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Between Globalising Religions and Embodying

Asia: Imagining Japan in Bengal

Varun Vivian Mallik

To cite this article: Varun Vivian Mallik (2023): Between Globalising Religions and
Embodying Asia: Imagining Japan in Bengal, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2023.2217393

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2217393

ARTICLE

Between Globalising Religions and Embodying Asia:

Imagining Japan in Bengal
Varun Vivian Mallik
Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article subjects the varied meanings that Bengalis gave to Asia; Bengal; body; global;
their imaginations of Japan during the Swadeshi Movement imaginations; Japan;
(1905–11) to close scrutiny. It does so by contextualising it within pan-Islamism; spirituality;
Swadeshi Movement
the attempts made by Hindus and Muslims to use religion as a
way of travelling globally. I use social hierarchy and embodiment
as analytical perspectives to frame the ways in which invoking
Japan provided opportunities to forge broader spiritual linkages
and, in doing so, negotiate their histories as separate from colo-
nial modernity. Further, this article problematises the categories
of local/global and indigenous/foreign that are used to isolate
these mobile acts of thinking, reading, negotiating and aspiring
that were simultaneously located both beyond and within the
nation. In turn, it suggests ‘imaginations’ and ‘invocations’ as a
fruitful site of studying such fluid histories.

The study of Swadeshi, a philosophy tied to the territorial boundary of the nation,
and Japan together is not a new one. In recent years, the historiographical turn in the
study of nationalism, by way of attending to the expansive internationalist projects
and transnational affinities that marked anti-colonial resistance in the twentieth cen-
tury,1 has highlighted the important ways in which Japan found itself deeply
embedded in the anti-colonial futurities of many Indians. A closer look at vernacular
publications brings to the fore the multitude of notes on ‘Japanese agriculture’,
‘Japanese ship and textile industry’, ‘Japanese loom’, ‘Japanese ideals’ amongst many
others that filled their pages.2 As Sumit Sarkar memorably demonstrates, efforts to
domesticate enterprise and industry thoroughly benefitted from the diffusion of

CONTACT Varun Vivian Mallik varunvivianm98@gmail.com

1. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and
Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kris Manjapra, Age of
Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014);
Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2020); Ali
Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2020).
2. Prabasi 8, no. 1 (April 1908): 667; Swadeshi 3, no. 11 (November 1908): 467; Swadeshi 1, no. 1 (November 1905):
38; Prabasi 9, no. 6 (January 1907): 493. All translations from Bengali are my own unless otherwise notified.

ß 2023 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 V.V. MALLIK

technical and scientific education from other industrialising societies, of which Japan
became a model example.3 These ‘modernising’ transformations acquired further
potency following Japan’s triumph over Russian forces on both land and sea in
1905—a war that was popularly conceived as the first instance of victory of an Asian
power over a Western one. As Indians came to be ‘constantly reminded of Japan’,4
they aspired to relate Japan’s efforts at making plausible the coexistence of both mod-
ernity and tradition to their own societies. For instance, by 1908, six Indians were
studying in Japanese universities, seven in technical schools and a number receiving
practical training in different arts and industries in factories and workshops.5 It is
perhaps why most scholars have focused their attention on the ways in which Japan
served as a model and inspiration to so many, particularly to the large number of
Japan pratyagat (those who returned from Japan) that emerged in Bengali society.6
At the same time, however, there is a tendency to mark these links either to the
benefits of colonial universalism—‘the multiple networks of exchange that arose from
the imperial experience’7—or to note the exhortations of Japan and Japanese visitors
under broader schemes of suspicion and global conspiracy.8 As a result, the relation
between Japan and anti-colonialism in India, productive of a mobility fuelled by the
workings of capitalism and imperialism, has been written as one of cause and effect.
Studying anti-colonial internationalism solely through these terms runs the risk of
inducing a distinction between origin/copy, indigenous/foreign and local/global. This
is evident in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s appraisal of the narrative strategy that privileged
the ‘specificity of the experience’ of those in Bengal over its global connections.
Chakrabarty maintains that this allowed Sumit Sarkar to prevent the ‘global from
swamping the local by asking of the local how it was produced rather than how it
was lived’.9 It is clear that such a reading rather myopically conceives the global only
within the discourse of ‘contributions’, ‘influences’ and ‘conspiracy’. In this article, I
make a case for an alternate translation of the global through a focus on
‘imaginations’ and ‘invocations’. In a recent essay, Martin Bayly has rightly argued
that global circulations encompassed more varied repertoires of thought than those

3. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 5th ed., 2017):
78–126.
4. Sarala Devi Ghoshal, a prominent educationist, makes this comment in The Dawn VI, no. I (1904): 10.
5. The Modern Review: Monthly Review and Miscellany: Vol. I, ed. Ramananda Chatterjee (Calcutta: Modern Review
Office, 1908): 104.
6. Michael Silvestri, ‘The Bomb, Bhadralok, Bhagavad Gita, and Dan Breen: Terrorism in Bengal and Its Relation to
the European Experience’, Terrorism and Violence 21, no. 1 (2009): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/
09546550802544383; Victor A. van Biljert, ‘The Icon of Japan in Nationalist Revolutionary Discourse in India,
1890–1910’, in Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945, ed. Li Narangoa and R.B. Cribb
(London: Routledge Curzon, 2003): 23–42; Steven G. Marks, ‘“Bravo, Bravo Tiger of the East!” The Russo-
Japanese War and the Rise of Nationalism in British India and Egypt’, in The Russo-Japanese War in Global
Perspective: World War Zero, ed. John W. Steinberg (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 609–27; R.P. Dua, The Impact of the
Russo-Japanese (1905) War on Indian Politics (Delhi: S. Chand, 1966); Stephen N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and
West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Nile
Green, ‘Shared Infrastructures, Informational Asymmetries: Persians and Indians in Japan, c.1890–1930’, Journal
of Global History 8 (2013): 414–35, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022813000351.
7. Silvestri, ‘The Bomb’, 20.
8. Peter Heehs, ‘Foreign Influences on Bengali Revolutionary Terrorism 1902–1908’, Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 3
(1994): 533–56, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00011859.
9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Home and the World in Sumit Sarkar’s History of the Swadeshi Movement’, in Sumit
Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 5th ed., 2017): 470.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

defined by simple imperial opposition (colonial/anti-colonial, East/West, imperial/in-

ternationalist) and that categories often blur the ways in which ideas contain multiple
overlapping and connected affinities, tensions, compatibilities and frictions.10 I find
that imaginations and invocations help complicate the distinction between global and
local, thereby trumping any proactive desire to impose and politicise values of foreign
and indigenous onto them. This they do by allowing for a mobility that goes beyond
the subjective experiences of peripatetic individuals to bring forth de-territorial histor-
ies of intellectual and social thought. As definitive of such cases of the ‘beyond’,
imaginations and invocations inhabit an intervening space that ‘signifies spatial dis-
tance, marks progress, promises the future … [which] are unknowable, unrepresent-
able, without a return to the present’.11
In pursuing this argument, I rely on Kris Manjapra’s reading of the international
imagination of the ‘Swadeshi avant-garde’, particularly in their ‘pursuit of new univer-
sal time’, ‘the rupturing [of] the timeframe and geographic mapping of colonial uni-
versalism’ and ‘the contingent outcomes of experiment, exploration, and invention’.12
For Bengalis invoking Japan in the Swadeshi years between the announcement and
the rescinding of the partition of Bengal (1905–11), I show that negotiating the colo-
nial production of global space and historical time takes place within the ambit of
religions going global. Here, I am interested in the attempts that use religion as a
way to travel globally, forging new alliances and geographies to their own ends, all
the while being determined by and reflective of the precarious traditions of embodi-
ment and social hierarchy (both caste and religious) that plagued Bengali society. The
end of the nineteenth century saw the rise of several religious internationalist projects
aided through the waves of the Indian Ocean, particularly visible in the efforts of the
Theosophical Society, Anagarika Dharmapala’s global Buddhist revivalism and the
pan-Islamic projects attempting to unify the Muslim world. Accordingly, this paper is
divided into two parts: the first part will examine the rhetoric of awakening to locate
the promise that Hindu spirituality held in their anti-colonial futures and the second
part, by contrast, will examine Bengali Muslims’ efforts at globalising their selves
within the ambit of the universalisms of pan-Islamism.

Part 1: Locating Asia and Japan

Inert Bengali, awake Japanese
In July 1905, it was announced that the Bengal presidency would be dismembered to cre-
ate the new administrative province of ‘Eastern Bengal and Assam’ in an attempt to
redirect resources to the underworked government of Assam. However, this partition,
camouflaged as administrative convenience, was popularly framed as an imperial conspir-
acy to divide and rule and to blunt the force of nationalism in Bengal. Against such
hopes, the partition did more to energise the cause of anti-colonial nationalism in Bengal

10. Martin J. Bayly, ‘Global Intellectual History in International Relations: Hierarchy, Empire, and the Case of the Late
Colonial Indian International Thought’, Review of International Studies 10 (2022): 1–20; 9, 19, https://doi.org/10.
1017/S0260210522000419.
11. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 4.
12. Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010): 23.
4 V.V. MALLIK

than anything else. The announcement generated mass protests, with the press urging
people to agitate ceaselessly. At one such public meeting, on October 16, 1905, the
academic-reformer Anandamohan Bose and the poet Rabindranath Tagore presided over
the foundation ceremony of the Federation Hall in north Calcutta (now Kolkata). An ail-
ing Bose was carried on a chair to the ground amidst the loudest cheers, where he is
reported to have given a most impressive speech: ‘Have we all not heard the booming of
the national call and its solemn summons to our hearts?’13 Mid-speech, he repeated the
lyrics—Mora Gange ban eseche—the currentless river Ganga is now swelling with the full
force and fury of the tidal bore. ‘Ours is not the land of the rising sun, for to Japan—
victorious, self-sacrificing and magnanimous—belongs that title’, continued Bose, ‘but
may I not say that ours is the land where the sun is rising again after ages of darkness
and gloom’.14 His speech poetically encapsulated the prevailing mood in Bengal—of
awakening, life and action. It also urged the 50,000 Bengalis present there to publicly
imagine Japan.
This section begins by analysing such invocations of Japan as they appeared in
Swadeshi songs. Attending to songs and poetry is particularly instructive for two sim-
ple reasons: first, they were a crucial medium by which Bengalis spirited a variety of
their nationalistic concerns, and in doing so, centred their imaginations both within
and beyond the territorial nation-state, and second, their widespread dissemination
reflected specific modes of popular social reflection within the context of anti-colonial
mobilisation. Let us then consider the following Bengali verses that were published in
the magazine Matripuja in 1908:
Awake! Awake! O’ children of India,
as Hindus and Muslims become one,
sacrifice yourselves for your homeland!
Wake up, wherever you may be.
Fulfill your work,
And stand on your feet.
For your witness shall be, look, look at Japan!
Your knowledge, your soul,
your arts and your science,
have been seized by others to obtain greatness,
leaving you dead in the roots.
By exporting your own grains abroad,
you hand your own wealth to others.
For how long will you remain dependent,
tolerating such an insult?15

Prathama Banerjee has argued that the work of imagination does not just simply refer
to the scope for visualisation, but, more crucially, as the practice of acting with and
upon time.16 Here, Japan is imbued with temporality by bearing witness to the

13. The Indian World II, no. A (1905): 188.

14. Ibid., 189.
15. Gita Chattopadhyay, Bangla Swadeshi Gaan (Delhi: Delhi University, 1983): 245–46.
16. Prathama Banerjee, ’The Work of Imagination: Temporality and Nationhood in Colonial Bengal’, in Subaltern
Studies XII: Muslims, Dalits, and the Fabrications of History, ed. Shail Mayaram, M.S.S Pandian and Ajay Skaria
(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005): 280–322.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

awakening of Indians. Japan’s victory heralded the ‘awakening of the East’ by serving
as an example and model of Western modernity in Asia.17 Its feat in reaching this
Western level of civilisation without necessarily abandoning its traditions convinced
many Bengalis that they could themselves repeat Japan’s path to progress. This is evi-
dent in another poem that, in narrating the light of dawn that Japan brought to Asia
(eneche Japan usha Eshiyay), points to the midday glory (madhyahan garima) that
was to be ushered in by independent India.18 By employing it as a witness, Japan is
imagined to have reached the temporal horizon of modernity where Indians were still
relegated as the ‘not yet’.19 But to simply think of Japan as a beacon of modernity
ready to be emulated without critically evaluating the context of these imaginations
misses out on the several layers of rejecting the ‘not yet’ that went beyond these
considerations.
By mid-1908, the Swadeshi Movement was neither able to translate its visions of
passive resistance and self-reliance into concrete programmes nor could it integrate
into its fold the large masses of both rural and urban poor. These fault-lines, taking
the shape of caste, class and religious differences, gave way to revolutionary
terrorism—of using violence as a way of shortening the time to the ultimate utopia,
swaraj (self-rule). From this point on, Bengal came to be enthralled by a campaign of
violence: the four assassination attempts on Andrew Fraser, the lieutenant-governor
of Bengal in late 1907; the shooting of sub-inspector Nandalal Banerjee in 1908; the
murder and decapitation of Sukumar Chakrabarti, who gave evidence against the
revolutionary Pulin Das; and Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki’s attempt to bomb
Douglas Kingsford in 1908, which instead resulted in the accidental deaths of the
wife and daughter of one Mr. Kennedy.20 At the centre of these bloody spectacles,
Japan is invoked with similar fury:
Ye youth of Bengal! Stand up for once in the fight with the sword of work in hand, save
mother India from disgrace with great prowess!
Behold with what slow motion the sun of good fortune is rising in yonder eastern sky
with a smiling face with the mass of fog in the rear,
At the first streaks of this light, Japan got up with terrible enthusiasm; China is rising
with quick steps. Alas, why does India remain in the rear?21
In juxtaposing the demand to fight with ‘the sword of work’, the poet encapsulated
udbodhan, the inauguration of swaraj, through an emphasis on greater agency.
Several scholars have noted how revolutionaries rearranged and evaded the ordered
timeline for political change through their ‘impatience’ for action.22 This politics of

17. Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 71.
18. Chattopadhyay, Bangla Swadeshi Gaan, 349.
19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000): 8.
20. For an overview, see Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–1910
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
21. ‘Report by Mr. H.L. Salkeld I.C.S Regarding the Proceedings of the Anushilan Samiti in Dacca’, August 1909,
National Archives of India (henceforth, NAI), Home Political, Part B, 21: 144–45.
22. Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst & Co.,
2015): 5–7; Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India 1919–1947
(New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 22–23.
6 V.V. MALLIK

action manifested urgent achievement through the use of violence. Japan’s enthusiasm
is then clear: far from just signalling its tryst with modernity, the icon of Japan is
infused with the militancy that guaranteed its victory. Buoyed by the successes of the
war, Japanese thinkers similarly began reformulating and indoctrinating an imperial
form of bushido (way of the samurai)—popularly associated with martial values of
loyalty to the Emperor, duty and self-sacrifice—which became a significant compo-
nent of not only the nationalistic and militaristic elements of the Japanese empire,
but also gave currency to the newly confident and often chauvinistic global public
discourse around Japan’s military victories.23 It matters little, then, if Bengali nation-
alists essentialised or misunderstood the bushido boom following 1905—the point is
that the concurrent allusion to both the revitalisation of Japan and the call to ‘save
mother India with great prowess’ in the song not only suggested what Indians could
potentially do for themselves, but also, by using legible associations to Japan, helped
mobilise Bengalis to the Swadeshi cause. The intersection of violence and temporality
becomes part of the linguistics of imagining Japan.
In an unpublished manuscript, Aurobindo Ghose, one of Bengal’s most radical
revolutionary thinkers, observed that the kind of people who dominated Japan and
India—the samurais in the former and the bourgeoisie in the latter—was central to
the difference in the histories of both these countries.24 Japan was rising in energies
and aspirations, while India was left tedious and dormant. For Aurobindo, the bour-
geoisie’s preoccupation with ‘leisure’, ‘peace’ and ‘refinement’ foregrounded the hyp-
nosis that made India unable to thrive and break free from the shackles of
imprisonment. This resonated with the frustration with inaction already felt by the
Swadeshi milieu. To that end, Aurobindo called to shatter the bourgeois and replace
it with a new nationalism, one that would attract ‘men who will dare and do impossi-
bilities, the men of extremes, of faith, of martyrs … the initiators of revolution’.25 In
effect, he conceived the rebirth of the Kshatriya in India. Evident here is an acute
impatience to code violence as a method of anti-colonialism by transforming people
from their lacklustre selves owing to a life that was ‘fat and comfortable selfish
middle-class’26 to a specific physical and moral persona that embodied the virtues
and actions of a warrior Kshatriya. In doing so, I find that, increasingly, Swadeshi
Bengalis metamorphosised their action of time into the action of the body. What this
means is that they rejected the ‘not-yet’ of time by recalibrating their physical, bodily
selves to reflect the ‘now-ness’, the awakening that had dawned upon them, thereby,
setting history on the right course towards complete independence or poorna swaraj.
Here, the body became the site of anti-colonial praxis and imagining Japan provided
a similar experience of creating loyal, martial bodies.
Such a development is important, for the political and social sphere of Bengal
came to be grounded in the late nineteenth century global circulation of social
Darwinism and environmentalism. The Bengalis’ accounts of their own effeteness and

23. Oleg Benesch, Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 111–24.
24. Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram: Political Writings and Speeches: 1890–1908, Vols. 6 and 7 (Pondicherry: Sri
Aurobindo Ashram Press, 2002): 1091–08; 1092.
25. Ibid., 1108.
26. Ibid., 223.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

physical decline were used to bring forth a cultural crisis—of the spiritual, moral and
racial degeneracy of Bengali society.27 Out of this was born a physical culture move-
ment that attempted to recover older cultures of the martial body with the clear hope
of reversing their political subjugation through physical self-strengthening.28 This
encouraged the establishment of akharas (gymnasia) and samitis (self-organising asso-
ciations), which organised detailed, intensive methods of cultivating a ‘martial body’
(most often conflated with a ‘masculine body’) through systems of exercises and
training in the usage of lathis (bamboo staves), swords, daggers and guns. For
instance, the Anushilan Samiti, arguably the most renowned nationalist organisation
in Bengal, was founded with emphasis on the role that anushilan or ‘constant prac-
tice’ would play in gaining freedom. In the late 1860s, the Hindu Mela, an annual
carnival, was launched combining displays of indigenous handicrafts with sporting
events of gymnastics, wrestling and other traditional sports with the specific hope to
energise and revitalise Bengalis. Bhadralok elites came to realise their inaction in
explicit caste terms, for instance, ‘their want of self-respect and self-reliance’29 or
‘virtues and methods of Vaishya’,30 thereby nourishing Kshatriya forms of embodi-
ment—self-sacrifice, of remaining perpetually armed—to overcome their hypnosis. It
is important to note that such a revitalisation of upper-caste visions of the Swadeshi
body not only made imaginations of Japan culturally legible but also reveals the tra-
gedy of the actual demographics of the Swadeshi milieu.
At one such display at Overtoun Hall in August 1905, a grand exhibition of jujitsu,
the Japanese art of self-defence, was organised. The exhibition included a wrestling
contest between a Bengali youth and a Japanese man, in which the latter was
decidedly victorious. The proceedings of this occasion began with a chorus singing a
Bangla song urging the sons of India to shake off their lethargy and follow the
example of Japan.31 Between 1904 and 1906, the Amrita Bazar Patrika regularly pub-
lished lengthy articles on issues such as ‘Physical Training in Japan’, ‘How Does
Japan Make Fighting Men’ and ‘Military Heroism in Japan’.32 Each of these detailed
not only the importance of self-sacrifice, but also the methods of training, mainly
jujitsu, that pushed Japan nearer to victory. These panegyrics on Japanese forms of
embodiment did not go unnoticed by the Bengalis. More and more young men
attending akharas were given instruction in jujitsu along with their daily drills in
lathis, swords and daggers. The popularity of these invocations of ‘Japan’ and ‘Jujitsu’
is further made evident through the vast references available in the archive. For

27. See John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal’, Past and Present 86, no. 1 (1980): 121–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/86.1.121; Harald Fischer-Tine,
‘From Brahmacharya to “Conscious Race Culture”: Victorian Discourses of Science and Hindu Traditions in Early
Indian Nationalism’, in Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity, ed.
Crispin Bates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 241–69.
28. Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Military Sports and the History of the Martial Body in India’, Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007): 490–523, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852007783245133.
29. The educationist Ashwini Dutta argued that Indians did not have a place in the scale of nations for they had
‘reduced themselves to the position of Sudras by their want of self-respect and self-reliance’: see (unknown
author), The Swadeshi Movement, A Symposium: Views of Representative Indians and Anglo-Indians (Madras: G.A.
Natesan & Co., 2nd ed., 1917): 124–29; 124.
30. Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, 239.
31. Amrita Bazar Patrika (August 13, 1905): 4.
32. Amrita Bazar Patrika (February 21, 1904): 7; (September 18, 1904): 10; (January 19, 1905): 3.
8 V.V. MALLIK

instance, F.C. Daly, the deputy inspector general of the Criminal Intelligence
Department, made note of the rumours of the presence of a Japanese man in
Calcutta ‘who could teach Jujitsu and “other tricks” by which a weak man could over-
come a strong man, even if he was harmed’.33 This is somewhat corroborated in
Jibantara Haldar’s account wherein a Japanese ostad (master) named ‘Gijin’ gave les-
sons in Japanese sword-fighting.34 Relatedly, when the police found the Anushilan
Samiti Drill Books—copiously detailed with glossaries of technical terms of different
ways of using weapons like ‘Aaka’, ‘Tamacha’, ‘Guruda Roast’ and ‘Yakamachop’—the
government-appointed Bengali translator, who was unable to locate the origin of
these terms, commented in their report that ‘they might be Japanese’.35 It is clear that
these references to Japan are framed not only as a positive example of physical self-
strengthening but also gendered Bengalis in very important ways. Even if the case of
the Japanese teacher is untrue, what is crucial is that Bengalis continued to invoke
Japan, bookending it within their bodily and racial anxieties of degeneracy and mori-
bundity. In doing so, they made several, sometimes overlapping, global connections,
often taking the form of ‘citation moments’.36 In effect, in Bengal at least, these vivid
imaginations of Japan, samurai and jujitsu, made legible through mixed bodily and
caste registers, got retold, translated and cited by the Swadeshis as they rearranged
the order of time through their physical self-strengthening. And through this, they
visualised their turn to Asia.

Indianising the East

In 1904, the Irish-born Sister Nivedita, in her introduction to the Japanese art curator
Okakura Kakuzo’s The Ideals of the East,37 centred ‘Indian spirituality’ as the source
of the unity of Asia. By subsuming Buddhism as a variation of Hinduism, Nivedita
allocated the ‘Asiatic meaning’ of Asia to this spirituality. While this introduction did
not detail how different nations put to use this spirituality, it is clear that the long
process of the dissemination of Buddhism and Hinduism into East and Southeast
Asia over centuries was not just a product of travel and religious intercourse, but that

33. F.C. Daly, ‘Note on the Growth of the Revolutionary Movement in Bengal’, in Terrorism in Bengal: A Collection of
Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939: Vol. I, ed. Amiya K. Samanta (Calcutta: Government of West
Bengal, 1995): 3–216; 131.
34. Haldar’s account of the Anushilan Samiti is based on interviews with the surviving members: see Jibantara
Haldar, Bharater Swadhinata Sangrame Anushilan Samitir Bhumika (Prakashana: Calcutta, 1989).
35. The Drill Books defined Aaka as ‘cutting the knee in a bent fashion beginning half a cubit above the right side
of the right knee’, Tamacha as ‘cutting the end of the right ear, beginning from the left ear and passing it
through the nose’, and Guruda Roast as ‘passing the sword into the armpit’: see ‘Report Regarding the
Anushilan Samiti Society Established in the Dacca Dist.’, February 1908, NAI, Home Political, Part A, 70/71.
36. Ronit Ricci shows how citations and translations of Arabic words, phrases and terms or even the adoption of
the Arabic script by various Muslim communities in South and Southeast Asia was a way by which these
communities ‘belonged’ to the broader Muslim world: see Ronit Ricci, ‘Citing as a Site: Translation and
Circulation in Muslim South and Southeast Asia’, in ‘Sites of Asian Interaction’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2
(2012): 331–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X11000916.
37. Okakura visited Calcutta in 1902 for almost nine months during which time he travelled to different parts of
India, visiting Buddhist sites and writing up a pan-Asian history of Japanese art, which would later be published
as The Ideals. While most assume that Okakura’s visit was in search of Tagore, it was in fact Vivekananda that
he was actually captivated by. It is through this connection that Okakura and Nivedita were acquainted: see
Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2006): Prologue.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

of Hinduism being aggressive. In doing so, she conflates this project of globalising
that Hinduism underwent and will continue to undergo in the future with the
‘Indianising of the East’.38 Although such an argument was not novel given the close
association with her guru Swami Vivekananda, who himself reclaimed Buddhism as a
logical conclusion of Hinduism,39 it is telling that this theorising of a pan-Asian geog-
raphy of Indian spirituality anticipated visions of a supra-local identity that would
become popular by the 1920s through the workings of the Calcutta-based Greater
India Society. The idea of ‘Greater India’ was a diffusionist cultural theory proposed
by middle-class Bengali Hindus such as Kalidas Nag, P.C. Bagchi, R.C. Majumdar
and O.C. Gangoly to redefine Hindu India as an ever-expanding cultural space. Based
on the study of the presence of the images, texts and iconographies of Puranic
Hinduism there, they centred this account of ‘cultural colonisation’ to ancient India’s
benign civilising influence in Southeast Asia.40 Gangoly wrote of this ‘Indianisation’
as being ‘not a question of influence’ but of the ‘wholesale transportation of the char-
acteristic features and phases of Indian culture’, thus making the cultural systems of
Asia a ‘substantial part of the original context of Indian civilisation’.41 While one can
comment on the deeply imperialist, hierarchical vision of ‘Greater India’, particularly
within the context of twentieth century anti-colonialism, these Indic/Hindu national-
ist narratives interestingly offered a way by which Hindus could inhabit global spaces,
bypassing those guarded by colonial modernity.
We find that similar sentiments are echoed as Hindus paid close attention to
revive the space of Asia. Even though the cartography of what constituted this Asia
varied and overlapped based on local agendas, be it V.D. Savarkar’s focus on East
and Southeast Asia or Mahendra Pratap’s attempt to bridge the diverse lands from
Turan to the golden lands of East Asia,42 the Swadeshi imaginations of Asia were
united in their humanist and spiritual goals. In an essay on the humanitarian spirit of
Indian nationalism, Aurobindo advocated that the ‘problems which have troubled
mankind can only be solved by conquering the kingdom within … by mastering the
forces of the intellect and the spirit’.43 For that work, he demanded that the resur-
gence of Asia was necessary. Like Ernst Bloch’s ‘geographical utopias’ that upheld the
hopes of the people for a better, perfect world, the rediscovery of the old—not new—
and very real space of Asia profoundly rearticulated for Bengalis the promise that
spirituality and religion held in their political emancipation.44 Asia became a space
where Indians could claim their destined freedom and greatness. It is necessary to

38. Nivedita, ‘Introduction’, in Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan
(New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 2nd ed., 1904): ix–xxii; xxi.
39. ‘Swami Vivekananda’s Speeches’, accessed April 5, 2022, https://belurmath.org/swami-vivekananda-speeches-at-
the-parliament-of-religions-chicago-1893/.
40. Susan Bayly, ‘Imagining “Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern
Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (2004): 703–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X04001246.
41. O.C. Gangoly, ‘Relation between Indian and Indonesian Culture’, The Journal of the Greater India Society 7, no. 1
(1940): 68–69.
42. Carolien Stolte, ‘Compass Points: Four Indian Cartographies of Asia, c. 1930–55’, in Asianisms: Regionalist
Interactions and Asian Integration, ed. Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016): 49–74.
43. Sri Aurobindo, Karmayogin: Political Writings and Speeches: 1909–1910, Vol. 8 (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Press, 1997): 26–27.
44. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 2, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1986): 792–93.
10 V.V. MALLIK

point out that this promise of Asia received a resounding vote of confidence follow-
ing 1905. The pamphlet Bhawani Mandir noted that ‘there is no instance in history
of a more marvellous and sudden upsurging of strength in a nation than modern
Japan’. Just as the Japanese drew their power from religion through the recovery of
Buddhism and Shintoism, Indians must also ‘change natures, and become new men
with new hearts … to be born again’.45 In this sense, spiritual strength and Hinduism
were the rallying call not only for the unity of Asia, but also for the pursuit of poorna
swaraj. It is this ‘quixotic programme of spiritualising politics’, of making spiritualism
the philosophical foundation of Indian nationalism, that the communist revolutionary
M.N. Roy critiqued for having no effect on the material forces that defined colonial
oppression.46 However, this production of Asia, bolstered by an Indian spiritual glob-
ality, allowed the formation of a new collective agency that attempted to transform
and elevate transcendental lineages into concrete political power.47 I argue that
embodying Asia as a space where Indians could affirm their historic agency presented
an alternative to the ‘inner sphere’48 to which they had hitherto relegated their free-
dom and initiative. Perhaps, then, the true source of their anti-colonialism and, in a
sense, their survival was inwards, within their Asiatic selves.
During his first trip to Tokyo in 1916, Tagore lectured the Japanese on the fatal
consequences of blindly accepting Western civilisation and implored them to instead
apply their Eastern mind and spiritual strength. This was located as thus: ‘in your
blood, in the marrow of your bones, in the texture of your flesh, in the tissue of your
brains’.49 The implication that there existed something inherent in the bodies of
Asiatic people which bound them together in good faith and which ultimately defined
their existence is interesting. Almost a decade earlier, this nostalgia of embodying a
true Asiatic self gets percolated in several writings imagining Japan and Asia. For
instance, one unnamed author argues that the ‘Japanese are the most profoundly
Oriental of all the Asiatic peoples’ and though they had ‘copied the West in many
ways’, the ‘soul of Asia never changes’.50 In emphasising an immutable Asiatic self,
the author underlined the potential similarity that Indians had with their Japanese
counterparts. And in nourishing not just spiritual but bodily affinities, embedded in
these imaginations is a longing for alternative universes where Hindus could realise
their emancipation (both from British colonisation and the degeneracy imposed
through Muslim rule in the subcontinent). However, Rustom Bharucha correctly
points out that this production of Asia involved elements of ‘self-Orientalisation’.51
This spiritual, civilisational turn was set in a timeless zone without any actual attempt
at historicising the exchanges across Asia. And in doing so, Bengalis were indelibly

45. Sri Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, 85–86.

46. Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vol. I, ed. Gangadhar Adhikari, M.B. Rao and Mohit
Sen (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971): 216–20.
47. For a nuanced exploration of the interconnectedness between Swadeshi politics and spirituality, see Alex
Wolfers, ‘Born Like Krishna in the Prison-House: Revolutionary Asceticism in the Political Ashram of Aurobindo
Ghose’, in ‘Writing Revolution in South Asia: History, Practice, Politics in Modern South Asia’, South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2016): 525–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1199253.
48. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993): 6–13.
49. Rabindranath Tagore, The Message of India to Japan: A Lecture (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1916): 16.
50. Amrita Bazar Patrika (April 20, 1905): 5.
51. Bharucha, Another Asia, 71–73.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

marked by an essentialism, one that crystallised their identities based on a cultural

superiority, distinctive spiritual nature and the universality of their beliefs.52
Yet there is something pertinent about a logic for Asia that was consciously built
using the thread of spirituality in significant part because rooted in it are the many
ways in which Bengalis forged and gave meaning to global linkages. The revival of
Hindu spirituality was employed to bring an affective sensibility to projects of bridg-
ing difference, and purposefully and imaginatively travelling to lands such as Japan
where they saw reflections or anticipations of their own experience.53 The invocations
of Japan during the Swadeshi years, followed by the strengthening force of ideas of
Greater India, exemplified these ways of looking out. Thus, I have shown how reli-
gious notions of spirituality were generously used by Hindus to morph their attempts
to go global, to create radical utopias, all the while tethering to a backward emotion-
alism and nostalgia for an imaginary Hindu past and geography. In my view,
Hinduism went global partly in response to pan-Islamism, which many Hindus saw
to be a problem of split loyalty. In many ways, it is not unusual for religions and reli-
gious internationalistic projects to have had a dialogical, often competing, relationship
with other projects, both domestic and global. The complicated nature of Hindu-
Muslim relations in Bengal nourished an anxiety among Hindus regarding the ways
in which Muslims interacted with those outside of the nation. We now turn to review
this context of Japan and Asia in pan-Islamic thought.

Part 2: Between pan-Islamism and Swadeshi

Japan in the Muslim world
By the mid nineteenth century, the extensive expansion of sea and land routes for pil-
grimage and general travel to Central Asia and the Middle East, along with the
remarkable growth of the vernacular press, brought Indian Muslims into greater con-
tact with the wider Muslim world. With it arrived the news of events impacting
Muslim populations—the Crimean War of 1853–56, the French seizure of Tunisia in
1881, the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, amongst others. Out of these birthed a
Muslim consciousness taking the form of pan-Islamism, a vaguely political and reli-
gious solidarity transcending differences of language, ethnicity and race. Although the
standard account of this unity converged to the concept of umma, the religious com-
munity of believers, Cemil Aydin problematises this ever-present religious-political
entity as rather a product of the confrontations of nineteenth century imperial
knowledge-making processes that racialised Islam.54 Laced in its strong anti-Western
assertions, in the Indian context, pan-Islamism fostered an emotional association par-
ticularly to the Ottoman empire, frequently reflecting sentiments of an Islamic
brotherhood. This culminated with the Khilafat Movement (1919–22), launched with

52. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’,
Representations, no. 37 (1992): 27–55; 29, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928653; Peter Heehs, ‘Bengali Religious
Nationalism and Communalism’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 1, no. 1 (1997): 117–39; 127–28, https://
doi.org/10.1007/s11407-997-0015-8.
53. Manjapra, M.N. Roy, 21.
54. Cemil Aydin, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017): 3–7.
12 V.V. MALLIK

the overt aim to pressure the British government to preserve the boundaries of the
Ottoman empire and the religious sanctity of the Caliph following the end of World
War I.55 For Indian Muslims, the Khilafat Movement offered a real chance to demon-
strate an internationalist affect emerging from their religious identities. As early as
1906, the weekly Mussalman, founded by the Bengali barrister Abdur Rasul with the
cooperation of Abul Kasem of Burdwan and Abdul Halim Ghaznavi of Tangail, noted
a ‘Mahomedan awakening’ credited to the ‘pan-Islamic firment all over the Muslim
world following the launch of the progressive movements in Persia and
Afghanistan’.56 Partly charged by publications such as Moslem Chronicle, Soltan,
Roznama-i-Mukaddas Hablul Matin, Muslims proactively created and reconsidered
their affinities to groups and movements such as the revolutionary Young Turks.
‘The sympathy of Indian Muslims with Turkey was noticeable as long ago as the
Crimean War’, suspected the Sedition Committee Report, ‘fanned by pan-Islamic
influences’.57 Their kinship to the Ottomans, supplemented by their dislike for British
agreement with Russia, imperial policy against Turkey and British inaction during the
Balkan war lured many Muslims to follow the Young Turks with keen interest and
enthusiasm, with several even initiating contact. One such was the scholar and first
minister of education of independent India, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who persua-
sively indicates the confirmation that the contact had on his political beliefs.58
Although the meta-geographical vision of Muslims, fuelled by pan-Islamism, is obvi-
ous in their turn to Central Asia and the Middle East, we find that Japan is invoked
with similar affect.
Shaikh Mushir Hosain Kidwai, a barrister and the secretary of the Pan-Islamic
Society in London, published a treatise on ‘Pan-Islamism’ which was reproduced in
the Modern Review. Kidwai, a recipient of the Order of Osmania by the Ottoman
Sultan in recognition of his services to the cause of Islam, quoted in this treatise a let-
ter that he wrote to the London-based Morning Post on Japan and pan-Islamism.
‘Now-a-days Japan has become the centre of attraction in many ways, the cynosure
of many eyes’.59 In submitting an explanation to why pan-Islamism must cast a
covetous glance towards Japan, he stated:
To us, the members of the Pan-Islamic Society, the news that Japan is seriously thinking
of adopting Islam as her State religion is more than welcome. Islam is a chivalrous and
practical religion and, Islamic civilization is best suited for the Asiatic people … . Japan
by adopting Islam would by one stroke become a Power possessing an influence all over
the world and backed, supported, and loved by one-fifth of the whole Human kind.60
In linking the regeneration of Asia with the spread of Islam, Japan came to be tasked
with leading Asia towards glory. This glory did not by rule look towards a past time,
laden with an affection for imperial Islamic rule. Instead, these pan-Islamic projects

55. For a comprehensive account of the movement, see Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism
and Political Mobilization in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982).
56. Selections from The Mussalman 1906–1908, ed. Bhuiyan Iqbal (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1994): 20.
57. Government of India, Sedition Committee 1918 Report (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing,
1918): 173.
58. Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom: An Autobiographical Narrative (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1959): 7.
59. The Modern Review, 153.
60. Ibid.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

were fervent in their nostalgia for a future of the full realisation of the ideal of
Islam.61 For Kidwai then, Japan came to share the geographical space where Islam
could realise its future political and social potential. Such sentiments were not singu-
lar and came to be shared particularly by Muhammad Barkatullah, an Indian revolu-
tionary and Islamic scholar who travelled across the globe developing cosmopolitan
alliances towards the dual causes of anti-colonialism and pan-Islamism. In 1909,
Barkatullah arrived in Japan to take up the post of lecturer in Urdu and Persian at
the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. During his time in Tokyo, he founded and
co-edited the ‘anti-British’ monthly Islamic Fraternity and made efforts in institution-
alising and promoting ‘fraternal feeling among the followers of Islam and those of
other sister religions’.62 Due in main to Barkatullah’s efforts, Japan became a centre
not only for the enlightenment of the non-Muslim public of the principles of Islam
but also as a crucial node in anti-colonial revolutionary networks.63 Then, just as
Asia presented a global space where Hindus imagined their anti-colonial, spiritual
futures, many Indian Muslims imbued Japan with a similar futurity, beyond the cali-
ginous realities of their political minority. Their ‘alter-national’ turn to Japan, particu-
larly in the 1920s and 1930s, was deeply rooted in their developmental efforts at
modernising local institutions.64 In Bengal too, Japan was frequently referenced while
making the case for the education of Muslims, with the monthly Nabanoor crediting
Japan’s successes solely to its ‘universities and Western scientific education’.65 And
yet, while Islam provided tools for anti-imperial mobilisation as well as ways to
imagine new geographies, pan-Islamism in Bengal was defined in important ways by
its precarious Hindu-Muslim relations.

Creating ideal selves

Hindu-Muslim relations posed the greatest challenge for the Swadeshi Movement in
Bengal and ultimately proved its greatest failure.66 Many Hindu bhadralok con-
structed Muslims as a community wholly separate to them. For instance, the noted
writer Nirad Chaudhuri listed the four distinct but natural aspects in their attitudes
towards Muslims at the turn of the twentieth century: of ‘retrospect hostility for their
one-time domination’, ‘utter indifference’, ‘friendliness of those with similar back-
grounds who they came in personal contact with’ and ‘contempt for the Muslim peas-
ant’.67 Despite the concerted involvement of a large number of upper-class Muslims
in various facets of Swadeshi, the inherited ‘natural-ness’ in the Hindu’s hostility
towards them repeatedly questioned their loyalty towards the Swadeshi cause.

61. Faridah Zaman, ‘Beyond Nostalgia: Time and Place in Indian Muslim Politics’, in ‘Feeling Modern: The History of
Emotions in Urban South Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27, no. 4 (2017): 639–45, https://doi.org/10.
1017/S1356186317000335.
62. Islamic Fraternity I, ed. Mohammad Barkatullah and Ahmad Fadli, nos. 5–6 (1910): 110.
63. Samee Siddiqui, ‘Coupled Internationalisms: Charting Muhammad Barkatullah’s Anti-Colonialism and Pan-
Islamism’, ReOrient 5, no. 1 (2019): 25–46; 40–41, https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.5.1.0025.
64. Nile Green argues this for the princely state of Hyderabad in ‘Forgotten Futures: Indian Muslims in the Trans-
Islamic Turn to Japan’, The Journal of Asian Studies 72, no. 3 (2013): 611–31, https://doi.org/10.1017/
S0021911813000582.
65. Nabanoor I, no. 7 (October 1903): 282.
66. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement, 344.
67. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London: Macmillan & Co., 1951): 225–26.
14 V.V. MALLIK

Maulana Azad, for example, claimed how the Jugantar group were ‘greatly surprised’
when he expressed his wish to join them, keeping him out of the inner council for
the longest time having never fully trusted him.68 Aurobindo himself only half-
heartedly tried to bring Muslims into the movement, failing to see religious conflict
as a vital political issue.69 This was further qualified by stray inflammatory circulars
like the Lal Istahar (Red Pamphlet) that called on Muslims to ‘boycott Hindus’ for
depriving them of their lives and livelihood.70 It is true that such provocations were
uncommon, but the concern evolved in the context of the strong class and caste def-
inition of the Hindu-Muslim divide, and, more immediately, in the incapacity of the
elite Hindu leadership to take into account the grievances of the largely Dalit and
Muslim peasant masses on whom the immediate effect of their economic ideologies
of boycott and Swadeshi enterprise were most strongly felt. Even decades later, as
articles in the Mihir-o-Sudhakar make evident, the nature of the Hindu-Muslim con-
flict was sufficiently anti-property in nature and a raging class struggle against the
overwhelmingly oppressive and arrogant Hindu zamindars, money-lenders and
traders.71
The problem of Hindu-Muslim relations in Bengal was also one of language. The
modern political expressions of Bengali Muslim identity and solidarity was in an
ongoing dialogue with the Sanskritised standardisation of Bengali language and litera-
ture by authors such as Tagore and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. By the late nine-
teenth century, thanks to the burgeoning world of print cultures, Bengali Muslims
not only began reviving ‘Musalmani Bangla’, which used words and neologisms from
Arabic, Persian and Urdu linguistic registers, but also began writing social critiques
in Sanskritic Bengali, highlighting issues of economic underdevelopment and social
mobility that perturbed them.72 It became impossible for the Swadeshi milieu to
locate a common language of mobilisation that would unite all fronts. The public
baptism of the Swadeshi resistance and revolutionary terrorism as a specific Hindu
duty, transforming it into a ‘political tool of blessed rage’,73 restricted Swadeshi from
becoming thoroughly legible. For instance, in using the subtext of the Vedic
Narameda Yajna (human sacrifice) to call for the assassination of Europeans, the
responsibility of inflicting violence got confined to only a select few upper-caste
Hindus.74 This was, in part, an exercise in making the revival of Hindu religious
practices synonymous with the nationalist movement. Further complicating it was a
form of anti-Muslim bigotry that was rife in the Swadeshi milieu, enabled by the tre-
mendous popularity of the unqualified stereotyping and otherisation of the Muslim

68. Azad, India Wins Freedom, 5.

69. Peter Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008): 211–12.
70. ‘Proposed Publication of a Contradiction of Assertions Contained in “A Statement of Recent Disturbances in
Eastern Bengal” Which was Published in the Newspapers’, Proceedings against the Author of the “Red
Pamphlet”, July 1907, NAI, Home Political, 189–92: 6.
71. See Tanika Sarkar, ‘Communal Riots in Bengal’, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, ed.
Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2nd ed., 1985): 302–19; 310–11.
72. Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2014): 1–37.
73. Anna Della Subin, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (London: Granta Books, 2022): 10.
74. ‘List of Seditious and “Swadhin Bharat” Leaflets in Circulation in Bengal from 1908 to 1918’, in Terrorism in
Bengal: A Collection of Documents on Terrorist Activities from 1905 to 1939: Vol. IV, ed. Amiya K. Samanta
(Calcutta: Government of West Bengal, 1995): 375–518; 383.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 15

self in the historical romances of Bengali nationalism that Chatterjee and others gave
life to in their novels.75 Nationalist-minded Muslims felt deeply about the extensive
filial piety for Chatterjee and the Hindu traditions of mass contact. In an editorial
titled ‘The Bande Mataram and Ourselves’, the authors criticised Bankim’s inability
to ‘shake off his Brahmanical prejudices’ and for his ugly delineation of the Muslim
character.76 Alienated by both the Swadeshi milieu and their literature, Syed Ali
Imam, in his 1908 presidential address at the second session of the All-India Muslim
League, conveyed his despair and disappointment that the ‘most forward people of
India put forward the sectarian cry of Bande Mataram’ and ‘the suspicion that, under
the cloak of nationalism, Hindu nationalism was preached in India’.77
Within this social context, it is not surprising that despite a fairly expansive
accounting of Japan in pan-Islamic thought, Swadeshi Muslims in Bengal actively
tried to make the argument that their pan-Islamism was not exclusivist by stressing
the compatibility between their Muslim identities and Swadeshi selves. For instance,
Mushir Kidwai, in a 1908 speech printed in the Hindustan Review, claimed, ‘some
critics say that all Indian Mussalman are anti-Swadeshists. That is untrue. I am a
Mussalman and yet I am a Swadeshist’. He continued, ‘I am a Pan-Islamist
Mussalman too. Yet I am a Swadeshist and do not hesitate to declare so’.78 Not long
before this, Mujbur Rahman also made such a public confession in a speech to the 24
Parganas District Conference, ‘I myself am a Mahomedan. My humble appeal to my
Hindu brethren is that they should guard against giving a place in their minds to the
ideal that “anti-Swadeshite” and “Mussalman” are synonymous’.79 These stem from
the unfounded suspicion, reinvigorated during the Khilafat years, that pan-Islamism
was inherently an extra-territorial loyalty to the community of Islamic believers and
that their attempts to look out either worked at cross-purposes to Indian nationalism
or were ambivalently nationalistic.80 As a result, rather than denouncing or making
invisible their pan-Islamism, Bengali Muslims, in ways that Hindus did not, increas-
ingly overstated and recalibrated their Swadeshi selves to create new ideal selves in
order to appear more belonging and acceptable.
However, one could incorrectly reinterpret this, as colonial reports on pan-
Islamism did, as there being ‘no enthusiasm among the Muhammedans of Bengal for
non-cooperation’ and that the ‘Khilafat was never indigenous to Bengal’.81 On the
contrary, if anything, the formation of the Jamiat-i-Hizbullah in 1913 and the Dar-ul-
Irshad in 1915 specifically to preach pan-Islamic thought followed by the triumph of
Maulana Azad’s presidential address at the Bengal Provincial Khilafat Conference in
1920 resounded with pan-Islamism in the Bengali Muslim mind. But what I find sep-
arates the experience of Bengali Muslims from non-Bengali Muslims are the unique

75. For an analysis of Chatterjee’s judgement on Muslim rule, see Tanika Sarkar, ‘Imagining a Hindu Nation: Hindu
and Muslim in Bankimchandra’s Later Writings’, Economic & Political Weekly 29, no. 39 (1994): 2553–61; 2558.
76. Selections from The Mussalman, 11–12.
77. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1906–1947, Vol. 1, ed. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada
(Karachi: National Publishing House, 1969): 51.
78. Mushir Hosain Kidwai in (no author), Swadeshi Movement, 289–93.
79. Mujbur Rahman in Swadeshi Movement, 251–55.
80. Minault, Khilafat Movement, 2.
81. Mushirul Hasan and Margrit Pernau, ed., Regionalizing Pan-Islamism: Documents on the Khilafat Movement (New
Delhi: Manohar, 2005): 169, 209.
16 V.V. MALLIK

conditions created by the partition of Bengal, exaggerated by the hidden suspicions

and the distrustful manoeuvres of the extreme factionalism of Bengali politics during
the Swadeshi Movement.82 Therefore, to address this, as a letter printed in the
Mussalman articulated, ‘the Pan-Islamic idea must give away to an in born love for
one’s country of birth’.83 Here the implication is that nationalism must remain the
‘sole affect proper to the present’ and that ‘pan-Islamism was antithetical to it’.84 To
do so was not simply to appear Swadeshi or Swadeshi enough, but also was an
attempt to locate Muslims within Bengali society and, in fact, Bengali ‘History’. The
activist-poet Ismail Hossain Siraji, through the stirring verse of his 1906 poem,
‘Akangkha (Aspiration)’, pines for this inclusion:
I do not want this hypocritical civility
nor these fineries.
I only want this right,
to call India mine.
I neither want appearances nor poetry
I only desire this solely
Alas! India’s Indians
Do not have the right.85

To recalibrate their pan-Islamic imaginations of Japan then was a method adopted by

Bengali Muslims to shape the possibilities of their future in a decolonised India.

Conclusion
In 1909, the journalist Saint Nihal Singh revealed a message for India that the spirit
of Japan whispered into his ears at the very moment he left the port city of
Yokohama. In urging India to do what it could not, Japan confessed its egregious
folly in neglecting spirituality, lured by materialism, and as a result, ‘preserving indus-
trialism and warism as its pantheons of gods’.86 By the late 1900s and early 1910s,
Bengalis became painfully aware of Japan’s imperialism in Korea and China. During
this time, Japan not only violently suppressed Korean resistance and eventually
annexed it, but also made explicitly imperialist demands in Manchuria. As a result, a
large number of Bengalis became increasingly divided over how to see the rise of
Japan as an imperial power. Of them, Tagore levied a fierce condemnation. In a series
of lectures in Tokyo against nationalism, Tagore admonished Japan that the danger
lay not in their imitation of the outer features of the West, but in the acceptance of

82. For an overview, see Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Revolutionaries, Pan-Islamists and Bolsheviks: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
and the Political Underworld in Calcutta, 1905–1925’, in Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, ed.
Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2nd ed., 1985): 101–24.
83. In her anonymous letter, ‘A Mohamedan Lady’ wrote of the attitude of Indian Muslims given the present
condition of the country. ‘It has taken Bengal a century and a half to realise the truth, force and necessity of
self-help … . From this point of view, we are Asiatics against Non-Asiatics and Indians against Asiatics’: see
Selections from The Mussalman, 174–75.
84. Zaman similarly notes this of Jawaharlal Nehru’s reading of pan-Islamism in Discovery of India: see Zaman,
‘Beyond Nostalgia’, 631.
85. Swaraj (March 1907).
86. The Modern Review: Monthly Review and Miscellany: Vol. 5, ed. Ramananda Chatterjee (Calcutta: Modern Review
Office, 1909): 156.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 17

the motive force of Western nationalism as their own.87 Japan’s selfish self-preserving
nationalism was annihilating the ‘Asia’ that was for centuries built upon the varied
and deeper relations of humanity and spirituality.88 It is this humanitarian definition
of Asia that Tagore related in his polemic against nationalism and his solidarity for
the Asian victims of Japanese aggression. In doing so, once again Asia came to
inhabit the anxieties of anti-colonial Indians.
This article limns the ways in which narratives of global religions contextualised
Bengalis’ attempts to look out. It shows us how Bengalis nourished a deeply spiritual
and emotional bond to their imaginations and invocations of Japan during the
Swadeshi Movement. It is perhaps telling then that Tagore’s criticisms of Japan in the
late 1910s engendered the same spiritual, humanitarian contexts. Evident in invoking
Japan was a language that appropriated varied registers emerging out of concerns of
embodiment, caste and religion, and in doing so, revealed how Bengalis focused their
efforts to challenge knowledge systems that relegated them forever to the waiting
room of history and monopolised their universalisms. While globalising through reli-
gion often provided opportunities to travel imaginatively, they were equally demon-
strative of a genuine and nuanced attempt to construct decolonial futures. It is fair
then to speak of Swadeshi as not being myopic, parochial or narrow-minded, and to
dismiss the tendency in its historiography to homogenise anti-colonial thought within
opposing frameworks of local/global and foreign/indigenous as far too simplistic.
Taking this as our point of departure, this article attempts to introduce invocations
and imaginations as an instructive translation of global. By going beyond the consid-
erations of ‘conspiracies’, ‘contributions’, ‘influences’ and ‘partnerships’ that dominate
the tone of anti-colonial internationalism, imaginations allow us to locate those fluid
acts of thinking, negotiating and aspiring that embodied an expansive capacity for
visualisation, all the while addressing seemingly unique concerns of the nation. It is
therefore important to acknowledge that the history of anti-colonialism in South Asia
cannot simply be isolated from the intellectual curiosity and imaginative mobility of
the people who lived and breathed its politics. Given this, it is now the task of histor-
ians to revisit the work of imagination if they wish to better understand the limits
and possibilities of a fairly complex historical period.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the two anonymous peer reviewers of South Asia for their close reading of
this paper and their detailed feedback. I am also grateful to my supervisor Faridah Zaman and
Rosalind O’Hanlon for their encouragement and insightful comments on early versions of this
project.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

87. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan & Co., 1917): 97.
88. Ibid., 85.
18 V.V. MALLIK

Funding
This research was made possible by the Indira Gandhi-Radhakrishnan Scholarship awarded by
the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development. The scholarship was awarded to fund
my Masters studies, and this article is a product of my thesis.

ORCID
Varun Vivian Mallik http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7524-9607