Purposive travelogue

A Great Clamour by Pankaj Mishra; Penguin Books; Rs.400; Pages 325   DURING THE PAST century Indian politicians and intellectuals suffering the humiliations heaped upon the people of Asia by Western colonial powers, have sporadically attempted to reach out to the people of China and Japan to make common cause on the basis of shared values and cultural affinities posited as superior to Western ideologies of individualism, imperialism and limitless industrial growth. Among them were poet, philosopher and educationist Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who visited China and Japan several times to preach Asian values of peace, harmony, contentment and spiritualism. But there were few takers for so-called Asian values among elites eager to replicate the Western industrial development model. In this riveting collection of essays — the outcome of purposive travels in resurgent China (including Tibet), Hong Kong, Mongolia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Japan — Pankaj Mishra investigates if any commonalities do indeed bind the countries of Asia and the East. The failure of Tagore, Subhas Chandra Bose and other intellectuals to build bridges to the East, has prompted Mishra to follow in their footsteps a century later to traverse a transformed Asian continent dominated by China, which has emerged as the new global superpower following the retreat of the Red Devils from Asia. Therefore quite logically, this searching travelogue begins with a revisionist history of communist China which unlike post-independence India, rejected Western democracy and seems to have achieved brilliant  success to emerge as factory of the world, and an economic (and military) power-house which may well re-emerge as the Middle Kingdom of the 21st century. But to those dazzled by communist China’s growing might, the author confirms that by tolerating the “pseudo-scientific visions of socioeconomic engineering” of chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976), the republic’s first helmsman, the people of China paid a heavy price for modest material prosperity. During the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), which included “a hundred absurd schemes” born out of chairman Mao’s “uneducated infatuation with the signs and symbols of modern progress”, 30 million — some accounts estimate 45-60 million — peasants died of starvation. To that humungous number, add another 10-12 million killed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Framed in a historical context, Mishra’s finely written investigative travelogue informs the subcontinent’s public about what’s happening in politics, academics and on the literary scene in contemporary China. Today the People’s Republic is the world’s largest creditor nation and second largest economy. But within the seemingly homogenous, conformist nation there is intense debate in the intelligentsia and academy about whether there is an inherent contradiction between a communist autocracy and free market economics as practiced in China today. Unknown to most Indians, there is a strident and growing group of intellectuals led by Prof. Zu Xueqin who are advancing the argument that the logical progression of China’s  free market reforms is “all other kinds of freedoms” leading to full-fledged democracy. On the other hand, there’s also the ‘New Left’ comprising writers, academics and activists  who believe the country’s free…