Pallavi Aiyar
Business Standard (India)
Geo-strategic pundits may reduce Asia to a quagmire of border disputes and nuclear weapons. But there is another, older, more closely-bound entity. Pallavi Aiyar seeks it out
The in-vogue idea of the ‘rise of Asia’ can be irksome. Lumping together civilisationally disparate entities like India and China with a motley collection of South-east, Central and West ‘Asian’ countries smacks of a persistent Orientalism, whereby a European definition of the exotic east prevails over the reality of how ‘Asians’ in fact perceive each other and themselves.
But an ongoing exhibition in Brussels, ‘A Passage to Asia’, is a powerful challenge to this scepticism, transporting the visitor across millennia to times before nationalisms and modern nation states clarified once blurry boundaries and identities.
It tells a story of sparkling precious stones and revolutionary religions, fragrant spices and radical technologies. It is a story that is ancient, yet startlingly modern, centred on manufacturing, investments, risks and profits; in short the forces of globalisation and trade that enabled India and China to dominate as economic and cultural powerhouses for much of history.
As a result it finds resonance with the Asia-boosters of today, giving their hype depth by underscoring how the emerging countries of the continent are in fact merely re-emerging. Moreover, at a time when geo-strategic pundits tend to reduce the region to a quagmire of border disputes and nuclear weapons, the exhibition reveals the historical existence of another kind of Asia, bound a lot closer together and more syncretically than either imaginable or imagined today.
What we see here are the points where modern day Mongolia, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan meet and spill over into each other; where Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia are laced together by Indian winds and Chinese breath.
‘A Passage to Asia’ was conceived as a cultural adjunct to the eighth ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) summit that will be held in early October in Brussels this year. Given that ‘Asia’ consists of 16 countries within this framework, Jan Van Alphen, the exhibition’s curator, confesses he was initially at a loss over how to focus the display.
There is an Asian culture that can be found in snatches all across the region, he insists. He points to the arc of Buddhist grottoes from Dunhuang in China’s Gansu province to Bamiyan in Afghanistan and on to the Ajanta and Ellora caves in India. He talks of the pathways Hinduism forged from India across the seas to Indonesia and Malaysia, and overland to Burma.
He alludes to the ‘pax Mongolica’ that saw the Mongols carve out vast territories across Eurasia, from Japan to the Balkans, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Bronze passports (on display at the exhibition) were issued to travellers along the Silk Route at the time, guaranteeing unimpeded passage.
The Silk Route, the mesh of paths that connected Antioch in the west to Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) in China, may be the most well-known of the overland trade routes within Asia and between Asia and Europe, but it was not the only one. Predating it by thousands of years a number of sea and land routes created interlinkages across Eurasia, with India already in contact with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and South-east Asia. There was a jade route, an animal skin route and even a lapis lazuli route via which the blue stone travelled west from Afghanistan to Egypt and Greece and east to India and Japan.
“But how do you tell these stories through objects? That was the challenge,” says Van Alphen with a smile. In the end the curator decided to arrange the exhibition into 10 sub-themes, each underlain by the two meta-themes of faith and trade.
‘Vessels for Life and Death’ kicks off the show with receptacles used to contain foodstuffs, beverages and human remains, from India, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. Dating from the 4th millennium BCE to the 2nd millennium CE, these vessels draw attention to the strong cultural elements that bound these far-flung areas together.
There are separate sections on the Silk Route and sea routes as well as traded commodities, in particular ceramics from China and Korea, and Gujarati textiles.
Indian clothing was a ‘hot ticket’ item in the Roman empire, Islamic world and Ottoman Turkey. But the exhibits focus on textiles from Gujarat which from the 10th century CE onward grew so popular that they altogether replaced traditional textiles in many East and South-east Asian countries.
The Gujarati combination of advanced textile printing technology, plentiful labour and quick delivery times proved unbeatable. Customisation was the name of the game even back then, with Indian weavers able to add specific motifs to fabrics on demand. Indian textiles were so highly valued that they were used quite literally as a currency. Van Alphen tells of families in South-east Asia collecting these textiles as investments over centuries. Later European colonialists used them to help gain monopolies over the spice trade. They would order fabric in India and exchange it for spices in South-east Asia.
Moving on from commodities, the exhibition showcases additional displays on Hinduism and Buddhism as threads knitting the region together, as well as displays on ‘Religions of the Book’. In this last section we learn how Islam was carried out of India by traders into Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Christianity’s spread across the continent is showcased by, amongst other objects, Mughal miniatures from Goa, which show the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary with Hindu tikas on their forehead.
From bronze drums to embroidered cloth and painted maps, the 400-plus carefully chosen objects on display bring to life the creative energy unleashed by centuries of mélange.
The role of India as a hub and disseminator of ‘Asian’ culture is also illuminated, resurrecting long-forgotten and rarely cultivated cross-border ties that pre-date our modern identities. Indian seafarers had use of sturdy ships and a good understanding of the monsoon winds, which allowed them to travel across the seas successfully. Even as far back as the Indus valley civilisation, seals were found in India bearing images of ships with masts.
Moreover, the great religions of Asia almost always spread via India. The oldest cultures in Vietnam: the Champa and Funan in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, for example, were Hindu civilisations. If you look at temples from Indonesia to Cambodia, the inscriptions on them are in Pali and Sanskrit, which are Indian languages. Buddhism spread both westward and eastward from India. This was, after all, the “biggest idea ever invented and exported”, says Van Alphen with a grin.
“In our exhibition, India and China are the two poles with several satellites around them,” he says. And it is apposite that just as they are “booming again, we remind ourselves of their dominance in the past”.
The invitation to rethink the idea of Asia as a cross-border and cross-civilisational, yet not altogether incoherent entity is relevant to the current context as well.
Of course the romance of the past inescapably loses some lustre in the cold light of modern-day reality. The exhibition’s organisers found themselves dealing with the Chinese objecting to boundaries shown around Bhutan, the Indians critical of borders demarcating Kashmir and Pakistan, the Japanese worried about the denomination of the sea that separates them from Korea and vice versa.
But in the end the objections were either withdrawn or worked around, and 16 Asian countries were able to cooperate closely enough to contribute to this remarkable show. A sliver of hope that, borders notwithstanding, a more collaborative future is possible. n
‘Passage to Asia’ is on at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels until October 10.
The in-vogue idea of the ‘rise of Asia’ can be irksome. Lumping together civilisationally disparate entities like India and China with a motley collection of South-east, Central and West ‘Asian’ countries smacks of a persistent Orientalism, whereby a European definition of the exotic east prevails over the reality of how ‘Asians’ in fact perceive each other and themselves.
But an ongoing exhibition in Brussels, ‘A Passage to Asia’, is a powerful challenge to this scepticism, transporting the visitor across millennia to times before nationalisms and modern nation states clarified once blurry boundaries and identities.
It tells a story of sparkling precious stones and revolutionary religions, fragrant spices and radical technologies. It is a story that is ancient, yet startlingly modern, centred on manufacturing, investments, risks and profits; in short the forces of globalisation and trade that enabled India and China to dominate as economic and cultural powerhouses for much of history.
As a result it finds resonance with the Asia-boosters of today, giving their hype depth by underscoring how the emerging countries of the continent are in fact merely re-emerging. Moreover, at a time when geo-strategic pundits tend to reduce the region to a quagmire of border disputes and nuclear weapons, the exhibition reveals the historical existence of another kind of Asia, bound a lot closer together and more syncretically than either imaginable or imagined today.
What we see here are the points where modern day Mongolia, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan meet and spill over into each other; where Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia are laced together by Indian winds and Chinese breath.
‘A Passage to Asia’ was conceived as a cultural adjunct to the eighth ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) summit that will be held in early October in Brussels this year. Given that ‘Asia’ consists of 16 countries within this framework, Jan Van Alphen, the exhibition’s curator, confesses he was initially at a loss over how to focus the display.
There is an Asian culture that can be found in snatches all across the region, he insists. He points to the arc of Buddhist grottoes from Dunhuang in China’s Gansu province to Bamiyan in Afghanistan and on to the Ajanta and Ellora caves in India. He talks of the pathways Hinduism forged from India across the seas to Indonesia and Malaysia, and overland to Burma.
He alludes to the ‘pax Mongolica’ that saw the Mongols carve out vast territories across Eurasia, from Japan to the Balkans, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Bronze passports (on display at the exhibition) were issued to travellers along the Silk Route at the time, guaranteeing unimpeded passage.
The Silk Route, the mesh of paths that connected Antioch in the west to Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) in China, may be the most well-known of the overland trade routes within Asia and between Asia and Europe, but it was not the only one. Predating it by thousands of years a number of sea and land routes created interlinkages across Eurasia, with India already in contact with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and South-east Asia. There was a jade route, an animal skin route and even a lapis lazuli route via which the blue stone travelled west from Afghanistan to Egypt and Greece and east to India and Japan.
“But how do you tell these stories through objects? That was the challenge,” says Van Alphen with a smile. In the end the curator decided to arrange the exhibition into 10 sub-themes, each underlain by the two meta-themes of faith and trade.
‘Vessels for Life and Death’ kicks off the show with receptacles used to contain foodstuffs, beverages and human remains, from India, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. Dating from the 4th millennium BCE to the 2nd millennium CE, these vessels draw attention to the strong cultural elements that bound these far-flung areas together.
There are separate sections on the Silk Route and sea routes as well as traded commodities, in particular ceramics from China and Korea, and Gujarati textiles.
Indian clothing was a ‘hot ticket’ item in the Roman empire, Islamic world and Ottoman Turkey. But the exhibits focus on textiles from Gujarat which from the 10th century CE onward grew so popular that they altogether replaced traditional textiles in many East and South-east Asian countries.
The Gujarati combination of advanced textile printing technology, plentiful labour and quick delivery times proved unbeatable. Customisation was the name of the game even back then, with Indian weavers able to add specific motifs to fabrics on demand. Indian textiles were so highly valued that they were used quite literally as a currency. Van Alphen tells of families in South-east Asia collecting these textiles as investments over centuries. Later European colonialists used them to help gain monopolies over the spice trade. They would order fabric in India and exchange it for spices in South-east Asia.
Moving on from commodities, the exhibition showcases additional displays on Hinduism and Buddhism as threads knitting the region together, as well as displays on ‘Religions of the Book’. In this last section we learn how Islam was carried out of India by traders into Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Christianity’s spread across the continent is showcased by, amongst other objects, Mughal miniatures from Goa, which show the baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary with Hindu tikas on their forehead.
From bronze drums to embroidered cloth and painted maps, the 400-plus carefully chosen objects on display bring to life the creative energy unleashed by centuries of mélange.
The role of India as a hub and disseminator of ‘Asian’ culture is also illuminated, resurrecting long-forgotten and rarely cultivated cross-border ties that pre-date our modern identities. Indian seafarers had use of sturdy ships and a good understanding of the monsoon winds, which allowed them to travel across the seas successfully. Even as far back as the Indus valley civilisation, seals were found in India bearing images of ships with masts.
Moreover, the great religions of Asia almost always spread via India. The oldest cultures in Vietnam: the Champa and Funan in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, for example, were Hindu civilisations. If you look at temples from Indonesia to Cambodia, the inscriptions on them are in Pali and Sanskrit, which are Indian languages. Buddhism spread both westward and eastward from India. This was, after all, the “biggest idea ever invented and exported”, says Van Alphen with a grin.
“In our exhibition, India and China are the two poles with several satellites around them,” he says. And it is apposite that just as they are “booming again, we remind ourselves of their dominance in the past”.
The invitation to rethink the idea of Asia as a cross-border and cross-civilisational, yet not altogether incoherent entity is relevant to the current context as well.
Of course the romance of the past inescapably loses some lustre in the cold light of modern-day reality. The exhibition’s organisers found themselves dealing with the Chinese objecting to boundaries shown around Bhutan, the Indians critical of borders demarcating Kashmir and Pakistan, the Japanese worried about the denomination of the sea that separates them from Korea and vice versa.
But in the end the objections were either withdrawn or worked around, and 16 Asian countries were able to cooperate closely enough to contribute to this remarkable show. A sliver of hope that, borders notwithstanding, a more collaborative future is possible. n
‘Passage to Asia’ is on at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels until October 10.
1 comment:
The author seems to have forgotten, or less knowledge, about Cambodia's past and glory, while making to references only to such derivative by-product sub-civilizations as Loas and Siem, and not the main civilized and glorious Khmer Kingdom. History is factual not fictional nor self-opinionated.
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