“The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan” by Kathryn Babayan
 

Reza Abbasi, detail Youth Reading, ca 1625 (Wikimedia Commons)

They gaze at you, the fashionably-attired youths of Esfahan, from a distance of 300 years. Swaying like cypress trees, their tresses floating in the air like clouds, their faces surrounded by peach fuzz, they smile like the Gioconda and with more mystery. Who are these young men and what do they say to the viewers? After the lucidity of the great 16th-century Persian and Mughal painters like Behzad and Sultan Mohammad, who painted kingly battles and hunts, the 17th century brings us the works of Reza Abbasi and Mohammad Qasem, and their ambivalent but sexually-charged portraits of young men and occasionally young women. These 17th-century masters painted not for royal masters and state gifts, but for middle-class collectors of scrap books for paintings, poetry, letters and didactic texts which they shared in more intimate settings. Kathryn Babayan takes us on a tour of 17th-century Esfahan (Isfahan in Babayan’s transcription), the city, its pastimes, its collectors and its memorialists. On this tour we try to understand what the cypress-like youths have to say.

17th-century Esfahanis led lives not too dissimilar from our own, hence the “early-modern” tag in the subtitle. They enjoyed majestic public spaces, coffee shops, wine-bars, shopping centers and outdoor spectacles. According to Babayan, the shahs of Iran lavished constructions on Esfahan not only to embody their secular power, but also to provide a foretaste of paradise, with all the pleasures and beauties that the faithful, newly-converted to Twelver Shiism, could expect in the afterlife.

The shahs also gathered in Esfahan, from around their empire, classes of people who could appreciate the finer things: artisans, scribes, theologists and merchants. In place of the courtiers, palace slaves or tribal khans who dominated the social scene under earlier dynasties, 17th-century Esfahan had middle class bons vivants who wrote poetry, collected paintings, and entertained one another with wit and cultivation. This larger, leisured class had access to ample quantities of paper and ink, and left voluminous records of their lives, their pastimes and their loves. As in Iran today, they lived in a society segregated by gender.

Consequently, their love lives give us the most difficulty. Babayan says thinking about sex with the early moderns “involves confronting those moments where the meaning of sexuality and eroticism are far from transparent.” She convincingly demonstrates, through a close examination that the pictural art of Shah Abbas’s age was suffused with eroticism, as in her reading of the great mural painting in the Palace of Forty Pillars, with its besotted pages and tribadic dancing girls. Certainly, the Esfahanis thought about sex.

More difficult is to know what they thought about it. In one case study, Babayan summarizes the rhymed, autobiographical account of a woman who undertakes the pilgrimage to Mecca upon the death of her husband. Along the way she goes to visit a female friend. The text makes it clear that the widow had once had an intimate relationship with this friend, but we don’t know if it was an improper relationship. We don’t really know whether a physical relationship between women provoked anything more than embarrassment in polite society.

The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan, Kathryn Babayan (Stanford University Press, April 2021)

Turning to relationships between males, the picture becomes even more complex. Intimate relations between males involving penetration, was considered by the religious authorities, then as now in Iran, as a capital crime. Although the cult of youthful male beauty is a hoary Iranian tradition, Domenico Ingenito demonstrated in his magistral study of Sa’di of Shiraz that the spectacle of male beauty provided ascetic mystics a better appreciation of the divine. In this sense, the album leaves by Reza Abbasi and Mohammad Qasem may have been no more than aids for mystical contemplation. On the other hand, there was an older, antinomian tradition of Sufi devotion involving physical consummation of forbidden love. Twelver Shiism rejected this tradition and began to persecute Sufi orders in Iran. Babayan reaches no definitive conclusions on the extent to which the authorities’ condemnation constituted mere lip service, or how the official position affected private behavior. It would have been helpful to look at legal cases and condemnations in Esfahan to form a firm opinion.

In the absence of data, we should probably not consider the 17th-century Iranians as any more given to same-sex, heterogenerational love than moderns. As Walther G Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli point out in their Age of the Beloveds (2005) just because the Safavids and Ottomans wrote about love of boys, that doesn’t mean it was more prevalent than in other periods. Going beyond mere sexuality, we see that Iranian culture reveres asymmetrical relationships: slave/master, pupil/teacher, lover/beloved. Babayan’s analysis of Mohammad Qasem’s painting of the teacher punishing a student suggests that out of these asymmetrical, often abusive relationships, comes art, civility, craftmanship and even love.

Babayan’s dense, close reading of family albums and memorials brings to life an Esfahan as lively and as sensual as any Safavid page or cup bearer. Babayan might have left more room in her book to let the protagonists speak for themselves: a translation of some of these texts would be welcome. Meanwhile, while we continue to struggle to understand precisely how 17th-century Iranians saw themselves, the richness of these texts convince us that they were as confused and amused by life as we are.

David Chaffetz 2 July 2021 Non-Fiction

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.

Podcast with Tonio Andrade, author of “The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China”
 

Tonio Andrade

On January 10th, 1795, a very tired caravan arrives in Beijing. The travelers have journeyed from Canton on an accelerated schedule through harsh terrain in order to make it to the capital in time for the Qianlong Emperor’s sixtieth anniversary of his reign. The group is led by two Dutchmen: Isaac Titsingh and Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, who are there to represent the interests of the Dutch Republic at the imperial court. It’s a momentous occasion, especially after the disastrous British Embassy from George Macartney two years earlier.

The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China, Tonio Andrade (Princeton University Press, June 2021)

Little did they know that their embassy would be the last by Westerners in the traditional Chinese court. Their journey is the subject of Professor Tonio Andrade’s The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China (Princeton University Press), published earlier this year: a rich and readable volume that tells the story of an event long-neglected by history and historians.

In this interview, Tonio and I talk about the Dutch Embassy, its protagonists and the nature of the imperial court. We discuss the perilous and rushed journey the ambassadors made to Beijing, and what their experience tells us about the nature of diplomacy.

Tonio Andrade is professor of Chinese and global history at Emory University. His books include The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton University Press), Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West (Princeton University Press, 2011), and How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia University Press).

New Book Announcement: “Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization” by Rosalind Galt

Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, Rosalind Galt (Columbia University Press, November 2021)

The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.

In Alluring Monsters, Rosalind Galt explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. She argues that the figure speaks to a series of intersecting anxieties: about femininity and modernity, globalization and indigeneity, racial and national identities, the relationship of Islam to animism, and heritage and environmental destruction.

The pontianak offers abundant feminist potential, but her disruptive gender politics also unsettle queer and feminist film theories by putting them in dialogue with Malay epistemologies. Reading the pontianak as a precolonial figure of disturbance within postcolonial cultures, Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization.

From the horror films made by Cathay Keris and Shaw Studios in the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary film, television, art, and fiction in Malaysia and Singapore, the pontianak in all her media forms sheds light on how postcolonial identities are both developed and contested. In tracing the entanglements of Malay feminist animisms with postcolonial visual cultures, Alluring Monsters reveals how a “pontianak theory” can reshape understandings of anticolonial aesthetics and world cinema.

Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization
by Rosalind Galt
Columbia University Press, November 2021 (ISBN 9780231201339)

New Book Announcement: “Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare” by Nathaniel L Moir

Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare, Nathaniel L Moir (Hurst, Oxford University Press, December 2021)

In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926–67) staked a claim as the ‘Number One Realist’ on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s execution by the Germans and his mother’s murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials.

Moir demonstrates how these critical events shaped Fall’s trenchant analysis of Viet Minh-led revolutionary warfare during the French-Indochina War and the early Vietnam War. In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued that—far more than anything in the United States’ military arsenal—resolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill.

Number One Realist: Bernard Fall and Vietnamese Revolutionary Warfare
by Nathaniel L Moir
Hurst/Oxford University Press, December 2021 (USBN 9781787384804)

“War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East” by Gershom Gorenberg


The British Eighth Army’s victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October-November 1942 is commonly considered one of the turning points of the Second World War—Winston Churchill called it “the end of the beginning” of the war. Historian and journalist Gershom Gorenberg, however, contends that the true turning point in the North African/Middle East campaign was the First Battle of El Alamein fought in July 1942. And the key to success in that battle was the Allied victory in what Gorenberg calls the “War of Shadows”, a war of codebreakers and spies.

Gorenberg, a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of three books on Israeli history, has dived deep into the once-secret archives of Bletchley Park (the home of British codebreakers during World War II), the UK National Archive, and other British institutions, American archives at Fort Meade, the Hoover Institution, the US National Archives at College Park, and the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library, and archival sources in Rome and Israel. He also gained access to the personal papers of some of the Allied codebreakers, and interviewed the children and grandchildren of some of the men and women who fought the War of Shadows.

The result of Gorenberg’s extensive research and legwork is a scintillating history of the secret war waged by mathematicians and spies to infiltrate foreign embassies, seize enemy code books, and, most importantly, break enemy codes. In war, the surest way to defeat an enemy on the battlefield is to know their dispositions and plans in advance by intercepting and deciphering their communications. And the enemy the Allies needed to beat was the famed German Panzer commander Erwin Rommel.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, Gershom Gorenberg (PublicAffairs, January 2021)

During the war, many US military and political leaders considered North Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Middle East as a sideshow to the more important theaters of Northwest Europe, the Russian front, and the Far East. But for Britain, Gorenberg writes, Egypt and the Middle East “were the keystone in the long arch of empire.”

But the reasons for defending Egypt were more than emotional or ideological. They were also strategic. The Middle East was what still gave Britain a hold on the Mediterranean and a chance to threaten Italy and Germany from the south. The Suez Canal and the oil fields of Iraq and southern Persia were prizes that had to be kept from the Axis.

Rommel was winning victory after victory in the desert, in part due to German and Italian codebreakers and spies. North Africa was the first long-promised (to Stalin) Allied military effort designed to confront the Axis powers with an unwinnable two-front war.

Gorenberg shows that the seeds of the Allied victory in the Middle East were planted in the 1930s, when Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and two of his colleagues in Poland’s prewar Cipher Office cracked the codes of the German Enigma machines that were used to send and receive military communications. The Germans believed that their Enigma machines were safe from codebreaking. Rejewski, Gorenberg notes, cracked the codes in less than three months. “Enigma appeared unconquerable,” Gorenberg explains. “Its fundamental flaw was that human beings built it, and other human beings could see it differently.” Codes that one human mind designs, another human mind can break.

The flaw in the machine was the man. The flaw in the machine’s design was forgetting that people—tired people, stressed people, people who don’t think randomly—would use it.

On 24 July 1939, two months before the outbreak of war, British codebreakers met in the village of Pyry (located in a heavily guarded building in a forest clearing) with Major Maksymilian Ciezki, Rejewski’s boss, who told them how Rejewski had cracked Enigma. That meeting at Pyry, Gorenberg notes, “made everything that Bletchley Park did possible.” When Germany and Soviet Russia attacked Poland in September 1939, Rejewski and his two colleagues fled to the French embassy in Romania, and then made their way to Vichy France where they helped the French underground intercept and transmit German communications to London.

Armed with knowledge of Rommel’s plans, the Eighth Army held at El Alamein. British General Claude Auchinleck later acknowledged that the work of the silent warriors at Bletchley Park was a decisive advantage.

Bletchley Park codebreakers—some with names lost to history like Margaret Storey, John Herivel, Russell Dudley-Smith, and Gordon Welchman—working endless hours, sifting through thousands of messages, deciphering numerous codes—fed Britain’s political and military leaders information that helped military commanders and soldiers stop Rommel and end the Nazi threat to the Middle East. As Churchill said about the brave pilots of the Royal Air Force: so much owed by so many to so few.

Gorenberg, though focusing on Bletchley Park, does not neglect the other silent warriors on both sides who fought in the War of Shadows: the Americans Bonner Fellers and William Friedman, France’s Gustav Bertrand, the Hungarian Lazlo Almasy, the Italian spymaster Manfredi Talamo, and many others. And as British and German forces clashed on the desert battlefields, in Egypt future leaders Gamal Nasser and Anwar Sadat sided with the Germans to throw off British imperial rule, while Palestinian Jews fought with the British to avoid the death camps of Hitler’s Final Solution.

Gorenberg writes that “the battle for the Middle East was one of the critical fronts of World War II [and] much of what determined the outcome of that battle, and therefore of the war as a whole, remained secret.” Historians will undoubtedly continue to debate this. But what is not debatable is Gorenberg’s conclusion that “what happened then shaped the Middle East, and continues to shape it today.”

Francis P Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War. His writings appear in The Diplomat, Joint Force Quarterly, the University Bookman and other publications. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University.

Podcast with Gershom Gorenberg, author of “War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East”
 

Gershom Gorenberg (photo: Yasmin Gorenberg)

Nicholas Gordon 11 November 2021 Podcast

The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East, Gershom Gorenberg (PublicAffairs, January 2021)

But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion. Gershom Gorenberg’s War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.

In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies’ secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies.

Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomG.

“An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent” by Owen Matthews


All lives ultimately end in failure, but Richard Sorge’s shone brightest at twilight. Sorge simultaneously infiltrated the highest levels of Hitler’s and Tokyo’s wartime establishments penetrating both the Nazi Party and the Japanese Court. He warned Stalin of “Operation Barbarossa”—even its very date, 25 June 1941—when Hitler was to abrogate the Nazi-Soviet Pact and send three million troops sweeping across 2900 km of border.

Few individuals outside of the ranks of international leaders, scientists and religious figure—and precious few of even these—can claim they changed the world in which we live. In retrospect, it is clear that Richard Sorge was one such man. He was hung by the Japanese before this was manifest, but his spectre was already haunting the Third Reich.

Stalin had been deafened by his complacency, dismissing Sorge’s early warnings as “false flags” and, as a result, condemning millions to death on the battlefield, in POW camps and through forced labor. But with hindsight, it made Sorge’s reputation, so when he subsequently signalled that Tokyo had finally chosen the southern strategy over the north—that they would strike toward Southeast Asia rather than into Mongolia and the USSR—Stalin was confident enough to strip Siberia of men and machines and send them west. They arrived in Moscow in September and October as the high tide of battle was joined and were instrumental in exacting a defeat that reversed the course of the war and proved to be the beginning of a long end.


Few individuals can claim they changed the world in which we live. Richard Sorge was one such man.

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent, Owen Matthews (Bloomsbury, March 2019)

Owen Matthews has rescued Soviet espionage from the prison of the Cambridge Five, and taken it from the tedious and mundane to the intrepid and dauntless with an exhilarating mix of fast women, motorbikes and alcohol.

Sorge was the son of a middle-class Russian mother and German father brought up in Baku. There was a revolutionary peppering in his genes. His great uncle had been Secretary General of the First International and a correspondent of Marx and Engels.

Radicalized by the massacres of innocents on the barbed wire entanglements of the First World War, Sorge spent the early post-war years chasing and failing to find the German revolution. He was lucky enough in 1919 to arrive too late for Berlin’s slaughter of the Spartacists, slipped through the aftermath of the splintered resistance to the Kapp putsch of 1920 and on into the ranks of “M. Apparat”, the armed wing of the German Communist Party.

This led to roles as professional agitator and amateur academic. These, and ancestry, saw him talent-spotted by Comintern and recruited in 1924 to work for the Political Bureau in international communism’s Moscow HQ. He briefly served as Bukharin’s secretary. By 1927 he had switched to Comintern Intelligence covering Western Europe. It was this that may have saved him. When all around were being purged and executed, it looked as if he was about to share their fate. In 1929 he was expelled from Comintern. This was no death sentence, but a diversion to hide his transfer to military intelligence as part of the Fourth Department of the Red Army.

An Impeccable Spy tells us that Sorge was assigned to Shanghai with the cover of academic and journalist working for Frankfurter Zeitung. Using the sinologist Karl August Wittfogel—future author of Oriental Despotism—he parlayed friendship for “letters of introduction”. Within weeks of his arrival he was a confidante of Shanghai’s expatriate Nazis, and not long after, via a brief love affair with American communist Agnes Smedley, he had access to the thinking and cadres of the Chinese Communist Party.

When he was summoned back to Moscow in 1933, his had been the only one of serial spy missions in China to have been an unqualified success. No good turn goes unpunished. Sorge’s next assignment was to be Tokyo where no Soviet “illegals” had ever successfully been put in place.

Using his cover of Shanghai Nazis as his launchpad, he quickly cast a spell over Tokyo’s German Ambassador Ott and his retinue. He used some of his Japanese contacts from China to weedle his way into imperial court circles. With his intelligence and breadth of contacts he was soon acting as an adviser to the leaderships in Berlin and Tokyo while delivering their secrets to Moscow, providing insightful analyses in his newspaper columns and drinking his “friends” under the table while sequentially seducing their wives.

Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy—brave, brilliant and relentless.

The crux of Sorge’s task was to find out whether Japan was going to attack the Soviet Union again. In 1905, they had seized Port Arthur and destroyed the Russian Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. In 1910 they took Korea from under the noses of Moscow and in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution they, as part of the interventionist alliance along the British and Americans, occupied Siberia as far as Lake Baikal. Most of this territory was eventually surrendered, although they had kept South Sakhalin (Karafuto) as a memento. In Tokyo, the Army wanted to go North and the Navy South. Even after the summer of 1939, when Georgy Zhukov gave the Japanese Kwangtung Army a “bloody nose” at the Battle of Nomonhan they persisted. After “Barbarossa” started to bog down, the Army had Hitler’s support as he urged his Japanese Allies—via the September 1940 Tripartite Pact—to open a second front against the Soviets.

It was Washington that applied the brakes, which sealed the fate of Pearl Harbor. After Japan’s virtual bloodless seizure of French Indo-China in late July, the US imposed an oil embargo on Tokyo and froze their banking assets.

Sorge was able to discover Japan was left with only six months fuel. Now Tokyo had to decide and decide quickly. August 1941 was the most dangerous time for Stalin. In the end however much the Japanese Army wanted to invade the USSR, the US had ensured it didn’t have the petrol. Tokyo was instead to strike south seeking Sumatra’s oil! When Sorge informed Moscow Plan North had been abandoned there was a lurch in history as more than half of Siberia’s military entrained for Moscow.

This was Sorge’s final act. The Japanese had been closing in on the clandestine radio Sorge’s group was using to transmit reports to Moscow, and some of the outer ring of his nest of spies. A routine investigation of Japanese ex-communists saw the walls come tumbling down. Sorge was arrested on 19 October, sentenced to death on 29 September 1943 and on the 7 November—the 34th anniversary of the Great October Revolution—he died proclaiming: “The Red Army! The International Communist Party! The Soviet Communist Party!”

An Impeccable Spy is based on sets of Russian archives previously unavailable but which Matthews has mined. It’s difficult to imagine who could have done more to introduce Sorge to the West. He belatedly became a hero in the late Soviet Union when it was facing extinction in the 1970s and ’80s. Matthews concludes, “Sorge was a flawed individual, but an impeccable spy—brave, brilliant and relentless.” It was his tragedy that his masters were venal cowards who abandoned him to his fate.

Glyn Ford is a former Euro-MP and author of North Korea on the Brink. His Talking to North Korea: Ending the Nuclear Standoff was published by Pluto in September.
Glyn Ford 3 June 2019 Non-Fiction, Reviews

“Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943” by Katerina Clark
 

Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943, Katerina Clark (Harvard University Press, November 2021)

Writers did a lot of shouting during the establishment of the Soviet Union. The literary salons being empty, they had to harangue the people, be heard over the crowd, and, as Katerina Clark wryly points out in Eurasia Without Borders, they had to shout because their public could not always understand the language they spoke.

The lack of a common language and literary tradition frustrated the bold internationalists of the 1920s and 30s who dreamed to liberate Marx and Lenin from the bounds of the German and Russian languages, and to lead the toiling masses forward into international culture free of bourgeois or feudal traditions. Since language itself is a social construct, shaped by the ruling classes, this effort, like the Five-Year Plans, faced serious challenges.

Against the background of titanic world events, the Russian Revolution itself, the failed Shanghai Workers Revolt of 1927, the Spanish Civil War, the Japan-China War and finally the Second World War, a generation of progressive writers read one another’s works, met at conferences in Baku, Kharkov, Berlin, or Paris, and strove to reflect the powerful currents of the 20th century in their works.

Should they follow Moscow’s line, rejecting modernism and formalism, and essentially continue the classical Russian tradition of the realistic novel with social themes? Or did revolution free the artist from bourgeois expectations, and allow him or her to invent a new language, a new experiential reality or even a new spirituality? Ambiguity dogged the Soviets themselves, and they frequently changed directions. In the early 20s they led the avant-garde, with writers like Khlebnikov who experimented with new languages. Later the Soviets feared such experiments were too intellectual for the toiling masses, who needed to be educated. They were understandably reluctant to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so they inculcated the Great Russian Novel on the Soviet peoples of Asia. At the same time, they insisted that each of the Soviet Republics have a classical opera. The Soviets’ culture policies suffered from the lack of experts who could actually read Persian, Turkish or Chinese. They relied on translations from French and English and absorbed a lot of their knowledge of Asia from “imperialist” sources. Surprisingly, they liked Kipling. Their own boundless and excusable admiration for Pushkin and Gogol, made their attempted literary guidance to Asians, seem a lot like cultural imperialism.

It’s difficult to summarize the reaction of the Asian writers to the Revolution, since each writer took a different starting point. The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmah absorbed the zeitgeist of the Revolution most directly, living in the Soviet Union and befriending many Soviet authors. Yet Rimbaud may have had more influence on Hikmet, who grew up in a French-speaking household in highly westernized Salonika. Abdolqasem Lahuti offers a contrasting example. He grew up in a traditional Iranian family and wrote classical Persian poetry his entire life. His national hymn for the Tajikistan SSR is no exception.

Chinese writers struggled with how to connect with the masses. Should they abandon their ideograms and write Chinese in Latin characters? This revolution was cut short by Mao Zedong, who pointed to the healthy acceptance of the vernacular novel in Chinese, like the Monkey King: Journey to the West. Mao’s later minister of culture Mao Dun crafted the first long, realistic novels in Chinese, innovating with vernacular language.

Finally, the Indian novelist MR Anand struggled with the fact that his novels were in English, and could not be read by the masses whose mobilization he dearly wished for. There are then, as many destinies as there were literary traditions, a far cry from the dreamed-of Eurasian ecumene.

Fellow travelers, French like André Malraux, Germans like Anna Seghers or English like WH Auden also tried to connect with the toiling masses of the east, but found it difficult to overcome their prejudices or even their preconceptions about Asia. In Clark’s narrative Malraux comes across as perhaps the most effective of these voices. He was both deeply engagé, a showman, and more dedicated to his art than to political schools. As a result, his Man’s Fate and The Conquerors are more readable today than some contemporary works.

Clark’s judgments about the ups and downs experienced by these interlocking literary circles are solidly grounded. Here is an example of her analysis: she points out that in the 1930s, the University of the Toiling Workers of the East was located in Central Moscow, while its successor, the Patrice Lumumba university was built in the distant suburbs. In the 30s, many Asian writers flocked to Moscow to have their books published. In the 1970s, they may have gone to Moscow to pick up their literary prizes, but they visited their publishers in Paris. This is how Clark shows us that the passionate dream of a common Eurasian destiny for the toilers of the East faded into a polite, transactional relationship.

This book is a challenging read. The subject covered is expansive both in geography and personalities. The euphoria and ebullition of the time bubbles over into Clark’s narrative, where Wassily Kandinsky, Peter Fleming and Blavatsky enter and exit in a breathless rush. Her insights into dynamics of Soviet Culture are fine, as are her critiques of the fellow travelers. Like her western subjects, she’s limited in her analysis of the Asian writers because she cannot read them in their language. Even today, in a world much more connected than the Comintern could ever have imagined, the dream of a common literary ecumene is still utopian.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.

David Chaffetz 1 November 2021 Non-Fiction

“Sergei Tretyakov: A Revolutionary Writer in Stalin’s Russia” by Robert Leach
 

Sergei Tretyakov

In the annals of Russian and Soviet literature and drama, Sergei Tretyakov is not perhaps the first name on the list. He remains, says Robert Leach, “curiously elusive”. Yet he was “absolutely at the heart of avant-garde modernism”, collaborating closely with Sergei Eisenstein, “one of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s most intimate associates” and an influence on Bertolt Brecht. This new and accessible literary biography brings the man and his work to life, and reinstates him at the center of some of the 20th-century’s most important cultural developments, a dynamic life cut short when in 1937 he, like so many others, fell foul of Josef Stalin.

But what interests us here is Tretyakov’s extensive experience in and relationship with China. Tretyakov graduated from University in 1916, an apparent supporter of the Social Revolutionaries, a revolutionary but by the standard of what soon came later, a relatively moderate group. 1917, of course, brought turmoil.

Sergei’s attitude to the revolution at this moment in its stormy history is difficult to gauge, but it is clear that he was not much in sympathy with it.

He left Moscow for Nikolayevsk (or Pugachyov) in 1918, in part because his mother was in failing health. He found himself in Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East in late 1919, exactly how or why seems difficult to determine. While there, he joined the Red Partisans. More importantly, perhaps, Tretyakov was introduced to “Futurism” and

enthusiastically joined the Vladivostok Futurist group ‘Creation’ (‘Tvorchestvo’) which had been established in 1918 by David Burlyuk – who gained a certain notoriety here by wearing trousers with legs of different colours – along with others who found themselves in the city at the time …

all in the middle of a civil war. He also met Olga Viktorovna Gomolitskaya, the twenty-three year old daughter of Viktor Petrovich Gomolitsky, who worked for the Chinese Eastern Railway, who was to become his wife. He began

writing for the Bolshevik paper, The Red Banner, as well as non-Bolshevik papers such as Far Eastern Review, Far Eastern Telegraph and others, often using pseudonyms such as ‘Zhen-Shen’ (ginseng) and ‘Tyutyun’.

But by 1920, with Vladivostok under Japanese occupation

Tretyakov was a marked man. Less than a month previously he had published in The Red Banner (under his pseudonym Tyutyun) a poem, ‘The Tank’, which employed Japanese poetic forms to ridicule the Japanese occupiers.

Tretyakov (and Olga) escaped by ship to Tianjin. In 1921, they went to Beijing and then to Harbin, where Olga’s father lived, and from there, back into Russia via Chita, capital of the then Far Easter Republic, where he met up again with the Futurists. By 1922, he was back in Moscow.

Sergei Tretyakov: A Revolutionary Writer in Stalin’s Russia, Robert Leach (Glagoslav, September 2021)

Tretyakov’s time in Moscow was hugely productive, but measured in months rather than years, for by mid-1924, he was back in Beijing on official appointment by the Soviet Government to lecture on Russian literature at the National University, where he also collaborated with Lu Xun on translations of Russian poetry. He dove right in, becoming a “regular” at Chinese opera, where

he even got to know the star performer, Mei Lan-fang, who played female parts with extraordinary grace, subtlety and not a little irony.

1924 also saw the “Wanhsien incident”, in which an American businessman drowned following an argument and altercation with a local boatman. The captain of the British gunboat Cockchafer, which happened to be in the area, demanded that when the ferryman could not be found and executed, two other men be executed instead or he would bombard the town. Tretyakov found in this the material for his 1926 play Roar, China!, which had what seems today like an extraordinary degree of success and acceptance for a piece of Russian revolutionary theatre about China no less: in the 1930s, the play was produced around the world, including New York, China, Poland and Japan.

Even Stalin attended a performance, and to increase its immediacy, up-to-the-minute despatches from China were sometimes read out from the stage. Roar, China! became Tretyakov’s – indeed probably revolutionary Russia’s – most performed play … when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, their victory was celebrated in Shanghai with a new production of Roar, China!.

In 1927, Tretyakov published Chzhungo, allergy a collection of previously published articles. Expanded and republished in 1930,

the work adds up to a series of snapshots of the evolving Chinese revolution, an examination of the historical process as it unfolds, with sharp insights into seemingly arbitrarily chosen details of its subject, failures and problems as well as successes and opportunities.

This was followed by a sort of directed biography Den Shi-hua, about Tretyakov’s former Beijing student who had transferred to Sun Yat-sen University, “a Soviet institution dedicated to training future Chinese Communist leaders”. The narrative ends when Den Shi-hua returned to China in 1927; after which he is lost to history. Film projects on China unfortunately never saw the light of day.

One cannot help but be struck by the pace of things. Tretyakov, also a respected photographer, was soon off in the Caucasus, Angara in Siberia, Austria and Germany, on a kolkhoz (a collective farm), writing articles, essays and books all the time. It was in Germany where he struck up a relationship with Bertolt Brecht: “Brecht was to refer to Tretyakov in 1939 as ‘my teacher’.”

But by 1935, dark clouds were gathering:

People no longer felt safe. The most terrifying aspect of the gathering storm for ordinary Russians, especially for those with less than a totally clear conscience, was waiting for the police to arrive at their home.

But Tretyakov hosted Paul Robeson and his wife at his flat, and managed a visit of the Chinese Opera, which included Mei Lan-fang playing the female roles.

Particularly appreciated by Russian audiences was The Fisherman’s Revenge in which a fisherman and his daughter (played by Mei Lan-fang) overthrow the despotic ruler, though whether this signifies a proletarian revolution may be doubted.

Brecht was there:

a short time after this, Bertolt Brecht began work on his most noteworthy ‘Chinese’ play, The Good Person of Szechuan, the protagonist of which is a strange blending of male and female.

Tretyakov’s health was beginning to fail him and it was from the Kremlin Hospital in mid-1937 that the “NKVD dragged him out of bed, threw him into their ‘black raven’ and drove off.” He had, among other things, been working on a new book about China.

Leach is an enthusiastic and empathetic biographer, much informed by his friendship with Tatyana, Olga’s daughter from a previous marriage, and adopted by Tretyakov. We live at a time when things are purported to move at unprecedented speeds, but Tretyakov packed an amazing amount of work and history into a productive life that was less than 20 years.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.

Peter Gordon 31 October 2021 Non-Fiction

“Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China” by Liz PY Chee
 

Liz Chee Pui Yee


Liz PY Chee vividly remembers the first time she visited a bear farm. It was 2009, and Chee, who was working for a Singapore-based animal welfare group, flew to Laos to tour a Chinese-owned facility. The animals Chee saw “were hardly recognizable as bears,” she later wrote, “because they had rubbed most of their fur off against the bars of the cages and had grown very long toenails through disuse of their feet.”

As at countless other bear farms across China and Southeast Asia, the bears there were being held for their bile. Bear bile—which is either “milked” through a catheter permanently inserted into the animals’ gall bladders or extracted by stabbing large needles into the animals’ abdomens—is popularly prescribed across the region to treat a host of ailments, including, most recently, Covid-19. It is also marketed as an all-around health tonic. Although there is a growing animal welfare and anti-bear farming movement in China, the industry remains powerful.

Seeing the suffering bears made Chee wonder about the cultural and historical forces that brought the animals there—a question that propelled her to conduct exhaustive research on animal medicalization in China. In Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China, she details her findings, many of which are distilled from sources never before published in English. Chee, who is now a research fellow and lecturer at the National University of Singapore, also found that, until now, even scholars in China have dedicated scant attention to the history of animal-based medicine, despite the controversy associated with the topic today.

Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China, Liz PY Chee (Duke University Press, May 2021)

“If Chinese medicine retains an Achilles’ heel in the present century, it is the widespread perception that it is contributing to a holocaust among wild creatures,” Chee writes, “and in so doing supporting a global criminal enterprise” of animal poaching and trafficking. Moreover, she adds, such medicines are often condemned “as being as ineffective as they are unethical”, even by some Chinese physicians. Many of these products are medically useless at best, Chee writes, and in some cases, actually harmful.

Defenders of animal-based Chinese medicine often point to the practice’s 2,000-plus year history. In Mao’s Bestiary, however, Chee shows that the roots establishing the use of most animals as ingredients in medicine are not as deeply planted in China’s culture as many believe. Instead, the industry as it exists now was purposefully developed, expanded, and promoted over the last century. Today, it is more closely linked to politics and profit than to ancient culture and tradition. This revelation has important implications for both species conservation and for public health, Chee argues, because it leaves room for “possibilities of choice and change.”

Chee focuses on the evolution of animal-based medicine throughout the tumultuous period of modern China’s formation, from the 1950s through the 1980s. These decades encompassed the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and, finally, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.

While animal-derived medicines do have a long history in China, Chee found that their use in the past was nowhere near the “startlingly abundant” level they are at today. Around 400 animals were cited in the 16th-century Compendium of Materia Medica for example, whereas more than 2300 are listed today in pharmacopeias.

Many newly medicalized species exist only on distant continents, such as jaguars in South and Central America. Nor is China’s use of animals in traditional medicine solely based on Chinese innovation, Chee found; ideas, approaches, and technologies from the Soviet Union, North Korea, Japan, and the Western world all heavily influenced the industry’s development. So while animal-based products may still “hold the aura of tradition,” Chee writes, in fact, most are the products of a profit-driven expansion.

Efforts to abolish traditional medicine and replace it with a science-based approach, primarily inspired by Japan, began in the 1920s and continued through the early days of a Communist government that was racing to build an industrialized economy. While researchers acknowledged that some especially efficacious Chinese herbs were worth investigating to find their active ingredients, animal-based remedies were “initially undervalued and underdeveloped” by the new regime as it worked to build up its pharmaceutical sector, Chee writes.

Traditional doctors pushed back on the attempt to phase out their industry, however, and argued that the synergistic effects of the plant, animal, and mineral ingredients of their practice were too complex to be nailed down in a lab. To appease both groups, the state-owned drug-making sector decided that doctors trained in Chinese and Western medicine should learn from each other, “scientizing” Chinese medicine and seeking new innovations from tradition.

“To learn from the Soviet Union” was also a popular phrase in China at this time. Following the example set by the USSR, China was especially interested in creating its own pharmaceuticals from local ingredients to become self-sufficient. Soviet interest in animal-based folk medicine and the USSR’s own practice of farming deer for medicinal ingredients soon “provided modern and scientific sanction for the Chinese fascination with faunal drugs,” Chee writes.

During the Great Leap Forward’s period of rapid industrialization, “animals as well as plants were swept up in this nationwide project,” Chee continues. China expanded its export of high-end medicinal products like deer antler, rhino horn, and tiger bone, especially to Chinese expatriates. To meet steep quotas, authorities promoted the creation of “laboratory farms” for scaling up production. Entrepreneurs at these farms were also encouraged to find more uses for existing animal parts, and to engineer additional uses for new parts and species.

“Once a medicinal animal was farmed, there was pressure or incentive to justify the use of all of its parts, regardless of previous traditions that had often been quite selective as to which part should actually be taken as medicine, and for what purpose,” Chee writes. Medicine farms popped up for a host of additional species, including geckos, ground beetles, scorpions, snakes, and seahorses.

Wildlife farming also began being presented as something benefiting conservation because it allegedly spared wild animals from being hunted. In fact, it usually had the opposite effect by stimulating the market and relying on hunters to replenish farm stocks, Chee notes. While she does not delve deeply into the impact this has had on animal populations within and outside China, many sources today argue that demand for traditional medicine all but emptied the country’s forests of tigers, pangolins, and other highly sought after species.

During the purges and upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the export of luxury medicines such as rhino horn were scaled up to generate much-needed revenue. Back home, however, a stark lack of medical care and supplies inspired an emphasis on “miracle cures” derived from cheaper, more common animals.

Chicken blood therapy—“the direct injection of chicken blood (from live chickens) into human bodies”—was representative of this time, Chee writes. The doctor who founded the treatment claimed chicken blood therapy could cure more than 100 conditions, and it was heavily promoted throughout the country, becoming “emblematic of economical grassroots innovations” and “the very expression of ‘red medicine,’” Chee writes.

This practice started to be phased out in 1968 when news surfaced of people dying after being injected with chicken blood. But similar remedies soon took its place, including ones that used goose or duck blood, lizard eggs, or toad heads. These new remedies were marketed as magic-like cures for serious and otherwise untreatable conditions, including cancer—“an attribute that has become standard in the marketing of many animal-based drugs today,” Chee writes.

After Deng came to power in 1978, wildlife farming and animal-based medicine “became even more popular as part of the official policy to enrich farmers,” Chee continues. The government-supported bear bile industry—which was originally inspired by facilities in North Korea and continues to flourish today—was one major result of this period, as was the proliferation of tiger farms.

Policy shifts also had significant ramifications for the regulation of Chinese medicine, and its impact on consumers and the environment. The forestry ministry was “given decision-making power over wild medicinal animals,” Chee writes, “and would essentially manage China’s forests as extraction sites.” Meanwhile, the health ministry only had full regulatory control of patented drugs, so companies selling animal-based medicines could bypass health or efficacy regulations and make extravagant, unchallenged claims about their products’ curative value.

Chinese medicine has become globalized over the last three decades, and animal-based products have “continued to play a central, if increasingly problematic, role,” Chee writes. The industry is assailed in the international media for its role in driving species declines, and clashes regularly occur within China between proponents of animal-based medicines and those who value wildlife and conservation. “Many middle-class Chinese, both on the mainland and in the diaspora, and within Chinese medicine itself, have been on the front lines in the battle to save endangered species from poaching and consumption,” Chee points out.

Mao’s Bestiary went to press in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Chee writes in the introduction that the likely link between Covid-19’s emergence and wild animals fundamentally changes the debate by making wildlife use a global public health issue.

Yet despite the undeniable threats posed by zoonotic diseases, animal-based traditional medicine remains an “immensely profitable, and thus politically influential” force in China, she continues. As evidence, Chinese authorities not only did not ban animal-based medicine during the pandemic, but actually promoted remedies containing bear bile for treating Covid-19.

As for shaping the industry’s future to mitigate the dangers for both wildlife and humans, Chee looks not to officials but to Chinese consumers, who can choose to boycott animal-based medicines. There is a large and growing animal welfare movement in China, so this could be more than just a pipe dream. “Whether they will reinvent the pharmacology of Chinese medicine as a practice less reliant on animals, endangered or otherwise,” she concludes, “remains a vital question.”

This article was originally published on Undark.

Rachel Love Nuwer 14 July 2021 Non-Fiction

Rachel Love Nuwer is a science journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, BBC Future, and elsewhere. She is the author of Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking.

“The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined the Buddha” by Jairam Ramesh

Edwin Arnold (via Wikimedia Commons)


Victorian poets such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson are celebrated for having survived the test of time, as literary historians would put it. But it is someone else, an “Oriental” poet from England and a popularizer of Buddhism in the West, in Asia, and even on the Indian subcontinent who has been translated into 13 European and 22 Asian languages.

This poet is Sir Edwin Arnold and the poem he is most known for is The Light of Asia, an epic romantic work about the life and the message of the Buddha. Published in 1879, it went on to influence leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, as well as authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, and famous, influential leaders and scientists. Arnold wrote a good many other poems too in addition to The Light of Asia, but it was this work that made him an international celebrity and which, in several ways, revived the neglected story of the Buddha for the modern world; works written prior to it were more or less scholarly pieces not meant for the general public.

India’s former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh has written a “biography” of this poem. His The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined the Buddha investigates the times in which it was written, and tracks every translation, adaptation, and dissertation dealing with the author and the poem. It also points out countless references to the poem in global politicians’ correspondences with each other, even in unnoticeable scenes in movies, and in school children’s syllabi and guidebooks to document the cultural phenomenon it has come to be.

The close-to-universal appeal of the text has shaped popular contemporary imagination of Buddhism and the Buddha.

The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined The Buddha, Jairam Ramesh (India Viking, May 2021)

Born in 1832 in Gravesend near London and educated at King’s College and Oxford University, Arnold had his first brush with Buddhism through poetry contests held in the college. He came to India for a couple of years to take charge of the principalship of the prestigious Poona College in 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny. It was there that he was exposed to the classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, translating some of them.

Thanks to the rising interest in “the Orient” (as it was then) and the publication of numerous works in Indology such as Samuel Beal’s The Romantic Legend of Sakya Buddha, Buddhism was in the air. While working as a journalist back in Britain for The Daily Telegraph, Arnold stayed in touch with Indian culture and translated the classics such as The Hitopadesa and Gitagovinda. The Light of Asia was soon to follow.

When it did, it became something of a cult text: it received glowing reviews everywhere and found an astonishingly wide audience eager to buy copies in all formats—illustrated as well as special Christmas gift editions. It was hailed as “‘an Idyll of the King’ with Gautama instead of Arthur for its hero and Nirvana instead of the Christian ideal and the Holy Grail as its aim,” and for bringing the style of John Keats and Alfred Tennyson to the themes of karma and nirvana. Here’s an example:

Ye are not bound! the Soul of Things is sweet,
The Heart of Being is celestial rest;
Stronger than woe is will: that which was Good
Doth pass to Better—Best.
I, Buddh, who wept with all my brothers tears,
Whose heart was broken by a whole world’s woe,
Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty
Ho! ye who suffer! know
Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels
None other holds you that ye live and die

The narration of Buddha’s life and doctrine in simple terms would enthrall the world. Ramesh provides the context:

The Light of Asia came at a time when organized religion was in retreat in Victorian society and was under attack across the Atlantic as well. It came exactly ten years after the word ‘agnostic’ was first coined. To use the title of Thomas Hardy’s extraordinary poem, Arnold placed Buddha in the public consciousness at a time when ‘God’s Funeral’ was taking place.

The success of the poem would upset those who had worked on Buddhism for several years but couldn’t get into the limelight. It would also make a lot of people insecure. Ramesh quotes several attacks on the poem and the poet by such people, one of whom says that “the dulcet and eloquent strains” of the poem would fool “uninformed and unsuspecting people” “into conclusions detrimental to Christianity.” Another quote from the archive says:

There has entered the general mind, an unconfessed, a half conscious, but a most shrewdly penetrative, misgiving that, perhaps, after all, Christianity has not of right quite the exclusive claim that it was previously supposed to possess, upon the attention and reverence of mankind.

His engagement with Buddhism was not limited to the authoring of the poem: it would also involve launching a huge movement to recognize a sacred Buddhist site. As Arnold became, or came to be seen as, a sort of “insider” in Buddhist affairs of his time, he launched a campaign for the handing over the Bodh Gaya temple in modern-day Bihar in India, where the Buddha attained Enlightenment, to the Buddhists. He compared it with such other sacred sites as Mecca and Jerusalem and campaigned heavily for it to be wrested from the control of the Hindus whom he saw as desecrating the sacred Buddhist site with Hindu rituals. The temple was transferred to the leading Buddhist body only in 1953—after seven decades of struggle by the Buddhist leaders all over the world.

In the process of recording the impact of the poem and its legacy, Ramesh also deals with an intriguing episode in the life of the text—that of the discovery of the Buddhist heritage site in Jharkhand, India. The researchers involved had followed an excerpt from the poem:

Thou wouldst see where dawned the Light at last,
North-westwards from the “Thousand Gardens” go,
By Gunga’s Valley till they steps be set
On the green hills where those twin streamlets spring,
Nilanjana and Mohana! Follow them,
Winding beneath broad-leaved mahua trees,
‘Mid thickets of the sansar and the bir,
Till on the plain the shining sisters meet
In Phalgu’s bed, flowing by rocky banks
To Gaya and the red Barabar Hills
Hard by that river spreads a thorny waste,
Urawelaya named in ancient days …

and found Buddhist ruins near Hazaribagh, the “Thousand Gardens” mentioned in the excerpt.

Such revelations about a seemingly forgotten 19th century poem unsettle a lot of deeply held beliefs about literary merit and canonicity in literary histories. Where does a text’s value lie: in popular appeal and its influence on statesmen and scientists or in the literary merit as articulated by literary critics? Ramesh makes a case for the former:

The enduring fascination that Mahatma Gandhi had for his translation of the Bhagwad Gita is sufficient for Sir Edwin Arnold to occupy a distinctive niche in not only Indian but also world history. If you add to this prodigious influence The Light of Asia had, then it would be fair to say he was. A poet who helped interpret not one but two faiths – an achievement that is quite extraordinary by any yardstick … The Light of Asia did not involve painstaking academic investigation. But clearly it met a demand, fed a hunger, filled a need and fulfilled an aspiration. It had something for everybody. It appealed to the Christian non-missionary world because of the close parallels in it between the lives of the Buddha and of Christ. It made Buddhists feel proud because it portrayed the founder of their faith in a glorious manner … Upper-caste Hindus in India did not see it as a potent threat because of the extensive use of Brahmanical themes in the poem.

This close-to-universal appeal of the text has shaped popular contemporary imagination of Buddhism and the Buddha. Ramesh’s biography of the text does a commendable job of tracing the origins of that appeal.

Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.

Soni Wadhwa 20 July 2021 Non-Fiction