Imagining India in Modern China : Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious, 1895–1962

Winner, 2023 Harry Levin Prize, American Comparative Literature Association Beginning in the late Qing era, Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to India in search of new literary possibilities and anticolonial solidarity. In their view, India and China shared both an illustrious past of cultural and religious exchange and a present experience of colonial aggression. These writers imagined India as an alternative to Western imperialism—a Pan-Asian ideal that could help chart an escape route from colonialism and its brutal grasp on body and mind by ushering in a new kind of modernity in Asian terms. Gal Gvili examines how Chinese writers' image of India shaped the making of a new literature and spurred efforts to achieve literary decolonization. She argues that multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections empowered Chinese literary figures to resist Western imperialism and its legacies through novel forms and genres. However, Gvili demonstrates, the Global North and its authority mediated Chinese visions of Sino-Indian pasts and futures. Often reading Indian literature and thought through English translations, Chinese writers struggled to break free from deeply ingrained imperialist knowledge structures. Imagining India in Modern China traces one of the earliest South-South literary imaginaries: the hopes it inspired, the literary rejuvenation it launched, and the shadow of the North that inescapably haunted it. By unearthing Chinese writers' endeavors to decolonize literature and thought as well as the indelible marks that imperialism left on their minds, it offers new perspective on the possibilities and limitations of anticolonial movements and South-South solidarity. "Examines how India's colonization, its struggle for independence, and its leadership in the earliest iteration of Third Worldism inspired Chinese intellectuals and literary figures to develop literary forms and modes of address that negotiated the legacies of colonialism. Examining historical interactions between Chinese and Indian writers alongside Chinese readings about India and of Indian literature, this book focuses on major modern Chinese poets, novelists, and translators such as Xu Dishan, Bing Xin, and Ji Xianlin, as they engaged with Indian paragons, both modern and premodern, such as Kālidāsa, Lal Behari Dey, and Rabindranath Tagore. From imperialism to decolonization, India in the Chinese Literary Imagination traces what would be perceived today as one of the earliest South-South literary spheres: the hopes it inspired, the literary rejuvenation it launched, and the shadow of the North which relentlessly haunted its struggles. While previous studies have highlighted the significance of contacts with Japan for inspiring the rise of China's national culture, this book reorients the usual China-Japan route by exploring how interactions with Indian writers and texts significantly shaped modern Chinese poetry, fiction, and drama. Shifting from the top-down model by which modern literature traveled from Europe to Japan and then to China, India in the Chinese Literary Imagination offers a perspective from the Global South, unearthing regional, transnational networks that were brought into existence through literary practice. Neither celebrating the decolonization solidarity project nor condemning it as failure, this book focuses on literary expression to reveal how literature captures both the dreams and the immense difficulties of breaking free from imperialist knowledge structures"-- Provided by publisher