How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding

468 Pages·2022·11.33 MB·English

by  Nile Green

H ow A si a Found H er s e l f
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How Asia Found Herself
A Story of Intercultural Understanding
Nile Green
new haven and london
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Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew
Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2022 by Nile Green.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity
for educational, business, or promotional use. For
information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. offi ce)
or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce).
Set in Scala type by Newgen North America.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953518
ISBN 978-0-300-25704-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of
ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
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To the unsung interpreters
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Seek knowledge even unto China.
—Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad
By the rivers of Yangtze and Han, a stranger who thinks of home.
—Poem by Du Fu
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C on t en t s
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Names and Spellings xiii
Introduction 5
1. Learning through Polemics in the Bay of Bengal 34
2. The Muslim Discovery of Buddhism 83
3. Lessons from Japan between India and Iran 133
4. The Constraints of a Muslim Japanology 175
5. Interpreting China across Maritime Asia 214
6. China in the Mirrors of Buddhism and Islam 265
Conclusions: “Asia Finds Herself” 316
Notes 331
Bibliography of Primary Sources 413
Index 433
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P r efac e a nd Ac k now l ed gmen t s
At the age of forty, I made my fi rst journey to Japan. After more than twenty
years spent wandering around the Middle East, Pakistan, and India, I found
myself in what the Bengali critic Rustom Bharucha has called “another Asia.”
My baffl ement at Japan’s written language and wider cultural codes made me
rethink everything I thought I knew about the continent. Treating myself to
a night in the old Nara Hotel, which still serves the curry sauce introduced
through Japan’s nineteenth-century links with India, I wondered what the
people I studied from the Asia I did know made of Japan. A few emails to
librarians furnished me with a scan of an Urdu book by Ross Masood, a Mus-
lim educationist and close friend of E. M. Forster (A Passage to India was dedi-
cated to him), who stayed at the same hotel while likewise marveling at Nara’s
Buddhist temples a century before me. Reading Masood’s response to Japan
marked my fi rst step along the tortuous paths of Asia’s self-discovery.
Later, as I turned to other Urdu and then Persian and Arabic accounts of
Japan, I began to ask how Asians themselves negotiated the diff erences with
other parts of the continent that had so struck me. I pondered whether there
was some common insider understanding that I, as a European outsider, was
missing. This in turn made me curious about more such books in languages
I could read about other parts of Asia, prompting further journeys, both bib-
liographical and literal, to Myanmar and China. But as I delved deeper into
many a forgotten text I located from libraries and booksellers across three con-
tinents, I found that the intercultural knowledge they contained was neither
wholly separate nor wholly derived from its colonial European counterparts.
The book that resulted is the story of how one half of Asia—India-Pakistan
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