Essay

	Essay	March 30, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 12
Chopsticks and Victorian Values What exactly is Asia, and why do the Confucians try to keep India out? By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray hen the leaders of east asia and europe assemble in London next month for their second summit, they might want to recall Disraeli's dictum, "All is race; there is no other truth." Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad certainly hinted at it when he blamed his mostly Muslim country's recent financial troubles on a plot by Jewish speculators. Race operates at many levels. The Asians who will attend this year's presumptuously titled Asia-Europe Meeting, or asem, a forum launched in Bangkok two years ago, maintain a rather narrow definition of Asia. They have reduced the region's vast land mass to little more than its Confucian fringe. Call it Chopsticks Asia. Prickly toward the West, arrogating to itself the exclusive privilege of continental spokesman, Chopsticks Asia has seized the Victorian virtues of hard work, discipline, deference and education and ascribed them lock, stock and barrel to Confucius. Forget the Protestant work ethic. In Chopsticks Asia's view, it was the ancient Chinese sage who deserves credit for modern East Asia's rapid growth. Mercifully, no one claims as yet that Queen Victoria was Confucius reincarnated in drag, but Chopsticks Asians must have gloated over an Australian politician's declaration that eating with chopsticks is a small price to pay for a nibble of their prosperity. Indians, who use fingers and are sublimely convinced that their country is the heart and soul of Asia, are not amused. Asia minus India is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, snapped then Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee when asem was started two years ago. Even European Commission Vice President Manuel Marin protested that, without India, asem would be only "a specific meeting between the E.U. [European Union] and the asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]." What then is this continent that arouses such contrary passions? A Japanese botanist in Bhutan called Asia a chrysanthemum with its heart in Japan, petals curling out to every part of Asia. A Tokyo diplomat said only those countries that Japanese troops overran during World War II could be considered truly Asian. Unlike Europe, Asia is not united by religion. Unlike America, it is not dominated by a single power. Asia is not homogeneous, though art historian Ananda Cooma- raswamy of what was then Ceylon wrote mystically that "the further we go back in history, the nearer we come to a common cultural type; the further we advance, the greater the differentiation." Buttressing this claim is the theory that Shinto, the Japanese state religion, comes from the word Sindhu (Indus), the river that gave India its name. That bears out French orientalist Sylvain Levi's observation that India had left "indelible imprints ... from Persia to the Chinese sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to the islands of Java and Borneo, from Oceania to Socotra." In contrast, China sent the Yellow Emperor's surplus sons and daughters to people Asia. The father of Asia's awakening was India's Jawaharlal Nehru, whose sweeping vision brought Soviet, Tibetan and Israeli representatives, Australian observers and, flouting geographical frontiers, Egyptian delegates to the grand Asian conference over which he presided in 1947. The Soviets and Egyptians were back 40 years later when Nehru's grandson Rajiv Gandhi organized a repeat meeting. By then, however, Israel had been pushed out of Asia, and Tibet out of existence. Australia still hovered on the fringe, a slice of Europe adrift in the Pacific, excluded from the Asian family by politics and race. Differences notwithstanding, Asian politicians usually find common ground when it comes to confronting Europe or its global successor, the United States. Indonesia's President Sukarno acknowledged the wellspring of this unity by hailing the 1955 non-aligned gathering in the Javanese city of Bandung as "the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind." To those who think geography and color have much to do with each other, a blond, blue-eyed Asian would be a contradiction in terms. Nehru blamed "European domination" for the modern "isolation of the countries of Asia from one another." In that view, Asia exists in antithesis-"irreconcilable antagonism," Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri called it-to the West. Recent predictions by American scholar Samuel Huntington and others of a clash between Islam and Christianity merely restate a civilizational antipathy that goes back, far beyond Kipling, to Greek historian Herodotus, who described the Greco-Persian wars 2,500 years ago to illustrate the rivalry between the two halves of the Eurasian land mass. Nehru's perception was politics and poetry; Chopsticks Asia's defining principle is money. Just as apartheid South Africa treated the Japanese as honorary whites, if Eskimos or Yemenis strike it rich, the Confucianists would probably embrace them as long-lost brothers. True, Chopsticks Asia's ethnic heartland-China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore-has so far largely escaped the current economic turmoil. But a narrowly defined Asia insults the rich diversity of a continent that is the birthplace of all the world's great cultures and religions. Asia is a geographical expression-as Metternich once described Italy-that is also a state of mind. It is an argument and an affirmation, the resurgent East's challenge to the established West.
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What exactly is Asia, and why do the Confucians try to keep India out?

By Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

hen the leaders of east asia and europe assemble in London next month for their second summit, they might want to recall Disraeli's dictum, "All is race; there is no other truth." Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad certainly hinted at it when he blamed his mostly Muslim country's recent financial troubles on a plot by Jewish speculators. Race operates at many levels. The Asians who will attend this year's presumptuously titled Asia-Europe Meeting, or asem, a forum launched in Bangkok two years ago, maintain a rather narrow definition of Asia. They have reduced the region's vast land mass to little more than its Confucian fringe. Call it Chopsticks Asia.

Prickly toward the West, arrogating to itself the exclusive privilege of continental spokesman, Chopsticks Asia has seized the Victorian virtues of hard work, discipline, deference and education and ascribed them lock, stock and barrel to Confucius. Forget the Protestant work ethic. In Chopsticks Asia's view, it was the ancient Chinese sage who deserves credit for modern East Asia's rapid growth. Mercifully, no one claims as yet that Queen Victoria was Confucius reincarnated in drag, but Chopsticks Asians must have gloated over an Australian politician's declaration that eating with chopsticks is a small price to pay for a nibble of their prosperity. Indians, who use fingers and are sublimely convinced that their country is the heart and soul of Asia, are not amused. Asia minus India is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, snapped then Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee when asem was started two years ago. Even European Commission Vice President Manuel Marin protested that, without India, asem would be only "a specific meeting between the E.U. [European Union] and the asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]."

What then is this continent that arouses such contrary passions? A Japanese botanist in Bhutan called Asia a chrysanthemum with its heart in Japan, petals curling out to every part of Asia. A Tokyo diplomat said only those countries that Japanese troops overran during World War II could be considered truly Asian. Unlike Europe, Asia is not united by religion. Unlike America, it is not dominated by a single power. Asia is not homogeneous, though art historian Ananda Cooma- raswamy of what was then Ceylon wrote mystically that "the further we go back in history, the nearer we come to a common cultural type; the further we advance, the greater the differentiation." Buttressing this claim is the theory that Shinto, the Japanese state religion, comes from the word Sindhu (Indus), the river that gave India its name. That bears out French orientalist Sylvain Levi's observation that India had left "indelible imprints ... from Persia to the Chinese sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to the islands of Java and Borneo, from Oceania to Socotra." In contrast, China sent the Yellow Emperor's surplus sons and daughters to people Asia.

The father of Asia's awakening was India's Jawaharlal Nehru, whose sweeping vision brought Soviet, Tibetan and Israeli representatives, Australian observers and, flouting geographical frontiers, Egyptian delegates to the grand Asian conference over which he presided in 1947. The Soviets and Egyptians were back 40 years later when Nehru's grandson Rajiv Gandhi organized a repeat meeting. By then, however, Israel had been pushed out of Asia, and Tibet out of existence. Australia still hovered on the fringe, a slice of Europe adrift in the Pacific, excluded from the Asian family by politics and race. Differences notwithstanding, Asian politicians usually find common ground when it comes to confronting Europe or its global successor, the United States. Indonesia's President Sukarno acknowledged the wellspring of this unity by hailing the 1955 non-aligned gathering in the Javanese city of Bandung as "the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind." To those who think geography and color have much to do with each other, a blond, blue-eyed Asian would be a contradiction in terms.

Nehru blamed "European domination" for the modern "isolation of the countries of Asia from one another." In that view, Asia exists in antithesis-"irreconcilable antagonism," Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri called it-to the West. Recent predictions by American scholar Samuel Huntington and others of a clash between Islam and Christianity merely restate a civilizational antipathy that goes back, far beyond Kipling, to Greek historian Herodotus, who described the Greco-Persian wars 2,500 years ago to illustrate the rivalry between the two halves of the Eurasian land mass.

Nehru's perception was politics and poetry; Chopsticks Asia's defining principle is money. Just as apartheid South Africa treated the Japanese as honorary whites, if Eskimos or Yemenis strike it rich, the Confucianists would probably embrace them as long-lost brothers. True, Chopsticks Asia's ethnic heartland-China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore-has so far largely escaped the current economic turmoil. But a narrowly defined Asia insults the rich diversity of a continent that is the birthplace of all the world's great cultures and religions. Asia is a geographical expression-as Metternich once described Italy-that is also a state of mind. It is an argument and an affirmation, the resurgent East's challenge to the established West.