A RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF PAN-ASIANISM: SOUTH ASIA, JAPAN, AND ANTICOLONIAL INTERNATIONALISM

In this dissertation, I explore the significance of “religion” and “Asianness” in the ideas, ambitions, and relationships of a select group of anticolonial revolutionaries from India who used Japan as a base for their political projects between 1905 and 1945. Although my dissertation’s focus is on Indian anticolonial figures like Muhammad Barkatullah and Rash Behari Bose, not only do I explore their relationships with other Indian revolutionaries both inside and outside Japan, but I also put them in conversation with Ceylonese, Japanese, and Euro-American actors with whom they were in direct or indirect contact. I begin my dissertation with British imaginings of Asian religions and end with reflections of ‘Japanese Orientalists’ like Ōkawa Shūmei. In between, the dissertation introduces several Indian revolutionary colleagues and interlocutors, such as Har Dayal, V.D. Savarkar, M.N. Roy, and Aurobindo Ghose.I make two central arguments in my dissertation regarding the role of religion in the political projects of Pan-Asianists from India in Japan. First, I argue that a new conceptual understanding of religion gave Asia coherence in Pan-Asianist discourse and political organizing. Second, while South Asian and Japanese figures challenged many of the racialized assumptions of Euro-American thinkers about Asian religious traditions in their attempts to resist the British Empire, I argue that they were unable to escape a central component of Orientalist scholarship: the “problem of origins.” I use the “problem of origins” to refer to the notion that the essential core of religious traditions was to be found in a particular geographic place, race, and language through a study of sacred texts, early religious sites, and religious founding figures.