Amid current day fractures in Asia, a Harvard historian’s book is a useful reminder of the powerful impulses of Asian universalism that existed in the first half of the 20th century.

If the idea of Europe can survive two world wars as well as current economic and cultural tensions, the idea of Asia needs to be evaluated in terms of the ability to withstand similar stresses and strains.

Thus writes Harvard historian Sugata Bose in his latest book, Asia After Europe: Imagining A Continent In The Long Twentieth Century.

Written against a backdrop of concerns about the present crossroads in Asia, and the paths to be forged, the book paints the portrait of an age and is presented as a tribute to Asian intellectuals and leaders who challenged European cultural domination to dream of the futurism of young Asia.

Professor Bose is no ordinary historian; his own grandfather Sarat Chandra Bose – elder brother of Indian independence figure Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose – had a role to play in the early 20th-century construction of an Asian consciousness. The barrister-turned-independence activist travelled to Rangoon in 1946, and stood alongside Burmese independence hero Aung San to dream of an Asian Federation “in the not too distant future”.

It was at Aung San’s urging that Jawaharlal Nehru hosted the first Asian Relations Conference in March 1947 – just months before India’s independence that saw Nehru become its first prime minister and which would begin the process of colonialism unravelling across Asia.

The past, they say, is a mirror to the present.

And placed in the middle of the nationalism-driven fractures of modern-day Asia, we often fail to comprehend how powerful was the vision of Asian universalism that existed once.

This universalism was founded on multiple factors, not least of which was a shared experience of subjugation under mostly-European colonialism.

Passenger shipping that connected lands across the seas built new connections, and new imaginings of Asia. “Asia is one,” Japanese art critic Okakura Kakuzo wrote in his 1903 book, Ideals Of The East.

Through more than four decades of writing on the Asian transition, I have often pondered about my own personal journey, and the steady march towards thinking of myself as essentially an “Asian” citizen.

Some of it comes from early influence – my most enjoyable years were the decade I spent at Asiaweek, the Hong Kong-based magazine founded in 1975 by two journalists who left the then dominant Far Eastern Economic Review, which they thought presented a too-British view of Asia.

Asiaweek’s mission statement spoke of seeing the world “from an Asian perspective, to be Asia’s voice in the world”.

Asiaweek survived only 26 years – eventual owner Time Inc shut it down in 2001, citing an advertising downturn. Nevertheless, the fact that it was conceived of, and thrived all the way through the last quarter of the past century, suggests that its mandate resonated with readers almost up until the 21st century.

Today, Asia is a cracked mirror. You could even say it has shrunk.

China and India, its two tectonic plates as Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo often calls them, have a brittle relationship.

It wasn’t that long back that matters were so different. The first Asian Relations Conference in 1947 even included delegates from North Africa – such was the expansive vision of the continent, and its purpose in the world. 

The Asian Socialist Conference hosted by Burma in 1953 had delegates from Lebanon and other West Asian countries.

Today, West Asia, still referred to mostly by the colonial construct Middle East, is largely pushed away from the Asian consciousness. 

Part of the reason, I suspect, is deliberate; perhaps some of us who live in the East do not wish to see West Asia’s toxic faith-based fissures imported to our shores, and are content to not draw that region too closely into our consciousness.

The great famines of Bengal, Henan and Tonkin during World War II once spurred a sense of a common suffering, and that unity is the salve for some shared sufferings.

More critically, says Prof Bose, these crises had huge political implications, undermining the legitimacy of the regimes that presided over these colossal, avoidable human tragedies.