Imai at the Itten-Schule classes. Ruth kept in touch with them, and in a letter dated 14 July 1933 she wrote that she had learned a lot from Yumeji and that his lectures were interesting. Eva Plaut, who later taught at the Sorbonne, was also excited about Yumeji’s lectures. She claimed that he and his teaching methods inspired her to also become a teacher. She studied at the IttenSchule between 1932 and 1934. In 1933, Eva Plaut arrived in Japan and visited the Jiyū Gakuen, where she taught Itten’s art theory for two years. One of her students, Ōchi Hiroshi later translated Itten’s text Kunst der Farbe (The Art of Colour) into Japanese and became a follower and promoter of Itten’s method in Japan.

Kawakita Renshichirō and New Bauhaus in Tokyo Upon their arrival to Japan, Yamamuro and Imai were in contact with Kawakita Renshichirō, the founder of the so-called Japanese Bauhaus, and they lectured on Itten’s methods at his school. Both of them were surprised to find many similarities and links between Japan and Europe in practice, which they shared with Yamawaki Michiko. Many of the texts brought back by the Yamawakis’, were immediately translated by Kawakita Renshichirō into teaching material and used at his school. Kawakita was born in Tokyo in 1902 and was a graduate of the Architecture department of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 1930, he received the fourth prize in the international competition for the design of the Ukraina Theatre in Harkow and in 1931, he translated László MoholyNagy’s Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture) into Japanese. Kawakita had been fascinated by the Bauhaus even before meeting the Yamawakis. He was friends with other students who had visited the Weimar Bauhaus in the 1920s, such as Mizutani Takehiko and Nakada Sadanosuke. 23 Suga, ‘Japanese Craft Industry in the Period of Modernism’, p. 12.

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Together, they founded Seikatsu Kōsei Kenkyūjo (Research Institute for Life Configurations) in the Mitsuki building on the Ginza in 1931. Kawakita also started publishing his magazine I See All in November of the same year, which he used to channel ideas about international architecture and living in Japan, but also to advertise education at his Institute. In 1932, he founded the Shinkenchiku kōgeika (Department of Modern Architecture and Design) department in the School of Industrial Design led by Hamada Masuji. When Hamada’s school moved out, he opened the Shinkenchiku kōgei kenkyū kōshūjo (School of New Architecture and Design) training centre, which later changed its name to Shinkenchiku kōgei gakuin in 1933. This school was a very progressive educational institution and based its curriculum on the Bauhaus. Kawakita employed many of the Japanese Bauhaus students, including the Yamawakis. Among the graduates of this institution were the pioneering designer Kuwasawa Yōko (1910-1977) and the famous graphic designer, Kamekura Yūsaku (1915-1997). Much like the Bauhaus in Germany, the School was fairly short-lived, but its impact was profound. The Ministry of Education refused to grant it a permit and finally, amid the rising fervour of Japanese militarism, it was forced to shut down in 1939. Again, similarly to the Bauhaus, the international connections of the school with other institutions abroad, as well as its foreign ethos, seemed suspicious to the increasingly controlling regime. As noted above, the Bauhaus was a complex entity of varied tastes, concepts, and ideas. Kawakita was fascinated primarily by Kandinsky’s musical visuality, which he drew on in his own architectural practice in the period 1924-1927. Secondly, he was inspired by Gropius’ idea of International Architecture, which was at its height around 1928 and the search for commonalities in architectural styles around the world as well as by Hannes Meyer’s ideas of architecture as a scientific production.

Concluding Remarks This study has aimed to show the complexity of networks operating in the arts in interwar Japan and their connections to Europe. Progressive schools such as the Bauhaus played a major role in the transformation of the art scene and in the development and creation of Gesamtkunstwerks in different fields. This idea can be found reflected in works by Yamawaki Iwao, Kawakita Renshichirō’s theory of design education, or even in Walter Gropius’ office in the Bauhaus itself. Furthermore, places such as

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the Bauhaus, the Itten-schule, or, more broadly, Berlin as a city, became transnational hubs and crossroads. As noted above, the newly nuanced sensitivity towards ‘things Japanese’ or japonisme formed the underpinnings of a new transnational network that actively supported avant-garde activity in both Germany and Japan. This study has mapped a fragment from this network by focusing on progressive educators such as Johannes Itten, Obara Kuniyoshi, and others. Additionally, this transnationalism can be seen represented in the life and work of Yamawaki Michiko, who sensed Japanese atmosphere and elements in the Bauhaus teaching methodology, its spirituality and values, which she compared to one of the Japanese traditional arts – the tea ceremony. This transnational experience allowed her to become a progressive weaver who did not solely follow modernist models. Rather, there was a hybridity to her work and life, using elements from Japanese and Euro-American tendencies.

List of illustrations Figure 1 Yamawaki Michiko with Ōno Tamae in Ōno’s Berlin apartment Figure 2 Yamawaki Michiko’s loom, 1933

Bibliography Alofsin, A., When Buildings Speak; Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867-1933 (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). Bowlt, J.E., ‘Constructivism and Russian Stage Design’, in Performing Arts Journal 1:3 (1977), pp. 62-84. Čapková, H., ‘Transnational Networkers – Iwao and Michiko Yamawaki and the Formation of Japanese Modernist Design’, Journal of Design History 4 (2014epu009  NovemberN), pp. 370-385. Delank, C., Das imaginäre Japan in der Kunst; ‘Japanbilder’ vom Jugenstil bis zum Bauhaus (München: iudicium, 1996). Dexel, W., ‘Bauhaus Style – A Myth’ in E. Neumann (ed.), Bauhaus and Bauhaus People: Personal Opinions and Recollections of Former Bauhaus Members and Their Contemporaries (New York: Wiley, John & Sons, 1992). Frampton, K., Modern Architecture. A Critical History (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). Fujita, Y., ‘Orinifurete shonan sensei kara ukagatta o-hanashi kara (From a conversation with Master Shonan from time to time)’, in Miru News, Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, 112 (September 1976). Imai, K., and Yamamuro M., ‘Prāgu yori’, in Gakuen Shinbun 7 (1931).

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Itten, J., Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus (Ravensburg: O. Maier 1963). Iwao Yamawaki (exhibition catalogue) (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999). Kaneko, Y., ‘A Study on the Art Education of Jumeji Takehisa at the Itten-Schule’, DaigakuBijutsukyōiku Gakkaishi 33 (2001), pp. 143-150. —, ‘Japanese Painting Lessons at the Itten-Schule’, Daigaku bijutsukyōiku gakkaishi 25 (1993), pp. 247-256. —, ‘Johanes Itten’s Design Education and Japan’, unpublished lecture provided by Prof. Kaneko (Kochi University, Pedagogical faculty 2-5-1, Akebono-cho, Kochi-shi, Kochi, 780-852, Japan). —, ‘The Relationship between Johannes Itten and some Japanese in Berlin’, Bulletin of Japanese Society for the Science of Design 50:6 (2004): pp. 1-10. Kawahata, N. (ed.), Kamekura Yūsaku (Tokyo: Transart, 2006). Moholy, L. and W. Rötzler, (eds.), Johannes Itten, Werke und Schriften, The Burlington Magazine 116:852 (1974): pp. 166-169. Nakada, S., ‘State Bauhaus’, Mizue 6-7 (1925). Obara, K. (ed.), Gakuen Nikki (College Diary) (Tokyo: Tamawagagakuen, 1931). Okakura, K., The Book of Tea (Boston: Fox, Duffield and Co., 1906). Raleigh, H.P., ‘Johannes Itten and the Background of Modern Art Education’, Art Journal 27:3 (1968): pp. 284-287. Sakamoto, P.R., Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: a World War II Dilemma (New York: Praeger, 1998). Suga, Y., ‘Japanese Craft Industry in the Period of Modernism as seen through Imai Kazuko and the Jiyū Gakuen Institute for Art and Craft Studies’, Bulletin of JSSA 54:2 (2007), pp. 9-18. —, ‘Modernism, Commercialism and Display Design in Britain: The Reimann School and Studios of Industrial and Commercial Art’, Journal of Design History 19 (2006), pp. 137-154. —, The Reimann School: A Design Diaspora (London: Artmonsky Arts, 2014). Taut, B., ‘Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture, Tokio 1936’, Lecture at the Peers’ Club, 30 October 1935. Teige, K., ‘Ten Years of Bauhaus’ in K. Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000). Thornton, R.S., ‘Japanese Posters: The First 100 Years’, Design Issues 6:1 (1989). Tsunemi, M., ‘Design Activities and Works of Bauhaus student Tamae Ohno’, paper presented at the Conference on Asia Society of Basic Design and Art, Tsukuba, 2007. Umemiya H., ‘Kawakita’s 1930s’, in author, Modanizumu/ nashonarizumu, 1930 nendai nihon no geijutsu (Tokyo: Serikashobo, 2003), pp. 102-132. Von Erffa, H., ‘The Bauhaus before 1922’, College Art Journal 3:1 (1943). Wick, R.K., Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfilden-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000). Yamano, H. (ed.), Yohanesu Itten: zōkei geijutsu e no michi (Johannes Itten, Wege zur Kunst) (Kyoto: Kyoto Museum of Modern Art, 2003). —, Avant-garde in Japan – Art into life 1900 – 1940 (exhibition catalogue) (Kyoto: National Gallery of Modern Arts in Kyoto, 1999). Yamawaki, M., Bauhausu to chanoyu, edited by Kawahata Naomichi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995). Yamawaki, I., ‘Reminiscences of Dessau’, Design Issues 2:3 (1985). —, Bauhausu no Hitobito (Tokyo: Shōkokusha, 1954). —, Keyaki (Tokyo: Atoriesha, 1943). —, Keyaki shoku (Tokyo, Nihon Daigaku, Geijutsu gakubu, Bijutsugakkakenkyūshitsu, 1973)

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About the Author Helena Čapková is Assistant Professor of Art History at the School of International Liberal Studies of the Waseda University in Tokyo. She received her PhD at the TrAIN (Transnational Art Identity and Nation) Research Centre of the University of the Arts in London. Her research focuses on exchange within the artists’ network that connected Japan and Central Europe in the interwar era. Other areas of interest include transnational visual art studies, theosophy and visual arts, japonisme and Modernism. She received her undergraduate and postgraduate training in Art History and Japanese Studies at Charles University, Prague and SOAS, London. Helena’s book about Czech purist architect and progressive stage designer Bedřich Feuerstein and Japan was published in June 2014.

Part II Missions and Education

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Schooling a Missionary in Early Twentieth-Century Eastern India Indrani Chatterjee*

Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH06 Abstract This essay explores the historical context within which a group of local dwellers in the hillsides of Eastern India criticized a young missionary male of the Welsh Calvinist Mission in the opening years of the twentieth century. Using a longue durée perspective on the settlement of these hills, the chapter suggests that the tensions between the mission and the local population should be understood as failures in cross-cultural communication. These failures are particularly poignant in the stark contrast of local understandings of laywomen’s work within the structure of local monastic governments, and those of post-Reformation Christianity. Rather than perpetuating the imposition of colonial and missionary categories, this chapter treats the dwellers of the hills in eastern India as ‘subjects’ of parallel non-Christian monastic governments of Buddhists, Bon, and other denominations.

An unsigned letter addressed to the directors of the mission and dated 29 August 1906 complains about a Welsh Calvinist Methodist missionary, Reverend E. Rowlands: ‘We think that his way of keeping company with young women is not good. […] One of his orphans saw him sitting and holding his young woman Thangkungi on his knee face to face and one * An early draft of this paper was read at the Conference ‘Asia-Europe Encounters: Intellectual and Cultural Exchanges, 1900-1950’ on 7-8 December 2012. Along with my generous hosts, including Professor Prasenjit Duara, I wish to thank Professor Michael Keenan for his comments, Professor Partho Datta and other participants and members of the audience for their encouragement and shared insights.

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of her legs was over his left side and the other over his right side. […] (He) saw him as he touched his young woman’s bosom in the month of July this year.’1 The note is rare in the historiography of interracial cohabitation in European empires in Asia and Africa. 2 It is also rare in the annals of missionary historiography, especially those of South Asia.3 For this note is not written by European missionaries about the immoral behaviours of ‘native’ men and women, examples of which abounded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This note is the reverse. It is written by someone who was a preacher to audiences in the Eastern Himalayan hillsides: the letter complains that ‘the Gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be preached with effect in the villages because […] Lushais say that we preach against fornication but they believe that our Missionary R. Rowlands has committed fornication’. The very tenor of the complaint suggests that the letter writer foregrounds some legal and moral code that has been infringed by the Christian missionary. Hence the letter writer uses Biblical language – ‘fornication’ – to imply that sexual relationships had occurred against that offstage normative order. This offstage, however, remains elusive. Neither in the note itself, nor in the larger bulk of the correspondence in this missionary archive is there anything that helps historians to identify the alternative legality or morality invoked by the letter writer. This chapter will attempt to put both this invisibility of the hillside – a particular kind of ‘local’ Asian social formation – into question and simultaneously attempt to recover from it. In this foregrounding of the local, the chapter has two main goals. The first is to extend the historiography of Christian missions in colonial India. This historiography has increasingly identified with ‘Indo-centric, bottom-up’ processes of intercultural and inter-religious interactions. 4 Yet the majority of scholars following this trend have focused their attention on the histories of the plains dwellers 1 Letter to ‘Our Heads in the Lord’, 29 August 1906. CMA 27, 314. 2 For illustrative survey, see Summers, ‘Mission Boys’, pp.  75-101; Predelli, ‘Marriage in Norwegian Missionary Practice’, pp. 4-48; Newell, ‘Devotion and Domesticity’, pp. 296-323; Steegstra, ‘A Mighty Obstacle’, pp. 200-230. 3 For examples, see Potts, British Baptist Missionaries; Dena, Christian Missions; Lhuna, Education and Missionaries; Downs, Essays on Christianity; Debbarma, Origin and Growth; Cox, Imperial Faultlines; Frykenberg, Christians and Missionaries; Studdert-Kennedy, ‘Evangelical Mission’; Hardiman, Missionaries and their Medicine; Howarth, ‘Advocates and Arbiters’; Thong, ‘To Raise the Savage’; Chatterjee, The Making of Indian Secularism. 4 Fox Young, India and the Indianness of Christianity, p. 8.

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of northern and southern India. Such attention has not merely left the Himalayan hills-based social groups outside of history – when their Christianization has been studied at all, it has failed to go beyond the colonial category of administration of such peoples: ‘tribals’. Rather than continue such linguistic and conceptual opacity, this chapter treats the dwellers of the hills in eastern India as ‘subjects’ of parallel non-Christian monastic governments of Buddhists, Bon, and other denominations. The first segment of the chapter will therefore outline monastic governmentality as it shaped the societies of the sub-Himalayan hills of eastern India and western Burma.5 The second goal of this chapter is to establish the specific regime of gender and value on which such monastic governments rested in the hills. This will allow historians of missions in India to treat gender also in an Indo-centric mode, and help them to extend a subaltern’s perspective on a comparative historiography of race, sex, and class. At its simplest, the aim is to interrogate a scholarship that currently views all interracial cohabitation as binary: either adjudicated from the standpoint of authoritarian patrilineal males or as examples of ‘erotic democracy’.6 Such characterizations have been popular in modern studies of eighteenthcentury Anglo-Mughal households in India and Britain as well.7 However, these studies too have omitted the specif ic local structures and political expectations that were infringed in the very formation of such living units. As a result, historians of both colonial South Asia as well as of missionary societies seldom understand the depth or direction of dispossession visited on local women in matrilaterally constituted, or of polyandrous hills societies when such women found themselves as members of interracial households. This chapter will discuss social groups of the latter kind. In adopting these two goals, this chapter hopes to reinterpret the charged encounter between European missionaries and laymen in a local and newly colonized Asian society in the early twentieth century. It will push the histories of European-Asian encounters in the colonies beyond discussions of the circulation of technologies (such as ship-building, engineering) to comprehend the ideas and social structures that did not circulate between a colonizing Europe and a colonized part of Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 5 Chatterjee, ‘Monestic Governmentality’. 6 The phrase is taken from Goldstein, ‘“Interracial” Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil’. 7 For examples, see Dalrymple, White Mughals; Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India.

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Monastic Governmentality and Women’s Work: 2nd-18th Century in South and East Asia Michel Foucault first defined ‘governmentality’ to refer to the ‘conduct of conduct’.8 It included the entire gamut of the education of desires, habits, aspirations, beliefs, and attachments: the making of subjectivities. But he distinguished it from ‘discipline’, the reform of designated groups through a detailed supervision in confined quarters such as prisons, asylums, and schools. After 1982, Foucault refined his argument on Hellenistic governmentality, suggesting that it was made up of a set of ascetic exercises through which the knowledge of the self and the care of the self were simultaneously learnt. The Other, or the teacher who trained the young Greek governor-tobe, was indispensable for the governor-in-training to learn the care of the self.9 Foucault’s scheme had no room for a governor-in-waiting’s mother or sister, nor room for a teacher’s wife and daughters. Indeed, not only was the household of both teacher and student entirely absent from Foucault’s governmentality, there was no possibility even of the self under training to be female and philosopher. In the workshop-household model that Pandurang Vaman Kane excavated from Sanskritic classical texts, on the other hand, a Brahman male teacher (acarya) presided over a cluster of pupils and disciples in an establishment where they lived together (acaryakula).10 Co-residence involved physical proximities, some social intimacies, and constituted the domain of subjectivation and submission of the student to the disciplines of body and mind necessary for any craft. The methods for cultivating such subject-formation were the mundane, everyday forms that scholars referred to as yoga and prayoga – the practices and attitudes initiated by the compact between a disciple-student and his or her teacherguru.11 The salient features of this educational model were ‘the high and honorable position assigned to the teacher, the close personal contact of the pupil with the teacher and individual attention, the pupil’s stay with the teacher as a member of his family, oral instruction and the absence of books, stern discipline and control of emotions and the will, [and] cheapness (as no fees were stipulated for)’.’12 Kane, marking the household of the teacher as the site of the making of the student’s self, thus implicitly let women 8 Foucault, Discipline and Punish. 9 Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 127-129; Foucault, The Government of Self, p. 6 passim. 10 Kane, History of Dharmasastra, vol. 2, part 1, p. 369 passim. 11 Pollock, ‘Theory of Practice’, pp. 499-519. 12 Kane, History of Dharmasastra, vol. 2, part 1, p. 369.

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and non-Brahmans remain part of the structures of ‘governmentality’. This model, more than Foucault’s, fit the evidence available from South, Central, and East-Asian historical societies between the second and eighteenth centuries. Hence, it is appropriate to refer to the Asian form as ‘monastic governmentality’. It diverges from Foucauldian governmentality (as well as post-Reformation Protestant imaginaries) in two key ways: the place of women and the household in the generation of authority, and the admission of women among the group of ‘subjects’ of such monastic governments. The place of women-centred households is fundamental also to rethink monasticity from a South-Asian perspective. In ordinary post-Reformation English usage the term ‘monk’ implied vows of celibacy. Therefore, noncelibate consecrated or ordained figures in lineages of Tantric Buddhists, Saiva, Vaisnava, and Sufi Muslims in South Asia have seldom been identified as monastic. But many ordained teachers, such as those Saiva acarya who trained Buddhist Pala kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries, had female consorts. For instance, a dedicatory inscription on a votive bronze caitya (monastic assembly hall) dated to the twelfth century was that of a donor who identified herself as the devi (lady) of Acharya Sangharakshita.13 Since the term acarya referred to ordained gurus/spiritual teachers, this was proof that such teachers had female consorts. Turrell Wylie had pointed to similar formations as critical to understanding Tibetan Buddhist biographies.14 Identical evidence from Himalayan Nepal led David Gellner to argue that married householder monks, fundamental to all South-Asian systems, should disrupt the universal expectation of celibacy for all forms of monasticism.15 Not permanent celibacy but strictly regulated and fixed seasons of retreat and self-discipline may be seen as the characteristic pattern of Asian monasticity. Giuseppe Tucci thus translated the Tibetan term dgonpa and the Sanskrit term aranyaka as ‘monasterium’, or site of refuge, set apart from all other buildings and dedicated to the exercises necessary for the cultivation of a discipline, or askesis.16 I am guided by Tucci and Gellner in deploying ‘monasticity’ to refer to the form of governmentality in especially Himalayan and sub-Himalayan societies in South Asia that form the core of this chapter. 13 Bhattacharya, ‘Inscribed Image’, pp. 309-313; Bhattacharya, ‘New Pithipati’, pp. 455-457. 14 For famous guru of the Bka-rgyu school in the eleventh century, Marpa, his nine wives or consorts, and the fortress-castle-monastery that his follower-disciple, Milarepa, built for him. Wylie, ‘Mar-Pā’s Tower’, 278-291. 15 Gellner, ‘Newar Buddhist Monastery’, pp. 365-414. 16 Tucci, Rin-chen-bzan-po, p. 10.

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Such societies had historically rested on the labours of women-centred households. Women were as integral to the production of skill as they were of crops, people, and young animals. Thus there were many female donors of grains and goods to teachers, monks, and shrines, who were both ordained (Buddhist bhikşuni) and lay ‘subjects’ of various disciplines (upasikā and shishyā in Sanskrit). Among Hindus and Buddhists alike, laywomen could be additionally described in relational capacities as daughters of eminent fathers, mothers of sons, and in the case of a donation to a temple in the Kathmandu valley, as part of a heterosexual ‘couple’.17 Women were central to the teacher’s, and the lay student’s, and the novice’s household. Women’s access to various kinds of economic and political activity was mediated through relationships both in the teacher’s and the donor’s households. This was especially germane to the conduct of monastic governmentality since the key constituents of the political society were the networks of households – supporters as well as adherents – that held together the core teaching-learning lineages. This network of households undergirded a tripartite form of order that was both ‘monastic’ and ‘governmental’. Its first aspect was that it was based on a relationship of initiation-consecration between a disciple and her/his teacher. Such ritualized initiations were mandatory in all forms of Mahayana Buddhist orders, all forms of Bhakti (devotionalism) including Vaisnavism and Sikhism, Saiva, and Bon Tantra, as well as among Sufi silsilahs (literally, a chain but figuratively used for a transmission lineage of saintly teachers and their disciples) after the ninth century. Empowerment and initiation rituals may or may not have been followed by a second and third, equally formalized, ordination or renunciation ritual. However, a basic gesture of initiation was adequate to constitute a relation of power and affection and had material and political effects. To accept initiation was equivalent to submitting to a legal-moral and disciplinary practice identif ied with particular teachers – the second aspect of monastic governmentality. Initiation committed disciples to certain physical and mental-emotional observances under the direction of a teacher-guru.18 This meant that instead of autonomy, each school cultivated the ideal of dependence as the basis of political order. Adherents enacted dependence towards deities and teachers when they accepted 17 For precolonial India and Nepal, see Bhattacharya ‘Munificence’; Orr, Donors, Devotees and Daughters; Talbot, Precolonial India, pp. 95-99; Rangachari, Invisible Women; Pant and Sharma, The Two Earliest Copper Plates, p. 29 and Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred, pp. 220-270. 18 Sanderson, ‘The Saiva Age’, pp. 4-90.

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instructions on righteous and unrighteous conduct, extending to the bodily comportment, social rituals, and economic roles. This cultivation of dependence was valued: young boys and men as well as young girls and women were expected to cultivate conformity to the rules of conduct established for each particular age and condition. All student-disciples were subjects of the teachers-governors. Their lay households were similarly the basis of the polity. This set up a codependent series of relationships between teachers and disciples, kings and subjects. As Alexis Sanderson’s studies of Pala disciples of particular Tantric Buddhist teachers reveals, initiates were spoken of as kings: after initiation, these men rewarded their teachers with headships of monasteries and monastic estates. Although king, each Pala king was also a subject of a teacher. Monastic subjecthood and monastic governmentality depended on and sustained one another. The critical place of a ‘teacher’ was not just important for Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, and Sufis in the subcontinent. It was equally important for Himalayan populations that followed the Bon [pronounced ‘pun’] religion.19 Adherents of Bon were called bonpo. During the tenure of the Tibetan empire (between the sixth and ninth centuries) the upholder of Bon was a king-emperor, and its ‘homeland’ a region called Zhangzhung (in Tibetan), a hidden semi-paradisiacal land, which latter-day humans could only reach in visions. Subsequent scholarship mapped this in territorial terms as lying roughly between north-eastern Iran and western Tibet, with its centre on Mount Kailash, and with a teacher gShen-rab (sTon-pa in Tibetan). After the eleventh century, Bon was reconstituted in ways that contained obvious points of similarity with Mahayana-Vajrayana Buddhist rituals and organization of monastics and laity; distinct differences remained in the name of the founder-teacher (Siddhartha Gautama in one and Tsongpa Shenrab in the other), the symbolism of yangdrung (Tibetan for ‘unchanging’ or ‘eternal’, equated with the diamond or vajra weapon and the Sanskrit svāstika) in Bon and the vitality of divination practices often (inaccurately) referred to by nineteenth-century Europeans as either ‘animism’ or ‘shamanism’. Stein thus identified the commonality of practices of Buddhist and Bon in the Himalayan world in terms of a veneration of territorial deities, beliefs in sacred mountains, sacrifices to tombs and on the occasion of oaths, and the taking of auguries and divinations.20 Elaborate rituals were carried out 19 Kvaerne, Tibet Bon Religion. 20 Stein, Tibetan Civilization, pp. 231-272; Stein insisted that non-Buddhist aspects of Tibetan practice did not have a particular name. For scholars who called this non-Buddhist practice ‘Bon’ or ‘Bon Tantra’, see Bellezza, Zhang Zhung; Karmay, Samten and Watt, Bon; Huber, ‘Contributions

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by trained ritualists focused on ensuring that the soul of a dead person was conducted to a post-mortem land of bliss by an appropriate animal (yak, horse, sheep). Animals, along with offerings of food, drink, clothes and jewellery – and in the case of the king, even of servants and officials – accompanied the dead to ensure their comfort in the Land of the Dead and to obtain their mediation on behalf of the welfare of the living.21 Codependence of teacher and follower, the third aspect of monastic governmentality, shaped the political economy in which all these social clusters coexisted. The training of the physical bodies of disciples and lay subjects included the performance of labour. For example, from at least the second century CE, Mahayana Buddhist lineages had required male subjects to work at a range of disciplines such as clerical writing, craft-working, construction, and military labour.22 Sometimes this labour itself was a way for indigent, able-bodied young men to buy shelter and subsistence.23 So labourers were organized in terms of ordained monastics and novices, lay tenants, and merchants working with lands, animals, orchards owned by monastic lineages of teachers, and tenants and merchants leasing from laymen and laywomen. And the gift of labourers remained a very high-value gift in upland societies especially because Buddhist codes (Mulasarvastivadin vinaya) forbade the luring of the ‘property’ of laymen in their slaves to monasteries. Owned, mortgaged, sold or loaned slaves were barred from taking monastic ordination.24 Since many of the earliest slaves appear to have been female, banning the ordination of female slaves ensured that ordination lineages were masculine, but they could be reproduced by the labour of the female slaves if given as ‘gifts’ by disciples and devotees. These gifts in persons did indeed occur across the subcontinent, both singly and in groups. For instance, in the tenth century, the Tibetan Buddhist monk who was also ‘king’ of western Tibet (Gu.ge-Puh.rangs) bestowed on his teacher, the Hindu pandita Dhanashila of Kashmir (Kha.che), 208 households of ‘subjects’ under his divine rule (lha `bangs) at Mang.nang.25 Such gifts of attached lay workers to favoured teachers constituted a particular kind

on the Bon Religion’; Martin, Mandala Cosmogyny; Martin, ‘Olmo Lungring’; also Templeman, ‘Internal and External Geography’ and Snellgrove, Nine Ways of Bon. 21 For ethnographic descriptions of Bon sites and practices associated with death, see Baumer, Tibet’s Ancient Religion, pp. 9-50. 22 Silk, Managing Monks. 23 Kane, History of Dharmasastra. 24 Schopen. ‘On Some Who Are Not Allowed to Become Buddhist Monks or Nuns’, pp. 225-234. 25 Vitali, The Kingdoms of Gu.ge – Puh.rang: According to mNga’i ris rgyal.rab , pp. 116-117.

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of ‘royal’ donation practised since the earliest centuries.26 This practice of donation constituted the hallmark of generosity, a personal trait that was constituted as a requirement of kingship as a result. Individual laymen in southern India between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries therefore made identical ‘gifts’ from among especially favoured female slaves, to Hindu and Jain (non-Buddhist) monks, deities, and temples.27 These females were the tevaratiyal (Tamil for ‘devotee’; other terms used were ‘daughter of god’ and ‘temple servant’). To make such gifts was to sequester such beings from circulation, use, and abuse at the hands of lay human actors: to be thus the ‘slave of a god’, a deity or a teacher was to occupy a protected and privileged status as a result. But in hills-based societies, access to labour remained contentious. It was this political economy that was the source of conflicts between lineages of teachers at various points in the history of the subcontinent. For instance, in the ninth century, conflicts around political offices occurred between Bon-supporting and Buddhist-supporting lineages in the Tibetan Himalayan centre. This led to a round of assassinations and dispersals of mixed Mazdaist-Bon-Tantric groups to hillsides further south and east. The hillsides between Sylhet (modern northern Bangladesh) and western Burma were among such sites. In the course of the thirteenth century, various different groups were dispatched by the Central-Asian Mongol-Sakya Buddhist political regimes to settle on hills to the south, thus intensifying the pluralism of Saiva Tantric, Bon, Mahayana Buddhist, Vaisnava, and Sufi monastic and ascetic lineages in the same Himalayan and sub-Himalayan hills throughout eastern India and western Burma.28 Collocation of Mazdaist (Iranian) – Bon –Nyingmapa (Tantric) Buddhist lineages and communities made it hard to identify boundaries between each group.29 Many different terms were used by Tibetan speakers to refer to the heteroglot populations of Bonpo and Buddhist living in the hills of eastern India. The one that sprang up in both mid-nineteenth century official Company records as well as in the missionary correspondence was ‘Lushai’. The Tibetan language 26 Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters, pp. 193-218; also ‘On Some Who are Not Allowed to Become Buddhist Monks or Nuns’. 27 For extensive historical studies, see Orr, title; Ali title, pp. 44-61 in Chatterjee and Eaton (eds.) title. 28 Zieme, ‘Notes on the Religions’, pp. 177-189; Beckwith, ‘Sarvastivadin Buddhist Scholastic Method’, pp. 163-176; Buell, ‘Tibetans, Mongols and the Fusion of Eurasian Cultures, pp. 189-208; Zarcone, ‘Between Legend and History’, pp. 281-292 and Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam. 29 For the combination of Iranian and Central-Asian systems, in addition to above, see Reynolds, Oral Tradition from Zhang-Zhung.

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is a tonal one, and as a result of its historical evolution, acquired distinctly regional forms of pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary. Therefore the interpretation of the term ‘Lushai’ is a tricky enterprise for speakers of nontonal languages. In Tibetan, the identical syllable ‘lu’ can refer to a variety of nouns each of which is spelt differently. ‘Lu’ can mean serpentine spirit (Tibetan kLu) living underground, the physical body (Lus), sheep (Lukh), older customs and manners (lukhs). The same holds true for the phoneme ‘shay’: only tonally would one be able to distinguish between its range of meanings from consciousness (shes), thought, ideas, intentions (bzhed), song or music (khzhas) to honouring or respecting (bzher). Therefore the term ‘Lushai’ could refer to all aspects of these terms. At one and the same time, then, the term could refer either to those who honoured older Tibetan and imperial norms and customs, or were physically strong, or were choral singers, shepherds, or worshippers of spirits of a netherworld. Reflective of collocation of such groups of overlapping occupational, spiritual, and cultural aspects, the terrain that such groups traversed has long been shaped by a variety of monastic institutions. On the plains, with riverine depots and warehouses, greater resources permitted a greater variety of monastic governments. Some were very large institutions, containing various levels of ordination for novices and monks. Others were much smaller ‘forest’-dwelling units. In the foothills of the Himalayas in eastern India and western Burma, Tibeto-Burman using Bonpo and Buddhist institutions appeared to be smaller institutions. Moreover, they lived alongside the establishments of Saiva tantric yogis. The discipline of monastic celibacy was required of the novitiate in particular, the stage before the full ordination of all Bon and Buddhist monks. This was how celibacy came to be associated with the training of monks in a society made up of lay subjects of Bon and Buddhist monks, laymen who coexisted with Saiva and Sufi householder monasticism in the southern Himalayas.

Sustaining the Monks and Hermitages of the Forests: Women’s Work A blinker that shapes the historiography of race, sex, and class in the encounters between Asian and European societies is an always already lay patriarchal and patrilineal social organization. This means taking for granted that men worked for wages outside the home and were free; women who worked within homes were ‘dependents’ of wage-earning men. Very different work regimes existed in the hillsides of eastern India at the

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same time where monastic governments flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All eastern Indian hillsides grew crops by broadcast seeding as well as by terracing methods. Both rice and cotton were grown by such means, and women were the key actors in such cultivation. As a result, women laboured at a variety of outdoor manual tasks. Officers who had visited the winter capital of a Himalayan Buddhist monastic lineage had been struck by the women who cultivated the terraced cornfields. It was mainly women who planted, weeded, harvested, and performed a ‘thousand laborious offices, exposed themselves to hardships and inclement weather’.30 Such officers noted the lack of a separation between ‘domestic’ and ‘external’ work and the absence of a sexual division of labour; women, like men, also worked as transporters or ‘coolies’. In the 1780s, a Company official observed women in Sylhet carrying cloths, iron, cotton, and fruits ‘from the mountains’ of Assam for sale to the plains. These women carried back considerable quantities of salt, rice, and dry fish, which were in extremely short supply in the Himalayan foothills. Colonial observers described the men of these groups accompanying the women ‘with arms to defend them from insult.’ These officers referred to such groups as ‘my Tartar friends’ while detailing the method of transportation: ‘women in baskets supported by a belt across the forehead, the men walking by their side, protecting them with their arms’.31 Curiously, accounts collected nearly a century later from vernacular sources from the same regions remembered narrative of migration from Tibetan highlands to southern Himalayan foothill societies in the same way. Women and female children constituted the literal centre of what were visualized as processions. As one account visualized it, ‘the women and children were in the middle, before and behind [them were] the brave chieftains and warriors strong’.32 The women carried the implements of cultivation – the short axes (dahs), hoes, the seeds, and the brass cymbals, yak tails and harps; the men carried the implements of war – the swords and shields.33 30 Turner, Account of an Embassy, pp. 180-181. 31 Robert Lindsay, Collector of Sylhet, to Board of Revenue, 14 December 1787. Sylhet District Records, vol. 2, p. 205. 32 Rongmuti ‘Traditional Account of the Garos’. 33 The continuance of this pattern is suggested by all colonial records of the early twentieth century. For descriptions of female traders and transporters between Tibet and north Bengal and Calcutta, see Waddell, Lhasa and its Mysteries, p. 102; for baggage ‘packed and shouldered by sturdy Bhutia women who obligingly undertake the duties of pack animals’, see Dundas, Lands of the Thunderbolt, p. 15.

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In treating the centrality of female producers of crops of consumption and exchange and the marginality and exteriority of male soldiers and guards, these legends actually described societies that had existed even in the midnineteenth century in the sub-Himalayan world. Non-official geologists and botanists roaming these areas had described identically organized societies, even when they did not recognize the ubiquity, longevity or coherence of this pattern. For instance, Hooker, a mid-century botanist roaming in the Sub-Himalayan foothills (of pre-annexation Sikkim, presently northern Bengal) observed the identical pattern of women labouring in the house, the field, and on the march. But by the mid-century, these non-official observers suffered from two constraints. An influential and trans-Atlantic evangelical discourse of abolitionism (of slavery) shaped their language, and made them represent all exchanges of service or cash in a social relationship as immoral ‘purchase’. Second, when describing gender regimes based on the centrality of female labour, they nevertheless assumed the perspective of the male in these societies. Hooker thus described marriages in which ‘the wife [was] purchased by money, or by service rendered to the future father-in-law’.34 Historians who repeat the androcentric language of mid-century geologists without translation incur major conceptual and analytical risks. They risk not recognizing the extent to which women’s labour was indeed the article of value in these societies. That was why indigenous legends of migration also emphasized that access to such high-value service depended on the transfer of equivalent goods or service as ‘wealth’ from the grooms’ households to the houses of the brides.35 We will refer to this for the rest of this chapter as bride wealth. The taking of a woman without transferring bride wealth to her family implied either that this was a ‘theft’ of a cultivator, or that the woman had herself lost dignity vis-à-vis the village’s pool of labourers.

The Making of Welsh Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth Century As industrialization took hold in Britain from the end of the eighteenth century, the pressure on agrarian poor in the British Isles escalated. From the 1830s especially, Welsh Calvinist and Methodist working classes struggled 34 Hooker, Himalayan Journals vol. 1, pp. 99-100. 35 Rongmuti ‘Traditional Account of the Garos’.

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against their largely Anglican landlords in Britain.36 The extrusion of such working-class men out of the countryside provided the context in 1840, when the first Welsh Calvinist Methodist missionary set off for Cherrapanji (currently Meghalaya, but known in the nineteenth century as ‘Khasi’ Hills). Such missions to ‘foreign’ societies, aimed at saving ‘heathen’ souls there, drew the intensity of class struggles away from the English countryside and left Anglican landlords to install regimes of agrarian capitalism within Britain. Yet when despatched to the colony, the largely rural working-class missionaries constituted a socially subordinate group to the largely Anglican British military officers of more prosperous middle-class origins. At the same time, these foreign missions also strengthened nonconformist nationalism among the Welsh by encouraging the combination of Calvinistic church organization with Methodist adherence to the theory of divine redemption earned through good works. It was here that the export of working classes from the British Isles to the British colonies contributed to the early ‘off-shoring’ of Britishness as a racialized enterprise. Right from the outset, this required severe disciplining of the self by colonial missionaries. For instance, in 1847, the Welsh Calvinist missionaries in Company-held Cherrapanji expelled an elderly Welsh widower missionary because he set up a f ifteen-year-old Indian-born girl (named Emma Catell) in his household.37 Even though such expulsion revealed the limits of ‘election’, dissenting churchmen consolidated racism by policing the constitution of heteronormative households within their own communities first. By excluding mixed households from the benefits of ethnic communion, such missionary discipline shored up their status of being perfect rule-keepers vis-à-vis both Church and non-church audiences. Such disciplinary actions against former members of the community also shored up the claims of missions to mediate between official colonial bureaucracies in the cantonments and towns and the rural subjects of such colonial governments. These actions confirmed the parity of missionary civilian ‘discipline’ with the racialized legal regimes of the army and colonial bureaucracy in early twentieth-century India and Burma. Since both Anglican officials and Evangelical missionary alike idealized the sacrament of church-based ‘Christian’ marriage, by the mid-nineteenth century, such Evangelical missionaries were therefore employed as on-site supervisors of Indian workers’ morals in many private colonial tea plantations as well as officially-sponsored building or irrigation sites. The supervisory authority of such missionaries, 36 Williams, ‘Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission’. 37 May, ‘Sex and Salvation’.

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most obviously enacted in policing inter-racial sexual relationships, also could be deployed to yoke the non-compliant to a colonial taxation regime.

After Tea Climbed the Himalayan Foothills The 1840s to 1870s were also the time in which a substantial majority of sub-Himalayan societies were forced to revise their relationships with all aspects of their physical environment. This was due to a convergence of unforeseen events. The monopoly of trade enjoyed by the English East India Company was legally ended by British Parliament in 1833, just as a former soldier employed by the Company in Assam successfully cultivated a tea plantation. As the price of tea in European markets boomed, the ability of private British merchants and proto-capitalists to buy land in eastern hills also expanded. Therefore, a large number of societies in these lower Himalayan societies found themselves confronted by aggressive plantationowners in the 1840s to 1870s. British arms stood behind the lands that were now given over to privately funded European commercial agriculture in the hillsides. This did not necessarily change older structures and organization of labour in the hillsides, but it certainly put pressure on them. In the late nineteenth century, women’s presence in the labour of transport and agriculture was used by incoming British colonial militaries sent to administer these regions. Taxation policies reflected just how solidly women’s labour in agriculture was taken into differential tax rates for the married and the unmarried. For instance, when all the eastern-most hills were annexed (from Burmese monastic and other authorities), colonial tax-collecting regulations for the Arakan Hills Districts in 1875 established that a tax of one rupee be paid by ‘each family of cultivator’ for each swidden field (taungya in Tibetan, jhum in Hindustani Bengali) cultivated every year along with a ‘tribute’ of one rupee per year per family.38 ‘Families’ of cultivators implied women. Apparently, it was taken for granted that men with access to cultivator women were richer and able to pay greater amounts in tax. Thus the Burma Land Revenue Act of 1876 had levied a higher capitation tax on married men (five rupees per year) and only half that sum on the single males.39

38 British Burma Code, pp. 179-181. 39 Ibid., pp. 142-162.

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At the same time, colonial annexation also implied a shift in land use. Alongside tea plantations, some of the plots of land on these hillsides were gifted to Evangelical missions. After tea plantations and missionary enterprise took over the lower elevations, the timber-rich higher elevations were ‘reserved’ for government use alone. Such shifts heightened vulnerability to periodic food shortages especially since local populations could not replenish food stocks by resort to such reserved forests. In 1881, the bamboo flowered and encouraged rats that ate right through the standing rice crop. Famine followed in 1882. 40 By 1885, these vulnerabilities were exacerbated by the British colonial annexation of the hillsides extending from Upper Burma. Hunger and devotion combined to sharpen the fierce resistance that many offered to the British regime. However, British imperial dominance over this resistance took many forms. Road building was one of them. From 1891, railway building was added to the mix. Roads were to be constructed to link Chittagong directly to parts of Upper Burma, and they would pass through the hills and valleys of the regions to the west of Burma. These hills of northern Arakan and parts of Akyab were administratively reorganized with parts of the southern Kachar hills, and called Lushai Hills. Populations on these hillsides became especially vulnerable to labour demands for road building in the aftermath of the annexation. Labour services had been given by men and women under precolonial regimes, as well. But these labour services were high-value goods: offered, as Hooker had already shown, as advances to a household in order to become an in-married kinsman. Elsewhere, labour services were either paid as commutations of fines, or as direct tax payable by ordinary indigent folks in lieu of cash or grain taxes or as ‘donations’ to lords. Those to whom the indigent labourer paid such personal services were also well-known figures in the local community ‒ the local monastery’s head monk, ascetic warrior, teacher, lay lord. Face-to-face relationships existed between those who were waited upon and those who performed the labour service. Labour services, redolent of co-dependence of payee and recipient, could always be commuted against other kinds of payments ‒ in grain, cattle, trade-goods, or cash. 41 By demanding that every household supply both cash or grain and labour service, colonial rulers had already begun to collapse older distinctions of status and intimacy in the 1870s to 1890s.

40 Different varieties of bamboo flower in cycles of different lengths ‒ most in twenty to eighty-year cycles. 41 Davis, Gazetteer of the North Lushai Hills, pp. 8-12.

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Though English officers and non-officials alike lacked the language to describe the institutions they presided over, their descriptions suggested that bride wealth had continued to be a vital aspect of the organization of labour in many sub-Himalayan communities in the late nineteenth century as well. For instance, in 1882, a fairly long-serving officer reported of societies in the hills of northern Arakan that post-pubertal marriages were the norm in those parts (a girl at seventeen and a man at twenty to twenty-one), but he described the payments made by the male suitor to the woman’s parents as ‘dowry’ instead of bride wealth. Another military officer referred to the payments that grooms were expected to make as those of bride ‘purchase’. 42 One has to translate nomenclature rooted in late Victorian and Edwardian sensibilities into modern English academic usage to understand that the institution that both officials described, had existed in the region for a long time as bride wealth. These payments were not fixed. They depended entirely on the local status of the woman. If the betrothed was the daughter of a powerful household, as much as six hundred rupees, or the equivalent in bullocks, gayals, and spears was expected; while the form and amount demanded for daughters of commoner men was substantially less. The potential for accumulating a herd of animal wealth was greater for a household with daughters than for households without them. At the same time, officials recognized implicitly that the fact of the payments by a groom to many different members of the bride’s lineage ‒ her nearest male relative, her aunt, her elder sister, her maternal uncle, and elective male and female guardians ‒ also meant that in case of a dissolution of the marriage, all the maternal and paternal relatives had to return the sums or gifts to the groom. This feature of household formation, intimately related with the persistence of descent considerations and high bride wealth paid for a woman of a great lineage reappears in the reports of the late nineteenth-century officials in Arakan and Chittagong, or what these officials called Lushai Hills. Unknown to themselves, they echoed descriptions of the Himalayan Buddhists (called Bhutia) in 1837, which had found it no ‘uncommon thing for two or three brothers to club together and share one woman between them. The eldest brother is considered the father of what offspring may take place and the younger as uncles.’43 The same patterns were reported among the many groups living in the hills of eastern India, where officers discovered a ‘custom for the widow to become the wife of her late husband’s 42 Shakespear, ‘The Kuki-Lushai Clans’, esp. p. 381. 43 M’Cosh, Topography of Assam, p. 140.

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brothers.’44 Describing what is called by modern scholars unigenerational and bigenerational ‘levirate’ (and implies the institution of polyandry), the officer referred to a code that had been devised to keep the patterns of marriage in place. This code said, ‘if a man dies leaving a son (whether a minor or not) and a brother, the brother succeeds to the exclusion of the son, marries his brother’s widows, administers the property, pays his brother’s debts, and as soon as the son has arrived at puberty provides for his marriage. If a man dies leaving a son of age and no brother, the former inherits directly and marries his father’s widow unless she is his own mother (this is another provision for keeping the dowry in the family)’. 45 Nor were such formulations merely hypothetical. Many women who had been fugitives from the plains and plantations and had remained in these hills had done so on the basis of such household maintenance patterns. One such woman was described in southern Kachar, as first married to a man in Tetua Punji, and on his death, married to his brother. He too died and so she was asked to live at another man’s house. Her son with the first husband was assimilated in the first husband’s lineage. 46 Such expectations of widows presumed that entire lineages of males, related to each other as brother, half-brothers, cousins, nephews, and uncles lived in sufficient community with each other to have made the death of one communicable and important in the life of the others. This pattern of ‘brotherhood’ had been found in the same hills in the 1830s to 1860s, but had been discredited. The gradual discrediting of such households had adverse implications when a famine occurred in this area in the early 1880s, and was followed by war and resistance in the 1890s. Distressed economic conditions particularly heightened the value put on women’s labour in growing food. This in turn translated into an even greater emphasis on the payments of bride wealth by potential grooms. In the period after 1890, colonial disregard of these codes of household constitution ‒ the bride wealth payments in cattle wealth, the implicit polyandry, and the institutions of levirate that sons and brothers in a lineage would expect to maintain with the spouses of a brother and father ‒ was compounded by military men’s attempts to seize local females in sexual conscription. 47 A very fierce rebellion occurred in these localities as a result in the course of 1890-1893. Colonial English 44 Hughes, Hill Tracts of Arakan, p. 25. 45 Ibid., p. 30. 46 NAI, Offg Dy Commr Kachar to Secy Chief Commr Assam, 10/3/1884. 47 Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends.

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officers then turned to Welsh Calvinist preachers to ‘civilize’ these resistant Buddhist-Bon Tantric men and women.

Enter the Missionary Reverend Rowlands: The Late Nineteenthcentury Eastern Hills Despite having held grants of land in the hills of Kachar and Sylhet since 1871, missionaries belonging to the Welsh Calvinist church even two decades later were no more intimate with the gender-specific codes of the populations they lived among. Nor perhaps did they need to learn about the Bon Tantric or Buddhist systems of rituals that surrounded them. From 1890, two Baptist missionaries (Frederick W. Savidge and J. Herbert Lorrain) had been working nearby in Brahmanbaria (modern Bangladesh). 48 They had begun to learn Bengali when the post-annexation Burmese and Manipuri resistance (1885-1892) occurred everywhere in the hills, merging with the resistance among groups in the British-governed regions called Chin-Lushai Hills. News of such resistance relayed to the metropolitan orders redoubled the energies and funds of many small evangelical bodies. One of these was the Arthington Trust at Leeds, which began to sponsor specifically hill-focused missionary work. This trust sponsored Lorrain and Savidge’s establishment in the newly established British province called Lushai Hills, where they were sent in 1894. By 1899, they had been joined by two other Welshmen. One was Edwin Rowlands, and the other was David Evan Jones. Like the Baptists of the late eighteenth century who came to India, the majority of the early Welsh missionaries also originated from the working poor in the late nineteenth century. Documents in the keeping of descendants of one of the missionary Lorrain brothers include a seventeen-year-old boy’s indenture bond from 1897.49 According to this bond, the youth Reginald Lorrain was apprenticed to a female greengrocer in the county of Surrey. The unpublished diary of the same man lists his travels from 1899 to 1902 working at a variety of agricultural and ranching jobs between Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada) and Houston (Texas). In the course of four years, this one man had held a variety of hard labouring jobs ploughing, harrowing, haymaking, building sod stables, tending stock, laying rails on the Canadian 48 Kyle, Lorrain of the Lushais, pp. 9-10. 49 Apprenticeship indenture, 8 February 1897 between James Lorrain, father of Reginald Lorrain. Unpublished diary of Reginald Lorrain in the keeping of Reverend Mark Lha Pi and Mrs Violet Lha Pi, Serkawr. I am grateful to the Lha Pi family for allowing me to read the diary.

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Pacific Railway, building roads, cutting wood in lumber camps in the backwoods of Ontario, and sorting timber for saw mills. This biographic profile is important both for the mechanical skills such missionaries brought to their work as well as for understanding the nature of the poverty that beset these missionaries. Poverty constituted their saving grace and their cross at the same time. It put them at a disadvantage with their middle-class social superiors, the Anglican officers of the British Indian army. But their presence enabled the British Government of India to gesture at the provision of healthcare, educational, and medical services at very low cost to the exchequer. Welsh working-class missionaries were expected to supervise and provide such services on the basis of a very small subsidy provided by the Government of India. Thus Welsh missionaries in the colonial empire were encouraged to identify themselves as lower-level administrators in a British imperial order, dependents of socially superior British and Anglican military governors who controlled their purse strings. Yet their poverty of resources impeded the actual delivery of much care. Welsh Presbyterian missionaries accepted as much when one of them admitted his own ‘medical incompetency’, his linguistic inability and financial distress, and the cumulative effect that these had in turning away scores of people from the humble missionary dispensary.50 The burden on such missionaries was that they were expected to subscribe to a discourse of racialized superiority that elevated a middle-class domesticity to a pinnacle of civilizational achievement: the missionary’s poverty and inability to emulate his Anglican superior set up many minute irritations between the officers and the missionaries. On the other hand, their assimilation to the racialized supremacy of patrilineal and patriarchal households ensured that the missionaries in the sub-Himalayan hillsides remained distant from the gender codes of their neighbours in the hills. Thus the Welsh Calvinist missionaries, too, did not appreciate the labouring patterns and rhythms that women were expected to follow as the chief food growers and preparers and men as the guardians of crops and cultivators: one noted disapprovingly that single young men only watched ‘while women worked in the fields […] the men do not work in their fields as they should’.51 While poverty set such missionaries apart from their Anglican social superiors, their androcentrism tied these men together in a common 50 Report by Rev. T. W. Reese for 1898 for Sylhet. Thanzauva, Reports of the Foreign Mission, p. 61. 51 K. Thanzauva, Reports of the Foreign Mission, p. 35.

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incomprehension of local values of bride wealth and subsequent household forms and dignities. Disapproving missionaries in eastern India opposed bride wealth transfers on the understanding that these were ‘purchases’. Evangelical attacks on ‘child marriages’ reveal that these men had little to no understanding of the crucial role of time – of generations and life cycles as well as of crop calendars and grazing seasons – in the guarantees sought by households with able-bodied daughters and sisters as ‘child’ marital-betrothal compacts with labour or cattle or grain-rich households in the countryside. Thus they understood nothing of the place of goods, animals, and services that were transacted in bride-wealth transfers which missionaries called ‘purchase’ or officials called ‘dowries’. Many missionaries thus could not explain the failures of their own Church-blessed unions repeatedly in the hills. As one lamented, ‘several of the Christians who had been married according to British law and in a religious service had separated again. The majority of them appear to think that there is no force in the marriage contract unless some dowry is given by the bridegroom to the wife’s family’.52 The absence of bride wealth had become especially vexed in a society attempting to recover from loss of resources, death by famine, war, and disease all converging in the 1890s-1900s. Missionary incomprehension of the salience of bride wealth was thus manifest when one of their own men became the object of local men’s complaints in 1906. A handwritten note written by a missionary called David Evans Jones to Edwin Rowlands on 8 August 1906 suggests that the latter had already had some trouble with girls in his charge.53 The note referred to local girls named Pawngi, Shiamkungi, and Thankungi, all of whom were being sent away from Rowlands’ house to another married missionary’s care. But Jones warned Rowlands, ‘never have anything to do with any girl privately unless you mean to marry her’. A little later, in 1906, came the letter this chapter began with.

Missionary Elders Educate the Novice: ‘Love’ and Civilization Male missionary elders, fellow Welshmen, were sent from the capital of the state, Shillong, and from Sylhet to investigate the complaint. They were torn between believing and dismissing the charge of fornication. Thus in 1906, too, those churchmen who dismissed the locals’ letter explained the growth 52 Ibid., p. 47. 53 D.E. Jones to Mr Rowlands, 8 August 1906. CMA 27, 314.

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of such accusations in the peculiarly fervid and sexualized imaginations of the ‘natives of India’. ‘It is unthinkable to them that any man can touch a girl of age with the tip of his finger and at the same time remain pure’.54 But the real reason that this complaint arose was that Mr Rowlands ‘is in love with Thankungi and would marry her tomorrow if he could see his way clear’. Other elders of the church agreed. The younger colleague’s dilemma arose because he was ‘much in love with Thankungi’, the sixteen or seventeenyear-old young woman at the heart of this impasse. It was love that had impelled the younger man’s failure to pursue a suitable marriage among his own class and ethnicity. Rowlands, this elder urged, needed to get married: ‘it is most important that he should have a European wife’.55 Another elder put it even more crudely: ‘it is preposterous that he should have allowed himself to love a girl who is so low in the scale of civilisation and is not yet baptised’.56 Was this historically another instance of a love that dare not speak its name, a love across the colour lines of the colony? It is an impossible question to answer partly due to the absence of the girl’s testimony as well as the lack of a confessional voice in the correspondence of the young Welshman with his Church elders and senior missionaries. Perhaps the consciousness of his social transgression was acute enough for him to avoid further confessions of love. Perhaps the more important issue for such a church man was not an affective state called love, but the conduct of a sacrament and set of obligations identified with marriage. The latter was his avowed concern in his correspondence. Writing from the mission complex in the hills of eastern India, Rowlands spoke of having seriously tried to press his suit of marriage on one of his own (ethnic) kind during a trip to Wales.57 The suit had yielded no result. Six months later, when the furore had not died down and he was summoned to Wales again, the missionary’s defence of his actions echoed many of the class-and- race specific concerns that his seniors had already articulated. Unlike them, however, he never once used to describe his feelings for the young girl at the centre of this drama as ‘love’.58 As for the girl, his note outlined that she had been the eldest of several children in a rather poor family that came from the interior of the 54 Ibid., Robert Jones to Mr Williams, Shillong, 8 June 1907. 55 Ibid., D. E. Jones to Mr Williams, Aijal, 13 December 1906. 56 Ibid., Robert Evans to D. E. Jones, Summer 1907. 57 Ibid., Edwin Rowlands to Mr Williams, 31 May 1907. 58 Ibid., Rowlands to Williams, 10 December 1907. Rowlands had been summoned to Wales by the Directors of the Mission and was living at Pensarn Abergele at the time of writing this letter.

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country to the English military cantonment recently established at Aijal. Rowlands had kept her, along with one of her brothers, in a two-room hutment which local men called an orphanage, but which he, the missionary, called home. In time, as he put it, he came ‘to feel very kindly towards her’. But his commitment to maintaining ethnic boundaries was uppermost, at least as far as his public address to his seniors was concerned. For Rowlands confessed that had the girl in his care been a European, he might have asked his directors in Europe to give him permission to marry her. ‘Her being Indian however and knowing from observation the peculiar disabilities of offspring of mixed marriages one felt less freedom. Otherwise one would probably have asked to be allowed to follow the example of […] Dr Mackay, of Formosa, the present senior missionary of the Canadian Presbyterian Church, whose wife is native’.59 For all his ‘kindly’ feelings towards the girl he had fostered, the missionary did not think of this young woman as either his marriageable equal or even as an agent in all the arrangements of her residence and employment. It appears that those men and boys who accused Rowlands of ‘fornication’ in 1906 had understood something that they could not name outright. But were the other missionaries, who presumed to judge Rowlands, any more sensitive towards the observations of rituals and customs of a woman-centred society? Were they in fact looking at Rowlands’ conduct from the perspective of a locally born girl who might need very different codes of conduct from her employers if she was to be accorded any dignity by her kinsmen? The correspondence among the Welsh missionaries does not suggest that they did. Two aspects of the correspondence jump out at the reader: there is absolutely no mention in the missionary’s correspondence to having attempted to pay any bride wealth for the young woman he had kept in the house. A second feature of the intramissionary correspondence was that there was general agreement among 59 Ibid. The reference was to George Leslie Mackay, a Scottish immigrant to Canada ordained as a missionary in Edinburgh in 1871, who was sent to the predominantly Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, and Malay Muslim populations who lived on old ‘Formosa’ or modern Taiwan, off the east coast of China. For a photograph of his local wife and three children with no explanation, see Mackay, From Far Formosa. For the mere name of this local Formosan, see Macgregor/Keith, Black Bearded Barbarian, p. 215. This silence is especially significant in the context of the marital strategies among the two major cultural groups among whom Mackay lived for most of his adult life: one, the Chinese, practised the mui jai system, in which betrothed young daughters-in-law were acclimated and trained in the households of their prospective mothers-in-law till they were mature enough to conduct sexual relationships with their husbands. The other group, Malays, also had strong matrilineal traditions and bride-wealth payments. But we know nothing of how these structures impinged on the Canadian missionary’s marriage.

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the missionaries that local men had complained against the missionary because they were all greedy. Rowlands suggested that the complainants were mission-fostered ‘country teachers’ who wanted better wages and lesser hours than he allowed. In his words, these teachers-in-training considered him ‘too strict’.

Monastic Subjects Attempt to Educate a European Novice as a Good ‘Monk’ The testimony of the complainants suggests very little rancour of the sort implied by their missionary superiors. Summoned to record their evidence by a mission-appointed body of enquiry, none of the complainants referred to acrimony over wages and hours. Their testimony outlines a picture of the Welshmen’s imperviousness to local codes of gender. These codes distinguished sharply between pubertal and post-pubertal norms of deportment for all unwed girls and young women. These were norms that in turn shaped the structures of monastic asceticism as well as enhanced the value of bride wealth in lay marriage. Thus a young woman named Nui, who had arrived at the missionary’s home as a child and grown into puberty there over seven years testified that Mr Rowlands insisted ‘on treating me after I had grown up as if I was a little girl or his wife… petting me after I had grown up as he did when I was small. I resented it but he kept on doing it putting his hands on my breasts […] (I) told him he was acting in a way unworthy of a missionary’.60 Rowlands would dismiss this as ‘hysterical’ behaviour in a girl. In this dismissal, he betrayed the extent to which the local codes of gender had escaped him altogether. First, both Bon and Buddhist novice monks, especially during their period of novitiatehood, were required to maintain celibacy very strictly. Subsequently, in some instances, especially among the Gelukspa, if some ordained monks needed to break their vows of celibacy for some reason or another, they could do so with the permission of the abbots in the monastic hierarchy under whom they lived and worked. Thus, as Hooker had found in the Dubdi monastery in the late 1840s, even the head of a monastery could be ordered to perform a penance for having ‘found himself surrounded by a family’ without having first obtained a dispensation from his monastic seniors.61 60 Testimony of Witnesses. CMA 27, 314, p. 9. 61 Hooker, Himalayan Journals, p. 234.

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These were the identical codes that young adolescent boys gestured at when assessing Mr Rowlands’ behaviour vis-à-vis the various girls he had taken on as disciples in his own household. A thirteen-year old Lakunga testified that when Mr Rowlands held classes at night in a room that doubled as both school and missionary home, the young boy heard someone else there in the dark and was told subsequently by Thangkungi herself that she was there. He delivered a very balanced assessment of the local views on Rowlands: ‘We all feel that he is doing wrong in conducting himself as he does with the girls, but in other matters we praise him. […] I personally feel that we could forget this and respect him as a missionary provided he ceases from those habits altogether’.62 Others were just as magnanimous. Another young man said that he had learnt of the popular distrust of the missionary because the matter had cropped up in public discussion in church and Rowlands had risen to speak about it himself. Asked his personal opinion of the missionary, Lalsalova recorded that ‘the people say that at first he was a good missionary but owing to his relation to the girls they do not want him any more […] I feel that we should forgive and forget each other’s failings. I believe the sahib would be as he was before if he were to keep clear of the girls’.63 Vanchhunga, whom the missionaries themselves considered ‘the best man’ in the hills, hinted that it was Rowlands’ unawareness of the local expectations of monastic celibacy or outright clerical marriage that was the heart of local grievances. Thus he pointed out that Mr Rowlands ‘insisted on keeping those girls in his house on his compound while he knew that all the people were suspecting him of living an immoral life’.64 Missionary correspondents amongst themselves appear to have paid no heed to local structures and expectations of novitiate self-discipline and celibacy, or indeed to the local laymen’s expectations of how monastic governments were expected to control their cadets. Nor did the Welsh missionaries appear to understand the laymen’s codes of conduct shaped by societies in which aspiring grooms transferred bride wealth before sexual cohabitation with a local young woman. In being oblivious to both sets of expectations, the Welsh Calvinist missionaries revealed the superficial nature of their engagement with the political, social or ethical concerns of the societies they had been deputed to tend by colonial military officers. 62 Testimony of Witnesses. CMA 27, 314, p. 6. 63 Ibid, p. 7. 64 Ibid, pp. 4-5.

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Conclusion: Codes that Did Not Translate across the EuropeanAsian Encounter The inability to see the world through the eyes either of the laymen whose job it had once been to guard women, or of the women whose labour centred these societies, did circulate around the globe as historical practice. However, it should also give all historians of the European-Asian encounter in South Asia some pause. It should put all of us on guard that we do not replicate the blind spots of the Welsh elders, most of whom were male and white. The missionary elders had simply held up a racialized discourse of ‘civilizational’ parity required in matters of ‘love’. When the errant junior missionary refused to fall in line, the elders merely asked that the novice be expelled. All that happened was that the disenfranchised missionary simply moved to a contiguous part of the subcontinent and acquired another congregation. In 1910, Rowland left the Calvinist Mission and joined the American Baptist Mission in order to teach the seventh grade in that mission’s high school at Mandalay (Burma or modern Myanmar). He was heard of ten years later from another missionary from yet another orphanage – this time, in the heart of central India, a place called Ellichpur in Berar.65 The letter writer complained that he had been deceitfully recruited to work for another Evangelical mission called the ‘Thado Kuki Pioneer Mission’ in eastern India at a place called Manipur (on the border between British Assam and British Burma). There he found Reverend Edwin Rowlands as his fellow missionary and heard of ‘some scandal in consequence of his attachment to a Lushai girl’. As this second round of missionary complaints against Rowlands suggests, the Calvinist missionary had ‘continued to visit the Lushai woman at her village during the following weeks, whole weekends being spent there’. Thangkhuni’s presence in the life – and household – of the European missionary nearly two decades later is significant. For one, in 1906, she had never been asked to testify to her own wishes by the elder missionaries in the hills. Nor had she been asked to testify to the character of the missionary she lived with or served. Since she had been entirely absent as an acknowledged actor in the missionary archives of 1905-1906, her invisibility could lead 65 Unsigned letter to Mr Crowe, dated 27 February 1924. CMA 27, 314. Ellichpur was the heart of a fifteenth-century Turko-Persian Bahamani Sultanate. By the eighteenth century, as the gazetteers of Maharashtra establish, it had evolved into a flourishing centre of cotton and silk manufactures, with solid crafts traditions in woodcarving and stone work. Competition with the power loom transformed the region by the early twentieth century into a producer of raw cotton, and an erstwhile Buddhist pilgrimage, Amravati, into a major outlet for the raw cotton.

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postcolonial and feminist historians of these encounters in South Asia to also misconstrue her long attachment to the European male as a form of false consciousness, an inability to name her relationship to colonialism correctly. Yet framing Thangkhuni’s continued attachment in this light might simply betray our own conceptual fallacies about love as merely a layman or woman’s emotion. It betrays our own incomprehension of the multiple aspects of ‘devotional love’ that monastic subjects could also cultivate towards their revered teachers and icons. Consider too the long histories of the subcontinent in which a young woman ‘gifted’ to a monk or an icon was both considered beyond access to ordinary men as well as committed permanently to a face-to-face relationship with the icon or the deified teacher. Far from seeing Rowlands as the manifestation of patriarchal privilege, Thungkangi’s long-enduring attachment to the man who would be a monk may well have been based in this kind of privileged ‘subject-hood’ of a revered teacher. Only from such an alternate monastic subjectivity can we then understand the import of the second complaint. As the letter of 1924 tells us, Rowlands’ habits were referred ultimately to a businessman in Calcutta, who stopped the payment of his salary. Within six weeks, this suspension achieved its goal. It brought the offending missionary to his Calcutta paymaster, to accept the unwisdom of his ‘affection for the woman’. After the missionary had ‘agreed to cease supporting her altogether and not to communicate with her or her people’, he was allowed to take up mission work once more. As this denouement of Rowlands’ affairs reveals, it was a rich layman, a donor of the church, who could finally ‘discipline’ the missionary, not the poor laymen of the hills, nor the church Elders. However, if the relationship with Thangkungi could be abandoned at the arm-twisting of the rich businessman in Calcutta, then what kind of relationship had it been to begin with? Had the missionaries been asking the wrong question all along of Rowlands’ ‘love’ for the young girl? Should they have been asking of the young woman’s permanent commitment to a teacher instead? Neither postcolonial cultural historians nor missionary historians have suggested that such interracial heterosexual relationships needed to be framed within codes of morality-cum-legality outside of post-Reformation Christianity, industrialized society’s patriliny or codes of ethnicity. Without framing alternative starting points for such investigations, all historians risk repeating the miscognition of the twentieth-century Churchmen. They risk replaying the hostility towards propertied women’s monastic oblation that was played out in British Indian government in the form of anti-devadasi legislation during and after the 1920s. They also risk repeating an older missionary blinker about the centrality of women’s labour and its valuations

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through practices of bride wealth and levirate in many societies in the empire. As this chapter has attempted to demonstrate, issues of labour, marriage, and bride wealth were political decisions taken in collective assembly. Behind a single letter of protest against a missionary Welshman’s ‘fornication’ lay a collective political will, articulating inchoately its entire structure of expectations about temporal wealth, power, and its distribution as well as of appropriate codes of monastic decorum and restraint. Thus a complaint about sexual disorder was in effect a political statement and critique of a Welsh missionary. The missionary’s Welsh and English peers treated the complaint in terms that echoed both the racialized structures of the empire, as well as that of an ideology of ‘love’ and domesticity that the letter writers had not articulated. The Bonpo, Buddhists, and Vaisnava or Saiva Hindu’s expectations of a novice for ordination, or the expectation of a newly ordained monk are seldom treated as the starting point of any historical enquiry into colonial sexual structures. But surely, such structures and codes of monastic governmentality were just as important to take into account as the failures and lapses thereof. Without taking these alternative non-Christian monastic codes into account, all historians of the EuropeanAsian encounter are left merely reinscribing their own presumptions of post-Reformation and industrialized European values back into Asian pasts and characterizing it as ‘local’ belief. This then repeats the major cognitive gaps from the historical past, such as that which lay between the pastors and their flock in 1906, and consolidates it in the present. Instead, the failure of the pastors should help historians probe the extent to which serving the empire limited the potential of both communication and exchange within members of the same church. But at the same time, these moments of conflict reveal the interlocking systems of privilege that undergirded the working of foreign missions in the British Empire. Finally, this moment in the failure of cross-cultural communication, also allows historians of either one of these societies to ask whether there was more that these societies had in common which had not been adequately or fully translated either by observers then or later. Was it possible that Rowlands’ resemblance to the undisciplined Bon, Buddhist novice was not mere happenstance, but learned by observation of local Bon, Buddhist, Tantric Saiva monks in his vicinity? Had these relationships simply mirrored each other and never publicly been avowed as analogues? If they had, then perhaps feminist historians in both Europe and Asia can begin to rewrite the history of monasticism from the standpoint of the household of the laity. They might then allow us to re-emphasize the centrality of the household to local populations’ assessments of men who would be ‘monks’.

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Bibliography Unpublished Sources National Library of Wales, Aberstywyth, Manuscript Collections, Church Missionary Archives (CMA). National Archives of India (NAI), External Affairs, October 1884, no. 377.

Published and Secondary Sources Aksoy, A., C. Burnett and R. Yoeli-Tlalim (eds.), Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011). Baumer, C., Tibet’s Ancient Religion: Bon. Translated by Michael Kohn (Trumbull CT and Bangkok: Weatherhill and Orchid Press, 2002). Beckwith, C., ‘The Sarvastivadin Buddhist Scholastic Method in Medieval Islam and Tibet’ in B. Aksoy and R. Yoeli-Tlalim (eds.), Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 163-176. J.V. Bellezza, Zhang Zhung, Foundations of Civilization in Tibet (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008). Bhattacharya, G., ‘The Munificence of Lady Catuhsama’ in G. Bhattacharya (ed.), Aksaynivi: Eassays Presented to Dr. Debala Mitra in Admiration of her Scholarly Contributions (New Delhi: Satguru Publications, 1991), pp. 313-322. —, ‘An Inscribed Image of a Saivacarya from Bengal’ in E. Haque (ed.), Essays on Buddhist, Hindu, Jain Iconography (Dhaka, Bangladesh: International Centre for the Study of Bengal Art, 2000), pp. 309-313. —, ‘A New Pithipati’ in E. Haque (ed.), Essays on Buddhist, Hindu, Jain Iconography (Dhaka, Bangladesh: International Centre for the Study of Bengal Art, 2000), pp. 455-457. Buell, P.D., ‘Tibetans, Mongols and the Fusion of Eurasian Cultures’ in A. Aksoy, C. Burnett and R. Yoeli-Tlalim (eds.), Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 189-208. Chatterjee, I., ‘Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, Postcolonial Amnesia’, The History of the Present 3:1 (2013), pp. 57-96. —, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). Chatterjee, N., The Making of Indian Secularism: Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830-1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Cox, J., Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940. With Introduction by D.G.E. Hall (London: J. Warren, 2002). Dalrymple, W., White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (London: Harper Collins, 2002). Davis, A.W., Gazetteer of the North Lushai Hills Compiled Under Orders of Chief Commissioner of Assam (Shillong: Assam Secretariat Printing Office, 1894). Debbarma, S., Origin and Growth of Christianity in Tripura with Reference to the New Zealand Baptist Missionary Society 1938-1988 (New Delhi: Indus Publishing, 1996). Dena, L., Christian Missions and Colonialism: A Study of Missionary Movement in Northeast India with Particular Reference to Manipur and Lushai Hills 1894-1947 (Shillong: Vendrame Institute, 1988).

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Downs, F.S., Essays on Christianity in North-east India (New Delhi: Indus Publishing, 1994). Dundas, L.J.L. Lands of the Thunderbolt: Sikhim, Chumbi and Bhutan (London: Constable and Company, 1923). Elverskog, J., Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Firminger, W.K. (ed.), Sylhet District Records, 4 vols. (Shillong: Assam Secretariat, 1914). Fox Young, R. (ed.), India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding – Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical – in Honor of Robert Eric Frykenberg (Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 2009). Foucault, M., The Government of the Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982-83, edited by Frederic Gros, translated by Graham Murchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). —, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981-82, edited by Frederic Gros, translated by Graham Murchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). —, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977). Frykenberg, R.E. (ed.), Christians and Missionaries in India: Cross-Cultural Communications since 1500 (Grand Rapids and London: Eerdmans and RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). Gellner, D.N. ‘The Newar Buddhist Monastery: An Anthropological and Historical Typology’ in N. Gutschow and A. Michaels (eds.), Heritage of the Kathmandu Valley: Proceedings of an International Conference in Lubeck, June 1985 (Sankt Augustin: VGH-Wissenschaftsverlag, 1987), pp. 365-414. Ghosh, D., Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Goldstein, D., ‘“Interracial” Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts?’, American Anthropologist 101:3 (1999), pp. 563-578. Hardiman, D., Missionaries and their Medicine: a Christian Modernity for Tribal India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Hooker, J.D., Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains etc., 2 vols. (New Delhi: Today & Tomorrow’s Printers and Publishers 1969 [1854]). Howarth, W., ‘Advocates and Arbiters: Travancore and Mysore Missionaries as Public Petitioner and Champions of Social Justice, 1806-1886’, Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology 1:2 (2010), pp. 1-19. Huber, T., ‘Contributions on the Bon Religion in A-mdo (1): The Monastic Tradition of Bya-dur dGa’mal in Shar-khog,’ Acta Orientalia 59 (1998), pp. 179-227. Hughes, W.G., The Hill Tracts of Arakan (Rangoon: Government Press, 1881). India Office, British Burma Code (Calcutta: India Office, 1877). Kane, P.V. History of Dharmasastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law), 8 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 1930-1962). Karmay, S.G. and J. Watts (eds.), Bon: The Magic Word. The Indigenous Religions of Tibet (New York: Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, 2007). Kim, J., Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Kvaerne, P., Tibet Bon Religion: A Death Ritual of Tibetan Bonpo (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985). Kyle, D., Lorrain of the Lushais: Romance and Realism on the North-east of India (London: 1944). Lhuna, J.V., Education and Missionaries in Mizoram (Gauhati: Spectrum Publications, 1992).

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MacGregor, M.E. (a.k.a. Marian Keith), The Black Bearded Barbarian: The Life of George Leslie Mackay of Formosa (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1912). Mackay, G.L., From Far Formosa: The Island, Its People and Missions. Edited by J.A. Macdonald (New York: H. Revell, 1900 [1896]). Martin, D., Mandala Cosmogyny: Human Body, Good Thought and Revelation of Secret Mother Tantras of Bon (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994). —, ‘Olmo Lungring: A Holy Place Here and Beyond’ in G. Karmay and J. Watt (eds.), Bon: The Magic Word (New York: Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, 2000), pp. 99-123. May, A.B. ‘Sex and Salvation: Modelling Gender on an Indian Mission Station’ in A. Barry et al. (eds.), Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History (Melbourne: University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, msp.esrc.unimelb.edu.au, 2008, last accessed 14 March 2012). M’Cosh, J., Topography of Assam (Calcutta: Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1837). Newell, S., ‘Devotion and Domesticity: The Reconfiguration of Gender in Popular Christian Pamphlets from Ghana and Nigeria’, Journal of Religion in Africa 35:3 (2005), pp. 296-323. Orr, L.C., Donors, Devotees and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamil Nadu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Pant, M.R. and A.D. Sharma, The Two Earliest Copper Plate Inscriptions from Nepal (Kathmandu: Nepal Research Center, 1977). Pollock, S., ‘The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory in Indian Intellectual History’, Journal of American Oriental Society 105:3 (1985), pp. 499-519. Potts, E.D., British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793-1837: The History of Serampore and its Missions (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Predelli, L.N., ‘Marriage in Norwegian Missionary Practice and Discourse in Norway and Madagascar 1880-1910’, Journal of Religion in Africa 31:1 (2001), pp. 4-48. Rangachari, D., Invisible Women, Visible Histories: Gender, Society and Polity in North India, Seventh to Twelfth Century (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009). Reynolds, J.M., The Oral Tradition from Zhang-Zhung (Kathmandu: Vajra Publications, 2005). Rongmuti, D.S. ‘A Traditional Account of the Garos’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1:1 (1933), pp. 54-60. Sanderson, A., ‘The Saiva Age: The Rise and Dominance of Saivism during the Early Medieval Period’ in S. Einoo (ed.), Genesis and Development of Tantrism (Tokyo: Institute of Oriental Culture at the University of Tokyo, 2009), pp. 4-90. Schopen, G., Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India, (University of Hawaii Press, 2004). ­—, On Some Who are Not Allowed to Become Buddhist Monks or Nuns: An Old List of Types of Slaves or Unfree Laborers’, Journal of American Oriental Society 130:2 (2010). Silk, J., Managing Monks: Administrators and Administrative Roles in Indian Buddhist Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Shakespear, J. ‘The Kuki-Lushai Clans’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 39 (1909), pp. 371-385. Snellgrove, D., The Nine Ways of Bon (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Steegstra, M., ‘A Mighty Obstacle to the Gospel: Basel Missionaries, Krobo Women and the Conflicting Ideas of Gender and Sexuality’, Journal of Religion in Africa 32:2 (2002), pp. 200-230. Stein, R.A., Tibetan Civilization. Translated by J.E. Stapleton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). Studdert-Kennedy, G., ‘Evangelical Mission and the Railway Workshop Apprentices: Instituionalising Christian Presence in Imperial Bengal, 1885-1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 33 (2005), pp. 325-348.

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Summers, C., ‘Mission Boys, Civilised Men and Marriage: Educated African Men in the Missions of Southern Rhodesia 1920-1945’, Journal of Religious History 23:1 (1999), pp. 75-101. Talbot, C., Precolonial India in Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Templeman, D., ‘Internal and External Geography in Spiritual Biography’ in T. Huber (ed.), Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places (Dharmasala: Library of Tibetan Works, 1999), pp. 187-197. Thanzauva, K., Reports of the Foreign Mission of the Presbyterian Church of Wales on Mizoram 1894-1957 (Aizawl: Synod Literary and Publication Board, 1997). Thong, T., ‘“To Raise the Savage to a Higher Level”: The Westernization of Nagas and their Culture’, Modern Asian Studies 45:1 (2011), pp. 1-26. Tucci, G. Rin-chen-bzan-po and the Renaissance of Buddhism in Tibet around the Millennium, Indo-Tibetica vol. 2, edited by Lokesh Chandra, translated by Uma Marina Vesci (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1988). Turner, S., An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet Containing a Narrative of a Journey through Bhutan and Part of Tibet (Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005 [1800]). Vitali, Roberto The Kingdoms of Gu.ge ‒ Puh.rang: According to mNga’i ris rgyal.rabs by Gu-ge Mkhan-chen Ngag-dbang-gr. (Dharamsala, India, 1996). Waddell, L.A., Lhasa and Its Mysteries: With a Record of the Expedition of 1903-04 (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1906). Williams, N.W., The Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Mission in Assam, 1930-50: with Special Reference to Missionary Attitudes to Local Society, Customs and Religion (Ph.D., University of London, 1990). Wylie, T., ‘Mar-Pā’s Tower: Notes on Local Hegemons in Tibet’, History of Religions 3:2 (1964), pp. 278-291. Zarcone, T., ‘Between Legend and History: About the Conversion to Islam of Two Prominent Lamaists in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries’ in A. Aksoy, C. Burnett and R. YoeliTlalim (eds.), Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011), pp. 281-292. Zieme, P., ‘Notes on the Religions in the Mongol Empire’ in A. Aksoy, C. Burnett and R. YoeliTlalim (eds.), Islam and Tibet – Interactions along the Musk Routes (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing).

About the Author Indrani Chatterjee is the author of Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, Memories of Northeast India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013). She is editor of Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Ranikhet and New Brunswick: Permanent Black and Rutgers University Press, 2004) and co-editor with Richard M. Eaton of Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). She has taught at Miranda House Delhi University and Rutgers University, and is currently employed as Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

7

The Catholic Church in China in the First Half of the Twentieth Century The Establishment of Zhendan University and Furen University Cindy Yik-yi Chu

Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH07 Abstract This chapter evaluates Chinese-foreign relations in the development of Christianity in China in the first half of the twentieth century. It addresses the Catholic Church and highlights both the cooperative nature of Chinese-foreign relations, which casual viewers were prone to overlook, and the co-existing disputes, which affected both the Chinese people and the foreign missionaries. Traditionally, the history of Christianity in China has largely been described as one of conflict owing to the social, cultural, and ethnic differences between Chinese and foreign missionaries. This chapter studies the interactions between Chinese intellectuals and foreign missionaries in the establishment of Zhendan University in Shanghai (1903-1952) and Furen University in Beijing (1925-1952). It argues that the history of Chinese Christianity was one of cross-cultural relations and mutual exchange. It explores the cross-cultural relations between the Chinese Christian intellectuals Ma Xiangbo, Ying Lianzhi, and Chen Yuan, and foreign Catholic missionaries.

In the early twentieth century, China was the most popular country for missionaries, Catholics and Protestants alike, to preach the Good News and to convert the local people to Christianity. Traditionally, the history of Christianity in China has largely been described as one of conflict, owing to the social, cultural, and ethnic differences between foreign missionaries and the Chinese population. This chapter critically evaluates

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Chinese-foreign relations in the development of Christianity in modern China. It addresses the Catholic Church and elucidates both the cooperative nature of Chinese-foreign relations, which casual viewers were prone to overlook, and contemporaneous disputes, which affected both the Chinese people and the foreign missionaries. This chapter examines an important contribution of the Catholic Church to China. It focuses on the concerted efforts of the Church in establishing and developing two institutions of higher elite education, which were Zhendan University (Aurora University, 1903-1952) in Shanghai and Furen University (1925-1952) in Beijing. It examines their missions and visions in providing higher education for the young generation. The two universities undertook the task of cultivating the elite for contributing to China’s modernization and upholding Catholic beliefs and values for the future. In addition, this chapter studies the interactions between Chinese intellectuals and foreign missionaries in the establishment and progression of the two universities. It shows that the history of Chinese Christianity was that of cross-cultural relations and mutual exchange as mentioned in recent scholarly works, such as Daniel H. Bays’ edited volume Christianity in China.1 Another example is Stephen Uhalley Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu’s edited book China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future.2 The subtitle well illustrates the coexistence of attachment and animosity in the account of Chinese Christianity. Uhalley notes that ‘this grand story of such an exceptional and historic intercultural encounter, featuring as it does such a provocative religious cutting edge, remains one of epic proportions’.3 He states that scholars have been focusing on ‘a longstanding and continuing drama’ of remarkable dimensions. 4 Naturally, there were cases of cooperation as well as conflict in Chinese Catholic-mission history. Most importantly, the Chinese intellectuals working with the missionaries came from elite families and were well versed in both Chinese and Western learning. This chapter will elucidate the Chinese response to the presence of foreign Catholic missionaries and vice versa. It will assess the impact of the Catholic Church on China and explain the Chinese assimilation of foreign teachings on the basis of their traditional heritage. It emphasizes the indigenization of the Catholic Church in China and recognizes the problems associated with this process. Specifically, this 1 Bays, Christianity in China. 2 Uhalley and Wu, China and Christianity. 3 Uhalley, ‘Burden Past, Hopeful Future’, p. 9. 4 Ibid., p. 3.

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chapter explores the cross-cultural interactions between three Chinese Christian intellectuals and the foreign missionaries: Ma Xiangbo (18401939), Ying Lianzhi (1867-1926), and Chen Yuan (1880-1971). Ma and Ying were Catholics, while Chen was a Protestant. This chapter describes the respective Chinese and foreign contributions to the development of elite higher education in China. At the same time, it stresses that China was facing unprecedented challenges and rapidly changing circumstances at the time. This chapter is about cross-cultural studies in the context of modernization, the development of higher education, and the indigenization of Christianity in early twentieth-century China. Historians of Chinese international relations have long engaged in crosscultural studies. Examples are Robert A. Bickers’ Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-1949; Warren I. Cohen’s The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations; and James Reed’s The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911-1915.5 These works discuss foreign individuals and communities in China, each with their own interests, motives, and agendas. As Akira Iriye points out, American-Asian interactions have been the focus of the historical studies of the cultural dimension of foreign relations. According to him, historians discuss ‘how individual Americans, mostly on private initiative, have reached across national boundaries to engage in commercial, religious, educational, and other activities overseas’.6 Iriye says, ‘Cross-cultural relations are nowhere more fascinating than in the meeting of Americans, imbued with a sense of mission and proud of the best legacies of Western civilization, and Asians with their own traditional heritage’.7 This cultural dimension is not confined to Chinese-American exchanges. In Iriye’s article ‘Culture and International History’, all countries should be considered ‘cultures when looking at their international affairs’.8 Joshua A. Fogel acknowledges Iriye’s concept of ‘international history’. This is reflected in Fogel’s The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.9 The book discusses Chinese studies in Japan as well as Japanese individuals and groups in China. 5 Bickers, Britain in China; Cohen, The Chinese Connection; and Reed, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy. 6 Iriye, ‘Culture and International History’, p. 220. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 216. 9 Fogel, The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations.

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Besides historians, scholars of comparative literature have contributed to cross-cultural studies. According to Eugene Chen Eoyang, cross-cultural exchanges have developed in two stages. His book is entitled Two-Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Studies in Glocalization. Initially, cross-cultural interactions have been understood as ‘two people looking at each other but each through the intermediary of a one-way mirror’.10 The idea of a one-way mirror is that ‘from one side, it acts like a mirror and is reflecting’ but ‘from the other side, the glass is transparent: the subject in front of the mirror can be viewed by someone unseen’.11 However, the subject could not see beyond the mirror. This applies to a foreign missionary asserting his or her presence in the missionary field in China. Subsequently, the metaphor of ‘two-way mirrors’ developed, meaning that ‘focusing on the other, reveals as much about the self’.12 It is like looking at oneself in a shop window, seeing one’s own reflection as well as the objects (or persons) behind the glass. In cross-cultural studies, the person tries to see oneself in a particular setting and observe the others at the opposite end. It could be a foreign missionary looking at him- or herself in the Chinese setting and seeing the Chinese people in their own households; or it might be a Chinese seeing his reflection in the glass and looking beyond the window of the missionaries’ house. Most importantly, evangelization became a two-way process. While the missionary preached the Good News, he or she also learned more about him- or herself and the Chinese, and experienced a kind of evangelization in this way. This second scenario of ‘two-way mirrors’ was a great step forward. However, it depended on both sides to see how effective the two-way process could be. It might not necessarily mean that two people at opposite ends could communicate with each other. And if they did, it did not say how well or in what measure one person interacted with another. Next, the idea of glocalization emerged, meaning that one should ‘think global and act local’.13 Eoyang employs this definition, as do many other scholars. While some historians emphasize cross-cultural studies, Iriye elevates the topic to that of ‘international history’. Scholars of comparative literature engage in cross-cultural analysis, and Eoyang extends his research to that of ‘glocalization’. International history recognizes the interactions of world cultures, bilaterally, and multilaterally. Glocalization acknowledges 10 Eoyang, Two-Way Mirrors, p. ix. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 177.

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global missions and down-to-earth contacts between different peoples and institutions. Contemporary theologians further explore the process of glocalization. Protestant theologian Bob Roberts Jr. publishes Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World in 2007. He says, ‘A new civilization – ‘Glocalization’ – was forming’.14 According to him, ‘“Glocal” is another term for the flat earth that describes the seamless integration between the local and global’.15 Roberts writes, ‘Glocal connects everyone, […] it doesn’t do away with anyone’s culture and customs’.16 He might be over-optimistic to think that glocalization can lead to the integration of every people. However, he stresses connection in cross-cultural exchange and international history. Catholic theologian Robert J. Schreiter argues that catholicity recognizes the cultural heritage of different peoples and the importance of communication in the mission fields. His book is entitled The New Catholicity: Theology between Global and Local.17 From a historian’s perspective, there had long been adaptation and adjustment of different cultures to new situations. Catholic mission history offers an excellent reflection on glocalization. Historians, scholars of comparative literature, and theologians emphasize communication and connection in cross-cultural studies. Foreign Catholic missionaries were in communion with the Vatican and the Universal Church. They adopted a global identity while they had to adapt and adjust to the Chinese situations. In China, intellectuals were looking for Western ideas to modernize their society. They hoped that their country could obtain a respectable position in the world setting. Nevertheless, the Chinese had to pick and choose from outside so as to achieve their goal. Evangelization and the assertion of China in the world arena were global concerns, while modernization and nationalism were great issues in modern Chinese history. These movements complemented each other; but they also created difficulties and frustrations. Drawing on these past works, this chapter first sees Chinese-foreign relations (bilateral and multilateral) as that of cross-cultural studies. Second, it places cross-cultural studies under the umbrella of international history, which emphasizes the broad perspective of the movement of different peoples, the spread of multiple ideas and thoughts beyond national boundaries. Third, this chapter recognizes the correlation between 14 Roberts, Glocalization, p. 14. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 17. 17 Schreiter, The New Catholicity.

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cross-cultural studies, international history, and glocalization. It is essential to see cross-cultural studies from the much wider spectrum of international history. More importantly, this chapter points out that glocalization has long existed in human history. The Chinese intellectuals and the foreign missionaries did ‘think global’ and ‘act local’. Throughout this process, both the Chinese and the foreigners transformed their global visions and adapted to the world circumstances and local situations. Undoubtedly, adaptation, adjustment, and transformation were the key notions in cross-cultural studies and glocalization. This chapter addresses the international trends of the first half of the twentieth century. Foreign missionaries, Catholics and Protestants alike, took much pride in establishing mission fields overseas. The spread of Christianity was a global trend. If this trend could be considered a cultural evolution, the Chinese were engaging in an intellectual renaissance themselves. There was the urge to learn from the West in the New Culture and May Fourth Movements (from around the mid-1910s to the mid-1920s). These exerted tremendous impact on the mentality of the intellectuals of Chinese society. The May Fourth Movement also witnessed the upsurge of nationalism in China. Chinese intellectuals were highly concerned about their country’s wellbeing in the world community. Westernization, modernization, and evangelization had great influence on Chinese society. It is essential to acknowledge the intermixing of international trends and local transformation. Historically, international and local movements had been intertwined. International considerations and local aspirations had not been at opposite ends. Roland Robertson, who is professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, calls for the need to ‘fully capture the complexities’ of globalization and localization.18 In his article entitled ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogenity-Heterogenity’, Robertson argues that the concept of glocalization facilitates the ‘attempts to combine homogeneity with heterogeneity and universalism with particularism’.19 How did the Universal Catholic Church cope with the Chinese situations? How were the foreign missionaries and the Chinese transformed in the process of evangelization and modernization? But first, how did the glocalization of the Catholic Church materialize in modern China? Glocalization applies to the adaptation of the foreign missionaries, the indigenization of the Chinese Catholic Church, and the cultivation of the Chinese Christian elite in Chinese society. The foreign 18 Robertson, ‘Glocalization’, p. 27. 19 Ibid.

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missionaries and the Chinese intellectuals put into practice the universal Catholic faith in the development of higher education. Both the foreigners and the Chinese had to think global in terms of the universal Catholic doctrine but to act local, satisfying the Chinese modernization and educational needs. They developed the ‘glocal faith’ and ‘glocal practice’ through the indigenization of universal Catholic ideals in the two universities in China.

The Catholic Church and Catholic Higher Education This chapter recognizes that the foreign missionaries embraced the universal Catholic faith. In the mission fields, they had to cater to local needs such as the modernization of education. How did foreign Catholic societies and missionaries cope with the Chinese situation? On the one hand, these were the concerns of the foreign missionaries. On the other hand, the Chinese elite saw the value of Western learning and advancement for the modernization of their society. Both the foreign missionaries and the Chinese elite transformed themselves during the process of cooperation in the context of higher elite education, modernization, and evangelization. The global and local cultures interacted and transformed in the manifestation in the Chinese setting. Glocalization, which specifies the combination of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, well describes the two-way evangelization of the foreign missionaries and the Chinese. Through the teaching and conversion of the Chinese to Christianity, foreign missionaries experienced their own evangelization. The Catholic Church was trying to contribute to the modernization of education in China. However, most Catholic schools were primary schools, aside from a few seminaries. It was difficult to transform them into advanced educational institutes for the Chinese people.20 As the Qing government abolished civil service examination in 1905, it became even more popular for the Chinese to seek Western-style education and Western-language training.21 The foreign missionaries were well aware of the local demands. They were suitable collaborators for the endeavours in higher education. Especially the Jesuits were well-known educationists. The Catholic missionaries were lagging behind their Protestant counterparts, who had built a solid foundation of cultivating the Chinese elite 20 Lutz, ‘Christian Education in China’, p. 33. 21 Ibid., p. 39.

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in their higher education. The Catholics were now only beginning to do so. In 1903, Zhendan University was founded in Shanghai under the guidance of the French Jesuits. During this time, the famous Belgian priest Frederic Vincent Lebbe was pronouncing the slogan of ‘China to the Chinese, the Chinese to Christ’. This meant modernizing society and establishing the Catholic Church for the Chinese people. Modernization and indigenization were serious issues that the Catholic Church had to consider. While the Chinese were struggling to learn from the West, they also embraced tremendous nationalistic sentiments. After the May Fourth Incident of 1919, Chinese nationalism was on the rise. This period also saw the emergence of anti-foreign and anti-Christian movements. The Catholic Church moved ahead amid conflicts and controversies. In 1922, Pope Pius XI dispatched the first apostolic delegate to China. By 1925, there were about 2,300,000 Chinese Catholics.22 In 1926, the Pope proudly appointed six Chinese bishops in Rome. The Higher Institute of Industrial and Commercial Education was established in 1923 under the patronage of the Jesuits in Tianjin. In 1925, Furen University was founded in Beijing under the auspices of the American Benedictines. Later on, the German Society of the Divine Word took over the management of Furen University. In an era of change and transition, Zhendan University, Furen University, and the Higher Institute of Industrial and Commercial Education, became respectable Catholic institutions that offered a much sought-after higher education in China. On the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, there were over 3,100,000 Chinese Catholics.23 Despite the war, the Chinese government sent its first ambassador to the Vatican in 1943. Three years later, in 1946, China had its first Catholic cardinal. That year, Pope Pius XII also established the Chinese Catholic Church hierarchy with its own dioceses and vicariates. The famous archbishop Antonio Riberi took up the responsibility of being the first internuncio to China. These were the circumstances of the Catholic Church in China during the Republican period (1921-1949).

Zhendan University (Aurora University, 1903-1952) Ma Xiangbo (1840-1939) and the French Jesuits founded Zhendan University in 1903. Historian Jean-Paul Wiest describes Ma as a devout Catholic, a patriot, 22 Holy Spirit Study Centre Staff, ‘A Chronology of the Catholic Church in China’, p. 30. 23 Ibid., p. 31.

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a reformer, and an educator.24 Ma lived to be almost 100 years old. His life experience was unique. Very few people could have lived so long and witnessed so much. He believed that education was the cure for China’s weakness. Ma started out as a priest but was soon engaged in arguments with foreign missionaries. He subsequently left the priesthood for officialdom, and became a politician struggling for China’s modernization. His brothers had advised him to contribute to the government’s reform efforts. Later, Ma entered a third stage of life when he established Zhendan University. He continued as an educator even after his subsequent departure from Zhendan. Ma’s life story closely reflects the modern history of China through reform and the introduction of the Western mode of education. Born into an affluent Catholic family in Jiangsu Province, Ma had received education from the Jesuits at the Collège Saint Ignace in Shanghai.25 The Jesuits recognized Ma’s great intellect and by the age of twenty, he had already learnt Latin, French, and Greek. Later on, Ma became the college’s master, and then moved on to do translation work in Nanjing.26 Ma was ordained in 1870 but left the priesthood in 1876. He had hoped to contribute to Qing’s reform but finally lost his faith in the government. After having taken care of family matters, he resumed celibate life in 1898. The failure of Qing’s reform in 1898 was a severe blow to Ma’s aspirations. He was no longer able to secure government support for opening a school for translators in Shanghai.27 After 22 years of public service, he could not count on the government anymore. Where could he look for guidance? He was teaching Latin to Liang Qichao (a prominent intellectual and reformer in the late Qing and early Republican periods).28 Incidentally, Ma met Cai Yuanpei (a well-known intellectual and later the president of Peking University) who was then a promising academic and was also very eager to learn Latin. Ma’s private lessons for Cai turned out to attract much attention from young intellectuals. Very soon, Ma found himself teaching Latin, French, and other subjects. This younger generation’s thirst for Western knowledge regenerated hope for Ma, who subsequently approached missionaries for advice. With his family property as endowment, Ma sought the French Jesuits’ backing for the establishment of a Chinese university, which he envisioned as groundbreaking and with Western characteristics.29 24 Wiest, Ma Xiangbo, p. 1. 25 Ibid., pp. 2-5. 26 Fang, Ma Xiangbo xiansheng wenji, pp. 1-2. 27 Hayhoe, ‘A Chinese Catholic Philosophy of Higher Education in Republican China’, p. 51. 28 Fang, Ma Xiangbo xiansheng wenji, pp. 2-3. 29 Hayhoe, ‘A Chinese Catholic Philosophy of Higher Education in Republican China’, pp. 51-52.

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Through his collaboration with the French missionaries, Ma’s dream came true. Ma and the French Jesuits established Zhendan University at the site of the Old Jesuit Observatory in Xujiahui, Shanghai. The university was a merger of two educational systems, the Chinese and the French. Wiest considers Ma a pioneer, who emphasized modern education as the means to rejuvenate China. In his article ‘Ma Xiangbo: Pioneer of Educational Reform’, Wiest notes that Ma ‘became a pioneer in the effort to rebuild his country through modern education, and he inspired many others to follow suit’.30 The establishment of Zhendan University ushered in another period of Western learning, reflected through the greater steps toward the modernization of education of the country. In Ma Xiangbo: Pioneer of Educational Reform in China, Wiest makes several observations about Ma’s life and thought.31 First, Ma adapted very well to Western teachings and recognized the importance of using Western learning to educate the young generation. Second, he upheld the essence of the Catholic faith, Western values, and Chinese culture as well as patriotic concerns. Third, he himself was the product of the encounter of East and West. As will be seen below, Ma embraced the merits of different cultures and sought to take advantage of the best of the East and the West to empower China. He was open-minded and receptive of new knowledge. At the same time, he did not totally refute Chinese culture and traditions, as later May-Fourth intellectuals would do. Fourth, Zhendan University was a superb amalgam of Chinese and Western styles of education. It became a model for other Christian institutions. Zhendan University was an institute of advanced learning, specializing in the training of translators for Western books, which were crucial for China’s modernization efforts, and for textbooks in arts and sciences, which Chinese universities urgently needed.32 Therefore, Zhendan played a key role in China’s modernization, which was made possible through the cooperation between the Chinese and the Westerners in the first half of the twentieth century. The modernization of China’s higher education took the form of a process of adaptation and adjustment. As Ruth Hayhoe mentions in ‘Towards the Forging of a Chinese University Ethos’, published in the China Quarterly in 1983, there was a huge cultural gap between Chinese traditions and Western education.33 She states that the use of foreign terms like university and college already 30 Wiest, ‘Ma Xiangbo’, p. 41. 31 Wiest, Ma Xiangbo, pp. 8-23. 32 Ibid., pp. 10-11. 33 Hayhoe, ‘Towards the Forging of a Chinese University Ethos’, pp. 323-341.

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revealed the tremendous cultural differences between the Chinese and the Westerners.34 According to her, Ma believed that it was necessary to retain certain traditional values. During the early twentieth century, he was trying to stay away from unnecessary politics.35 Then, Ma relied on the French Jesuits and embarked on the establishment of an institute with both Chinese and Western characteristics. Without doubt, the endeavour was that of mutual cooperation, exchange, and cross-cultural relations. Hayhoe describes Ma’s Zhendan University as under the lead of ‘reform-minded’ intellectuals who wanted to separate their institutes from the existing government schools.36 The curriculum of Zhendan University was innovative, placing equal emphasis on the study of Chinese and Western cultures.37 With this in mind, Ma demanded of the students of Zhendan that they study classical Chinese and Latin, as well as modern Chinese literature and Western languages and literature. The students could then decide to focus on either liberal arts or the sciences.38 In this way, Ma was a pioneer in asking students to explore both world cultures and Chinese traditions. The students acquired a world outlook and would be able to make use of Western knowledge to modernize their own society. This could be the first step forward to pursuing an outlook of ‘thinking globally and acting locally’. Indeed, Zhendan University offered what the society needed at the time. That would be the ability to understand and compare the East and the West. Also, Ma allowed students to form their own organizations and to contribute to the university administration. The privilege that the students had in overseeing how Zhendan should develop was extraordinary. Although Ma had a world vision, he asked students to learn in the old way, namely the traditional educational style of Chinese academies (shuyuan).39 That meant he stressed much freedom in teaching, allowing students to take home with them assigned materials and to study on their own. Thus, there were very few formal lectures. 40 Ma combined the trendy Western learning with the traditional mode of shuyuan education. He blended the old with the new to develop Zhendan University. At this moment, Ma was ahead of his fellow countrymen in contributing to the modernization and the indigenization of Western learning in China. 34 Ibid., p. 323. 35 Ibid., p. 326. 36 Ibid. 37 Hayhoe, ‘A Chinese Catholic Philosophy of Higher Education in Republican China’, p. 52. 38 Wiest, ‘Bringing Christ to the Nations’, p. 670. 39 Hayhoe, ‘A Chinese Catholic Philosophy of Higher Education in Republican China’, p. 52. 40 Ibid.

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While Ma had refrained from involvement in government politics, he also hoped to avoid religious disputes. Nevertheless, that would soon prove to be difficult. Despite their initial collaboration, the French Jesuits soon found fault with Ma’s management of Zhendan University. Ma wanted to avoid religious disputes on campus.41 He excluded the discussion of religious doctrine from Zhendan University. The disagreements between Ma and the French Jesuits resulted from their different expectations of Zhendan University. The Jesuits envisioned an institution where the students would study in ‘a Christian environment’, thus fulfilling the objective of evangelization through cultivating a Chinese elite of Catholic upbringing, or at least of a Christian disposition. 42 Two and a half years after the founding of Zhendan University, Ma stepped down as its president. This was in August 1905. He then moved ahead with 128 students, who were also against the Jesuits’ reform of Zhendan University, to look for an opportunity to open another academy. Conflicts had quickly developed after the establishment of Zhendan University. 43 Within only a few years, Ma and his students were at odds with the French Jesuits despite the fact that the Jesuits, in general, were well known for their devotion to education. There were contentious issues in cross-cultural relations between the Chinese intellectuals and the foreign missionaries. These issues concerned the debates on the value of Chinese traditions and the extent to which Western thought should be adopted. Ma was an excellent example of the Chinese intellectuals of the time in terms of the dilemmas they faced. Fr. Patrick Taveirne notes, ‘[a] hardcore nationalist, Ma had come to realize that nationalism deprived of spiritual values would not result in a solid modern nation. This also illustrates Ma’s personal struggle between his devotion to Christianity and the Chinese cultural heritage of which he was a master’. 44 This raises the question of how to bridge the gap between thinking globally, but at the same time adapting to and changing local situations. In Hayhoe’s later work, she also acknowledges the internal contradictions of Ma. She seems to have agreed with Taveirne’s observations. In her edited volume Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China 1840-1939, published in 1996, Hayhoe reveals the cultural conflicts of Ma and the difficulty in 41 Taveirne, ‘Catholic Higher Education’, pp. 6-8; Hayhoe, ‘Towards the Forging of a Chinese University Ethos’, p. 329. 42 Wiest, ‘Bringing Christ to the Nations’, p. 654. 43 Taveirne, ‘Catholic Higher Education in China’, pp. 7-8. 44 Ibid.

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putting his ideals into practice. 45 In one of the chapters, the co-editor Lu Yongling writes ‘Ma often had conflicts with both Jesuits and utilitarian scholar-officials in the Chinese system. He objected to copying the pattern of Jesuit education indiscriminately, and believed that education should not be detached from the cultural soil’. 46 There was much tension in his career and vocation despite the fact that Ma was an intellectual of extraordinary versatility. If he could not manage the crisis, it would be even more difficult for the average Chinese intellectual. In subsequent years, the French Jesuits put much effort in expanding Zhendan University, which eventually emerged as a prestigious institution of higher education. The Jesuits had long decided to bring the best elements of the French educational system to China. 47 Thus, they established three faculties in Zhendan: Law, Medicine, and Engineering. 48 They believed that these disciplines were what Chinese students needed most at the time. Through the importation of their educational system and Christian mission into China, they believed that they were uniquely positioned to contribute to the Chinese modernization effort. Despite their sense of cultural superiority, the Jesuits did try their best to cultivate close relations with the Chinese students. It could be said that the Jesuits thought in their French way but acted with much consideration for the local students. Most importantly, the Jesuits showed ‘that same deep respect of the “other” as a person, which has been a constant trademark of the Society of Jesus’. 49 For example, they often requested their French superiors to send young Jesuit professors, who were energetic, highly devoted to their mission, and would easily develop close bonds with Chinese students.50 The need for mutual respect was always there, for Ma as well as for the French Jesuits. In 1932, Hu Wenyao (1885-1966) became the president of Zhendan University.51 The choice was made for practical considerations that the Jesuits had to acknowledge. Hu remained in that position until 1952, when the Communist regime eliminated all private schools and combined Zhendan University with other institutes. The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China database of the Ricci Institute at the University of San Francisco lists all 45 Hayhoe and Lu, Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China 1840-1939. 46 Ibid., p. 145. 47 Wiest, ‘Bringing Christ to the Nations’, pp. 669-670. 48 The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China database. 49 Wiest, ‘Bringing Christ to the Nations’, p. 673. 50 Ibid. 51 Taveirne, ‘Catholic Higher Education in China’, p. 8.

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the presidents of Zhendan: Ma Xiangbo (1903-1904), P. Perrin (1903-1908), P.H. Allain (1908-1914), P. Fournier (1914-1915), P. Henry (1915-1923), P. Schlier (1923-1932), and Hu Wenyao (1932-1952). Having obtained his PhD degree in Mathematics from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, Hu returned to China in 1913. Subsequently, Hu taught in Peking University and Beijing Higher Normal School. When the French Jesuits decided to register Zhendan University with the Chinese government, they had to ask a Chinese to become its president so as to receive official recognition. They chose Hu in 1932, and the latter was baptized ten years later.52 It was another example of cooperation between the Chinese elite, who had received education abroad, and the foreign missionaries – at least before the Communist takeover in 1949.

Furen University (1925-1952) Ying Lianzhi (1867-1926), who was then a renowned Catholic scholar, urged Pope Pius X to consider the founding of a Catholic university in Beijing.53 Ying collaborated with Ma in this endeavour in 1912. They asked the Vatican to dispatch Catholic missionaries to China, and to be flexible in selecting from which country and which society these priests came.54 They wanted to avoid the impression of the dominance of the Catholic Church from a particular nation and of a specific society.55 Both of them had been close friends for a long time, and it was Ma who had advised Ying to read the works of Matteo Ricci and Adam Schall.56 Subsequently, Ying had converted to Catholicism. Evangelization had thus worked through the encouragement of his peers. In Tianjin, Ying was well known for his work as editor of the prestigious newspaper Dagongbao. With his Christian faith, he hoped to introduce Catholicism to the Chinese people. Both Ying and Ma were familiar with the Belgian priest Vincent Lebbe in Tianjin. Father Lebbe was very devoted to his mission with the Chinese and agreed with Ying that education was of utmost importance to the modernization effort. After the petition to the pope, Ying resigned from journalism and moved to Beijing. In 1912, Ying 52 Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity. 53 Wiest, Ma Xiangbo, p. 20. 54 Fang, Ma Xiangbo xiansheng wenji, p. 23. 55 Ibid. 56 Taveirne, ‘Catholic Higher Education in China’, p. 9; Wiest, Ma Xiangbo, p. 19.

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organized the study group Furenshe, providing education for some forty young Catholics in Beijing.57 With the patronage of the American Benedictine Monks of Saint Vincent Archabbey (Tianzhujiao Benduhui Shengwensen Huiyuan) in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Furen University came into existence in 1925. Ma was delighted to see the arrival of the American Benedictines in China. He believed that the American higher education differed from the French in several aspects. First, the American Benedictines could introduce both traditional European civilization and American scientific knowledge to Chinese students. Second, the American Benedictines would not establish as rigid an educational system as the French had done. Third, they would blend Chinese traditional culture with Catholic values to develop the university.58 Unfortunately, Ying died of exhaustion in 1926. After his death, Chen Yuan (1880-1971), who was a Protestant, became vice-president of Furen University.59 Later on, Chen became the president of the university. Chen was an eminent historian and wrote on the history of Chinese Christianity.60 He later proved to be an outstanding administrator at Furen University. As Jesuit scholar Edward J. Malatesta also described, the establishment of Furen University resulted from the cross-cultural collaboration between the American Benedictines and Chinese scholars. In 1919, Rome sent an investigative team to China, which subsequently reported on the small number of Catholic institutes of higher education.61 In 1920, Reverend George Barry O’Toole (1886-1944), who taught at the Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, looked into the matter. He met with Ying in China. Eventually, both men agreed on the establishment of a Chinese Catholic university.62 In 1923, Reverend Aurelius Stehle, archabbot of Saint Vincent Archabbey, decided to launch the project.63 Also, in 1924 China’s First Plenary Council opened in Xujiahui, Shanghai. This event was significant as it showed that the Catholic Church placed great emphasis on higher education in China.64 In 1925, Furen University was established. Furen University was another illustration of the cooperation between Chinese and American Catholic 57 Wiest, Ma Xiangbo, pp. 19-21. 58 Hayhoe, ‘A Chinese Catholic Philosophy of Higher Education in Republican China’, p. 56. 59 The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China database. 60 Chen, Chen Yuan xueshu lunwenji. 61 Malatesta, ‘Two Chinese Catholic Universities and a Major Chinese Catholic Thinker’, p. 237. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Wiest, ‘Bringing Christ to the Nations’, p. 654.

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educators during the Republican period. Furen was also a product of reformminded Chinese scholars. In his 1993 dissertation, Xiaoxin Wu evaluates Western influences on China’s educational system, with particular reference to Furen University between 1927 and 1933.65 Wu assesses the cooperation between the Chinese educators and the American Benedictine Monks, and their mutual concern to preserve Chinese culture and language.66 Thus, Wu’s work highlights Chinese-foreign collaboration and the American missionaries’ respect for Chinese civilization. Wu emphasizes that the modernization of higher education was an excellent example of cross-cultural exchange in China before 1949.67 Wu points out that, by the end of the 1920s, Zhendan University and Furen University already groomed hundreds of graduates and embarked on major contributions to higher education in China.68 Wu asserts that the achievements of Furen University, as a private institution, gained full official appreciation by the late 1920s.69 He describes Furen University as signifying the three dimensions of cross-cultural exchanges: between two cultures; between the Catholics of two countries; and between two educational systems.70 Reverend George Barry O’Toole was president of Furen University from 1925 to 1929. Recognized by the Chinese government in 1927, Furen was a university of arts and literature with Chinese, English, History, and Philosophy Departments in the very beginning.71 It resembled an American liberal arts college. Gradually, Furen expanded to include a science faculty with the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematics. In 1929, it established the Faculty of Education. According to Taveirne, Furen University reorganized its top management when the Chinese government put up new regulations for private schools. The result was a collaboration of experts of various fields, namely educators, politicians, businessmen, and religious leaders, to promote the image and versatility of the administration of Furen University. Again, cooperation was the key to success.72 In the 1920s, Furen University seemed to look more successful 65 Wu, ‘A Case Study of the Catholic University of Peking during the Benedictine Period (1927-1933)’, pp. 1-2. 66 Ibid., p. 2. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., p. 29. 69 Ibid., p. 31. 70 Ibid., pp. 120-121. 71 Taveirne, ‘Catholic Higher Education in China’, p. 10. 72 Ibid., pp. 10-11.

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than the initial stages of Zhendan University in terms of the cohesion of both Chinese and foreign educators, and in the diversity of personalities in its top administration.73 Cooperation with foreign missionaries continued after the German Society of the Divine Word took over Furen University from the American Benedictine Monks in 1933. The transfer of management was mainly because the Society of the Divine Word was more capable than the American Benedictines in bearing the financial costs of Furen.74 An official leaflet of Furen explained the transfer of leadership to the Society of the Divine Word as a solution to the ‘extremely heavy burdern for the Benedictines’, resulting from the rapid development of the University. Therefore, Rome made the decision to hand over Furen to the Society of the Divine Word.75 The Society, in its internal documents, highlighted three major objectives: to maintain the stable development of Furen University, to ‘make the University one of the pillars of Chinese education’, and to establish the University as the centre of Catholic education in China.76 These were the fundamental considerations of the Society of the Divine Word, aiming at making Furen a highly prestigious Catholic university on Chinese soil. This meant hard work and cooperation with the Chinese. It required mutual communication between the German Society of the Divine Word and the Chinese authorities and people. In The Rise and Fall of Fu Ren University, Beijing: Catholic Higher Education in China published in 2004, John Shujie Chen provides a comprehensive picture of the institute. Chen claims that Furen University embraced three objectives, which were similar to those mentioned above: first, it promoted Catholic ideals; second, it offered superb education to students; and third, it groomed its students to become the elite of society.77 Chen emphasizes that Furen continued to expand without compromising its educational standards and Catholic heritage while the institute survived the anti-Christian, anti-foreign movements and the Second Sino-Japanese War. He believes that there is still much room for researchers to look into Catholic higher education, considering the fact that Protestant universities have received 73 Ibid. 74 Taveirne, ‘Catholic Higher Education in China’, p. 11. 75 Leaflet published by Furen University, n.d. (1945?), University Archives, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei. 76 Document of the Society of the Divine Word – ‘Suggestions for the Stability and Further Development of the Catholic University of Peking’, n. d., University Archives, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei. 77 Chen, The Rise and Fall of Fu Ren University, Beijing, p. 3.

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far more academic attention.78 After 1941, Furen University continued its status as a prestigious private university retaining some independence. The enrolment of Furen rose sharply with over six thousand students in 1941. Many of its students later acquired high standing in their specialties in China and abroad.79 The German Society of the Divine Word was successful in promoting Chinese culture in Furen University, as seen by the establishment of a folklore museum for the study of Chinese customs and an association for the appreciation of Chinese Christian art.80 In addition, Furen University published several Sinological periodicals, such as Fu Jen Sinological Journal (in Chinese) and Folklore Studies (in English, French, and German).81 This illustrated the cross-cultural adaptation of the foreign missionaries and the Chinese people. An additional example of the promotion of both Chinese and Western cultures was the University Library, which kept some 80,000 Chinese volumes and some 28,000 foreign-language volumes.82 By 1945, Furen University’s academic staff comprised professors, associate professors, lecturers, tutors, and assistants, who belonged to ten nationalities with the majority being Chinese.83 At the same time, the Society of the Divine Word believed that Furen, as a Catholic university, should erect a large and impressive church building that could accommodate the students on campus.84 The Society of the Divine Word adapted to Chinese situations on the one hand, while exerting the presence of Catholicism and fostering elements of Western culture on the other.

Conclusion This chapter has considered Chinese-foreign relations a reflection of the process by which Christianity spread and formed a global network among nations.85 Cross-cultural experience involved both cooperation and conflict. The relationship between Western Christianity and Chinese Christianity 78 Ibid., pp. 9-13. 79 Lutz, ‘Christian Education in China’, p. 46. 80 Leaflet published by Furen University, n.d. (1945?), University Archives, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Robert, Christian Mission.

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was progressing to a more equitable connection. Christianity embraced pluralism and diversity.86 Although Chinese Catholics recognized their communion with the Universal Catholic Church, they believed in the necessity to develop their church in their own way. They were looking forward to a Chinese Catholic Church, which remained in union with the Universal Church. With the rise of Chinese nationalism, foreign missionaries recognized the need to indigenize Christian values and practices in China. Nevertheless, foreign missionaries had to ensure that the Chinese Catholic Church did not split in doctrine with the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church upheld the benchmark against which the Chinese Catholic Church was measured. This chapter has pursued the perception of the glocalization of the Catholic Church in China. The foreign Catholic missionaries stayed in communion with the Universal Catholic Church. No matter what nationalities they were, the missionaries did not diverge in faith or doctrine. The differences between missionaries of different nationalities were located in their respective adaptation and adjustment to the Chinese setting, as demonstrated by the various practices of the French and American missionaries in China. It must be recognized that while they had similar global visions, their indigenization of the Catholic Church in China differed. This chapter has attempted to use the history of Zhendan University and Furen University as a lens through which to view modern China. The first half of the twentieth century was a period of rapid change and the importation of Western ideas. Therefore, the outcomes of this research throw light on the Four Modernizations (Chinese agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s) through comparing the first half of the twentieth century to the post-1979 period. The rise of modern China can certainly be compared with the rise of contemporary China. This chapter has focused on the educational endeavour, which was an ongoing conversation between foreign missionaries and Chinese intellectuals throughout. It was emphatically not a dictatorship of foreign culture on Chinese soil. Instead, the communication was mutual and there were connections on both sides. Chinese intellectuals took initiative in asking for the patronage of the foreign missionaries in establishing Zhendan University and Furen University. It was the Chinese who made the first move, and secured the backing of the foreign missionaries, who also regarded higher 86 Beyer, ‘De-Centring Religious Singularity’, pp. 357-386.

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education as valuable to society and helpful for evangelization. In that sense, Zhendan University and Furen University can be considered predecessors of many contemporary educational endeavours. Currently, a major challenge is the establishment of Chinese branches of foreign universities in China. This has largely been accomplished through association with local Chinese universities. The most recent example is New York University (NYU) Shanghai, which has the East China Normal University as its partner institute. NYU Shanghai has been promoted as ‘the newest portal campus in NYU’s global network’. The precedents examined in this chapter can help facilitate understanding of similar endeavours in contemporary China. Viewing such endeavours within the longer history of cross-cultural dynamics in education in modern China, places Chinese-foreign joint ventures in contemporary China in context.

Bibliography Primary Sources University Archives, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taipei.

Secondary Sources Bays, D.H. (ed.), Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Beyer, P., ‘De-Centring Religious Singularity: The Globalization of Christianity as a Case in Point’, Numen 50:4 (2003), pp. 357-386. Bickers, R.A. Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, bdcconline.net/en/stories/h/hu-wenyao.php (last accessed 17 June 2014). Chen, J.S., The Rise and Fall of Fu Ren University, Beijing: Catholic Higher Education in China (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004). Chen, Y., Chen Yuan xueshu lunwenji, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua shudian, 1982). Cohen, W.I., The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Eoyang, E.C., Two-Way Mirrors: Cross-Cultural Studies in Glocalization (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007). Fang, H. (ed.), Ma Xiangbo xiansheng wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1947). Fogel, J.A. The Cultural Dimension of Sino-Japanese Relations: Essays on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995). Hayhoe, R., ‘Towards the Forging of a Chinese University Ethos: Zhendan and Fudan, 1903-1919’, China Quarterly 94 (1983), pp. 323-341.

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—, ‘A Chinese Catholic Philosophy of Higher Education in Republican China’, Tripod 48 (1988), pp. 49-68. —, and Yongling Lu (eds.), Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China 1840-1939 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). Holy Spirit Study Centre Staff, ‘A Chronology of the Catholic Church in China in the Context of Selected Dates in World and Chinese History’, Tripod 76 (1993), pp. 19-76. Iriye, A., ‘Culture and International History’, in M.J. Hogan and T.G. Paterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Lu, Yongling. ‘Standing Between Two Worlds’ in R. Hayhoe and Y. Lu (eds.), Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China 1840-1939 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). Lutz, J.G. ‘Christian Education in China: A Retrospective’, Tripod 48 (1988), pp. 28-48. Malatesta, E.J. ‘Two Chinese Catholic Universities and a Major Chinese Catholic Thinker: Zhendan Daxue, Furen Daxue, and Ma Xiangbo’ in J. Heyndrickx, (ed.), Historiography of the Chinese Catholic Church: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leuven: Ferdinand Verbiest Foundation, 1994), Reed, J., The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy, 1911-1915 (Cambridge MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983). Robert, D.L. Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Roberts Jr., B. Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007). Robertson, R., ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogenity-Heterogenity’ in M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds.), Global Modernities (London: Sage, 1995). Schreiter, R.J. The New Catholicity: Theology between Global and Local (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997). Taveirne, P., ‘Catholic Higher Education in China’, Tripod 142 (2006), pp. 5-14. The Ricci 21st Century Roundtable on the History of Christianity in China database: ricci.rt.usfca. edu/institution/ (last accessed 17 June 2014). Uhalley Jr., S., ‘Burdened Past, Hopeful Future’ in S. Uhalley Jr. and X. Wu (eds.), China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). —, and X. Wu (eds). China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2001). Wiest, J., ‘Bringing Christ to the Nations: Shifting Models of Mission among Jesuits in China’, Catholic Historical Review 83:4 (1997), pp. 654-690. —, Ma Xiangbo: Pioneer of Educational Reform in China, CSRCS Occasional Paper No. 9 (Hong Kong: Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society, 2002). —, ‘Ma Xiangbo: Pioneer of Educational Reform’ in C.L. Hamrin and S. Bieler (eds.), Salt and Light: More Lives of Faith That Shaped Modern China, vol. 2 (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2010). Wu, X., A Case Study of the Catholic University of Peking during the Benedictine Period (1927-1933) (Ed.D., University of San Francisco, 1993).

About the Author Cindy Yik-yi Chu is Professor of History and Associate Director of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her publications include Catholicism in China, 1900-Present: The Development of the Church (2014), The Catholic Church in China (2012), Chinese Communists

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and Hong Kong Capitalists: 1937-1997 (2010), The Diaries of the Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921-1966 (2007), The Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong, 1921-1969 (2004) and its Chinese edition (2007), Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s-1950s (2005), and Yapian zhanzheng de zai renshi (A Reappraisal of the Opium War) (2003, in Chinese).

Part III Shared Trajectories, New Subjectivities

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Indigenizing Cosmopolitanism Shifting Metropolitan Subjectivities in Twentieth-century Colombo Anoma Pieris Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH08 Abstract During the f irst half of the twentieth century, pressured by political transformations, metropolitan loyalties gradually shifted across colonial and nationalist ideological lines, wartime alliances and Cold-War dialectic. In early postcolonial Asia, and more specifically in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, definitions of cosmopolitanism were accordingly transformed from a studied mimicry of colonial habits to new strategies for indigenizing the colonial legacy. In architecture, these transformations were captured in the institutional architecture of the era: those produced to gain legitimacy, the patronizingly Indic styles of the colonial Public Works Department, and the new nationalist architecture. In each of these stylistic phases, particular attributes of cosmopolitanism were advanced or erased, while indigenous motifs were applied as embellishments. These processes involved a range of reformers, who drew on European artistic developments and Indic architectural styles. These cosmopolitan interactions eventually produced late colonial experimentation with vernacular aesthetics and subsequent movements for indigenization.

Renewed attention to theories of cosmopolitanism at the start of the new millennium, in the works of Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, Craig Calhoun, Anthony Appiah, David Harvey, and others, responded to what we might describe as the post-national and neo-liberal tenor of political and economic life at the end of the Cold War.1 The failure of idealized liberal agendas and 1

Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty, Cosmopolitanism.

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their histories of violence posed new challenges for strategies of governance. These authors referenced nineteenth-century nationalist ideologies of regionalism and cosmopolitanism that underwrote twentieth-century hostilities and offered cautionary insights into what decentralization, porous boundaries, and immigrant labour flows may mean for human-rights discourse. They exposed the human cost of economic liberalization against the celebratory advance of marketization. Whereas these discussions occurred against the backdrop of European unification, postcolonial scholars like Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, alerted us to cosmopolitanisms occurring elsewhere, at the margins of Europe and America, reminding us of colonial and nationalist histories of like phenomena. Whereas ideas of cosmopolitanism were typically associated with the activities of a comprador class, produced by colonial education, the first generation of nationalist leaders emerged from within their ranks. The struggle for independence and the parallel processes of decolonization occurring as they did at the height of Cold-War hostilities lent a regionalist tenor to national politics, adversarial to ‘Western’ cosmopolitan values. Regional alliances advanced through the Non-Aligned Movement rejected the British Commonwealth and strengthened socialism. In fact, the term ‘regionalism’ was used to describe the postcolonial politics of Southeast Asia, Singapore’s political preoccupation with ‘Asian values’, and the regional politics of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations).2 Regionalism was also internal to the nation, as in the case of India, following the years 1977-1980 which saw the defeat of the Congress Party and weakening federalism. When Congress returned to government under Rajiv Gandhi in 1980 several high-profile spectacles such as the Asian Games, Delhi (1982); meeting of Commonwealth Heads of State, Goa (1983); and Non-Aligned Nations Summit (1983) were staged to recoup nationalist ideals, on a regional basis.3 With the pro-market shift of India in the late 1980s the term ‘regionalism’ was reconstituted along neoliberal lines. 4 The unification of Europe into a single market and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) gave a different economic basis for that regionalism, changing its meaning from a vehicle for self-determination and political visibility to an avenue for marketization. In Sri Lanka, a communal regional polemic was cultivated during an insular socialist era and, after economic liberalization in 1977, 2 Reid, ‘The Bandung conference’. 3 Panicker, ‘Indian architecture and the production of post-colonial discourse’. 4 Dash, Regionalism in South Asia.

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broke out into a fully-fledged civil war (1983-2009). Communalism and marketization occurred in tandem. This chapter scrutinizes early twentieth-century manipulations of nationalist sentiment at a time when the ideals of cosmopolitanism and regionalism were still in flux. The shifting allegiances of this era and the negotiations of its increasingly urban polity made critical contributions to processes of decolonization, which were realized – or not, as the case may be – in the decades after independence. I would like to call this period ‘cosmopolitan’ not only because of the cultural affiliations that gave rise to nationalist loyalties but because of the resultant democratization of institutions and values. Yet, these first turbulent years of the twentieth century saw the hardening of nationalist loyalties along communal and linguistic lines, positions that were replicated across Asia where majorities marginalized by the colonizer sought political and cultural redress. I aim to explore the ‘indigenization’ of the public sphere advanced by such groups as manifestations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ – of affiliations that rose above caste identity to articulate racial and religious collectives. In pairing contradictory terms such as ‘indigenization’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ in an analysis of like phenomena I hope to disassociate them from the nationalist polemic that sees traditional culture and modernity as adversarial. The socio-spatial context through which I intend to explore these ideas is Colombo, the capital city of Lanka, known as ‘Ceylon’ under British rule (1815-1948), a city created solely for the purpose of resource extraction, trade, and colonial administration, with no previous indigenous urban history. My focus is on residential and institutional architecture. The period I explore spans the early twentieth century and political independence in 1948, when decolonization gathered momentum across many public social arenas, in associations, publications, and through anti-colonial agitation. We might describe it as an era when transient and adversarial subjectivities were forged. And yet, the involvement of British architects in the design of new institutions illustrates a specific outcome of the Asia-Europe encounter during this last phase of European colonialism, where an Orientalist legacy converged with nationalist expressions. The forms of indigenization encountered in this essay are anti-colonial and later nationalist efforts at self-determination in the urban public sphere. However, strategies used included hostility towards, mimicry of, and hybridization with European cultural traditions. In architecture, there was a shift from the surface embellishment of colonial domestic architecture to the reinvention of public architectures along indigenous lines. Yet the cosmopolitan aspirations that underscored these changes persisted.

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The resultant aesthetic turbulence, this chapter argues, responded to the indigenous cultures’ public and material visibility following centuries of colonial suppression. Controlled by a succession of European colonizers – Portuguese, Dutch, and British – since the sixteenth century, the expression, associations, and meanings of ‘Ceylon’s’ public architecture had to be reinvented alongside independence. Yet these processes were not limited to indigenous agents. The self-conscious recreation of architectural subjectivities occurred either under colonial tutelage through the Public Works Department, or through private entrepreneurship and philanthropy. The postcolonial national subject was produced through the rejection of colonial values, indigenization of institutions and marginalization of minorities, in this instance by aggrandizing the culture of the SinhalaBuddhist majority at the expense of minority Sinhala-Christians, Hindu or Christian Tamils, Tamil-Muslims, Moors, and Burghers. These processes of achieving cultural hegemony can be read in the institutional architectures of the era.5

Incipient National Sensibilities Early twentieth-century Colombo, the capital of British Ceylon, like many of its companion spaces across the British Empire, was organized around a harbour through which the products of agricultural industries in the hinterland, tea, rubber, and coconut, could be loaded onto ships and sent off to the far reaches of the globe. The Fort, which was attached to this harbour like a protective armature had been divested of its walls and opened up to a new influx of commercial establishments and private entrepreneurs by the British. Yet the heart of twentieth-century Colombo was not at this imperial node but further south in a new suburban development shaped by indigenous elites. Encompassing areas like Kollupitiya, Maradana, and Cinnamon Gardens, this area had been reclaimed from jungles and plantations and created a refuge from the soot of steam ships that had overtaken the port environs. It was here that Christianised elites, mobilized by colonial enterprise, staked their claims in urban property and invested in new colonial institutions such as churches, schools and associations. Notably marginal in this arena were their indigenous – Buddhist or Hindu counterparts. The city of Kandy in the central highlands remained at the nexus of Buddhist identity, as did Jaffna for the Hindu Tamil minority. 5

This chapter builds on topics explored in Pieris, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka.

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Figure 1  Regina Walavva

Photographed for the author by Ayndri de Soysa

However, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims had also benefitted from colonial enterprise and become educated and urbane. Their arrival in the capital city would underwrite initial processes of indigenization evident in the changing architecture of the domestic sphere. The urban public sphere was as yet a colonial and therefore European preserve. In 1920, the government purchased Regina Walavva (an elite residence) from the estate of a local philanthropist, Thomas Henry Arthur de Soysa, and renamed it ‘College House’, establishing it as the administrative building for the University of Colombo (fig. 1). The building, constructed in 1912, although fashioned after the late Victorian mansions of the comprador classes, could be deemed appropriate for its new purpose. Unlike its close neighbour, his brother, Alfred (A.J.R.) de Soysa’s mansion, Laxmigiri, with its Palladian style architecture and front gates modelled after Buckingham Palace, Arthur had selected the Travancore Style for his family home, named after his wife, Regina. Arthur was inspired by Motilal Nehru’s home, Ananda Bhawan (later called Swaraj Bhawan) during a visit to Allahabad in 1904.6 The building’s asymmetrical plan comprised few rooms but numerous verandas with turrets and conical roofs reminiscent of late nineteenth-century Victorian Eclecticism. The incorporation of Gothic and Indic architectural features suggested the influence of the British Picturesque Movement and renewed interest in arts and crafts traditions. The style was exemplified in 6 Personal communication from Sirima Weerasuriya and Rupa de Soysa, January 2003.

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Robert Chisholm’s designs for the Napier Museum in Trivandrum and the Madras Post and Telegraph Office built during the 1870s and 1880s.7 It was developed on the environmentally responsive rationale of religious and palatial architecture of the humid south-western coast of India. The forms of indigenization that occurred during the early twentieth century were tenuous rejections of colonialism, while still maintaining the cosmopolitan habits and Christianized values of the comprador class. Their history of the appropriation and modification of an earlier tradition of colonial mimicry signals the incipient nationalism already taking root among the early twentieth-century Ceylonese elite. Such shifts of allegiance towards Eastern values made space for nationalist sentiments that would follow. However, as argued by Mark Frost, they produced a Ceylonese consciousness bent on internationalization rather than an insular ethnic consciousness.8 Both Arthur and Alfred de Soysa expressed their Eastern orientation in different ways; the older brother, by naming his mansion ‘Laxmigiri’ (the goddess, Lakshmi’s mountain) and the younger by adopting a hybrid ‘Eastern’ style of architecture. Curiously, both these processes of aesthetic defiance were mediated by the colonial architects, commissioned to deliver a scale and style of architecture suited to their client’s desires. Such adaptations in the built environment extended to changes in dress, inspired by rising nationalist sentiment in neighbouring India. Regina and her close friend Catherine Sri Chandrasekere cast off their Western gowns and defiantly wore Indian saris to the governor’s ball.9 The wedding of their eldest daughter, Violet, held at Regina walavva five or six years following her mother’s death, likewise embraced Eastern traditions. The magul maduwa (wedding hall) was of a Hindu architectural style – an arched dome – similar to the style at the Thirumalai Palace, Madurai (fig. 2). It was designed by experts from Jaffna, D.P. Tampo, and S. Mahadeva of the PWD.10 However, in comparison with his bride, who wore a white crepe de chine sari embroidered with silver, the groom, Leo (L.E.O.) Pieris, wore a Western-style wedding suit with coattails, top hat, and gloves. The progressive Eastern leanings of elite women who had worn Portuguese skirts or English dresses a generation earlier, is not necessarily indicative of their advanced politicization but of the suppression of indigenous expression in a male-dominated colonial public sphere. 7 Metcalf, An Imperial Vision 1989, p. 64; Walker, ‘Institutional audiences and architectural style’. 8 Mark Frost, ‘Wider opportunities’, p. 949. 9 Personal communication from Rupa de Soysa, 2 January 2004. 10 ‘Marriage of the Chilean consul’s daughter’, 1917, unidentified newspaper account, from Lankeswara Pieris.

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Figure 2  Regina Walavva, wedding pavilion and cake

Courtesy L.S.D. Pieris

The ease with which the de Soysa’s amalgamated Eastern and Western traditions was evident in the practices of ‘national elites’ who forged relationships with colonial government while romanticizing the village on the path to constitutional reform.11 Their efforts must be contextualized in an era of political agitation for Universal Adult Franchise granted in 1931. For these aspiring national elites, the village was a socially distant but politically significant symbol of democratization. The reformist ideals of these urban elites who included Burghers, Tamils, Muslims, and the Sinhalese, is best represented through Ananda Coomaraswamy, known for books like Philosophy of National Idealism and Medieval Sinhalese Art. Coomaraswamy, concerned about the ‘denationalization’ of the urban community founded the Ceylon Reform Society in 1905, and published the Ceylon National Review (1906). He emulated William Morris and the English Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings (1877), and held meetings of the Arts and Crafts Society at Sravasti, the house of W.A. de Silva, during the 1920s.12 He also maintained close relationships with members of the Indian Swadeshi movement. Coomaraswamy advanced a broadly regional albeit conservative understanding of aesthetic and craft traditions desirous of integral cultural continuity derived from traditional social structures. His idealization of the 11 Roberts, ‘Problems of Social Stratification’. 12 Lipsey, Ananda Coomaraswamy, p. 259.

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village community underwrote pleas for the preservation of religious buildings, temple frescoes, and domestic spaces. His address to the Ceylon Reform Society in 1908 was on the ‘Village Community and National Progress’.13 The village featured very differently in the work of the 43 Group of artists (formed in 1943) who broke away from the Colombo Art Club and were unconcerned with cultural revival. Departing from the conservative British idiom prevalent in Colombo they advanced what Ranjit Fernando describes as a revolt against the Ceylon Society of Arts much like the Impressionists against the French Salon.14 The Group members, many of whom trained in Europe, were open to Western influence and found a hospitable environment there for their experimentation. It was a period, observes Fernando, in which there was increasing support for the recovery of tradition in postcolonial nations, a position that stemmed from the guilt of cultural suppression and destruction in former colonies and a previous ‘clandestine flirtation with [the] “primitive” and “exotic”’. Their initial exhibitions overseas were at the Imperial Institute, London (1952), and the Petit Palais, Paris (1953).15 The constitution of the 43 Group is indicative of their ‘Ceylonese’ perspective, synonymous with a cosmopolitan approach to nationalist ideals. They were led by Burgher photographer Lionel Wendt (1900-1944), whose house in Guildford Crescent was the first home of the group, and whose photography illustrated a way of life that ‘retained in spite of poverty, squalor and apathy, a vital sense that was lacking in more progressive countries’.16 An effort to capture ordinary life and explore new techniques learned from Europe produced an artistic genre quite unlike its predecessors where village scenes and subjects entered urban canvases. The group included Burghers, Eurasians, and national elites from privileged and urbane families such as Justin Deraniyagala, George Keyt, Harry Pieris, Aubrey Colette, George Claessen, and Geoffrey Beling, but also artists like Ivan Pieris, L.T.P. Manjusri, and Richard Gabriel, who had closer connections to indigenous communities. Although romanticizing village life from an anglicized elite perspective, certain members of the group held leftist views, which differentiated them from the Orientalists. Harry Pieris, a portrait and landscape painter (1904-1988) who hosted the 43 Group following Wendt’s untimely death in 1944, was trained in London under Sir William Rothenstein and under Peter Falk in Paris. He received informal criticism at Matisse’s studio. In 1935, he went to Rabindranath 13 Brow, ‘Utopia’s new-found space’, p. 72. 14 Dissanayake, ‘What is the use of art?’, The Island, 7 September 1993. 15 Weeraratne, 43 Group, p. 31. 16 Van Geyzel, ‘Introduction’, p. 13.

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Figure 3  Sapumal Foundation

Photo by the author

Tagore’s school, Santiniketan, in Bengal, as a teacher. He observed that ‘politics had invaded the world of art’ and that Western art ‘was cold-shouldered, while it was quite in order to copy Chinese or Japanese or any other Asian Art’.17 His home, now preserved as the ‘Sapumal Foundation’, was frequented by the Group for meetings, classes, and other cultural activities, and is a precursor to the vernacular-derived architecture that emerged in Sri Lanka during the late twentieth century (fig. 3). Dissanayake describes it as ‘… cottage-like rather ramshackle and unpredictable, with high peaked ceilings, half walls (with open mesh above) and smallish rooms leading off from one another’.18 She describes it not as a museum but a domestic space personalized through its collection of art, craft, and sculpture. The 43 Group offered a cosmopolitan reworking of Coomaraswamy’s reformist values, rather than a genuine platform for indigenization.

Indigenizing the Capital City Nihal Perera describes the indigenization of Colombo in terms of the penetration of colonial areas by indigenous elites and their adaptation to and of the built landscape. He defines indigenization as simultaneously being 17 Van Geyzel, ‘Life devoted to art’, p. 5. 18 Dissanayake, ‘A personal appreciation’, p. 17.

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a form of assimilation and resistance, ‘a way of assuming a colonial subject position through the creation of new and hybridised cultural practices and spaces’.19 ‘The resulting multilayered landscape, negotiated between imposing colonial structures and Ceylonese cultural practices, was characterized by irony, mimicry, ambivalence, liminality, and hybridity’, he writes.20 These characteristics are evident, for example, in Coomaraswamy’s pluralistic approach or the 43 Groups diverse sources, but the location of Buddhism within these constructions would prompt a deeper cultural polemic. The contestation of both cultural and urban space via a Buddhist revival was symptomatic of this era. The polemical construction of Buddhism in late nineteenth-century Ceylon has a complex history, which will not be dealt with here. It responded to diverse provocations: a contest among Buddhist fraternities for access and recognition of urban coastal caste communities; the aggressive prosyletization of Christian missionaries seeking to increase converts and the hegemonic Christian, anglophile metropolitan culture of Colombo. Frost points out that ‘the [colonial] government’s failure to safeguard the privileges, schools and temporalities of the Buddhist Sangha (clergy) revealed its commitment to disestablishment’, a process that was reversed (to impact the Anglican Church) with rising nationalist consciousness.21 The resultant ‘Buddhist-Christian Confrontation’ (1800-1880) stimulated metropolitan Buddhist interests among trading communities and won broad-based support in coastal communities,22 which demonstrated the strength of Buddhist institutions and the futility of missionary efforts at proselytization in rural areas.23 The Society for the Propagation of Buddhism (1862) in Kotahena was established along the lines of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel of the Anglican Church (1840);24 public debates were held in regional towns and polemical publications, tracts, and periodicals resisted Christian propaganda.25 Seneviratne describes the ‘Buddhist revival’ in terms of the convergence of interest between the 19 Perera, ‘Indigenising the colonial city’, p. 1704. 20 Perera, p. 1703. 21 Frost , p. 943. 22 Malalgoda, ‘The Buddhist-Christian Confrontation’; Wickremeratne, ‘Religion, Nationalism, and Social Change in Ceylon’. 23 The two most important figures in the confrontation were the Salagama Migettuwatte (Mohottivatte) Gunananda Thero (1823-1890) from Balapitiya, and Goyigama Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala Thero (1827-1911), both excellent orators. 24 Malalgoda, p. 192. 25 Abhayasundara, Controversy at Panadura; Royal Asiatic Society, ‘Panadura Vadaya’; Malalgoda, p. 193.

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urban laity and the newly emerging missionary monks of the city where practices such as dharma deshana (religious sermons) were morally and socio-economically didactic.26 Although the Buddhist revival commenced activities through cosmopolitan practices of mimicry and mirroring, it gathered strength through counter strategies, following the involvement of Henry Steele Olcott. Olcott, the son of a Protestant minister from Orange, New Jersey, formed the Theosophical Society in New York City with Helena Blavatsky, in 1875, travelling to India in 1879 and to Ceylon in 1880. He modelled a form of Buddhism along the lines of Protestant Christianity, argues Gananath Obeyesekere, restructuring it according to the rationalist principles of a scientific philosophy, by writing a catechism (1881) and cleansing it of popular religious cults and ritualistic practices.27 He focused on Buddhist education and temporalities, unity and organization, and Buddhist schools that might challenge the monopoly of Christian missionary institutions along the southwestern coast.28 His ideas influenced the Goyigama Don David Hewavitarne, who, taking on the name of Anagarika Dharmapala (mendicant protector of Buddhism) devoted his life to propagating Buddhism. Dharmapala’s economic programme for rural regeneration was centred on the Mahabodhi Society (Great Buddhist Society), founded by him in 1891: an idyllic, self-sufficient and self-governing community that prefigured experiments in rural development.29 He revived neglected ancient Buddhist sites in India as destinations of Buddhist pilgrimage. Dharmapala was also involved in the Temperance Movement (1895/1911-1914), which sought to discipline the laity against colonial habits. He openly attacked colonial material culture, decrying the sale of alcohol, the neglect of Sinhalese education in local schools, and the adoption of Western dress.30 Dharmapala’s declaration that for the ideal woman ‘a proper blouse should cover the breast, stomach and back completely’ and ‘a cloth ten riyans [cubits] long should be worn as osariya or saree’ was influenced by Victorian morality.31 He likewise rejected the Western combination of hat, comb, collar, tie, banian (singlet), shirt, waistcoat, coat, trousers, cloth socks, and shoes for men. Whereas Olcott’s reforms had adopted forms of mimicry and mirroring, combatting Christian missionary activities with Buddhist counter 26 Seneviratne, The Works of Kings, p. 48. 27 Obeyesekere, ‘Colonel Olcott’s reforms’, p. 10. 28 Wickremeratne, p. 128. 29 Seneviratne, The Works of Kings, pp. 57-58. 30 Wickramasinghe, p. 10, citing Guruge, Dharmapala Lipi, pp. 37; 42. 31 Wickramasinghe, ‘Some comments on dress’, p. 10.

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strategies, Dharmapala’s proposals were bent on ‘indigenization’ via the purification of tradition. He achieved this through ingenious forms of anticolonial cultural invention that gained popular appeal. Opposition to anglophile or foreign behaviours soon echoed across the public sphere in numerous new mediums such as novels and newspapers and the imagined community of the nation was infused with a ‘negative consciousness’, directed at the false values of the late nineteenth-century bourgeoisie.32 While vocalizing the cultural sentiments of the Sinhalese majority, this polemical stance suppressed Christian and Westernized values and marginalized minorities: Tamils, Moors, and Europeans who had participated in the ‘Ceylonese’ public sphere.33

Buddhist Institutions By the late nineteenth century, Colombo was the locale of the most important temples and monastic schools after Kandy, writes Perera. ‘First, the temples at Kelaniya and Kotte, former Lankan seats of power in the vicinity of Colombo, were reinvigorated. Secondly, these historical temples were supplemented with newer ones built much closer to or within Colombo.’34 Similarly ‘new organizations’, such as the Buddhist Theosophical Society, the Society for the Propagation of Buddhism and the Mahabodhi Society, and lay organizations such as the Young Men’s Buddhist Association and Buddhist missionary schools asserted the growing Buddhist presence. Although these institutions were initially marginal, observes Perera, often occupying existing buildings or houses, they were at the forefront of the radical movements for cultural reform, temperance and political change advanced by the Buddhist revival. The pedagogical strategies of two pirivena (temple) schools, the Vidyodaya Pirivena at Maligakanda (1873), and Vidyalankara Pirivena at Peliyagoda (1875), were adopted for a generation of urban educational institutions financed by local philanthropists.35 The monks who were educated in these schools bridged the cultural gap between city politicians and philanthropists, and the rural areas they hoped to develop. Seneviratne describes them as having very different political and 32 Gramsci describes negative consciousness as the polemical responses of groups unable to mobilize themselves. Gramsci, Selections from ‘the Prison Notebooks’. 33 Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labour Movement, p. 170. 34 Perera, ‘Indigenising the colonial city’, p. 1714. 35 ‘Vidyalankara Pirivena’, Daily News, 12 December 2007.

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ideological orientations: Vidyodaya was conservative and pro-establishment while Vidyalankara was a source of rebellious nationalism.36 Leading metropolitan monks, Olcott and the Theosophical Society, Buddhist intellectuals, and caste leaders combined in achieving the shift to secular institutions conceived along religio-cultural lines. The 300 or more Buddhist schools they established challenged the dominance of Christian missionary education and nurtured Sinhalese Buddhist pride among the laity. They focused on the scientific study of Buddhism, and the inculcation of Buddhist values, while anti-colonial sentiments were cultivated.37 Their architecture included buildings modelled after the Buddhist pirivena and were decorated with Buddhist motifs. The scholars’ routines were based on indigenous rituals and practices. The objective on the part of educators and parents was to secure the school environment from Christian proselytization and its alien cultural norms. Organizations such as the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, modelled after its Christian counterpart, likewise entered the city through private patronage in the domestic sphere. The indigenization of colonial institutional prototypes for exclusively Buddhist activities prior to independence alerts us to a different form of cosmopolitanism, occurring at the city’s periphery and arising from vernacular practices. We might analyse it in terms of Homi Bhabha’s discussion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, a social sensibility disassociated from Western/ colonial norms.38 Benita Parry describes it as cosmopolitanism from below and Walter D. Mignolo as ‘critical cosmopolitanism’, a form of border thinking located outside both Western forms of modernity and coloniality.39 Institutions such as the YMBA, although patronized by Colombo’s Buddhist elites, can be identified as a cosmopolitan space with vernacular cultural roots. Its migration from the urban periphery to a central location is indicative of this process. The YMBA was inaugurated in 1898 at nos. 60/61 Maliban Street, Pettah, the home of the Theosophical Society’s newspaper Sarasavi Sandaresa;40 it moved in 1912, to a rented property known as the Maradana walavva in the First Division and again in 1922, following a fire, to another walavva at Third Division, Maradana. In 1924, a property named Mahanil was purchased in Borella where a new building was later constructed. In addition to weekly sermons, a substantial Buddhist library, printing press, book agency, and 36 Seneviratne, The Works of Kings, p. 57. 37 Dissanayake, ‘Ananda’s role in Buddhist education’, Daily News, 3 July 2009. 38 Breckenridge, et al., Cosmopolitanism; Bhabha, ‘Unsatisfied notes’. 39 Mignolo, ‘The many faces of cosmo-polis’, p. 160; Parry, ‘The contradictions’, p. 41. 40 Amerasinghe, ‘50 years of the Colombo YMBA’, p. 48.

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religious examinations, the YMBA encouraged billiards, cricket, chess, and draughts but not card playing, suggesting its modern membership. 41 Its objective was to keep young people from harmful urban distractions. An All Ceylon Buddhist Congress (1919) and branch associations outside Colombo expanded its membership and disseminated its values. Once incorporated in 1925, the association’s activities broadened further to encompass Sinhala historic dramatic performances, the Lyceum – a debating club – and an office for the registrar of marriages. The building was illuminated for lavish Vesak festival celebrations and hosted distinguished visitors like Mahatma Gandhi, Krishnamurti, Rabindranath Tagore, Annie Besant, and Jawaharlal Nehru. By the 1940s, picnics to places of pilgrimage, musical evenings for Indian auxiliary regiments, and civic activities were augmented by elocution or poetry contests such as the ‘Light of Asia’ contest. A new hall donated by Sir Cyril de Zoysa, a transportation magnate from Welitara, was inaugurated in 1948. The YMBA headquarters (1955-1958) did not penetrate the Fort until the mid-twentieth century (fig. 4). 42 The new building was designed by Oliver Weerasinghe and H.J. Billimoria and finished by Justin Samarasekera and Neville Gunaratne, prominent members of the first generation of local architects. Built largely due to the efforts of Sir Cyril de Zoysa, the new multistorey building included residential accommodation, a restaurant, offices, and a shrine room. 43 Three octagonal turrets with Kandyan-style roofs, similar to that designed for the Pattirippuva, the raised platform from which the king addressed his subjects, a prominent feature at the Dalada Maligawa, the Sacred Temple of the Tooth Relic in Kandy, declared it a Buddhist building, although the body of the building was modernist like those that surrounded it. We might argue that the creation of secular institutions within a religiocultural scaffolding was indicative of specific forms of cosmopolitanism, of the coming together of social agents, of democratizing institutional access beyond mimicry of colonial institutions. I would argue with Perera that the polemical undercurrents that produced these changes were invested in indigenizing the public sphere. Yet, while the affiliations demanded by this process, across caste lines, invoked the imagined national collective they would produce exclusive majoritarian platforms. 41 Ibid., pp. 56-57. 42 Bandarage, ‘Sir Cyril de Zoysa’, pp. 96-99. 43 Piyasena, ‘Colombo YMBA’, p. 74; Premaratne, ‘Sir Cyril de Zoysa’, 2010; YMBA website; Wanigasundera, ‘A story of struggle’, p. 46.

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Figure 4  YMBA Building

Photo by the author

Indigenising Christianity The Buddhist renaissance provoked a cautious indigenization of Christianity, which combined these two traditions – little and great – suggestive of an early interest in vernacular architecture. The derivation of church designs from Buddhist prayer halls and palace architectures suggests the conflation of cultural with religious attributes in the minds of their British architects. The Trinity College chapel is an intriguing example of this new hybrid aesthetic, modelled after the Magul Maduwa [audience hall] of the Nayakkar kings, in Kandy, a building that was located on the palace premises. The hall, designed in 1783 by the royal architect Devendra Mulachariya, had a two-pitched Kandyan roof supported on carved timber columns.44 Its occupation by the British following the fall of Kandy has been interpreted by James Duncan as a measure of replacing royal authority with their own.45 The palace buildings became the residence of the government agent and the audience hall was used as a civic court during the week and an Anglican Church on Sundays. 46 44 According to Manjusri, Design Elements, p. 23, he was of a South-Indian artisan caste. A Kandyan roof is designed to have a steep central portion surrounded by a low skirt roof; de Silva and Chandrasekara, Heritage Buildings, p. 168. 45 Duncan, ‘The Power of Place’, p. 7. 46 Ibid., p. 7.

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Figure 5  Trinity College Chapel

Photo by the author

The derivation of the Trinity College chapel design from the Sinhalese tradition could be attributed to its British Vice-Principal L.G. Gastor, who professed a keen interest in the historic artefacts of Lanka’s ancient cities, Polonnaruwa, and Anuradhapura, the appreciation of which he hoped to inculcate in the younger generation. The rediscovery of their ancient Sinhalese heritage revivified, reinterpreted and adapted for the purposes of Christian worship, is how the process is summarized in the college history: ‘It is not enough to translate the scripture into the vernacular tongue: their message must be interpreted in terms of the vernacular thought and culture. That is what I mean by building in the vernacular’. 47 The chapel was completed in 1939 (fig. 5). Columns, bases, façia, and tiles were decorated with Buddhist decorative motifs (pineapple, lotus, cobra hood) typically used for Buddhist temples, and the building was raised on a high podium reminiscent of the temple hall at Ambekke. A radical departure from colonial practice, of Byzantine, Classical or Gothic church architecture, the appeal to familiar and meaningful symbolisms was an effort to win over the congregations’ hearts and minds. The use of permanent building materials asserted the authority of the church, despite its derivation, replicating a relationship where Christian or Catholic institutions rose imperiously in the rural landscape. Unlike 47 ‘Building for eternity’, Trinity College Magazine, pp. 75-76, citing a radio address by McLeod Campbell.

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the audience hall, which was built in timber, the chapel was constructed using substantial granite columns with square bases and capitals, and partly octagonal posts. Timber capitals, doorframes, and carvings contrast sharply with the steel trusses of the steep-pitched tile roof. 48 The artist, David Paynter, was commissioned to paint a mural of the crucifixion based on native life-models. The adaptation of indigenous forms and details to modern concrete technologies was subsequently tested in a number of public buildings, the most prominent being the Independence Hall (1953) and the imposing Protestant, Cathedral of Christ the Living Saviour, in Colombo (1973). The latter, designed by Welshman Neville Wynne-Jones of the PWD, with P.H.W. Peiris, took its hexagonal form from a Buddhist prayer hall and was constructed by U.N. Gunasekera. The indigenization of the profession, previously dominated by British architects, was occurring alongside that of the public sphere.

The Architecture of Independence The architecture of the independence era (1930s–1950s) was rich with metaphor and allegory, literally translating colonial institutions into an indigenous idiom with applied symbolisms from traditional culture. Analogies of language in the works of Barthes (1972) and Anderson (1983) are useful tools for interpreting their meaning in relation to ensuing struggles over power. The authors of this process belonged to the colonial PWD, or were private practitioners schooled in Victorian eclecticism. Buddhist architectural motifs were wrapped around the Gothic Revival or Neo-Classical stylistic forms of Europe producing indigenous-cosmopolitan hybrids. These curious aesthetic amalgamations, which were perceived by locals as anti-colonial were an extension of Britain’s Indo-Gothic stylistic experiments across the colonies. British architects developed Indo-Saracenic, Travancore, and Buddhist aesthetics most notably in Edwin Lutyen’s design for New Delhi (completed in 1929). 49 As observed by Homi Bhabha, the colonial government adopted ‘a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic’ and Orientalist scholars provided the knowledge useful for achieving this

48 Premawardene, ‘An examination of the evolution of the architecture’, pp. 55-57. 49 Metcalf, An Imperial Vision.

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end.50 James George Smither (1833-1910), the first government architect of the PWD (1865-1883) and architect of the Colombo Museum had published an exhaustive work on the architectural remains of Anuradhapura, as part of an Orientalist endeavour at documenting the ‘Aryan Buddhist’ architecture of the island.51 The construction of a lost Aryan past through colonial archaeology created an exaggerated interest in historic styles which were appropriated by private architects. Their introduction to Colombo is attributed to the work of British colonial architectural practices like Edwards Reid and Booth (ER&B) in buildings such as the Art Gallery, a neoclassical building decorated with Sinhalese motifs, and the more substantial ‘Kelaniya style’ developed by H.H. Reid. The aesthetic, which amalgamated the styles of two shrines in Kandy, was first applied to the remodelling of the sixteenth-century Kelaniya Raja Maha Viharaya, an important Buddhist temple located north of Colombo, between 1927 and 1946.52 Walters reminds us that the revival of this temple coincided with a resurgence of nationalist fervour, voiced by its patrons the Wijewardene family, future leaders of the United National Party. The style was imbued with political, religious, and historical associations. The Buddhist architecture of the independence era slips between several categories. Architectural elements from the Kandyan King’s palace are replicated in many public buildings. And although this architecture was designed and purpose-built as a royal commission, the style is conflated with that of the village vernacular. While the forms are certainly derivative, the distinction is colonial – a method for differentiating indigenous from European architecture. After independence, indigenous traditions would be delineated internally along two different trajectories, of the great and little indigenous traditions, with their associations of power and patronage or of everyday life.

Institutional Decolonization During the 1940s, and after independence in 1948, government institutions such as the Buildings Department and State Engineering Corporation took on the task of institutional decolonization. Yet the shift from an Orientalist interest in exterior embellishment to a projection of modern national 50 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 35. 51 Smither, Architectural Remains. 52 Robson, Geoffrey Bawa, p. 44.

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institutional spaces was not as yet visible. These architects introduced cultural features onto public buildings in a style reminiscent of Victorian eclecticism but, unlike their European predecessors who saw them as aesthetic strategies, imbued them with religio-cultural meanings. The first generation of local architects, many of them trained overseas, experimented in this stylistic approach. Although invested in reviving Buddhist cultural features, they responded to struggles internal to the metropolitan community. Their private interventions occurred alongside the assertion of Buddhist grievances in the political sphere. The ruling United National Party (Eksath Jathika Pakshaya) under the first Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake (followed by Dudley Senanayake and Sir John Kotelawala) with its liberal, capitalist agendas, was less sympathetic to ethno-religious issues, due to its metropolitan locus and appeal to ethnic minorities. Although the first generation of representatives had fought for constitutional reform by highlighting the plight of the landless peasant alienated by colonial industries they were descendants of the comprador class who had been for generations divorced from indigenous concerns. Subsequent champions of indigenous grievances sought to bridge this gap. A growing political opposition, under the MEP (People’s United Front, Maha Jana Eksat Peramuna) called for economic and social equity through the redistribution of land, labour, and capital.53 An electoral alliance led by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and consisting of the SLFP – Sri Lanka Nidahas Pakshaya (Sri Lanka Freedom Party), the Viplavakari Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Revolutionary Ceylon Equal Society Party), and the Sinhala Bhasa Peramuna (Sinhala Language Front) their policies were revolutionary and favoured the Buddhist majority. The MEP’s advocacy of the Buddhist Commission of Inquiry (1956), a bid to investigate the betrayal of Buddhism by colonial governments (a move rejected by the UNP) would lead to Bandaranaike’s victory at the general elections of 1956. As the Sinhala-Buddhist majority and their political representatives travelled from the margins to the centre of national representation their imagined community became synonymous with that of the nation. By the mid-twentieth century the Buddhist architectural styles and decorative elements determined and embellished public architecture, marginalizing all other expressions of culture. By the late 1950s, the indigenization of institutions was a nationalist project no longer confined to the private sphere. It underwrote the developmental ideology of the socialist-leaning Banadaranaike government. 53 Samaraweera, ‘Land, Labour, Capital’.

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Advertisements for the Ceylon Government Railway in 1956 domesticated and gendered new technologies along nationalist lines. The trains to Jaffna, Matara, and Kandy were given female identities: Yaal Devi (northern goddess), Ruhunu Kumari (southern princess) and Udarata Menike (upcountry maiden) based on the traditional nomenclature in their respective regions. Such cultural inscriptions, although invoked in favour of a European technology, reiterated the traditional biases for ethnic regional identities. Incipient forms of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ were overtaking the public sphere to inform the nationalist subjectivities post-independence. The first generation of national institutions had been designed by British architects, such as Wynne-Jones, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, and Clifford Holliday, with assistance from locals. The mid-twentieth century saw a changing of the guard both in public and private arenas. By the late 1940s, both H.J. Billimoria and Justin Samarasekera were working for the PWD, Oliver Weerasinghe and Neville Gunaratne for the Town Planning Department, Wilson Pieris for the Colombo municipality, and K. Jayatissa for the Department of Archaeology.54 While the institutions of the 1940s-1950s were different from their colonial antecedents, incorporating programmatic change would require a different mind-set.

National Self-fashioning The Independence Hall (1953), designed by Wynne-Jones, is an open pavilion built in concrete and raised on a one-storey podium, housing a museum (fig. 6). Its two-pitched Kandyan roof structure is also of concrete, designed from precast units, symptomatic of post-war industry. The highly decorated columns with their Buddhist motifs are designed as vertical cantilevers to counter wind loads and carry the entire roof. The frame is covered with plaster mouldings and the entire building is surrounded by f igures of seated lions, the symbol of the Sinhala race.55 Aesthetic similarities to the Trinity College Chapel alert us to their common derivation from the magul maduwa. An anecdotal account regarding the choice of aesthetic suggests that it was provoked not by calculated nationalist sentiment but a suggestion

54 Abeyekoon, ‘Fifty years of architectural education’, Daily News, 5 September 2007. 55 Wynne-Jones, ‘The Independence Hall’; Wynne-Jones, ‘Being a review of engineering activity’.

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Figure 6  Independence Hall

Photo by the author

by Sir John Kotelawala – later to be Prime Minister.56 An initial design proposal was for a colonial saluting platform. Yet the building remains one of the more significant monuments in the city of Colombo, the stage for annual Independence Day celebrations, approached along Independence Avenue. Modifications to the buildings are suggestive of subsequent nationalist claims. The Asoka trees that flanked it were replaced in 2011 by Na trees (Mesua Ferrea), the national tree and symbol of the Maitreiya Buddha.57 During the 1980s, as ethnic conflict escalated, four additional lions, modelled on those at a palace site in Yapahuwa, were installed around the commemorative column for D.S. Senanayake, asserting Sinhala prestige. The building also appeared on the reverse of the 200-rupee note (1998), a note conveying the entire history of the island from its origin to the present, which space it shared with the palace in Kandy and the new universities. Democratization and decolonization of Ceylonese institutions saw radical changes to the education system dissolving socially divisive colonial separation of English-language and vernacular schools. C.W.W. Kannangara’s educational reforms (1942) established the central school system in regional centres. The indigenization achieved through Buddhist schools was already apace. If, as Hobsbawm observed, schools and universities 56 Communication with Justin Samarasekera, 1993. 57 Wijesuriya, ‘Architectural monuments related to the republic story’.

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were nationalism’s most conscious champions then the creation of local universities carved new pathways to professionalization.58 The University of Colombo (1942) was an amalgamation of two earlier colonial institutions – Ceylon University College (1921) and Ceylon Medical College (1870) (see the University of Colombo website) – both cast in the colonial mould. The University of Peradeniya (1952), planned for a bucolic site of 3,500 acres outside Kandy, was proposed instead as a landmark educational and residential campus associated with the last indigenous capital. The ‘Battle of the Sites’, between Colombo and Kandy, which preceded its construction, lasted from the 1920s to 1938.59 Sir Patrick Abercrombie assisted by Clifford Holliday and the Sinhalese architect Shirley D’Alwis of the PWD planned the university on the invitation of the colonial government. Abercrombie described the site as ‘typical of central Ceylon with its mighty rivers, its rushing boulder strewn torrents, its highly modelled hills, its varied foliage and its background of stony mountain peaks’.60 The geography of the campus captured the inspirational geography of the island. The revivalist style applied to the design had strong associations with Kandy, elements of which had by now penetrated public architecture in the capital (fig. 7). Yet it was the object of scathing critiques by a generation we might identify as modernist. Ranjit Fernando dismissed it as pseudo Oriental/Sinhalese/Buddhist architecture maintaining that a revival of traditional art was impossible exactly because ‘it was considered politically expedient’.61 The nascent art magazine Marg, which was fast gaining recognition in India, regarded it as a lost opportunity for ‘creating a modern local tradition in architecture’. It claimed: ‘In trying to give a feeling of Ceylon’s traditional architecture to these buildings for a modern university for our modern times with modern techniques of building, they have borrowed from the motifs of the past and applied them to the reinforced concrete or steel structural skeletons’.62 The social model proposed for the new university was European in origin. The Oxbridge tradition with its dining halls and high tables, proctors and marshals, gowns, ties, blazers, colours, and crests, were strictly adhered to by Vice Chancellor, Sir Ivor Jennings. He described them as ‘tangible

58 Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 166. 59 Gunewardena, ‘The University of Ceylon’, Times of Ceylon Annual, p. 114. 60 Gunewardena, p. 116. 61 Dissanayake, ‘What is the use of art?’. 62 ‘Ceylon’s First University’, p. 13.

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Figure 7  University of Peradeniya

Photo by the author

evidence’ of ‘a community, membership of which is a privilege [… that] binds its members to its perpetual association’.63 The new university fostered affiliations, although not after its British ideals. It gave the emergent middle class opportunities to better themselves while nurturing a sense of collective and national belonging. These ‘vernacular cosmopolitans’ would produce the first generation of bilingual professionals, whose adult lives were free of colonial restrictions. Yet the pattern was not replicated in the years that followed. As the educational reforms of Kannangara were realized, universities increasingly catered to a monolingual student body taught by monolingual academics and administrators, thus diminishing the integration conceived in a university environment.64 Observes Wickramasinghe, the beauty communicated by the landscape and the creation of a community of scholars, were not idealized in future models.65 Opposition to Buddhist revival in architecture, voiced from modernist platforms augured the changes that would underwrite post-coloniality. The Orientalist or ethno-nationalistic references that had shaped the independence era were criticized and discarded in architecture. Postcolonial society, 63 Gunewardena, ‘The University of Ceylon’, Times of Ceylon Annual, p. 117. 64 Wickramasinghe, ‘University Space and Values’, p. 10. 65 Ibid., p. 58.

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however, would expand on their values, equipped with an insular nationalist education. The socialist environment that dominated Sri-Lankan politics for the next two decades from 1956 to 1977, and the country’s regional and Cold-War alliances produced a political and social climate adversarial to European influences. The British architects whose architectural hybrids gave nationalism its face were neither studied nor criticized. The local architects who collaborated in these ventures went on to form multivalent approaches that shifted between modernist or vernacular associations. The era of Asian-European encounters was decidedly over. Although Europeans would travel to Asia to offer aid or expertise they would face hostile nationalist sentiment. Statutory conditions in the registration of architects would preserve the local profession from foreign intervention. The 1970s would advance a different architectural expression: a vernacular-derived aesthetic, deliberately stripped of religious associations, and rationalized in terms of climate and technology; the functionalist tenets of the modern movement. The style would be championed by local architects, schooled in European humanism, and suspicious of ethno-nationalist positions. I have argued elsewhere that they produced a ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’ that has, as with the work of architect Geoffrey Bawa, been frequently celebrated as regionalist.66 Yet they preclude overt references to palatial architectures or Buddhist monuments that are fundamental to their predecessors. The public architecture of the late twentieth century would be largely derived from regional domestic traditions. The institutional architectures of the early twentieth century are products of that era of constitutional change, ethnocultural politics and greater agency for a majority that were suppressed by European colonialism. We might argue that they were exaggerated expressions of these values. The complicity of British architects in their conception has to do with their dominance in the late colonial public sphere, ignorance of its politics, and failure to recognize that public architecture is political. The ease with which the first generation of indigenous government architects adapted Victorian eclecticism for ethnocultural expressions augmented the biases of the Orientalist symbolisms already in use. In Ceylon, during the early twentieth century, both European and Asian architects amalgamated cosmopolitan with indigenous values in an incongruous architecture of nationalism. Theirs was the final legacy of the Asia-Europe encounter. They shaped an aesthetic path for the modern nation based on 66 Pieris,‘Tropical cosmopolitanism?’.

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celebrating precolonial cultural traditions while disguising its aspirations for change.

List of illustrations Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7

Regina Walavva Regina Walavva, wedding pavilion and cake Sapumal Foundation YMBA Building Trinity College Chapel Independence Hall University of Peradeniya

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Reid, A. ‘The Bandung Conference and Southeast Asian Regionalism’ in S.S. Tang and A. Acharya (eds.), Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Conference for International Order (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2009), pp. 19-26. Roberts, M., ‘Problems of Social Stratification and the Demarcation of National and Local Elites in British Ceylon’, Journal of Asian Studies 33:4 (1974), pp. 549-577. Robson, D.G., Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002). Royal Asiatic Society, Journal of the Sri Lanka Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society special volume on the Panadura Vadaya (‘debate’), New Series 69, 2004. Samaraweera, V., ‘Land, Labour, Capital and Sectional Interests in the National Politics of Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies 15:1 (1981), pp. 127-162. Seneviratne, H.L., The Works of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Smither, J.G., Architectural Remains, Anuradhapura, Ceylon, Comprising the Dagabas and Certain Other Ruined Structures; Measured, Drawn and Described by J.G. Smither (Colombo: Ceylon Government Press, 1984). University of Colombo, ‘Our history’, www.cmb.ac.lk (last accessed 3 March 2012). Van Geyzel, L.C., ‘Life Devoted to Art’, pamphlet for Harry Pieris exhibition, The Sapumal Foundation, 1984, pp. 3-5. Van Geyzel, L.C., ‘Introduction’ in Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon (New Delhi: Navrang, with Colombo: Lake House Book Shop 1950; reprint 1995). ‘Vidyalankara Pirivena: Its Contribution to Cultural and Educational Development’, Daily News, 12 December 2007. Walker, P., ‘Institutional Audiences and Architectural Style: The Napier Museum’ in V. Prakash and P. Scriver, Colonial Modernities: Building Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 127-147. Wanigasundera, M. ‘A Story of Struggle and Achievement: One Hundred Years of the Colombo YMBA’, The Buddhist, Special Centenary issue, 68:3-4 (1997), pp. 34-64. Weeraratne, N., 43 Group (Melbourne: Lantana, 1993). Wickramasinghe, N.K., University Space and Values: Three Essays (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2005). —, ‘Some Comments on Dress in Sri Lanka’, The Thatched Patio (January/February 1992), pp. 1-21. Wickremeratne, L.A., ‘Religion, Nationalism, and Social Change in Ceylon, 1865-1885’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1969), pp. 123-150. Wijesuriya, G., ‘Architectural Monuments Related to the Republic Story’, Architecture Students Association Magazine (Katubedde, Moratuwa: University of Moratuwa, 1977), pp. 23-25. Wynne-Jones, T.N., ‘The Independence Hall, Freedom Square, Colombo’ in H.F. Billimoria, The Engineering Association of Ceylon, Transactions for 1954 (1954, Part 1), pp. 25-38. —, ‘Being a Review of Engineering Activity in the Country During the LastFifty years, 1906-1956’, The Engineering Association of Ceylon, Transactions for 1956, Golden Jubilee souvenir (1957), pp. 77-111.

About the Author Anoma Pieris is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. She is author of Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: a penal history of Singapore’s plural society (University

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of Hawaii Press 2009) and Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser Under the Cloth (Routledge 2012). Anoma is co-author with Janet McGaw of Assembling the Centre: architecture for indigenous cultures: Australia and Beyond (Routledge 2015). She has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of Melbourne, and UC Berkeley.

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Fighting for the Soviet Empire War Propaganda Production and Localized Discourses on Soviet Patriotism in Uzbekistan during the Second World War Boram Shin Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH09 Abstract Cultural encounters between Soviet Europe and Soviet Asia during the Second World War had a significant influence on redefining the location of the Uzbek nation within the Soviet empire, as well as the location of the Soviet Union within the Uzbek nation. During the war, Moscow cultural elites were evacuated to Central Asia, while Central-Asian Red Army soldiers marched into battle. Due to this criss-crossed mobilization, the hierarchical centre-periphery relationship was interrupted as the Soviet authorities learned the importance of winning support from the CentralAsian periphery. Leading Uzbek intellectuals and Russian cultural elites were therefore assigned to promote Soviet patriotism among the local population. Together, they constructed heroic narratives for the Uzbek nation and (re)discovered the Uzbek people’s pre-Revolutionary history, which sometimes contradicted Soviet ideology. Nevertheless, their collaborative efforts to localize Soviet war-propaganda messages added an Uzbek dimension to post-war Soviet identity, which contributed to the empire’s weathering of the storm of decolonization in Asia.

The people called out: ‘Oh God, Rescue us from those who came to save us.’ Hey sir, please tell me: Who else is waiting for salvation from you? […] But the East has its own defender, A brother who rose up –

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A true, selfless defender – Who freed the East from the shackles of slavery […] I am a son of my land, poet of the East Foresight is my gift. More than once my visions came to pass as if fulfilling my mandates. I am a free son of the Soviet East. An Uzbek, who found happiness in creativity My pen is given to me by Lenin – A great leader and a great man.1 G’afur G’ulom, Two Easts2

In 1949, Uzbek poet G’afur G’ulom wrote Two Easts, a poem that compares Soviet Central Asia to the other Asia ‘outside the red bloc. To put the text into context, the other Asia was swept up in the surge of anti-colonial nationalism followed by a wave of decolonization that often escalated into violence. As Harry Gelber observes, for the European colonies in Asia and Africa fundamentally affected by Western modernization, ‘nationhood and statehood [were] the very conditions of independence and the principal way to make themselves heard in the world’.3 If the First World War rendered the concept of empire temporary and limited, the Second World War accelerated empires’ physical demise. While Europe lost its imperial control over the world, the post-war international order led by the United States and the Soviet Union each occupying the opposite ideological pole legitimized the Asian nationalists’ struggles for independence (at least in principle). For both the United States and the Soviet Union, the Second World War had been a ‘moral crusade’ against German fascism and Japanese imperialism, and a struggle to end the global colonial system. Washington had adopted the Atlantic Charter in 1941 while Moscow had already incorporated anti-imperialist rhetoric into its Leninist-Stalinist platform in the early 1920s.

1 G’ulom, Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy, vol. 2, pp. 157-163. 2 This chapter uses the BGN/PCGN system for romanization of Uzbek and the Library of Congress Romanization and ALA-LC system for romanization of Russian. 3 Gelber, Nations out of Empires, pp. 151-152.

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G’afur G’ulom’s ode to the Soviet Union reflects how the Soviet Union used anti-imperialist rhetoric to recruit allies in Asia at the beginning of the Cold War. Soviet Central Asia served as a showcase of the ultimate emancipation and the prosperous future socialism could bring to the other Asia. From the late 1940s to 1950s, Central Asian cultural elites travelled around Asia and Africa spreading the words of Lenin and Stalin. In return, they brought home the stories of Asian brothers who suffered under the lingering shadows of their colonial masters and the local capitalist tyrants supported by the new imperial power, the United States. Anti-imperialism and the renewed spirit of internationalism again legitimized the Soviet rule both inside and outside the Soviet border to curb US influence. However, the Soviet anti-imperialist banner was no more than empty rhetoric, as revealed in its protest against granting full membership of the United Nations to the Philippines and India based on the assumption that the two former colonies would serve the interest of their respective former metropoles as satellite states. Inside the Soviet border, Russian nationalism grew stronger as the Russian people emerged as the ‘saviours’ of the Soviet Union. The national anthems of the non-Russian Soviet republics inaugurated in 1947 uniformly expressed the republican peoples’ indebtedness and gratitude towards the ‘Great race of Rus’. The new Uzbek SSR anthem, for example, began with the following lyrics: ‘Greetings to the Great Rus, to our greater big brothers/ Glorious be, immortal leader, our own Lenin!/ The way of struggle for freedom led us forward/ And the Uzbeks have been glorified by the Soviet state!’4 Under these circumstances, the (de)colonization of Central Asia was never raised as an issue by the Central Asian elites who had led their nations through war and had witnessed the developments in the rest of former colonial Asia. It was only in the 1980s, that local writers began to reassess Central Asia’s status within the Union. Until then, the sense of pride from belonging to a global superpower state had overridden criticisms encrypted in subtle and complex codes. This absence (or ‘delay’) of self-reflective reassessment of the Soviet empire can be explained by a number of external and internal factors. 4 A new Uzbek national anthem was adopted in 1947 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution. In 1946, the Uzbek Writers’ Union submitted lyrics written by renowned Uzbek poets to the Uzbek Peoples’ Commissariat who selected one by Timur Faqqakh and Turob To’la, which began with a salute to the Russian people. Different versions of the lyrics are collected at the Central State Archive of Uzbekistan under R-2356/2/358.

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When the United Nations replaced the League of Nations as a new institution of global governance, the US and the USSR contested for more representation (i.e. influence) within the institution. While the USSR was sceptical about whether the Philippines and India could act as independent states, it pushed for the full recognition of all fifteen Soviet socialist republics (SSRs) as member states in the UN. The US countered this argument suggesting that if the SSRs enter the UN as independent members, all of its forty-eight states should also be similarly recognized. As a result, the Central Asian national republics could not be discussed as illegitimate colonial possessions of the Soviet Union on account of the balancing of power. Even though the 1955 Bandung Conference declared the Central Asian republics colonies of the Soviet Union, this statement was absorbed into Chinese foreign-policy rhetoric during the Sino-Soviet conflict. Western academics also began to use the term ‘empire’ to describe the Soviet Union as early as the 1950s, but such a view remained relatively marginal even in the field of Sovietology.5 In addition, the early dissident Central Asian community who had escaped the Bolshevik advances in the early 1920s, sided with the Nazis and collaborated with the Muslim Legion. The fall of Nazi Germany also signalled their defeat. Inside the Soviet Union, the Stalinist regime tried to strengthen its grip on the periphery, which now included the newly acquired territories in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In 1947, the Soviet People’s Commissariat issued a decree that called for the annihilation of local nationalist intelligentsia and recruitment of political workers who could be re-educated and indoctrinated into Soviet ideology.6 The decree was intended to restructure society in the newly annexed territories as well as to recentralize power that had been delegated to the local-level governments due to the exigencies of the war. Furthermore, the regime launched anti-cosmopolitanism 5 The terms ‘Soviet empire’ and ‘Soviet colonialism’ were used within a smaller circle of Anglo-American scholars who focused mainly on Central Asian ethnic groups. For example, Caroe argued in Soviet Empire that the Soviet political and economic systems were designed to ensure the central authority of Moscow and complete dependency of peripheral national republics. Edward Allworth and Carrer d’Encausse, two pioneers in the study of Uzbek culture, also referred to the Soviet Union as an empire, often portraying local literary and intellectual movements as nationalistic resistance against their colonial Soviet/Russian oppressors. The ‘empire’ rhetoric, however, became predominant in the wider field of Soviet studies only after the Soviet Union collapsed. As Suny notes, ‘the Soviet Union, which a quarter of a century ago would have been described by most social scientists as a state […] is almost universally described after its demise as an empire, since it now appears to have been an illegitimate, composite polity unable to contain the rising nations within it’. Suny, ‘The Empire Strikes Out’, p. 27. 6 Quoted in Jo’rayev and Fayzullaev, O’zbekistonning Iangi Tarikhi, pp. 508-511.

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campaign that condemned national(ist) narratives constructed by the peripheral republics during the war. The Central Asian cultural elites who had mobilized the local population under the banner of Soviet patriotism were instructed to reassess their wartime activities and admit any ‘errors’ they had committed. Nevertheless, the Party could not completely reverse the effects of the war, which gave the native elites an opportunity to explore the relationship between their ‘nation’ and the Soviet Union and to reconstruct their identity as both Soviet and Asiatic. The Stalinist regime attempted to recreate a centralized and omnipresent government in the post-Second World War period. However, to argue that the Soviet empire was preserved by Moscow’s ‘totalitarian’ control over the periphery would overlook the complex interactions and mutual dependencies between the Soviet centre and local actors in creating the Red empire, which had survived more than seven decades. Nor does it explain the relatively peaceful fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent rise of nation states in Central Asia. In fact, the Bolsheviks were nation-builders that had arguably granted statehood to budding nations at the fall of the tsarist Russian empire. The Bolsheviks brought the modern concept of nation as well as socialism to Central Asia, which fundamentally shook its native society. For a decade and a half since the establishment of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924, the Soviet way of life was imposed on the Central Asian population through the so-called process of Sovietization. However, it was during the Second War World that Soviet ideology became localized and integrated into Uzbek national identity, when Russians from the empire’s capital came to the Central Asian periphery as war refugees, while Central Asians marched to the front in Red Army uniforms. This chapter explores wartime developments in the Uzbek cultural and literary scenes, which relocated the discourse on Uzbek ‘identity’ from ‘within’ the Soviet ideology to an identity ‘in-between’ Soviet universalist form and national content. Although the war period was marked by exigencies, it was not completely detached from the continuous process of constructing a Soviet nation. On the contrary, the wartime reshaping of the native perception of their ‘belonging’ to the Soviet Union accelerated the internalization of ‘Sovietness’ into Uzbek identity and introduced a new dynamic to the ‘identity’ discourse. Before embarking on a journey to 1940s-Soviet Central Asia – more specifically to Uzbekistan – this chapter takes a brief excursion to the beginning of the Soviet empire to present the institutional and historical context that gave rise to wartime identity discourses.

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The Beginning of the Soviet Empire: Nation-building as Empirebuilding Project When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, they discovered (or perhaps induced themselves to discover) that the tsarist colonization had not served as a ‘tool of history’ in the way Marx had predicted in his article The British Rule in India.7 The tsarist colonization had failed to transform the native socio-political structure, which the Bolsheviks referred to as ‘feudal’ and ‘backward’. The Central Asian social hierarchy had been largely maintained, and indigenous customs were little affected. The Bolsheviks campaigned for the colonies’ self-determination to win local support, but they could not afford to have the empire completely dissolve due to economic concerns.8 The Bolshevik echelon recognized the vulnerability of the new socialist state and the importance of Central Asia for guaranteeing self-sufficiency. Moreover, as the idea of a world revolution spreading through Europe became a distant dream rather than a close prospect, Central Asia, and Asia in general, gained more strategic significance. Although a ‘socialist empire’ seemed like an oxymoron, the Bolsheviks felt an obligation toward taking the red man’s burden as a ‘conscious tool of history’ to lead the ‘backward’ and ‘feudal’ Central Asians along the Marxist timeline of modernization and social evolution. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks began vigorously promoting nationhood, dividing territorial units according to ethnic lines and creating national republics that were ‘internally independent’ within the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks were convinced that what they called native or defensive nationalism had emerged as an opposition to Russian colonization. Defensive nationalism would soon wither away if the Bolsheviks granted non-Russian ethnic groups their nationhood, and led them towards socialism. The People’s Commissariat of Nationalities created the f ive Central Asian nation states – Uzbekistan (1924), Turkmenistan (1925), Tajikistan (1929), Kazakhstan (1936), and Kyrgyzstan (1936). In parallel with the territorial demarcation, the policy of korenizatsiia or ‘nativization’ was implemented. Under this policy, the members of the titular nationality were privileged in the competition for land, jobs, and political power within the republican territory. The Soviet regime also introduced what it called ‘the anti-Russian Chauvinism Campaign’, which purposefully suppressed expressions of Russian nationalism. 7 Marx, ‘British Rule in India’, pp. 17-19. 8 RGASPI 558/1/2196/1-6.

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In 1936, Stalin announced that the Soviet Union as a whole had entered the era of socialism. This meant that all (officially-recognized) ethnicities had been decolonized and evolved into modern nations. He declared that transnational solidarity among the working people of all nationalities had been achieved, and that any interethnic mistrust and hostility that had lingered on after Russian colonization, had completely disappeared. Hence, there was no longer any need for national proliferation, suppression of the Russian chauvinism, or enforcement of the korenizatsia policy. Around this time, the Stalinist Terror began to take full swing in the Central Asian republics. Those whom the state classified as a potential threat – mostly the native modernists, called Jadids, and the indigenous Bolshevik leadership – were arrested under the charge of bourgeois nationalism and counter-revolutionary activities. It is estimated that 55.7 per cent of Party officials in central government organizations, and 70.8 percent in district committees were purged in Central Asia in 1937.9 Stalin also introduced the ‘Great Friendship of the Peoples of the Soviet Union’, which became the official slogan for a harmonious Soviet multiethnic community. Under this banner of Friendship, non-Russian national identity became ‘ritualized’, brought to Moscow, and displayed as evidence of the Soviet regime’s success as the agent of revolution and modernization. Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, increasingly came to resemble a colonial metropole as it became the main stage for massive public celebrations and parades that displayed the national cultures of the periphery peoples. As Malte Rolf notes, ‘Mass festivals were an omnipresent cultural feature of the 1930s, not limited to the staging of joyful parades but also endlessly reproduced in other fields of culture such as literature, the arts, or photography during Stalin’s time’.10 For this reason, Moscow celebrations were especially effective in forging Soviet unity. They also set the prototype images for national representation, which in turn were internalized and became a part of national identity. Furthermore, national culture became the most important field of identity construction as the source of legitimacy for the peripheral nationhood shifted from political leverage in the 1920s, to representations and rituals in the 1930s. The 1930s was also the time the Soviet ‘cultural tripod’, which governed the production of national cultures for the republics, was introduced. In 1932, the Soviet government liquidated all independent and semi-independent cultural organizations across the Soviet Union. Instead, it implemented 9 McGlinchey, Chaos, Violence, Dynasty, p. 57. 10 Rolf, ‘A Half of Mirrors’, p. 602.

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the cultural tripod, which included the formula of ‘socialist in content and national in form’; the aesthetic doctrine of Socialist Realism; and the highly centralized and state-controlled cultural apparatuses and educational institutions. The cultural tripod helped to homogenize local-level cultural production and placed republican ‘national culture’ within the grid of Soviet multiculturalism. With the establishment of republicanlevel cultural organizations including the Uzbek Writers’ Union, directly answerable to their respective all-union level organizations such as the Soviet Writers’ Union in Moscow, Russian influence in the local cultural scenes inevitably increased. The Second World War, or the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Soviet parlance, came to Central Asia when the Soviet institutions and ideology of the Friendship had already taken firm roots in the Uzbek cultural scene. However, the wartime exigencies that changed the dynamics between Moscow and Tashkent had also affected how Soviet ideology was interpreted by the local cultural elites, and how Soviet institutions were employed for native identity construction.

Soviet Friendship at the Central Asian Home Front News of the German invasion reached Tashkent on 23 June 1941. As obliged by the Soviet Constitution, the Uzbek SSR entered the war declared by the Soviet Communist Party in the name of the socialist peoples. The Uzbek SSR was mobilized as the tyl or ‘home front’ responsible for providing material supplies and labour to support the Soviet war effort. Tashkent served as the heart of the Soviet defence economy. As one of the initial responses to the Soviet declaration of war, Qizil O’zbekiston, the official Uzbek-language Party newspaper, reported on 24 June that the professors, teaching staff, and students of Tashkent Finance and Economics Institute gathered to discuss the issues of war economy and expressed their confidence in Uzbekistan’s readiness for the war.11 On the same day, the Tashkent Textile Factory workers’ collective held a special meeting during which its leader urged the Uzbek working people that ‘in order to defeat the vile and barbaric enemy with fewer hardships and lesser bloodshed, it is necessary to maximize discipline at the home front; every worker, specialist, collective farmer, and helper be at your post!’12 Factory workers and collective farmers elsewhere in 11 Dzhuraev, Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Uzbekistana, p. 8. 12 Pravda Vostoka, 1941, p. 1.

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Central Asia also declared themselves mobilized and called to their fellow Uzbek citizens to demonstrate their patriotism by taking up hammers and sickles. Similar proclamations of ‘voluntary mobilization’ helped to portray the Uzbek workers as heroic Soviet citizens and to express the population’s trust towards the central and local Communist Parties. The image or rather illusion of abundance constructed around the Russian writer Aleksandr Neverov’s novel Tashkent – the City of Bread gained significance in the representation of wartime Uzbekistan. The Central Asian republic was imagined as a faraway land untouched by the tragedies of the war. It was also the land of limitless supplies and reserve forces. Such representation of Uzbekistan was prevalent in wartime propaganda. The Letter of the Uzbek People to the Soldiers Fighting at the Great Patriotic War, the collective letter in verse of the Uzbek people to the Red-Army soldiers published in the local Party newspapers in 1942, assured that ‘Uzbekistan is the country [which] produces all that is needed for the war’.13 The Letter also pledged loyalty towards the Soviet Union based on the principle of the Soviet Friendship.14 The Letter implored the Uzbek citizens: Remember how your friend liberated you from the shackles, How blood spattered over his stiffened body. […] Now, how can your soul not burn, When your old friend is in dismay? […] No, you cannot and must not keep silent Uzbeks – Your conscience cannot escape the torment. Your fraternal Union was never half-hearted [when coming to the rescue] And the oath of friendship you must honour faithfully.15

The Friendship was constructed around the Bolshevik civilizing mission combined with the pre-war veneration for the Great Russian people or the vanguard of the Revolution who had liberated all nations from the yoke of feudal and imperialist oppressions. The Letter warned that the fall of Moscow would restore the shackles of feudal tyranny and imperialist slavery 13 Pravda Vostoka, 1942, p. 3. 14 Similar discussions on the Letter of the Uzbek People is presented in Boram Shin, ‘Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism during World War II’, pp. 42-43. 15 Pravda Vostoka, 1942, p. 3.

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the people of Central Asia had suffered from until the arrival of the Russian Bolsheviks. The Uzbek people were hence indebted to their Soviet friends for their freedom and the blessings of socialism. Now was the time for the Uzbek people to repay their debt. A long list of Uzbek proverbs about helping friends in grief and repaying gratitude was also included with didactic commentaries linking Soviet ideology to traditional Uzbek moral values. At the 25th anniversary of the birth of Soviet-Uzbek literature celebrated in 1942, the Uzbek Community Party Secretary, Usmon Yusupov, proudly claimed: ‘in the previous World War, we the Uzbeks could not even be trusted with weapons. But for this Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Peoples […] it is our inalienable right to fight for our motherland with the other [Soviet] nations.’16 Yusupov dismissed the historical fact that during the First World War, the 1916-tsarist conscription order had triggered a series of violent uprisings of Central Asian populations against the Russian colonial masters. Instead, he emphasized the ‘incapability’ or ‘immaturity’ of the Uzbek people as the reason for the Uzbek people’s dishonourable absence in the noble task of defending the motherland. By the 1940s, colonialism was interpreted as a policy devised by colonizers and implemented through local tyrants who acted as the colonizers’ henchmen. Colonialism enchained the masses, led to ignorance and backwardness, and inhibited them from moving forward in the Marxist historical evolution. Therefore, preventing the Uzbek people from reaching the level of civil consciousness (i.e. patriotism) and restraining the people’s right to take up arms against the invaders were grave offences of colonialism. The fact that the motherland they ought to defend was the (colonial) metropole was simply forgotten. The Uzbek people’s participation in a world war added national pride.17 In reality, however, Central Asia did not share the sense of urgency and desperation that loomed over the Western territories of the Soviet Union. As an Uzbek Party secretary complained, the urgency of the situation to which the very survival of the socialist state was at stake was not shared by the native population who had little if any ties to the parts under German attack. A Party secretary also expressed his concern that there was no visible sign of the war in Tashkent with the exception of a few slogans sparsely hung around the city.18 Daily life remained unaffected during the first few weeks of the war, or at least until the evacuees arrived. Soon however, loss 16 O’z RMDA, R-2356/1/95/10. 17 Shin, ‘Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism during World War II’, p. 44. 18 Stronski, Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, p. 74.

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and death, hunger, severe shortage of goods, infectious diseases, overcrowding, and widespread criminal activities overwhelmed life in the republic, especially in the urban areas. Tashkent was not prepared to accommodate the sudden influx. The locals and evacuees alike found themselves in daily competition for survival. The hungry Uzbek population complained against the Russian evacuees because they thought that the evacuees received more generous treatment from the state. Some Uzbeks even demanded that the Party give the local population priority in bread rationing. The Uzbeks also began to imagine the nation’s future without the Soviet Union. Some openly expressed anti-Russian sentiments. An Uzbek worker, for example, allegedly threatened his Russian colleagues and said he would ‘slice up’ the Russians in Central Asia once the Soviet Union collapsed.19 An NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) report described an incident in which a group of Uzbek men volunteered for the Red Army to escape starvation in Tashkent. The men explained that the Party was letting the natives starve to death to ensure the survival of Slavic territories of the Soviet Union.20 Unlike the population, the Uzbek party leadership was eager to support the Soviet military campaign and expressed continuous loyalty towards the centre. As Donald Carlisle explains, the new Stalinist generation of Uzbek political elites was not influenced by the local modernist movement and had never experienced mutual dependency between the local and Moscow authorities their predecessors had enjoyed at the republic’s birth. As a result, the new elites were ‘implicated in Stalin’s crimes as the beneficiary of the elimination of those natives who had previously held their posts’ and thus ‘wholly dependent on Moscow and naturally beholden to Stalin for their elevation to political height’.21 A letter from an informant to the Moscow NKVD dated July 1941, suggests that there was a rivalry within the Uzbek leadership between Usman Yusupov, the First Secretary of the Central Committee, and Muhammedjon Yuldash, the head of the Tashkent Communist Party. According to the informant, the resentful ‘communists’ who were recently rehabilitated from the 1930s trials were scheming to use this internal rivalry to ‘sell’ Yusupov in a manner similar to how he himself had orchestrated the fall of the former leaders. The informant also drew attention to a low-profile ‘reactionary nationalist’ group called Turkestani Circle that was still influential among the local Muslims, hinting at the 19 Ibid, p. 122. 20 Ibid. 21 Carlisle, ‘The Uzbek Soviet Intelligentsia’, p. 248.

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possibility that this group could turn into a serious threat during a time of emergency.22 Not every word of the letter can be taken as fact but it does suggest possible instability and lack of a secure sense of legitimacy among the Stalinist elites in the wake of the war. The war years were the time when the Uzbek political elites had an opportunity to consolidate their status while enjoying a degree of leverage. But when the elites asked themselves whether the local Uzbeks would fight for the survival of the Soviet Union, the answer was less than encouraging. The Party began to monitor the population for expressions of defeatism and anti-Soviet/Russian sentiments. At the same time, the elites mobilized the republican cultural and propaganda apparatuses to promote Soviet patriotism among the Uzbek population.

Making of the Soviet Friendship at the Uzbek Home Front The Soviet propaganda campaign and its agitation material were created through centralized operations, in which the tight censorship from the pre-war era was still prevalent. On 8 July 1941, the Communist Party of the Uzbek SSR issued a decree to strengthen the wartime propaganda campaigns and political agitation. The decree initiated the restructuring of all local cultural apparatuses and censorship organs for the wartime emergency and mobilized all artists and intellectuals affiliated with the republican organization. The mobilized cultural workers were instructed to produce contents that demonstrated the heroic past and present of the Soviet peoples, to prepare publications about the Red Army’s victories, and to identify the themes that could express patriotism of the Soviet working people at the home front. Every possible cultural medium and communication channel, including public lectures, brochures, newspapers, magazines, radio, literary and scholarly publications, popular songs and other forms of music, plays, films, concerts, and exhibitions, were used for Soviet war propaganda. On a popular level, ordinary citizens such as students and workers were recruited and trained to give tours and consultations to mobilized factory workers, collective farmers, and the soldiers’ families to promote the Soviet military cause and explain the duties of the Soviet citizens. These delegates also encouraged women to enter the work force to fill the vacancies left by drafted men. Local cultural houses (dom kul’tury), red teahouses, factory 22 RGASPI, 17/125/30/19-30.

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and kolkhoz clubs, amateur performance and artistic circles, local libraries, and museums also added their efforts to the republic-wide propaganda campaigns even though a significant number of the popular-level organizations were closed during the war. In 1941, these local amateur groups gave around 500 performances.23 Public spaces including museums, party cabinets, agitpunkts (‘agitation point’), and industrial enterprises throughout Tashkent hosted war-themed exhibitions of various kinds and scales. The local libraries also organized special shelves for war literature to meet popular demand. The state-funded and fully mobilized Uzbek cultural apparatuses produced an impressive volume of literary and cultural propaganda in a relatively short period of time despite the material difficulties during the war. It is recorded that from June to November 1941, the Uzbek Soviet writers produced more than eighty works of prose, 305 poems, and 60 plays.24 The first wartime films were already produced a few days into the war. Many writers and artists, motivated either by the state’s pressing demands or by their own personal enthusiasm, were eager to produce something on the war. But they generally lacked both personal experience and accurate information about the war to create a realistic representation. The Soviet government tried very hard to prevent any negative news from reaching the public especially during the earlier stage of the war, which was marked by disastrous military failures. Consequently, writers and artists felt lost as to how to approach the task they had been given. Some believed in the omnipotent power of the Soviet ideology and the Party’s overly optimistic promise of an easy and quick victory. In a short and naive film shot in the earlier days, for example, an Uzbek cook together with Ukrainian soldiers converts a group of German soldiers to the Soviet side by sharing Uzbek plov (friend rice). The Russian writer-evacuees criticized the widespread confusion and naivety of their Uzbek colleagues often adopting a tone of condescension. One Russian writer remarked that since the Uzbek poets ‘all lived in the home front’, expecting from them the same quality of work as produced by the Russian poet Simonov was simply unfair to the Uzbek poets.25 In that writer’s opinion, Uzbek war poems generally lacked ‘human face’ as a consequence.26 From 1942, the Uzbek Writers’ Union sent its members as 23 Akhunova, Uzbekskaia SSR, pp. 213-223. 24 Ibid, p. 231. 25 O’z RMDA, R-2356/1/93/35b. 26 Ibid.

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cultural delegates to the front to promote the morale of Uzbek Red Army soldiers and to give the writers an opportunity to witness the war. Even after their returns, however, Uzbek writers could not honestly describe what they had witnessed at the front. It was only when the Stalinist era came to an end that a more ‘realistic’ portrayal of the war and the Uzbek soldiers’ and civilians’ experiences of the war made its appearance in literature.27 On 26 June 1941, the Uzbek Writers’ Union published the following passage in Pravda Vostoka, the Russian-language Party newspaper printed in Uzbekistan: Fascism brings death of the world culture. We remember how the Nazis who lost their human forms burned down the great monuments of culture because they knew by their animal instinct that fascism cannot stand next to great arts. We, the writers of Uzbekistan, in these gloomy days of war, will fight for victory along with the Soviet people. Our weapon is a bayonet and a pen.28

As reflected in the passage above, culture, or even civilization itself was mobilized against the Nazis who were described as barbaric destroyers of the arts. The Soviets, by contrast, represented themselves as the protectors of cultures of all nationalities. On the pedestal was the Russian classic. In the earlier days of the war, Soviet patriotism was built on the ‘high’ and thus ‘universal’ Russian arts, and on Russian historic and cultural figures. The ‘great Russian poet’ Alexander Pushkin, who represented not only Russian classical literature but also the Russian nation, often appeared on wartime posters, guiding the marching Red Army soldiers to the front. However, local Party officers and propagandists soon realized that this ‘Russianized’ representation of the Soviet Union deterred Central Asian citizens and other non-Russian peoples within the Soviet Union from taking up arms for the Soviet motherland. It was necessary and crucial to localize the propaganda programmes and campaigns. From that point onwards, Alisher Navoi, the Chagatai poet from the fifteenth century who came to officially represent the Uzbek nation in the 1930s, was commonly featured in locally produced posters. David Brandenberger argues that the Russocentric slogans and images that dominated wartime Soviet propaganda should be considered more 27 Ibid. 28 Quoted in Kadrina and Kasymov, Istoiia Uzbekistoi Sovetskoi Literatury, p. 186.

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as expressions of popular sentiment than as the central Party line.29 The Party more often than not remained or attempted to remain true to the principle of the Friendship of the Soviet peoples in its official rhetoric. In order to forge the image of Soviet multinational unity, the Party continued to encourage Russian intellectuals and propagandists to engage more with non-Russian Soviet cultures and histories. A rather dramatic demonstration of the Friendship between Russians and Uzbeks was the celebration of Alisher Navoi’s 500th birthday convened in the winter of 1941 in blockaded Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg). Whereas in Tashkent the celebration was postponed indefinitely due to the war, Orientalist scholars in Leningrad gathered to honour the first Soviet commemoration of the Chagatai poet on the originally scheduled date. In Wartime Leaflet, Boris Piotrovskii described the Leningrad Navoi anniversary held at the Hermitage Museum in following words: This is not simply a form of complacency, an escape from the reality, or a withdrawal to the monastic cells of sciences. This is an endeavour to engage with the cultures of the peoples of the Soviet Union united in a single fraternal family. [This unity] nurtured by these cultures, will not be defeated and enslaved by any military or technical means in the hands of our enemies.30

In an ironic turn of events, however, the news of the Leningrad commemoration never reached the Uzbek public until the end of the war. Instead, the evacuated Russian writers and scholars worked in collaboration with their native colleagues on building a ‘useful’ or ‘heroic’ pre-Bolshevik past for the Central Asian people. Many evacuated Russian writers and scholars wrote influential studies on Uzbek belle lettres and folklores during their stays in Tashkent. The prominent Russian writers Aleksei Tolstoi and Kornei Chukovskii were placed in charge of translating Uzbek literature into Russian. The two most important joint translation projects were Treasures of Central Asia and Poetry of Uzbekistan, both a collected volume of Uzbek poetry published for the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution in Central Asia. The History of Soviet Uzbek Literature describes the war years as a time in which the friendship of the Soviet peoples was invigorated especially on the literary front. It writes: ‘For the multinational tributaries of Soviet poetry, 29 Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, p. 120. 30 Quoted in Varshavskii and Rest, Podvig Ermitazha, p. 147.

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the Great Patriotic War not only presented a great challenge but also brought them closer to one another. This in turn led to the growth of Soviet patriotism which was commonly shared among all cultures of the USSR’.31 The war did not only provide a common agenda and an idea of shared historical destiny but also physically brought the Soviet cultural echelon from the Soviet centre to the Central Asian republics. Between 1941 and 1945, Tashkent hosted prominent writers and scholars, including Vladimir Lugovskoy, Anna Akhmatova, Viacheslav Ivanov, Viktor Zhirmunskii, Vasilii Ian, and Evgenii Bertel, who, along with their affiliate institutions, were evacuated from Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa. The Leningrad Institutes of History and Philosophy, World Literature, Oriental Studies, and Economy and Law; the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House); the Institute of Languages under the Soviet Academy of Science; the Belorussian Academy of Science; the Moscow Lenin Theatre; and the Kiev Academic Theatre were among the cultural institutions that evacuated to the Uzbek republic. According to state propaganda, collaboration between the local Uzbek writers and their evacuee colleagues provided an opportunity not only to demonstrate the friendship of the people but also to learn from each other. For the Uzbek writers, the mere presence of some of the most prominent literati of the Soviet Union was an opportunity to elevate the quality of Uzbek literature to ‘international’ prestige; for the Russian writers it was an opportunity to become familiar with the literatures of the brother republics in Soviet Central Asia. At the Uzbek Writers’ Union meetings convened behind closed doors, the Soviet Friendship was revealed to be less ideal than was presented in the celebrated public scenes of cultural exchanges. This was also the case for the closed-door discussions between Russian and Uzbek writers involved in translation of a collection of Uzbek wartime poetry, a project originally proposed by writers who evacuated to Tashkent. The collection was to be included in the influential Soviet Writers series. With a special permission from the Uzbek Communist Party First Secretary Yusupov, scarse resources were set aside for the publication and a special committee was organised under the Uzbek Writers’ Union for the translations. In June 1942, Homid Olimjon, the head of the Uzbek Writers’ Union, delivered to his Russian colleagues the Uzbek Party’s request for an update on how the collaboration between the writers was progressing. The Russian writers reported about slow progress made thus far and offered explanations for the shortcomings. The literary scholar Viktor Zirmunskii quite frankly 31 Vladimirov, Kadrina, and Kasymov, Istoiia Uzbekistoi Sovetskoi Literatury, p. 196.

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admitted that ‘the literature of the Soviet East is distant from us [and] we see many aspects of it for the first time’, dismissing the official rhetoric of mutual familiarity and appreciation for every Soviet national culture by all Soviet peoples.32 Aleksei Tolstoi expressed his scepticism of the wartime literary ‘production schedule’, which he thought would be impossible to fulfil. He predicted, as did most Russian evacuees, that the war would end by the autumn and most of the writers would return home to Russia, which meant that the collaborative projects would come to a halt. Tolstoi suggested that many writers considered the translation projects temporary and ‘incidental’ assignments given the extraordinary circumstances of the war. In addition, he openly admitted that the Russian writers could only provide partial assistance in the grand search for an artistic approach to creating a Socialist-Realist Uzbek hero, because they were not yet conversant with the local literature. He urged his Russian colleagues: ‘We [the Russians] need to familiarize ourselves [with the local culture]. This is what I want to say about artistic work. Our job is to […] not drop it halfway through. This is called “learning”’.33 Isaiia Lezhnev, on the other hand, protested that the plan was made unrealistic by the uneven allocation of tasks and accused some ‘Tashkent writers’ of acting as if they were ‘demobilized’.34 Others made similar complaints hinting at the need to bring more local participation. The Russian writers also maintained the pre-war patronizing attitude towards their local counterparts and acted as teachers who represented the ‘correct’ path towards socialism and modernity. In discussing the quality of translations, the Russian critic Kornelii Zelinskii congratulated the Uzbek literature and writers for making impressive progress in the realm of political ideology. He rejoiced: ‘How amazed would Furkat [Furqat] be if he sees this book. Here is presented a great insight into political consciousness, a deep pathos of the Friendship of the People […] Here, the Uzbek poets are singing about Stalin, Lenin, the Friendship, and Moscow!’35 Further on, Zelinskii described the publication as the final realization and the ultimate victory of a group of nineteenth-century Uzbek writers represented by Furqat who were the first to envision a modern Central Asian nation and sought ways to bring social reforms to the region. Addressing the question of how to express Uzbek ‘national character’ in war literature, the critic offered a word of advice to the Uzbek poets that they must be cautious of ‘minor errors’. He 32 O’z RMDA, R-2356/1/93/28. 33 Ibid., 27. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 31.

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asserted: ‘Here the Uzbek comrades approach the theme of war traditionally. We need to talk about the [new] Soviet poetry. [… Soviet poetry] is remarkable in the sense that it is exceptionally novel and reveals all its soul to its readers as do today’s heroes. The Uzbek poets must understand this’.36 In response to Zelinskii’s criticism, Izzat Sultan [Sultanov], an Uzbek poet, suggested that Uzbek poetry was much more vibrant than how it was represented by the poems collected for the volume. Furthermore, he claimed that its depth and breadth went well beyond the expressions of Soviet patriotism. Although he agreed with the Russian critic that the Uzbek poets needed to find something ‘new’ in general, Sultanov argued that the volume had only a limited purpose. ‘This collection’, he said, ‘gives only a glimpse of maturity of our poetry. It is purely an incidental project. The main agenda is this: to have the poems resonate the anger of the people against the invading enemy’.37 Other writers and critics turned their attention to the quality of the translations to make their case. Kornei Chukovskii, the Russian head of the committee, demanded the Russian translators and editors ‘to feel passionate about the Uzbek poetry, treat it as Russian, and help the native poets not after the book is published but before’.38 Lev Pen’kovskii, on the other hand, found this attitude (or the attempt) of the Russian translators and editors to treat Uzbek literature as ‘their own’ problematic. He argued that this could lead to biased and careless misinterpretations that might Russianize the native voice. To avoid directly criticizing the institutional leadership and the system, the critic used the term ‘depersonalize’ to pose questions concerning how to improve the translators’ negligence towards the native cultural and linguistic particularities. Pen’kosvkii asked: ‘Where is the distinction between Turkic, Uzbek, Ukrainian, [and] Belorussian? How will they be unique? They will only end up sounding the same… We must not Frenchify-Englishfy [the non-Russian Soviet] literatures… We [the translators] must struggle together to make the poetries of the Uzbeks, the Kazakhs, and the Turks distinguishable from one another’.39 Both Sultanov’s and Pen’kovskii’s comments and criticisms reflected changes in the centre-periphery dynamic caused by the war and the evacuation. The wartime exigencies and the consequent realignment of power required a change in how the Soviet Friendship and the Uzbek national culture produced as its manifestation were negotiated between the centre 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 32. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 34.

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and the periphery. It was a time of what Franz Fanon calls (and Homi Bhabha elaborates) an ‘occult instability’ – ‘a time of cultural uncertainty, and most crucially, of significatory or representational undecidability’.40 The war brought the centre and periphery into direct contact to create a ‘multicultural ideology’, i.e. Soviet patriotism; its legitimacy was no longer derived solely from the centre’s authority but also from its persuasive power over the periphery’s audience. The imagery of the centre’s panoptical surveillance, sustained partly by the physical distance separating Moscow and Tashkent, collapsed. Soviet multiculturalism based on the totalizing diversity rooted in the universal multiplicity of Soviet ideology, could no longer serve as viable grounds for cultural identification. Instead, Soviet ‘multiculturality’ as a condition had to be reconceptualized within the local discourses. A ‘third space’ (a passage) of differentiation and hybridization was opening up in the construction and localization of Soviet patriotism upheld by the Soviet Friendship, the political banner originally devised to confine differences within diversity. Although soldiers of all non-Russian republics fought in and for the Soviet Red Army, they each marched under the banners of their own nation. The war gave an opportunity to revive the unique pre-Bolshevik national history, which had been sealed by the universalist Leninist-Stalinist historiography. Uzbek writers created fictional biographies of the past heroes which included Oybek’s Navoi, Tarabi; Uyg’un and Sulton’s Alisher Navoi; Homid Olimjon’s Muqanna; and Shayxzoda’s Jalaladdin. Elsewhere in Central Asia, writers such as Sh. Khusainov, B. Kerbabaev, and K. Dzhantoshev wrote stories of legendary warriors to celebrate the heroic histories of the Kazakh, Turkmen, and Kirgiz peoples. The Soviet Central Asian propagandists reintroduced the past warriors and rulers into their national narratives despite the warriors’ and rulers’ class origin. They justified themselves with the rather romantic idea of organic narrative, which suggested that it was the people (narod) who remembered and passed on the tales of the legendary heroes between generations in the form of folklore and oral epics. Therefore, these heroes were the heroes of the people and not their class. In the prologue to The Motherland is Calling, a collection of Uzbek wartime poems and prose published in 1943, the editors claimed: ‘When we were children, our mothers sung lullabies about past heroes. As children we listened to the songs that preserved the people’s memories of the heroic deeds of Rustam, Raushanbek, Avazhan, Alpamysh, and other warriors. Let these heroes inspire you… in the battles against the hateful German occupants’. 41 40 Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 65. 41 Quoted in Kedrina and Kasymov, Istoiia Uzbekistoi Sovetskoi Literatury, p. 200.

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Because an absolute priority was given to the goal of promoting patriotism among the Uzbek population, historical accuracy and biographical facts were sometimes compromised. Later in 1945, Oybek explained the mood of the time and his decision to alter historical facts in Tarabi at an Uzbek Writers’ Union meeting. He explained: Our comrades were facing the situation that called for [literature] that could inspire the people to fight for their country, even if the stories did not correspond to historical facts. At the end of 1941, we had to produce [literature] that would pour new strength and faith in victory into the hearts of our people. Therefore, the hero had to live on. 42

The wartime exigencies which appeased the qualms about the heroes’ class origin and trivialized the test of historical accuracy revived military figures whose glory was won by the defeat and suffering of other peoples of the Soviet Union, the ancestors of today’s socialist ‘friends’. Reassessing Jalaladdin, a popular play by Maqsud Shayxzoda, Komil Yashin asked: ‘We have to come to a common conclusion on who this Jalaladdin (Dzhalaleddin in Russian) was – a hero who protected his homeland or an oppressor? However, this issue is beyond the control of our Writers’ Union. Our writers portray him as a hero and the Georgian and Armenian writers portray him as a cruel oppressor’. 43 Yet, the writers as well as the Party censorship often overlooked such contradictions during the war, so it was only after the war that this became an issue. Furthermore, as a result of the quest for a usable and distinguishably ‘national’ past from the Central Asian region characterized by constant movements of peoples, historical figures, and cultural heritage of regional significance came to narrowly represent a single national republic. If such proprietary claims had already been made before the war, they were further reinforced by the prevalent patriotic narratives and validated by the vast corpus of scholarly works produced jointly by the Russians and local intellectuals. Once the central authority recovered its power after the war, it criticized the ‘national’ ownership of cultural heritage as a ‘nationalist deviance’ and misunderstanding of Leninism. In 1948, the Soviet Writers’ Union sent out a letter requesting all Central Asian and Caucasus intellectuals to reassess works on national literature and history produced during the war. The letter stated: 42 O’z RMDA, R-2356/1/58/10. 43 Ibid., 6.

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Often contradictory interpretations arise when one and the same literary monument or folklore is claimed by not one but two or even several nations. Such claims for exclusive possession by not one but many peoples and the consequent contradictions arise concerning Avesta, the epics of elderly Kordud…44

Among the works on Uzbek literature that needed reassessment were Oybek’s biographies of Alisher Navoi as well as Evgenii Bertels’ influential scholarship on the Timurid period poetry. However, the central authority could not reverse the effects of wartime enthusiasm for the revival of national history, manifested by the belated celebration of the 500th anniversary of Alisher Navoi’s birth. Held in 1948, it fortified the poet’s status as the Uzbek poet. Oybek, the new head of the Uzbek Writers’ Union declared the following to his fellow writers during the preparatory meeting for the commemoration: Now, Soviet science has proven that […] the Uzbek people […] had and have a distinct and original culture and that they are also creators of beautiful culture… [Science has also proven] that Alisher Navoi was not an imitator or translator but an independent poet who made significant contributions to the development of not only Uzbek literature but also literatures of other Central Asian and Asian literature. […] Navoi enriched not only literature of the East but literature of the world. 45

The Alisher Navoi Commemoration of 1948 was an enunciative moment of modernity – while Alisher Navoi was rescued from unoriginality, the Uzbek people were saved from ‘backwardness’. As Alisher Navoi was venerated as a poet of international significance, the Uzbekistan emerged in the world as a Soviet nation.

Conclusion When the Second World War broke out in the Soviet Union, the Moscow centre was brought into direct contact with the Central Asian periphery. Under the banner of the ‘Friendship of the Soviet Peoples’, which had governed interethnic relations within the Soviet Union since the 1930s, the Uzbek Red Army soldiers marched to the Soviet West while Russian 44 O’z RMDA, R-2356/1/146/58. 45 O’z RMDA, R-2356/1/141/191.

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cultural elites evacuated to Tashkent collaborated with their local counterparts to create a regional cultural centre in the Uzbek capital. It was also upon this principle that Soviet patriotism and Uzbek nationalism were negotiated. This chapter argued that Uzbek nationalism and Soviet patriotism, often perceived as a binary opposition, were not constructed against each other, especially when the state needed to promote both to gain the peripheral population’s support to win a war. Instead, they worked together to create a space to construct an Uzbek identity. In other words, the march to war made it possible for the republic to move beyond the Soviet rhetoric and add an Uzbek dimension to the local identity, which was crucial for the continuation of the Soviet existence in subsequent decades. The end of the Second World War marked the dissolution of European colonial empires and the rise of a new international system which divided the globe into three ideological spheres. While in the coming decade G’afur G’ulom’s other Asia would be caught up in violent struggles for decolonization under the banner of colonial nationalism, Central Asia arguably would become more ‘Sovietized’. Central Asia’s experience of being the Soviet Union’s periphery suggests a unique mode of colonialism justified by socialist principles, preserved by nationalist sentiments among the ruled population, and promoted vigorously by the metropole.

Bibliography Primary Sources Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), 558/1/2196, Sovetskaia Vlast’ i Natsional’nyi Vopros v Rossii by Stalin, 1920. —, 17/125/30, Pis’mo A.V. Stanishevskogo Sekretariu TsK VKP(b) G.M. Malenkovu o Polozhenii v Srednei Azii v Sviazi s Usileniem Raboty Nemetskoi Razvedki na Vostoke I Merakh po Okazaniiu Protibodeistbiia Organami NKGB SSSR, 1941. Tashkent, Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan (O’z RMDA), Uzbek Writers’ Union Files, R-2356/1/95, Vystupleniia Tovarisha Iusupova U. na Prediuma Soiuza Sovetskikh Pisatelei Uzbekistana,Posviashchennom XXV-letiiu Uzbeskoi Literatury, 1942a. —, R-2356/1/93, Protokol Zasedaniia Prezidiuma SSPUz, 1942b. —, R-2356/1/58, Literaturnyi Disput o P’ese Shakhizode ‘Dzhelaleddin’, 1945. —, R-2356/2/358, Varianty Gimma Uzbekskoi SSR, 1946. —, R-2356/1/146, Letter from N. Tikhonov and P. Skosyrov, 1948a. —, R-2356/1/141, Zasedaniia Prezidiuma Soiuza Sovetskikh Pisatelei Uzbekistana, 1948b. Uzbek Writers’ Union, ‘Pis’mo Uzbekskogo Naroda Boitsam Belikoi Otchestvennoi Voiny’, Pravda Vostoka, 15 March 1942, p. 3.

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Secondary Sources Akhunova, M., Uzbekskaia SSR v Gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny: 1941-1945gg, 3 vols. (Tashkent: Fan, 1981-1985). Bhabha, H.K., Location of Culture (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004). Brandenberger, D., National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2002). Carlisle, D., ‘The Uzbek Soviet Intelligentsia’ in P. Cockes, R. Daniels and N. Heer (eds.), The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). Caroe, O., Soviet Empire: The Turks of Central Asia and Stalinism (London: Macmillan, 1967 [1953]). Dzhuraev, T., Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Uzbekistana v Gody Velikoi Otchestvennoi Voiny (Tashkent: Uzbekistan, 1964). G’ulom, G’., Stikhotvoreniia i Poemy, 2 vols. (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo Literatury i Iskustva im. Gafura Guliama, 1983). Gelber, H.G., Nations out of Empires: European Nationalism and the Transformation of Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2001). Kadrina, Z.S. and S.S. Kasymov, Istoiia Uzbekiskoi Sovetskoi Literatury (Moscow: Nauka, 1967). Marx, K., ‘The British Rule in India’, in Communist Working Circle (ed.), Marx and Engels: On Colonies, Industrial Monopoly and Working Class Movement (Copenhagen: Futura, 1972). McGlinchey, E., Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia: Politics and Islam in Central Asia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). ‘O Mitinge Trudiachshikhsia g. Andizhana v Sviazi s Verolomnym Napadeniem Fashistskoi Germanii na Sovetskii Soiuz’, Pravda Vostoka, 23 June 1941, p. 1. Rolf, M., ‘A Half of Mirrors: Sovietising Culture under Stalinism’, Slavic Review 68:3 (2009), pp. 601-603. Stronski, P., Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City 1930-1966 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Shin, B., ‘Red Army Propaganda for Uzbek Soldiers and Localised Soviet Internationalism during World War II’, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 42 (2015), pp. 39-63. Suny, R.G., ‘The Empire Strikes Out’ in R.G. Suny and T. Martin (eds.) A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 23-65. Varshavskii, S.P. and B. Rest, Podvig Ermitazha: Dokumental‘naia povest’ (St. Petersburg: Lenizda, 1985). Jo’rayev, M. and T. Fayzullaev, O’zbekistonning Yangi Tarixi, 3 vols. (Tashkent: Sharq, 2000)

About the Author Boram Shin received her PhD in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests include Soviet Central Asian history, Central-Asian film and literature, socialist expansion in the early Cold-War period. Currently she is HK Research Professor at the Asia-Pacific Research Centre at Hanyang University.

10 Shared Origins, Shared Outcomes? Transcultural Trajectories of Germany and Japan during the Asia-Pacific War Andrea Germer Stolte, Carolien, and Yoshiyuki Kikuchi (eds.), Eurasian Encounters: Museums, Missions, Modernities. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. DOI: 10.5117/9789089648839/CH10 Abstract In the formation of Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, the accelerating mobility of people, commodities, and ideas, of technology and, not least, of aesthetic trends, produced transcultural flows that functioned to a considerable degree to reconf irm, re-enact or newly establish localized ideologies and assertions of hegemonic structures in the political sphere. Subsequently, the fascisms that evolved in Europe and in Asia and became virulent from the 1930s expressed themselves in modern, international, technologically, and aesthetically advanced cultural forms. This chapter focuses on transcultural developments in aesthetics and media technologies. As a window onto these fields, it discusses the intricate links between two wartime overseas propaganda journals: NIPPON, published in Japan by the photography and graphic-design company Nippon Kōbō between 1934 and 1944; and Signal, produced in Germany in 1940-1945 by Deutscher Verlag, the successor of the Jewish Ullstein Verlag, which had been usurped and renamed by the Nazis in 1934. Tracing the common trajectories of NIPPON and Signal, this chapter situates these cultural products in transcultural motions between Europe and Asia between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, pointing to shared aesthetic origins as well as utilizations to similar political ends.

The search for origins never ends, as any finding or result will inevitably produce the question of what led to it, and any answers will invite only further inquiries. Michel Foucault suggested a genealogical and archaeological approach to questions of origins, one that is not looking for essentialisms

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but rather for contingent elements, factors, conditions, and configurations that coalesce to form distinct cultural and political opportunities and phenomena.1 In this chapter, I trace some of the cultural origins, linkages as well as (dis)connections of distinct media productions in Europe and Asia from the 1930s until the end of the Second World War. I discuss the politically similar uses to which they have been put in different, but related, wartime theatres. I focus on the intricate links between two overseas propaganda journals: NIPPON (1934-1944), published in Japan by the photography and graphic design company Nippon Kōbō (Japan Studio) and Signal, produced in Germany between 1940-1945 by Deutscher Verlag (German Press), the successor of Jewish Ullstein Verlag (Ullstein Press) which had been usurped and renamed by the Nazis in 1934.2 Tracing the common trajectories of NIPPON and Signal, but also discussing their distinctive differences, I situate these cultural products in transcultural motions between Europe and Asia between the late 1920s and the mid-1940s, pointing to shared aesthetic origins and similar political ends. To understand the transnational connections as well as ruptures that underlay the developments of these media, Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the cultural dimensions of globalization is helpful as he notes that cultural forms are essentially fragmentary, overlapping and becoming increasingly complex.3 However, the fragmentation, overlap, and complexities produced by intellectual and cultural flows will not necessarily serve to undermine the notions of cultural identity and their uses in seconding the nationalistic imaginations and assertions of hegemony. In the formation of Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, the accelerating mobility of people, commodities, and ideas, of technology and, not least, of aesthetic trends, produced transcultural flows that functioned to a considerable degree to reconfirm, re-enact or newly establish localized ideologies and assertions of hegemonic structures in the political sphere. Subsequently, the fascisms that evolved in Europe and in Asia and became virulent from the 1930s onwards, expressed themselves in modern, transnational, and technologically advanced cultural forms. As Appadurai notes elsewhere, ‘we need an architecture for area studies that is based on process geographies’ and that examines the ‘precipitates 1 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. 2 On the history of Ullstein Press see Lindner, Presse-und Verlagsgeschichte im Zeichen der Eule and www.preussen-chronik.de/begriff_jsp/key=begriff_berliner+illustrirte+zeitung.html (last accessed 20 June 2014). 3 Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

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of various kinds of action, interaction and motion’. 4 To accomplish this, we have to trace the agency of cultural and political brokers and their products in the making and transmission of hegemonic ideologies and their cultural technologies. An early case in point is the Iwakura mission of the early 1870s, and the subsequent international travels of Japanese government officials and affiliated elite intellectuals that brought these go-betweens in contact with particular Euro-American strategies of politically inventing and culturally performing the nation state. They brought home models for inventing and enacting Japanese versions of it.5 Even though these encounters had greater impact on subsequent Japanese cultural and political strategies, they had repercussions on both sides. The rapidly increasing transcultural and transnational flows of commodities, people, technology and knowledge between Asia and Europe shaped the political and social changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Media technologies present a particularly insightful showcase for these flows in their various modern manifestations.

NIPPON and Its Models6 The modernists in the photography and graphic design company Nippon Kōbō who produced NIPPON were deeply influenced by their German encounters with the trends of New Vision, New Objectivity, and modern photojournalism. The company’s owner, Natori Yōnosuke (1910-1962), was a photojournalist who had learned his profession in Weimar Germany.7 Reaching an impasse in his youth when he did not meet the requirements for advancing to university, his wealthy parents decided to send him to Germany for study in 1928. In Munich, he met his German partner Erna Mecklenburg (1901-1979) who eventually followed him as his wife upon his return to Japan. Interested in the arts and exploring different avenues in Germany, Natori and Mecklenburg encountered evolving photographic and photojournalistic practices in the late 1920s. Between 1930 and 1933, Natori worked for the biggest illustrated newspapers: first the Münchner 4 Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, pp. 7-8. 5 See Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, for an exemplary account of how in this process the Japanese Imperial Household and its ceremonial structure was fundamentally transformed. 6 This section is based on my recent article in German, ‘Kunst und Politik?’ and incorporates findings published in Germer, ‘Visual propaganda in Wartime East Asia’ and Germer, ‘Artists and Wartime Agency’. 7 Natori, Shashin no yomikata.

234  Figure 1  Cover NIPPON 1 (1934)

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Figure 2  Kurt Kranz, Portrait in front of the Bauhaus, ca. 1928-1929

NIPPON Fukkokuban (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2005)

In C. Haenlein (ed.), Photographie und Bauhaus (Hannover: Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1986), p. 8. Permission by Ingrid Kranz

Illustrierte Presse (Munich Illustrated Press; hereafter MIP), and then the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated News; hereafter BIZ), produced by the German Ullstein Press. After relocating to Japan in 1933, he kept returning to Germany for photographic assignments and cultural exchange that served both Japanese and German audiences and he continued to take cues from the particular visual and institutional strategies of Nazi propaganda.8 The magazine NIPPON that he and his team produced in Japan appeared in 41 issues, including five Japanese editions, between 1934 and 1944. It was geared to overseas audiences and published in English, German, French, and Spanish, with the self-proclaimed purpose of explaining and presenting ‘actual life and events in modern Japan’.9 In the course of its appearance, it carved out the image of a highly modern Japan – its culture, politics, 8 Germer, ‘Artists and Wartime Agency’. 9 NIPPON 1934, no.1, editorial page. See the facsimile published by Kokusho Kankōkai, NIPPON, 2003-2005.

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economic strength, and peacefulness, as well as its justifications for belligerent expansion. In the making of NIPPON, Natori’s ‘German’ cultural heritage, particularly his indebtedness to the avant-garde trends of so-called New Vision and Bauhaus design and aesthetics, can be seen in the particular visual strategies he and his team at Nippon Kōbō used in their propagandistic productions in wartime Japan. Advocating Nazi propaganda strategies for Japan in 1938, Natori, and Mecklenburg, who played an important role at Nippon Kōbō, became pioneers and prolif ic Japanese propagandists in China, Manchuria, and Southeast Asia. They produced a number of illustrated propaganda magazines during the Asia-Pacif ic War. 10 They also contributed to Nazi propaganda through cultural cooperations and through contributions to German media during the 1930s. The transnational couple Natori and Mecklenburg were a product of their time in the sense that the increasing mobility of people who could afford transnational travel and study between Asia and Europe enabled them to meet, and to create synergies in the production of innovative cultural and political media. The couple eventually put their cooperation and expertise to lucrative use within the emerging fascisms of their respective countries. Their aesthetically outstanding product NIPPON can be seen as a forerunner in the emerging print journalism for overseas audiences. One notable and similar contemporary publication was the Soviet magazine SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction, 1930-1941 and 1949) whose overt political, economic, and ideological zeal promoted the USSR to Western economies as a trading partner rich in natural resources, particularly in the first years of its appearance. In time, however, its ideal primary readership would become the domestic emerging Stalinist elite, rather than an international audience.11 In the early 1940s, this Soviet magazine became the model for FRONT, another aesthetically outstanding overseas propaganda journal produced in Japan between 1942 and 1945.12 In the late 1930s, another international 10 Financed by the Army and KBS, Nippon Kōbō was renamed and restructured in 1939 to become a corporation, the Kokusai Hōdō Kōgei Kabushiki-gaisha. In 1940, this corporation had its main office in Tokyo and branches in Ōsaka, Nanking, Shanghai, Canton, and Shinkyō (today’s Changchun). It employed around 80 photographers and designers, producing several propagandistic cultural magazines, all of them of high quality and combining arts, culture, photos, and illustrations, thus becoming a major organization for the production of state propaganda. See Koyanagi and Ishikawa, Jūgun kameraman no sensō, p. 146. 11 Wolf, ‘When Photographs Speak’, p. 54. 12 Germer, ‘Adapting Russian Constructivism and Socialist Realism’.

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propaganda magazine was inaugurated in the wake of the Tripartite Pact by the title Berlin Rom Tokio (1939-1944).13 However, this monthly journal was very text-centred, packed with overtly politico-ideological statements, had a conservative layout and image handling, and did not appeal to a broad or aesthetically interested audience. An overseas propaganda magazine such as NIPPON, which aesthetically mixed culture, fashion, technology, entertainment, with the advances of the war, military might, and fascist ideology, did not exist anywhere else in comparable style and quality in the 1930s. Nevertheless, its beginning was influenced by European trends and models in three distinct regards.14 The political model and motivation was provided by the international magazine Die Böttcherstrasse. Internationale Zeitschrift (The Böttcher Street. International Journal), which was edited in Bremen between 1928 and 1930. Combining highly aesthetic design, luxurious layout and high-quality print, this magazine assembled high-ranking international scholars, artists, intellectuals, and politicians and carried National Socialist and völkisch-racist ideas. Coffee industrialist Gerhard Ludwig Wilhelm Roselius (1874-1943) financed the magazine. He sympathized with the Nazi worldview and became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933.15 Die Böttcherstrasse was an ‘exceptional and ideal magazine’ for Natori. It led him to follow the German example and approach a powerful patron (Kanebo) to finance such an advertising magazine.16 Within one night Natori, graphic designer Kōno Takashi (1906-1999) and Albert Theile, the former editor of Die Böttcherstrasse, produced the model for such a magazine in Japan. In its visual style, however, NIPPON did not emulate Die Böttcherstrasse. Rather, Bauhaus aesthetics in photography, architecture, and graphic design 13 The magazine was published by the German Foreign Office. It was published in German and Italian but did not normally carry any Japanese, except for the translations into Japanese and Italian of brief statements by Hitler and the then Head of the Foreign Office Joachim von Ribbentrop, in the inaugural edition of May 1939. 14 The following section is a revised and translated portion of my article in German, Germer, ‘Kunst und Politik?’. 15 Roselius had actively promoted war propaganda and pushed the German Supreme Army Command since 1915 to employ stronger, more emotional and proactive propaganda informed by mass psychology (Bussemer, ‘“Über Propaganda zu diskutieren, hat wenig Zweck”’, p. 433). The main artist and conceptual architect of Die Böttcherstrasse was sculptor and painter Bernard Hoetger (1874-1949). He and his patron Roselius sympathized with the ‘Nordic’ and Aryan ideology and tried to please Hitler by dedicating art works to the Führer. Hoetger and the Böttcherstrasse project were nevertheless rebuked by Hitler as degenerate art in 1936 and Hoetger was excluded from the Party. See Schreiber, ‘“Die Böttcherstraße”’, p. 12. 16 Natori, Shashin no yomikata, p. 139.

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were crucial influences on the magazine.17 The cover page of the first issue, for example, shows the kind of double exposure as we know from the late phase of photography at the Bauhaus. Works by Kurt Kranz (1910-1997) (see fig. 2) and Lotte Beese (1903-1988) show a combination of rational design and clearly structured architecture with the double exposure of human figures. At the Bauhaus, double exposure was a common technique to express simultaneity, and in NIPPON’s first cover page created by Yamana Ayao (1897-1980) (see fig. 1) the simultaneity of traditional crafts and modern architecture (which was part of the Bauhaus agenda as well) is particularly striking.18 Russian constructivism was also influential with regards to the choice of technical objects, which was termed ‘machine romanticism’, as was Bauhaus photography and the photomontage and photo collage of German Dada.19 All of these were part of the trend of New Vision that evolved in the 1920s and 1930s. Its techniques included extreme angles (bird’s eye view, worm’s eye view), variations in shades and light, extreme close-ups, photogram, photomontage, photo collage, and double exposure (see fig. 2). New Vision aimed at engaging the viewer in the creation and deconstruction of meaning.20 The third and final major influence discernible in NIPPON is its journalistic style that emulates the style of photojournalism as developed and applied by the Berlin Illustrated News (BIZ) and the Munich Illustrated Press (MIP), for both of which Natori had worked. ‘Photo stories’ are created via photo sequences and captions, and are accompanied by brief texts. New photography, innovative layout, and typography combine to present a coherent story in which the visual aspects dominate. Tim Gidal maintains that modern photojournalism emerged mainly in Germany between 1928 and 1931.21 This may be a very narrow time frame, but undeniably, at the time, the portable, lightweight and high-quality German cameras Ermanox and Leica greatly facilitated the emergence of a profession that was shaped by a new generation of photojournalists who used the highly sensitive small-size 17 There were, indeed, remarkable differences. While Die Böttcherstrasse represented and favoured impressionists and their art, clearly visible in the design of all the covers of the magazine, NIPPON would resemble late Bauhaus aesthetics in its concept of combining modern functionalism with traditional crafts. NIPPON’s visual aesthetics had much in common with the magazine die neue linie (the new line) designed by Bauhaus artists. 18 Germer, ‘Kunst und Politik?’. See also Capkova in this volume. 19 See Weisenfeld, ‘Touring Japan-as-museum’. 20 Wick, Das Neue Sehen. 21 Gidal, Deutschland, p. 5.

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Figure 3  NIPPON 29 (1942), pp. 56-57

NIPPON Fukkokuban (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2005) The photo feature allegedly shows ‘Indian soldiers of 10 different tribes’ and praises the contributions of ‘various races’ to the construction of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’.

cameras for the new genre of the photo story. Both graphic designers who worked with a combination of typography and images, and a new kind of editors-in-chief who would choose and decide which photographs would be published, were willing to creatively experiment with and shape this new form of mass media.22 Thus the weekly illustrated became photojournalism’s main forum. In NIPPON, such techniques serve to illustrate various ideologies of the modern face of Japan, of the ‘harmony of the five races’, or of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’ (see fig. 3). Natori’s photojournalistic expertise, which he had acquired through his work at MIP and BIZ and applied in the overseas propaganda magazine NIPPON, closely connect the Japanese magazine to its later German counterpart Signal, despite some ostensibly aesthetic differences in their visual designs.

22 Vowinckel, ‘Der Bildredakteur’.

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Modernists in the Service of Overseas Propaganda With NIPPON, the team at Nippon Kōbō successfully combined three different elements: the overseas propaganda of Die Böttcherstrasse; photomontage and phototechniques of the Bauhaus and the avant-garde more generally; and photojournalistic visual and textual combinations, the graphic design layout of the BIZ and MIP. All three elements were utilized for the propagandistic representation of the Japanese Empire. The socio-political context for the creation of NIPPON in 1934 was Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, its subsequent withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, and the ensuing international isolation that the magazine sought to remedy. With the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the Pacific War in 1941, the magazine worked to justify, illustrate and propagate Japan’s militarist expansions. Eventually, the production costs of NIPPON were borne by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Army and the Navy, and the Inter-Ministerial Information Committee (Gaimushō Rikukaigun Jōhō Iinkai).23 In Natori’s and Mecklenburg’s aesthetic choice for a Japanese propaganda magazine, they were children of Weimar Germany’s avant-garde, exceptional in the masterful way in which they employed the trends and techniques of New Vision, Bauhaus aesthetics, and photojournalism in the cultural context and service of growing ultra-nationalism and expansionism in Japan. Borrowing John Clark’s words, they can be called two of those ‘long-distance cultural specialists in the formation of modernities’ who carry visual discourses from one context into another and back again.24 Natori was certainly not the only Japanese participating in these transcultural flows of visual aesthetics and using them to surprising ends. Rather, as also Annika Culver shows by tracing the connections of diverse Japanese artists with the South Manchurian Railway Company, the active cooperation in state-directed propaganda, here regarding the Manchurian puppet state, was a common feature among modernists and avant-garde artists.25 One of the few Japanese students who studied at the Bauhaus (in Dessau) was Yamawaki Iwao (1898-1987), who also figures in Capkova’s chapter in this volume. In 1932, Yamawaki created a photomontage entitled ‘Der Schlag gegen das Bauhaus’ (The blow against the Bauhaus), and its message was already too critical of the Nazis to be safely exhibited in 23 See Shirayama, ‘Natori Yōnosuke no shigoto 1931-45’, and Germer, ‘Visual Propaganda in Wartime East Asia’. 24 Clark, ‘Asian Artists as Long-distance Cultural Specialists’, p. 19. 25 Culver, Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo.

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Figure 4  NIPPON 2 (1938), Japanese edition

Design by Kōno Takashi; photo by Koyanagi Tsuguichi

Germany at that time.26 Instead, he published the piece upon his return to Japan. Despite his critical work on Nazism he contributed to the Japanese regime’s propaganda during the 1930s and 1940s. Among other things, he created some monumental photomurals designed to encourage Japanese soldiers and civilians to continue the fight.27 Another famous example of a modern artist in the service of Japanese Imperial propaganda is graphic designer Satomi Munetsugu (1904-1996), with his travel advertisement 26 Iizawa, ‘Bauhausu “Shinkyo shashin”’, 1995; Yamawaki, Iwao Yamawaki. 27 Matsudo-shi Kyōiku Iinkai and Mori, Shikaku no Shōwashi, 1998; Nanba, Uchiteshi yamamu, pp. 45 and 166.

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Figure 5  Poster by Satomi Munetsugu (1936)

Japan: The Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. Lithograph in colours, 100 x 64cm; www.therepublicofless.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/go-here-go-there/ (last accessed 17 July 2014)

posters. The poster ‘Orient Calls’ prefigures visual tropes of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, showing particular stylistic similarity with recurring visual elements within NIPPON (see fig. 1 and 5).28 As John Clark has noted with regard to other artists, these were technical specialists and 28 See his travel advertisement posters in http://therepublicofless.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/ go-here-go-there/ (last accessed 17 July 2014). Satomi later served as the head of the propaganda unit of the Japanese 18th Area Army in Bangkok.

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artists who moved between visual discourses, but had spent the formative part or even the whole of their careers at home, and often contributed to propagandizing the nation.29

Signal: An Illustrated Propaganda Magazine for Europe Six years after the publication of the first issue of NIPPON, a magazine was inaugurated that could be called its German counterpart. A joint project of the German Army (Wehrmacht) and the Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt), the magazine Signal was published biweekly between April 1940 and March 1945.30 It was to serve as a means to ‘foster understanding and appreciation of Germany in the world’,31 an aim similar to NIPPON’s mission to present ‘actual life and events in modern Japan’.32 Japan, as Natori stated, had been misunderstood as a country reducible to geisha and cherry blossoms.33 Signal became the most successful illustrated magazine in Europe, with the highest circulation in the midst of the ongoing war (see fig. 6). At its peak, around the turn of 1942-1943, publication numbers soared to more than 2.4 million issues.34 In the first three years of its circulation, it allegedly sold more than 100 million copies.35 In comparison with NIPPON, which combined only four different languages in each issue with brief summaries at the end of the magazine, Signal published each complete issue in various languages, first in German, English, French, and Italian, and increasing the number of languages with the territorial gains of invasions to 26 languages altogether.36 29 Clark, ‘Asian Artists as Long-distance Cultural Specialists’, p. 29. 30 Until June 1944 (issue 11 of that year), the journal appeared regularly. Due to wartime developments, its publication became irregular thereafter. 31 According to contemporary assessment in a handbook on newspaper sciences (Lehmann, ‘Stichwort Illustrierte’, column 1792), quoted in Rutz, Signal, p. 10. All translations from German and Japanese are my own. 32 NIPPON 1, editorial page. 33 Natori, Shashin no yomikata, p. 140. 34 Moll, ‘“Signal”’, p. 366; Rutz, Signal, p. 10. 35 The estimate was given by Johannes Weyl, authorized signatory (Prokurist) in the Deutscher Verlag (formerly Ullstein Verlag), cited in Moll, ‘“Signal”’, p. 380. 36 Signal was published in the following languages: 1940: German, English, French, Italian (soon German/Italian mixed issues), Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, only one special edition in Maghrebinian; 1941: Spanish, Bulgarian, Hungarian (later German with Hungarian captions to visuals), Swedish, Romanian, Croatian, Portuguese, Persian, Arab, Greek, Turkish; 1942: Finnish, Slowakian, Serbian, Russian; 1944: Polish; 1945: Lithuanian, Estonian. See Rutz, Signal, pp. 73-75.

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Figure 6  Signal (French edition) 2:16 (August 1942)

Private collection

NIPPON and Signal were both specif ically conceived as overseas propaganda magazines. But while five issues of NIPPON were also produced in Japanese, and all issues were sold in very limited locations such as bookstores for foreign books in Japan, Signal’s German versions were intended for Switzerland and Austria and were not distributed to sellers within Germany. In terms of the scale of publication and distribution, the number of languages and targeted audiences, Signal clearly outdid NIPPON. However, in terms of their origins, functions, and intentions, the similarities of both organs are more significant than their differences. None of the few existing studies on Signal carries any mention of NIPPON as a precursor, model or even reference for the German overseas propaganda magazine. However, considering the fact that the German Foreign Office shared the costs and tasks with the Wehrmacht in the publication of Signal as a way

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of advertising Germany to the world, the possibility of an unacknowledged inspiration seems very likely. Since 1934, NIPPON had been produced in Japan in order to advertise Japan to the world. It had been distributed to foreign bookstores and embassies in Japan, as well as to bookstores, consulates, and Foreign Ministries overseas. Thus officials in the German Foreign Office must have known Japan’s foremost overseas propaganda magazine, especially since it carried a large number of articles written in German. One special issue was even published in German exclusively. Information to this end is scarce. In reports of Japanese Embassies abroad, NIPPON is mentioned only as being highly praised. Information on sales, circulation numbers, or more detailed reports on the magazine’s reception abroad, is missing.37 Through Natori’s other cultural exchange activities, such as the International Crafts Exhibition in Berlin and the exhibition of Japanese objects of daily use (Japanische Gebrauchsgegenstände) in Leipzig, both in 1938, his position as a middleman between the Japanese Society for International Relations (KBS) and Nazi organizations of economy, industry, and crafts, was crucial.38 The German special edition of NIPPON was devoted to the Berlin exhibition. But more than these various avenues of direct contact with the journal in Germany, the shared origins and trajectories of both propaganda magazines account for the high degree of convergence between both publications. These trajectories have the most tangible origins in the connections of Natori as a former photojournalist of BIZ to the Ullstein Press. Renamed ‘German Press’ by the Nazis, this company continued the production of BIZ, and after the lay-off of its Jewish members employed much the same non-Jewish personnel to subsequently publish the overseas propaganda magazine Signal.

The Making of a New Propaganda Tool The German Wehrmacht was very much aware of the need to represent itself visually as a righteous, determined, and victorious institution of the German Reich. Its aim of taming, saving, and creating a unified Europe under unquestioned German leadership needed images that would be purported most effectively in visual propaganda. In the beginning, Signal had been the special edition of the BIZ in foreign countries. As BIZ was Ullstein Press’ and 37 Shibaoka, Hōdō shashin to taigai senden, p. 116. 38 Germer, ‘Artists and Wartime Agency’.

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then German Press’ most successful domestic illustrated, its Signal special edition was using the prestige and popularity of BIZ to camouflage itself in order to hide its propagandistic intentions.39 That Signal rose to the dimensions described above was mainly due to some media and advertising experts. Two young men in particular are credited with designing and pushing through the project of Signal. For the style, layout, and general concept of Signal, Harald Peter Lechenperg (1904-1994), editor-in-chief of BIZ, was solicited as chief of the new editorial office, and served as editor-in-chief of both BIZ and Signal until the Summer of 1941. He claimed to have made a draft of Signal during one night, and had it immediately accepted by the High Command of the Wehrmacht (Oberkommando Wehrmacht, hereafter OKW). Indeed, the magazine’s layout, style, and concept were fixed by the time Lechenperg was succeeded by other editors. 40 Again, we see a parallel foundational narrative for Signal and NIPPON when considering the way in which Natori recounts the making of a model of NIPPON within one night, and its positive acceptance by his major sponsor Kanebo at the time. 41 Signal’s colour arrangement, signet, and layout were heavily influenced by American Life magazine, first published in 1936, as well as the British magazine Picture Post, published since 1938.42 This speaks to the fact that from the mid-1930s, most of the major professionals of these new illustrated magazines had been trained as photojournalists and editors of the Ullstein Press’s BIZ and its Munich-based competitor MIP, before they were forced to emigrate because of their Jewish descent. The other major force in the making of Signal was the manager and owner of an advertising agency, Fritz Solm (1899-1946), who combined his private commercial activities with some of the off icial and semioff icial propaganda institutions. Despite allegations launched by the Propaganda Ministry and the Foreign Off ice that he was mixing his official position and private business interests, and created extra profits from the advertisement sections of Signal, the OKW stood behind him and kept him in the so-called propaganda unit of the Wehrmacht as the officer responsible for Signal until the end of the war. 43 This illustrates the fact that from the very beginning of Signal, the magazine was a 39 Moll, ‘“Signal”’, pp. 369-370. 40 Ibid., p. 362. 41 Natori, Shashin no yomikata, pp. 138-140. 42 Dollinger, ‘Die Geschichte des Signal’, p. 12. 43 Moll, ‘“Signal”’, p. 361.

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highly contested item in the pull of power and influence between at least three actors: the Wehrmacht, the Foreign Off ice, and the Propaganda Ministry. 44 It was the advertising expertise of Solm and the photojournalistic expertise of Lechenperg that brought the magazine into the format that proved to be so successful. 45 For Japanese predecessor NIPPON, both of these qualities were combined in the person of Natori. Natori used his family’s business relations for advertising strategies while he also lobbied with the Army and with the semi-governmental KBS, enlisted the help of advertising experts, drew up a model for NIPPON, served as its editor-inchief, and ran the production team at Nippon Kōbō with the help of his German wife. Whereas NIPPON was launched in the context of international isolation that ensued after Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, Signal’s inauguration coincided with all-out war in Europe. Both magazines, however, would not have been feasible without the visual and photographic material supplied through military channels. In the case of Japan, Nippon Kōbō cooperated with the Army at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and in Germany materials came from the propaganda units that had been established since 1938. Natori had instantly understood the significance of photojournalists accompanying the Army. Immediately after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, he flew to Shanghai and, later that year, managed to strike a deal with the Shanghai Expeditionary Army that three Nippon Kōbō staff members would serve as photographers for the Army Press Unit. 46 In Germany, the Wehrmacht and the Ministry of Propaganda had experimented with military propaganda troops, employing photographers and journalists for psychological warfare since 1936. They officially established the first unit in September 1938, rapidly increasing the number of such troops and immediately training them for the impending invasion of the Sudetenland. 47

44 For a discussion of the power politics surrounding the publication of Signal, see Rutz, Signal, 2007, pp. 57-62. Solm was for example a holder of shares worth 20,000 Deutschmarks in the company Fremdsprachen Verlag GmbH that produced magazines for foreign propaganda under the control of the Propaganda Ministry (Moll, ‘“Signal”’, p. 361). 45 Their competitive individualism, each asserting creative ownership of Signal, presumably led to Lechenperg’s dismissal as editor-in-chief in summer 1941; see Moll, ‘“Signal”’, p. 383. 46 Nakanishi, ‘Natori Yōnosuke wa nani o nokoshitaka’, p. 231. 47 Uziel, ‘Propaganda, Kriegsberichterstattung und die Wehrmacht’, p. 17.

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Visual Strategies With the accelerating discrimination and persecution of Jewish colleagues within the Ullstein publishing house, young non-Jewish photographers like Hanns Hubmann (1910-1996), Max Ehlert (1904-1979), Erik Borchert (1911-1941), Gerhard Gronefeld (1911-2000), Boris Spahn, and Arthur Grimm (1909-?), would eventually cover the spectacular Nazi mass events. They conveyed them to their audiences employing the most cutting-edge methods of modern photojournalism.48 As Christoph Stölzl notes in his historical aesthetic assessment of Ullstein Press, ‘[t]he most ingenious photo-text montages of Ullstein publications become the downright strength of Nazi propaganda that had been rather petit bourgeois before 1933. In a paradoxical fashion, it was the methods of Ullstein Press stripped of its ethical substance that first of all cemented National Socialism’s monopolising influence over public opinion’.49 Signal’s content and visual representations can be summarized in the following categories: military reports; drafts of the New Europe envisioned by Germany; downplaying of England’s role and position; creating anxiety about a Russian victory; civil and cultural entertainment of various kinds, including serious articles on economy, science, and culture; and advertisements. Images of warfare and politics coexisted with images of culture, nature, science, and sports, thus reflecting the contradictory messages and double-sided propaganda mission that asserted military might as well as cultural and civil wellbeing. Altogether, Signal was designed as an illustrated magazine for Europe. In a fashion similar to NIPPON’s camouflaging of the subjection of East and South-East Asian countries as the cooperative ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’, Signal displayed appreciation for European cultures and peoples and acted as if the German attempt in uniting Europe under its leadership had already been successful.50 In visual terms, the advancement of German soldiers on various fronts in Europe and Africa was portrayed not only by poses of military victory, but significantly by way of combining cultural curiosity and appreciation of European cultural diversity and traditions, sometimes likening the advances of soldiers to educational and touristic travels (see fig. 7a and 7b). 48 Kaufhold, ‘Die Berliner Illustrierte’, p. 44. 49 Stölzl, Der Ullstein-Geist, p. 12. 50 Even after 1943, at a time when the Wehrmacht was on the retreat and German towns experienced indiscriminate bombing, the magazine stressed the spirit of unwavering resistance and optimism that should lead readers to believe that despite the war dragging on for years, civil life in Germany continued as before; see Moll, ‘“Signal”’, p. 390; see also Rutz, ‘Die netten Deutschen und das “Neue Europa”’, p. 202.

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Figures 7a and 7b  Signaal (Dutch edition) 5 (1944), pp. 17 and 19

An extensive photo reportage of German endeavours in science, arts, and culture is followed by the show of military might and the advancement of German soldiers into Athens.

From the second issue of Signal onwards, a pattern evolved for the cover page and the back fold that showed male head shots or male figures in action on the front page, and predominantly females or male/female couples or, less often, animals and other civilian objects on the back page of the magazine (see fig. 8a and 8b). In this way, the gender imbalance was somewhat alleviated even if the dominance of male representation and vision was never in question. Apart from the overwhelming number and wide range of masculinized and militarized images that were due to the nature of the magazine’s producers – the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office – cultural, female erotic, and even subdued homoerotic as well as popular scientific visuals were also presented (see fig. 9 and 10). These popular themes recurred frequently, even though they may not have been of the scope that would have satisfied Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels championed propaganda through seemingly unpolitical popular culture, and, in the words of Thymian Bussemer, aimed at a ‘propagandistically interspersed popular culture’ that met the tastes of mass audiences and helped stabilize the political order.51

51 Bussemer, ‘“Über Propaganda zu diskutieren, hat wenig Zweck”’, p. 55.

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Figure 8a and 8b  S  ignal (French edition) December issue 23/24 (1942), cover and back page

Private collection

The illustrations of both NIPPON and Signal set the fascist enterprise within a decidedly modern technological and culturally sophisticated context. However, more pronounced than Signal, NIPPON cultivated a modern, technological face for the magazine. NIPPON’s initial and main corporate sponsor Kanebo stressed the need to establish the country as modern and technologically advanced.52 A pattern of front pages for NIPPON mirroring in colour and theme its back pages most often feature the range of Kanebo products and their local and overseas production sites (see, for example, fig. 11). The intended audience in NIPPON’s case were certainly the business and political elites in Western countries to whom it advertised Japan as a highly productive and technologically advanced business partner, an attractive tourist destination, and a nation on par with Western political systems. These appeals shifted along the contingencies of international political developments from ‘the West’ towards the Axis partners, and lastly towards countries in Asia, in the last issues. Signal, on the other hand, was launched for the common reader in ever more European countries and was sold in print runs that went into the millions at news stands across Europe. 52 Natori, Shashin no yomikata, p. 140.

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Figure 9  Signal (French edition) 2:16 (1942), p. 31

Private collection One of few erotic images in the magazine. Other images of (partially) nude people were part of segments on theatre or entertainment.

Figure 10 

Signaal (Dutch edition) 5 (1944), back page

Private collection

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Figure 11  NIPPON 24 (1940), cover and back page

The cover page features a portrait of Konoe Fumimaro (1891-1945) who served as prime minister from 1940-1941. The colour pattern of the cover is replicated in the Kanebo silk advertisement on the back page.

It provided a less artistically sophisticated but much more popular and ad hoc photojournalism for a mass audience. In this regard, it resonated with domestic illustrated magazines of other countries, the American Life magazine, and the British Picture Post, but also the Japanese Asahi Gurafu (Asahi Graph). The latter also introduced the overseas propaganda magazine Signal to its Japanese readers.

Conclusions The Bauhaus visual aesthetics had themselves been substantially influenced by Nipponism and by Japanese architecture and material culture (see also Capkova in this volume). In turn, they were crucial in what developed as New Vision. Combined with photojournalistic innovations, again closely connected to the innovative illustrative newspapers, most prominently at the publishing house Ullstein, New Vision spurred the pervasive modernization of vision in the twentieth century. These closely interrelated aesthetic trends were important elements in a set of political, social, and cultural

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circumstances whose threads of influence did not stop at national or continental borders. Instead, they spread in and between Asia and Europe, as seen in the productions of the international couple Natori-Meckleburg. These threads point to the need for a historical genealogical approach as well as for ‘process geographies’ that account for their ‘precipitates in various kinds of action, interaction and motion’.53 In the fabric of making and remaking propaganda techniques, these threads need to be grasped in a framework of modern global circuits of vision and visuality. At the end of the war, Natori’s company was dissolved, and he and Mecklenburg returned from China to Japan, with Natori immediately engaging himself in the publication of a new magazine, Shūkan San Nyūsu (Weekly Sun News) that became highly influential in the publishing industry of post-war Japan, as many writers, photographers, designers, and manga artists who had been active during the war published there.54 This group, called the ‘Natori School’, comprised of a host of photographers and editors who would shape the post-war Japanese photographic profession. Natori himself remained influential in photojournalism and photo criticism, and his own – as well as his team’s – lack of reflection about his wartime role in Japanese Army propaganda is extraordinary.55 Of course, photojournalist careers such as Natori’s, and the lack of reflection on individuals’ cooperation with the regime, are said to be rather common in Germany as well, be it in East or West Germany. Several former BIZ photojournalists who went on to work in Propaganda Units and had been pivotal to the success of Signal, became photojournalists for the Allied Forces (such as Hanns Hubmann) at the end of the war, and subsequently held major positions in post-war German illustrated magazines.56 The post-war legend of die saubere Wehrmacht (‘the clean Wehrmacht’) is an extension of the wartime propaganda image of Signal. After 1945, this legend claimed that the Wehrmacht had kept 53 Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, pp. 7-8. 54 See Iizawa, Sengo shashinshi nōto, pp. 8, and the exhibition Shūkan San Nyūsu no jidai: Hōdō shashin to Natori gakkō (The time of Shūkan San Nyūsu: Press photography and the Natori school) in Tokyo in 2006 http://www.jcii-cameramuseum.jp/photosalon/photoexhibition/2006/20061128.html (last accessed 6 October 2010). 55 See in more detail Germer, ‘Visual propaganda in Wartime East Asia’. In the collection of reminiscences added to the facsimile edition of NIPPON, each of the featured six members of the former Nippon Kōbō team focuses on clarifying his or her relationship to Natori as well as explaining Natori’s behaviour, thereby almost completely evading to reflect on their own place in society and the history of cooperating with the wartime regime; see Fukkokuban NIPPON bessatsu. 56 See Hartewig, Wir sind im Bilde, p. 55; Rutz, Signal, pp. 148-163; Rutz, ‘Alte Netze – neu gestrickt’; Uziel, ‘Propaganda, Kriegsberichterstattung und die Wehrmacht’.

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its distance to Hitler and the Nazi regime, had fulfilled its military duty with honour and dignity, and had only been informed of the atrocities of Himmler’s troops after the fact.57 However, as research of the Hamburg Institute for Social Science Research and other research in the wake of its controversial Wehrmacht Exhibition since 1995 has shown, the Wehrmacht did not fight a ‘normal’ war in the Soviet Union and on the Balkan. It was actively and deeply implicated in the war of extermination against Jews, prisoners of war, and the civilian population, which took millions of lives.58 The examples of Signal and NIPPON show some of the intricate links of institutional origins and common trajectories not only regarding propaganda within Japan and Germany, but within the spread of these cultural technologies around the world. Japanese as well as American (Life) and British (Picture Post) publications were greatly influenced by German photojournalism, accelerated by the outflow of refugees’ expertise due to the murderous racist politics of the Nazi regime. In time, American illustrated magazines and, as I argue here, Japanese examples of overseas propaganda, would become models for German overseas propaganda journals in turn. All of these were relatively new cultural technologies of vision and modernist visions of technology. They had profound influences in many parts of the world. At the same time, we can discern ruptures or independent aesthetic developments and their political outcomes in different yet related wartime theatres. In this transnational context, NIPPON and Signal exemplify how modern and Western cultural technologies of vision that have a hybrid history of cross-fertilization themselves were applied to carry localized versions of nationalistic ideology in the East-Asian context. They also exemplify how such versions could become global forerunners in the cultural production and effective mediation of new forms of hegemonic ideology.

List of illustrations Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4

Cover NIPPON 1 (1934) Kurt Kranz, Portrait in front of the Bauhaus, ca. 1928-1929 NIPPON 29 (1942), pp. 56-57 NIPPON 2 (1938), Japanese edition

57 HIS, Vernichtungskrieg, p. 7. 58 Ibid.

254 

Figure 5 Figure 6 Figures 7a and 7b Figures 8a and 8b Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11

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Poster by Satomi Munetsugu (1936) Signal (French edition) 2:16 (August 1942) Signaal (Dutch edition) 5 (1944), pp. 17 and 19 Signal (French edition) December issue 23/24 (1942), cover and back page Signal (French edition) 2:16 (1942), p. 31 Signaal (Dutch edition) 5 (1944), back page NIPPON 24 (1940), cover and back page

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Gidal, T.N., Deutschland – Beginn des modernen Photojournalismus (Luzern and Frankfurt a.M.: Bucher, 1972). Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (ed.), Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944. Ausstellungskatalog. 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1997). Hartewig, K., Wir sind im Bilde. Eine Geschichte der Deutschen in Fotos vom Kriegsende bis zur Entspannungspolitik (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2010). Iizawa, K., ‘Bauhausu ‘Shinkyo shashin‘ – Yamawaki Iwao o chūshin ni’, Déjà vu 19 (1995), pp. 81-86. —, Sengo shashinshi nōto (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1993). Ishikawa, Y., Hōdō shashin no seishun jidai: Natori Yōnosuke to nakamatachi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1991). Kaufhold, E., ‘Die Berliner Illustrierte – Synonym der deutschen Bildjournalismus’ in E. Lindner (ed.), Presse- und Verlagsgeschichte im Zeichen der Eule: 125 Jahre Ullstein (Hamburg: Springer, 2002), pp. 40-45. Kokusho Kankōkai, NIPPON, facsimile, 3 vols. (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2003-2005). Koyanagi, T. and Ishikawa Y., Jūgun kameraman no sensō (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993). Lehmann, E.H., ‘Stichwort Illustrierte’, in W. Heide (ed.), Handbuch der Zeitungswissenschaft, vol 1. (Leipzig: Hiersemann, column 1775-1797, 1942). Lindner, E. (ed.), Presse- und Verlagsgeschichte im Zeichen der Eule: 125 Jahre Ullstein (Hamburg: Springer, 2002). Matsudo-shi Kyōiku Iinkai and Mori H., Shikaku no Shōwashi 1930-1940-nendai. Tōkyō Kōtō Kōgei Gakkō no ayumi (2) (Matsudo: Matsudo-shi Kyōiku Iinkai, 1998). Moll, M., ‘“Signal”: Die NS-Auslandsillustrierte und ihre Propaganda fūr Hitlers “Neues Europa”’, Publizistik. Vierteljahreshefte für Kommunikationsforschung 31 (1986), pp. 357-400. Nakanishi, T., ‘Natori Yōnosuke wa nani o nokoshitaka (6): Chūgoku de Nihongun no taigai senden ni nettchū’, ASAHI CAMERA 6 (1980), pp. 227-231. Nanba, K., Uchiteshi yamamu: Taiheiyō sensō to kōkoku no gijutsusha tachi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988). Natori, Y., Shashin no yomikata (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2004 [1962]). NIPPON (1934-1944). 41 issues. Nippon Kōbō/ Kokusai Hōdō Kōgei Kabushiki-gaisha. Rutz, R., ‘Die netten Deutschen und das “Neue Europa”: Sympathiewerbung für die Wehrmacht, den Krieg und die Besatzung in der NS-Auslandsillustrierten Signal’ in R. Rother and J. Prokasky (eds.), Die Kamera als Waffe: Propagandabilder des Zweiten Weltkrieges, 193–208 (Munich: Richard Boorberg, 2010). —, ‘Alte Netze – neu gestrickt. Von der NS-Auslandspropaganda zur konservativen Nachkriegspresse: die Netzwerker von Signal’ in P.U. Hohendahl and E. Schütz (eds.), Solitäre und Netzwerker. Akteure des kulturpolitischen Konservatismus nach 1945 in den Westzonen Deutschlands (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2009), pp. 167-184. —, Signal: Eine deutsche Auslandsillustrierte als Propagandainstrument im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2007). Schreiber, D., ‘“Die Böttcherstraße” – nationalistischer Lehrpfad und “Internationale Zeitschrift”’, AKMB-news 12:1 (2006), pp. 10-13. Shibaoka, S., Hōdō shashin to taigai senden: 15-nen sensōki no shashinkai (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 2007). Shirayama, M., ‘Natori Yōnosuke no shigoto 1931-45’, Fukkokuban NIPPON bessatsu (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2005), pp. 5-33. Stölzl, C., ‘Der Ullstein-Geist: Katalysator gesellschaftlicher Modernisierung’ in E. Lindner (ed.), Presse- und Verlagsgeschichte im Zeichen der Eule: 125 Jahre Ullstein (Hamburg: Springer 2002), pp. 8-13.

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Uziel, D., ‘Propaganda, Kriegsberichterstattung und die Wehrmacht: Stellenwert und Funktion der Propagandatruppen im NS-Staat’ in R. Rother and J. Prokasky (eds.), Die Kamera als Waffe: Propagandabilder des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Munich: Richard Boorberg, 2010), pp. 13-36. Vowinckel, A., ‘Der Bildredakteur: Genese eines modernen Berufsbildes’ in A. Ramsbrock, A. Vowinckel and M. Zierenberg (eds.): Fotografien im 20. Jahrhundert: Verbreitung und Vermittlung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), pp. 69-89. Weisenfeld, G., ‘Touring Japan-as-museum: Nippon and other Japanese imperialist travelogues’ Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8:3 (2000), pp. 747-793. Wick, R.K. (ed.), Das Neue Sehen: Von der Fotografie am Bauhaus zur Subjektiven Fotografie (München: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1991). Wolf, E., ‘When Photographs Speak to whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stoike (USSR in Construction)’, Left History 6:2 (1999), pp. 53-82. Yamawaki, I., Iwao Yamawaki (Göttingen: Steidl, 1999).

Websites http://www.preussen-chronik.de/begriff_jsp/key=begriff_berliner+illustrirte+zeitung.html http://www.jcii-cameramuseum.jp/photosalon/photo-exhibition/2006/20061128.html http://therepublicofless.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/go-here-go-there/

About the Author Andrea Germer is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at Kyushu University, Japan. She has been conducting research in the fields of history, gender, and visual propaganda. She has published a book on women’s history in Japan and the lay historian and controversial feminist Takamure Itsue (2003, in German). Her essays in English appeared among others in Japan Forum, Social Science Japan Journal, Journal of Women’s History, Contemporary Japan and Intersections. She is co-editor of Gender, Nation and State in Modern Japan (Routledge 2014), and is currently working on a book project entitled Visual Propaganda in Wartime Japan and Germany.

Index 43 Group 186-8, 205 Acarya 126-7 Adaptation 10, 13, 16-7, 159-60, 164, 172-3, 184, 187, 195 Aesthetics 18, 25n, 45-6, 99, 104, 112, 179, 195, 231, 234, 237, 240-1, 255 Agriculture 59, 136, 173 Albers, Annie 109 Albers, Jozef 107, 109, 111 Allahabad 81, 92-3, 183 Allain, P. H. 168 Anachronism 13 Andersson, Johan Gunnar 63, 70 Anglican 135, 141, 188, 194 Anti-cosmopolitanism 210 Anti-imperialism 21, 209 Antiquity 30, 52-4, 63-5, 70 Anyang Yinxu (archaeological site in China) 52, 66-7 Arakan 136-9, 151 Archaeology 26n, 32-5, 49, 52, 63, 66-7, 69-71, 196, 198, 204, 231, 232n, 259 Architecture 17-9, 31, 36, 38, 57, 69, 71, 104, 107n, 109, 111-2, 115-7, 119-20, 179-84, 187, 191, 193-205, 232, 237-8, 255 Arts and Crafts 104, 106, 183, 185, 203 Aryan 196, 236n ASEAN 180 Asian Games 180 Asian Values 180 Assam 133, 136, 138n, 139n, 140, 150-3 Aundh 13-4, 25-8, 30, 34-5, 39, 41-6 Aundh Experiment 25-8, 41-66 Avant Garde 12, 19, 76, 99-100, 103-4, 118, 120, 234, 240-1, 259 Balasaheb 14, 25-8, 34-44 Bandung Conference 180n, 204, 210 Banerjee, Rina 88-90, 97-8 Baptist 124n, 140, 147, 150, 152, 176 Baroda 33-4, 45-6 Bauhaus 15, 18, 103-12, 114-20, 234, 237-8, 240-1, 242n, 255, 257, 259-60 Beese, Lotte 237 Beijing Higher Normal School 168 Benedictines 162, 169-71, 175 Bengal School of Painting 35 Benin 63 Berlin 9, 12, 20, 46, 103-4, 107-9, 112-3, 115, 118-9, 132n, 234, 236, 239, 244-5, 249n, 259 Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (BIZ) 233-4, 239-40, 245-6, 249n, 256, 259 Bhakti 128

Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 28, 38-9, 151 Blavatsky, Helena 189 Böhme, Jakob 107 Bolshevik 210-3, 215-6, 221, 225 Bombay (Mumbai) 31, 33, 35-6, 43, 45-6, 75, 81, 95, 100-1 Bon/Bonpo 16, 123, 125, 128-9, 130n, 131-2, 140, 145, 149-52 Borchert, Erik 249 Botany/botanists 31, 134 Boundary 97, 131, 144, 157, 159, 180 Bride wealth 134, 138-9, 142, 144-46, 149 British Museum 50, 62-4, 68 Britishness 64, 135 Budapest 80, 92, 100, 115 Buddhism 131n, 151-3, 188-91, 197, 205 Buddhist Revival 11, 17, 188-90, 201 Bunmei kaika 60 Bunten (Monbushō Bijutsu Tenrankai) 109-10 Burgher 182, 185-6 Burma (Myanmar) 125, 131-2, 135-7, 147, 151 Cabinet des curiosités 53 Cai, Yuanpei 163 Calligraphy 52, 81, 92, 104 Calvinism 123, 134-5, 140-1, 146-7, 153 Caste 17, 181, 188, 191, 193 Catholicism/Catholic Church 10, 13, 16, 155-7, 159-63, 165-76, 195 Celibacy 127, 132, 145-6 Ceylon Reform Society 185-6 Chagatai 220-1 Chen, Yuan 155, 157, 169, 174 Chittagong 137-8 Christianity 16, 64, 123, 124n, 148, 150-1, 155-7, 160-1, 166-9, 172-5, 189, 193 Chronicle of Zuo (Zuozhuan) 53, 64 Citizenship 14, 25, 29, 42 Clergy (clerical, bishop, cardinal, Pope) 130, 146, 162, 168-9, 188 Cold War 17, 179-80, 201, 209, 229 Collège Saint Ignace (Shanghai) 163 Collocation 8, 131-2 Colombo 11, 17, 179, 181-3, 186-8, 190-2, 195-6, 198-200, 203-5 Colombo Art Club 186 Commonwealth 152, 180 Communalism 181 Communism 63, 79, 168, 176, 214-5, 217-8, 222, 229 Confucius/Confucianism 48, 51-2, 60 Constructivism 99-100, 119, 236n, 238, 259 Consumption 134

258  Cosmopolitan(ism) 8, 10-2, 15, 17, 19-21, 75-7, 79n, 88n, 96-102, 108, 179-81, 184, 186-7, 189, 191-2, 195, 198, 201-4, 210 Crafts 33-4, 116, 119, 126, 130, 147n, 185, 187, 244-5 Craftsperson (craftsman, craftspeople) 12, 33, 106-7, 203, 237 Cross-cultural 8, 12, 19, 53n, 54n, 55n, 69, 123, 149, 151, 155-60, 165-6, 169-70, 172-4 Cultural translation 48, 259 Cultural tripod 213-4 Dada 238 Dagongbao (newspaper) 168 Deccan College (Pune) 41 Deccani School 35 Decentralization 42, 180 Decolonization 17, 21, 45, 180-1, 196, 199, 208, 213, 228 De-globalization 9 Democratization 29, 44, 181, 185, 192, 199 Deng, Xiaoping 173 Deracination 10, 12, 78 Design education 15, 103-4, 118-9 Dessau 108-9, 111n, 120, 241 Dharma 42, 189 Dharmapala, Anagarika 189-90, 204 Discipline 66, 74, 126-8, 130, 132, 135, 146, 148, 151, 167, 189, 214 Disjunction 15, 73, 76 Divination 129 Domesticity 91, 124, 141, 149, 152 Dowry 138-9, 142 East India Company (English) 136 École des Beaux-Arts (Lyon, Paris) 73, 75, 78-81 Edwardian 138 Ehlert, Max 249 Ellora 35, 36 Ethnography 30-2, 56, 71, 101, 130n Eurasia(n) 7-10, 13, 19, 131n, 150, 186 Euro-American 13, 27, 75-6, 97, 110, 118, 233 Evangelical 124n, 134-5, 137, 140, 142, 147, 152 Evangelization 158-61, 166, 168, 174 Exhibition 15, 19, 32n, 33, 46, 48-52, 55-62, 68, 70-1, 74, 78, 80-2, 89, 92-3, 95, 101, 109-10, 112-3, 119-20, 186, 204-5, 218-9, 244-5, 256-7 Exhibitionary complex 50 Femininity 77, 82, 91, 93-4 Feminism 15, 73, 75-7, 79n, 87, 89, 91-2, 95-7, 99-102, 114, 148-9, 261 Film/cinema 99, 101 Fine arts 78-80, 110, 115 First Opium War 55, 176 First Sino-Japanese War 68 First World War 9, 34, 81, 208, 216 Forbat, Fred 112 Forbidden City/Imperial Palace (Beijing) 58, 66-7, 69

EUR ASIAN ENCOUNTERS

Forces Nouvelles 81 Foucault, Michel (Foucauldian) 50, 126-7, 151, 231, 232n, 259 Four Modernizations 173 Fournier, P. 168 Friendship 43, 213-5, 218, 221-6 ‘Fukoku kyōhei’ 60 Fukuzawa, Yukichi 55-6, 70 Furen University (Beijing) 16, 155-6, 162, 168-75 G’ulom, G’afur 207-9, 228-9 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 42-3, 46, 192 Gandhi, Rajiv 180 Gender 78, 79n, 91-2, 99-100, 114, 125, 134, 140-1, 145, 152-3, 198, 252, 261 German Society of the Divine Word 162, 171-2 Gesamtkunstwerk 112, 117 Globalization 49, 74, 90, 96, 102, 160, 174, 232-3, 256, 258 Glocalization 13, 16, 158-61, 173-5 Goebbels, Joseph 253, 259 Governmentality/Foucauldian 125-30, 149-50 Governor-General 41-2 Great Kantō Earthquake 105 Great Patriotic War 214-6, 222 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere 240, 243, 251 Grimm, Arthur 249 Gronefeld, Gerhard 249 Gropius, Walter 106-8, 112, 117-8 Guandong 62 Hamada, Masuji, 117 Hani, Motoko 115-6 Henry, P. 168 Heritage 14, 27, 49-50, 52, 57, 64, 65n, 66-7, 70-1, 78, 151, 156-7, 159, 166, 172, 193-4, 203, 226, 234 Heude, Peter 56 Hermitage 132, 221 Himalayas 124-5, 127, 129, 131-4, 136, 138, 141, 145, 151-2 Hindu(ism) 16, 37, 39, 78, 90n, 128-31, 136, 149-50, 182-4 Hiroshima, Koho 113 Historical Records (Shiji) 53 Hoffmann, Josef 115 Hu, Wenyao 167-8 Hubmann, Hanns 249, 256 Human Rights 180 Hundred Day Reforms 57, 68 Hybridity 8, 10, 17, 118, 188 Identity Politics/identitarianism 17, 18, 61, 95-6 Imai, Kazuko 115-6, 119 Indigenization 17, 156-7, 160-2, 166, 173, 179, 181-4, 187, 190-3, 195, 197, 199 Intercultural 48, 68, 124, 156 International Architecture 109, 117

Index

International Labour Organization 8 Interracial/mixed race 92, 124-5, 148, 151 Interwar 15, 19-20, 103-5, 113, 117, 120 Irony 82 Ishimoto, Kikuji 108 Islam/Islamic (Muslim) 19, 74, 76, 99, 131, 150-1, 153, 229 Itten, Johannes 103, 106-7, 112-6, 118-120 Itten-Schule 103, 112-6, 118-9 Iwakura mission 233 Jaipur 32n, 33, 46 Japonisme 15, 103-4, 118 Jesuits 161-9, 175 Jiyū Gakuen (School) 103, 105, 114-6, 119 Kahlo, Frida 75-6, 96, 100 Kamekura Yūsaku 117, 119 Kang, Youwei 57, 70 Kandinsky, Wassily 108-9, 111, 117 Kandy 182, 190, 192-3, 196, 198-200, 203-4 Kanebo 236, 246, 253-4, 258 Kaneko, Yoshimasa 113, 119 Kawakita, Renshichirō 111, 116-8, 120 Kayser, Eva 116 Kayser, Ruth 116 Köhn, Friedrich 112 Komuro, Sui’un 113 Kōno, Takashi 236, 258 Korenizatsia 212-3 Kozuka, Shin’ichirō 115 Kranz, Kurt 109, 237, 257 Krishna 37 Kuwasawa, Yōko 117 Laozi 107 Laymen/laywomen 123, 125, 128, 130-2, 146-8 League of Nations 8, 210, 240, 249 Lebbe, Vincent 162, 169 Lenin, Vladimir 207-9, 223, 225-6, 229 Li, Gui 55 Liang, Qichao 70, 76 Liberal Arts 165, 170 Lin, Zexu 55 London 34, 55, 59, 64, 71, 95, 120, 186 Louvre 28n, 29-30, 45, 50, 62, 64 Love 88-9, 98, 142-3, 147-150 Lushai (Chin-Lushai Hills) 124, 131-2, 137-8, 140, 147, 150-2 Ma, Xiangbo 155, 157, 162-9, 174-5 Machida, Hisanari 80 Madras (Chennai) 31-2, 34, 78, 184 Mahabharata 28, 38-9, 43 Mahabodhi Society 189-90 Maharashtra/Marathi 26, 36, 147n Margins/marginality/marginalization 17, 26, 41, 44, 80, 97, 134, 180-2, 190, 197, 210 Marxism 65, 212, 216

259 Masculinity 93 May Fourth Movement 160, 162, 164 Mecklenburg, Erna 18, 233-4, 240, 256 Meiji Restoration 14, 48, 55-9, 62n, 63, 67-9 Meister Eckhart 107 Methodism 123, 134-5, 153 Metropole/metropolitan 17, 30, 40, 140, 179, 188-9, 191, 197, 209, 213, 216, 228 Meyer, Hannes 117 Ming (dynasty in China) 64-5 Minerva 78 Ministry of Propaganda (Germany) 249 Mission/Proselytization 11, 13, 15-6, 63, 123-5, 135, 137, 141n, 143, 145, 147-50, 152-3, 156-7, 159-61, 167, 169, 173n, 175, 215, 243, 250 Missionary 8, 13, 15-6, 18, 56-7, 68, 123-5, 131, 134-5, 137, 140-53, 155-61, 163-4, 166, 168, 170-5, 188-91 Mixed race see interracial/mixed race Mizukoshi, Shōnan 113-4, 118 Mizutani, Takehiko 117 Mobility 8-9, 15, 20, 68, 231-2, 234 Modernism 12, 18-20, 34, 73-8, 80n, 81n, 82, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100-2, 104-6, 109, 112, 115, 116n, 118-20, 192, 200-2, 213, 217, 233, 240-1, 257, 260 Moholy, Lucia 112, 119 Moholy-Nagy, László, 107-8, 116 Monasticity 127 Moors 182, 190 Moscow 75, 99, 208, 210n, 211, 213-5, 217, 222-3, 225, 227 Mount Kailash 129 Mouseion 50 Muche, Georg 112 Münchner Illustrierte Presse (MIP) 234, 237-9, 245 Murray, Hugh 55 Musée de Heude 56 Musée Guimet 88-91, 97 Museology 50 Nagai, Alexander (Alekisan) 113-4 Nagai, Nagayoshi 113 Nagai, Therese (née Schumacher) 113 Nakada, Sadanosuke 108, 110, 116 Nakagawa, Kigen 110 Nanga school 107, 113-4 Nanjing 79, 82, 163 Nantong Museum 56-9 Nationalism 8, 13, 15-6, 25, 27, 67, 71, 73, 75-7, 90, 94, 98, 135, 159-60, 162, 166, 173, 184, 191, 200, 202, 206, 208-9, 212-3, 228, 239 Nationalist Party (China) 64, 66 Natori, Yōnosuke 18, 111, 233, 235-9, 242, 244-6, 252 Natural History 26n, 31, 59 Natural History Museum (London) 59

260  Nazi Germany (Nazi regime) 18, 210, 220, 231-2, 234-6, 239-40, 244, 247, 253 Neo-classical 35, 195-6 Neo-liberal 96, 179-80 Neologism 48, 53-4 New Culture Movement 160 New Delhi 81, 84, 94, 180, 195 New Objectivity 233 New Vision 18, 233, 235, 237, 239, 251 Nihonga 109 Nihon University College of Arts 111 Ninagawa, Noritane 60 NIPPON 109, 231-47, 249, 251-3 Nippon Kōbō (Japan Studio) 231-3, 235, 239, 246, 252n Nipponism 251 Nitten (Nihon Bijutsu Tenrankai) 109-10 Non-aligned Movement 180

EUR ASIAN ENCOUNTERS

Priesthood 163 Princely State 13-4, 25, 32, 34 Progressive 33-4, 44, 96, 103-4, 106, 113, 117-8, 184, 186 Progressive Artists Group 96 Propaganda 17-8, 67, 188, 207, 215, 218-20, 222, 231-2, 234-6, 238-48, 252-3 Protestant 11, 127, 155, 159-61, 169, 171, 189, 195 Public Works Department (Sri Lanka) 179, 182 Qing dynasty 48-9, 51, 54-5, 57-9, 63-5, 67-8, 161, 163 Qufu (Shandong Province, China) 51

Obara, Kuniyoshi 113-4, 118 Ōchi, Hiroshi 116 Okakura, Kakuzō 76, 104 Olcott, Henry Steele 189, 191 Ōno, Tamae 109-10 Orientalism 13, 17, 30, 76n, 82, 93, 181, 186, 195-6, 201-2, 221 Osaka 57, 59, 61, 69, 235n O’Toole, George Barry 169-70

Ramayana / Chitra Ramayana 28, 36-9, 41, 43 Red Army 207, 211, 215, 217-8, 220, 225, 227 Regionalism 17, 21, 97, 180-1, 202 Reimann-Schule 103, 115-6 Renaissance 35, 91-2, 160, 193 Republic of China 48, 58, 66 Riberi, Antonio 162 Ricci, Matteo 167-8 Rohe, Mies van der 109 Rome 74, 80, 162, 169, 171 Roselius, Gerhard Ludwig Wilhelm 236 Rowlands, Edwin 123-4, 140, 142-9 Royal Academy (London) 34 Royal Asiatic Society 30-1

Pala 127, 129 Palace of Love 88-90 Palladian 183 Pan, Yuliang 15, 73, 75-83, 85, 87-8, 92-8 Pant, Apa 26, 42 Paris 12, 15, 21, 55-6, 64, 73-5, 78-83, 87-92, 94, 96, 98 Patharvat, Mahadev 28, 39-40 Patharvat, Pandoba 39 Patriarchy 92, 132, 141, 148 Patrimony 14, 29 Patriotism 17, 59, 67, 81, 164, 207, 211, 214-6, 218, 220, 222, 224-6, 228 Patron/Patronage 14, 26n, 28, 32-3, 35-6, 38-40, 43, 162, 169, 173, 191, 196, 236 Peking/Beijing 66, 79, 87, 155-6, 162-3, 168-9 Peking Man 66 Peking University 163, 168 People’s Republic of China 48, 65 Perrin, P. 168 Photojournalism 111, 233, 237-9, 244-7, 251 Pieris, Harry 186 Plaut, Eva 116 Pius X 186 Pius XI 162 Pius XII 162 Polyandry 125, 139 Postcolonial/postcoloniality 30, 74n, 75-6, 89, 97n, 148, 179-80, 182, 186, 201 Prague 115, 120

Saiva/Shiva 16, 127-8, 131-2, 149 Sakuma, Shōzan 55 Sanskrit 30, 38, 126-9 Satomi, Munetsugu 240-1 Schall, Adam 168 Schlier, P. 168 Science Museum (London) 59 Sculpture 26, 28, 30-1, 34-5, 40, 88, 90-1, 109, 187 Second Sino-Japanese War 162, 171, 239, 246 Second World War 17-8, 25, 42, 45, 63, 113, 207-8, 211, 214, 227-8, 232 Shang (dynasty) 52 Shanghai 12, 56, 75, 79-81, 95, 155-6, 162-4, 169, 174, 235n, 247 Sher-Gil, Amrita 15, 73, 76-83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92-8 Siccawei Museum 56 Signal 18, 231-2, 238, 242-53 Simla 78, 81 Simon, Lucien 73, 75, 81 Sinhala 182, 192, 197-9 Sino-Soviet Conflict 210 Social(ist) realism 214, 223 Solidarity 17, 77, 213 Solm, Fritz 245-6 Song dynasty 52, 64 South Manchurian Railway Company 239 Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) 209-10, 214, 218, 222 Soysa, Alfred de 183-5

261

Index

Soysa, Thomas Henry Arthur de 183-5 Spahn, Boris 247 Spirituality 92, 118 SSSR na stroike 235 Stalin, Jozef 209, 213, 222 Stalinist 208, 210-1, 217-8, 220, 225, 235 Stehle, Aurelius 169 Stölzel, Gunta 109 Subjectivity/subjecthood 8, 14, 16-7, 29, 44, 77, 79n, 82, 93, 126, 129, 148, 181-2, 198 Sufi 127-9, 131-2 sumi-e (Japanese painting with brush and ink) 114 Swaraj/Self-rule 13-4, 27, 28, 41-4 Sylhet 131, 133, 140, 142 Tahiti 82-3, 86-8 Taisho 63 Taiwan General Government Museum 62 Taj Mahal 38, 89 Takehisa, Yumeji 114 Tamagawa Gakuen School 113 Tamil 131, 182, 185, 190 Tang (dynasty) 64 Tantra 128, 129n Tartar 133 Tashkent 214-7, 219, 221-3, 225, 228 Taut, Bruno 104 Taxation 136 Tea Ceremony 15, 103-4, 106, 108-9, 118 Technology 18, 57, 60, 67, 89, 105-6, 116, 173, 198, 202, 231-3, 236, 253 Temperance Movement 189-90 Theile, Albert 236 Theology 159 Theosophy 120, 189-191 Tianjin 162, 168 Tibet 127, 129-133, 136 Tokyo 12, 51, 58-61, 103, 105, 111-6, 235n Tokyo Institute of Technology 116 Tokyo University of Education 111 Tokyo University of the Arts 114 Transcultural(ism) 12, 18, 231-3, 239 Translatability/Translation 10-6, 18, 42, 47-9, 51, 53-5, 57, 61, 68, 112, 114, 116, 127, 134, 138-9, 147, 149, 163-4, 194-5, 221-4, 227, 236 Transnational(ism) 8, 10, 14-5, 17-8, 47-9, 68, 74, 74n, 75n, 104-5, 113, 118, 213, 232-3, 235, 253 Travancore 34, 78n, 183, 195

Travel 10, 12-3, 15, 17, 19, 31, 34-5, 49, 54, 56-7, 59, 74, 109, 113, 115, 140, 189, 197, 202, 209, 233, 235, 240, 247 Travelogue 56-7 Tripartite Pact 236 Tsuchiura, Kameki 110 Uchida, Masao 60 Ullstein Verlag 231-2, 234, 244-5, 247, 251 United National Party (Sri Lanka) 196-7 United Nations 209-10 Untranslatability 11, 13, 16, 18 Uzbek Writers’ Union 209n, 214, 219, 222, 226-7 Vaisnava/Vishnu 16, 127, 131, 149 Varma, Ravi Raja 26n, 34-7, 39 Vernacular 13-4, 17, 133, 179, 187, 191, 193, 196, 199, 202 Vernacular Cosmopolitanism 10, 191, 198, 201-2 Victoria & Albert Museum 59 Victorian 40, 138, 183, 189, 195, 197, 202 Vienna 51-2, 59-60, 106, 115 Walden, Herwarth 112 Wang, Tao 54 Watercolour 36-7 Wehrmacht 242-6, 247n, 248, 252-3 Wei, Yuan 55 Weimar 106, 108, 116 Weimar Germany 233, 239 Westernization 60, 160, 190 World Exhibition/Fair 49, 51, 56, 59-61, 68 Yamaguchi, Bunzō 109 Yamamuro, Mitsuko 115-6 Yamana, Ayao 237 Yamawaki, Iwao 15, 108-12, 115-7, 239 Yamawaki, Michiko 103, 108-11, 115-8 Ying, Lianzhi 155, 157, 168 Yoga 107, 126 Yoshida, Shōin 55 Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) 191-3 Yushima Temple 61 Zhang, Jian 56-9, 61 Zhendan/Aurora University (Shanghai) 16, 155-6, 162-8, 170-1, 173-4 Zhou (dynasty) 52