6 - Connecting Orientalism and Internationalism

Summary

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.