Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia

2. Civilizational Encounters: Europe in Asia

Civilizational Encounters 15 2 Civilizational Encounters: Europe in Asia Satish Saberwal When we think of the encounter between Asia and Europe, we are aware of a lack of balance between the two entities. ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ may be counterposed geographically; but in cultural and civilizational terms, the counterposing is problematical. There is a historic cultural unity to Europe, due largely to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, which has no counterpart in Asia. By the mid-12th century, the Cistercian order of monks regularly held annual meetings in central France, its monasteries’ abbots, or their representatives, travelling there from the far ends of Europe—Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Portugal. For near comparisons in Asia, we would have to think of similar gatherings within China, within the world of Islam in West and Central Asia, or within India. Asia has been multi-civilizational. China and India had a thin link in Buddhism; as did India and Southeast Asia in Hinduism. Islam spread through India and Southeast Asia rather swiftly, but the regions under its sway have been too disparate, and its institutional impulses too diffuse, to achieve the kind of shared ‘personality’ that Europe came to acquire. What gives Asia its unity, perhaps, is its 16 Satish Saberwal common experience of Europe as an expansive—indeed aggressive— civilization; but that experience we have shared with Africa and with the pre-Columban Americas and Australia too. On the other hand, between Asia and Europe, there had been contacts much earlier, as with the Arabs in Spain, or Marco Polo in China at the Mongol court; and these contacts were profoundly consequential in shaping the course of history. This essay considers only the period after Vasco da Gama. For all of us in Asia, Europe’s expansion, and its more recent withdrawal from colonies, have had significant consequences in the making of the present. The record of the encounter between Asians and Europeans over these five centuries is a priceless resource, for, on our shrinking planet, such cultural encounters are becoming denser and more frequent than ever before. It is through reviewing past experience that we can learn to form judgements about such civilizational interfaces, and to make informed choices for the future. There is a daunting diversity to Asia—and to Europe’s presence in Asia. Yet we need handles with which to make sense of that diversity, and to appraise the major lines of influence. The consequences of Europe’s expansion arose initially from the commercial, political, and similar frameworks, like the ‘colonial mode of production’, created by colonial powers for their own purposes. These have often had devastating consequences, and it has been common to blame colonialism, and the West generally, for nearly all our maladies. Some of the colonial frameworks—say the educational institutions for training low cost local manpower for operating the colonial regime—had unintended consequences: some indigenes were able to scan, more or less intimately, spacious European cafeterias of ideas—of technologies, of epistemologies, and so forth; and they were exposed, too, to European modes of institutional designs. The European repertoire on offer has included powerful resources with which to reconstitute our societies, to set them on relatively steady courses. Whether it is the disruptions that prevailed, or the effective reintegration of our societies into new keys, has depended, partly, on the kinds of skill, imagination, and organizing drives which our ancestors, and we, have brought to those stocks of ideas—in the West, and indeed elsewhere within Asia and in the past of our own particular societies. Europeans and Asians have influenced and challenged, attracted and repelled, each other in a great variety of ways. The following Civilizational Encounters 17 consideration of what Asians have done with things European will take five steps. It opens with a brief review of the capabilities that Europe had already achieved in the Middle Ages. We in Asia have tended not to take Europe’s historical experience seriously. We begin to notice Europe from the Renaissance—15th and 16th centuries—as if Europe had really been born at that time! To try to correct this misconception I wish to indicate briefly why I think Europe in the Middle Ages deserves our most serious attention. The Asian response to things European may, in turn, be examined in terms of four domains. I shall begin with modes of knowing, that is, epistemologies, and here I...