Indian, Chinese Scholars Look to Lessons from Asia’s History

KOCHI:
The differences and parallels between the historical contexts of India and China and their undeniable effects on contemporary realities in and pressing issues between the two nations are the focus of an important conclave of scholars that convened here today.
Titled ‘The Present Juncture of Historical Change: Decolonizing Asian Futures’, the two-day symposium from March 17-18 is jointly presented by the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2016 and Inter-Asia School – a think tank of interdisciplinary studies with an Asian focus – and sponsored by the Hong Kong-based Moonchu Foundation.
Held at the Pavilion in Cabral Yard under the aegis of the Inter-Asia Biennale Forum – an annual programme that regularly collaborates with biennial events in Asia, the conference brings leading thinkers from India and China in direct dialogue and discussion with each other – unmediated by Western academia.
Noting that the term decolonisng did not mean “rejecting, resisting or demolishing traits inherited from the West” but rather “confronting or engaging with problems already with us”, Prof. Sun Ge, a political and cultural theorist from the Inter-Asia School, said, “Intellectuals in the South (referring to the developing world) share a common fate in the sense that the very thinking we are trying to decolonise, such as nationalism, did not only come from the outside. It is internal to us and has traces in our thinking, reasoning and feeling,”
“India and China share a common problem: how to decolonise. Over the conference, we will discuss how to decolonise not only intellectually – by rebuilding our individual subjectivities to be positive, autonomous and free – but also from a cultural perspective,” she added, noting that “this was a reconstruction of the West in ourselves”.
Observing that Asia was at a second moment of decolonisation – the first being primarily the political movements and liberation struggles from the imperial regimes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Prof. Aditya Nigam, from the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, said, “Intellectual decolonisation involves transcending mindsets to arrive at a newer sense of our futures, our future imaginaries, our categories of thought, for example.”
This process of decolonising thought, he contended, was hinged on moving past nationalism, a byproduct of that first moment that had become reactionary in the post-imperial age.
“What nationalism did in India and China is not that different in this respect. Confronted by the aura of Western thought, nationalists tried to prove that the East had everything the West did. Whi
le there was a lot of intellectual activity along with the political resurgence, it focused on a perverse claim of ‘sameness’. For instance, Kautilya is thought to have lived 15 centuries before Machiavelli, yet his Arthashastra became the ‘equivalent’ of The Prince,” Nigam said.
This, he said, was one of the problems inherent to nationalism. “Indians forgot that India was not a self-enclosed entity with its own distinctive civilisation, but always a place where various currents traversed. It is time for a post-national moment to look afresh at our connections in a way nationalism and its pathologies has blinded us to,” Nigam added.