S0612 Asian Nationalisms in the 20th Century: The Cases of China and India

India and China represent two of the oldest civilizations of the world. Most historians agree that these two empires were at least until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in technological, economic, and other respects more advanced than Western societies. It was only after the development of science and industry in the West that they succumbed to the superior military power of the new Western nation states and fell prey to imperialism. In modern times, the concept of the nation and nationalism were seen in both countries as central vehicles for their fight against foreign domination and colonialism. While the history of Indian nationalism has to be seen primarily as part of the process of decolonisation, in China, the establishment of a modern nation-state was seen as precondition for economic, social and cultural development. Today, the people in these countries are confronted with anonymous markets that commercialise, erode or transform traditional contexts of life and social relations as well as religious beliefs. At the same time, the so-called socialist system in China has been discredited. As a reaction to these processes, we find that beliefs in the myths of nationhood are, sometimes intentionally and in the service of political ends, being resuscitated, so that today we find even greater attachment to the myths of national authenticity. Thus, the process of globalisation has led to a resurgence of cultural and political nationalism (and sometimes religious fundamentalism) as well as to a change of their function.The aim of the course is to examine how these two ancient civilisations tried to come to terms with a changing world where Western power and Western values were perceived as increasingly asserting themselves. The part of the course dealing with China will focus on the manifestations of nationalism in the context of the new phase of globalisation in the last decades of the twentieth century. In order to understand its motive forces and functions, it will be necessary to put these contemporary phenomena in a theoretical and historical context. The course will therefore in the first place introduce recent theories and views of nationalism, and then, before turning to the contemporary scene, examine the emergence of the new concepts of nation and nationalism in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. The part of the course dealing with India will first try to elucidate the nature of the British imperial presence against which nationalism was created. The timeframe we look at thus concentrates on the period from the mid 1700s to 1947 when Independence created not one but two independent nation-states, India and Pakistan. In order to comprehend the idea of the „Indian nation\" we therefore have to touch upon various aspects of Indo-Islamic culture, including language issues, Muslim separatism and the new Hindutva nationalism of the 1990s.
The course will be held as a seminar. Discussions will be based on selected texts (a reader will be provided) and on short individual or group papers on central ideas and developments. It will also include the examination of some fictional texts and feature films which have the nation as their central theme.