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'Chindia': A cultural project?

Yudhishthir Raj Isar Global Media and Communication 2010 6: 277 DOI: 10.1177/1742766510384965 The online version of this article can be found at: http://gmc.sagepub.com/content/6/3/277

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Section II: Chindia in a global cultural context

Chindia: A cultural project?

Yudhishthir Raj Isar

The American University of Paris, France

Any contemporary buzzword such as Chindia, particularly when it becomes a floating signifier, invites deconstruction. A notion that was coined as a catchy label for a voluntaristic project to boost economic and commercial cooperation between China and India now connotes a very wide range of things to many different actors. The original relationshipnurturing construct has been reified and has come to be perceived by some as a threatening entity, whereas for others it is the stuff of dreams. What is more, the notion appears to have far more purchase among Indians than Chinese thus it is bereft of true mutuality. Despite these issues or perhaps because of them I shall opt to place the Chindia Challenge on a different terrain, that of cultural cooperation. Seeing the construct through the lens of cultural analysis makes it possible to overcome scepticism of the concepts viability in the economic-political arena and allows one to address it instead in a spirit of constructive utopianism. Hence, using the somewhat rosetinted glasses of the cultural activist, I shall attempt to imagine Chindia as a potential set of public spheres to be animated by artists and cultural workers interested in building new intercultural alliances for their own sake. Observation of such inter- or trans-cultural work in many different settings allows one to see the public sphere as a framework of rational-critical exchange that leads the actors of such exchange to negotiate and make sense of both similarities and differences in public and decide upon common purposes (McGuigan, 1996). On the EuropeAsia axis, among others, a great deal of such networking is taking place; artists and cultural operators from both China and India take part in these processes as partners, that is, with Europeans and North Americans, rather than with each other. Extrapolating from these interactions, as I believe is warranted, I shall

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spin out an optimistic culturalist scenario. But before I do so, let me return to the critique of the term itself, precisely because of the rhetorical bandwagon it has created. A construct and its forbears It is generally believed that the Indian economist and politician Jairam Ramesh popularized the portmanteau word Chindia in 2006, when he wrote a book advocating a major revision of Indian attitudes towards China. Ramesh did this for eminently instrumental reasons of national interest, primarily economic, as well as on behalf of Indias international image, branding and prestige. He saw rapprochement between China and India as an opportunity for both countries, but one that was clearly greater for India than for China. Indirectly, he may well have had in mind the need to redress the asymmetries that prevail in the worlds axes of power and exchange, to stand outside the predetermined routes of interaction hitherto mapped on a predominantly NorthSouth (or EastWest) trajectory (Bharucha, 2000). The construct Chindia has proved to be an alluring one, as we deduce from its many different understandings. The notion has been appropriated by Westerners to represent or connote a number of things, including in particular the emergence of an economic bloc that threatens their own hegemonies. In the process, it has come to occupy a discursive field that is not as infra-Asian as it was intended to be. The Western appropriation and inflections are par for the course. Perhaps the more critical question is whether Chindians are able to, or want to, define their own readings of the Chindia Challenge without Western mediation, and if so, what these local readings might be. Can the media and cultural industries of the two countries work in concert to overturn existing patterns of domination? How could the media in the two countries cover each others realities better? Behind these and many similar questions that could be asked, lies the assumption that Chindia and India possess inherited commonalities or collective memories of past ties that will make it easy for them to do so.1 Here the Chindia discourse echoes, particularly in its cultural guise, the once powerful discourses of Asia as a unified cultural area. These narratives, it must be said, have had a much more limited hold on the Indian imaginary than they have in Southeast Asia; amongst Indians a strong sense or a willed rhetoric of belongingness to a larger imagined community called Asia is rarely to be observed and there are grounds for arguing that Chinese sensibilities are no different. To

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be sure, some Indians such as the seer Rabindranath Tagore imagined an Asia set in a timeless zone, in the prehistory of those days, when the whole of eastern Asia from Burma to Japan was united with India in the closest tie of friendship, the only natural tie which can exist between nations (from his book entitled Nationalism, cited in Bharucha, 2006: 73). What is more, this idea of Asia emerged more as the outcome of a self-consciousness than as a naturalized collective identity. Yet also, as Rustom Bharucha observes (with respect to academic departments), the Asias dont meet. South Asia doesnt talk to Southeast Asia, and East Asia is so exclusive that it is almost relegated to the status of a rich relative (Bharucha, 2006: xxiv). The idea of Asia is othered within its own boundaries (2006: 13). In recent years, we have witnessed much political and intellectual rhetoric over Asian Values, the Asian Renaissance, or the New Asia (under whose combined aegis the city-state of Singapore has in fact branded itself as the global city of the arts). Bharucha has aptly described this discourse of Asia as state-determined cultural capital (2006: xv). In this sense Asia, along with each of the various prefixes it has collected, has always been a somewhat spurious and factitious idea, and politically loaded and manipulative too. Yet it has also undoubtedly provided a welcome space for artists and intellectuals to build on the commonalities that do exist. In cultural circles across the geographical expanse of Asia, artists and cultural workers appear to be striking out, slowly and tentatively to be sure, in directions that take them towards a self-problematizing, self-questioning and self-transformative cultural space (Jahanbegloo, 2010: 13) based on reasoned inter-cultural (rather than putatively intra-cultural) relations. The idea of Chindia as a cultural project is of coinage similar to the Asia construct, and offers, I argue, similar public sphere potential. It is, for its part, underpinned by the largely mythical narrative of over two millennia of close and fertile Sino-Indian cultural relations. This vision was inspired mainly by the spread of Buddhism from India to China, as a result of which Chinese scholars and pilgrims visited India between the 1st century BC and the 10th century AD. Comparable Chinese influences during that period on Hindu belief, thought and life are difficult to identify, however. There is scant evidence of sustained cultural relations of any kind afterwards, not to speak of exchanges in the economic or the political realms. It is certainly true that both Chinese and Indian ideas and forms contributed a great deal in history to forging the cultures of the whole of Southeast Asia. But they hardly operated in concert; instead, they were streams of influence that ran parallel to each other.

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Yet so wishful was the thinking in India of the early 1950s, elaborated under the banner of a shared commitment to international socialism, that even the erudite K.M. Pannikar could hype this up to state that intimate religious, cultural and social relations existed between the two major civilizations of Asia for a period of nearly 1500 years. For nearly a 1000 years, from the 1st century BC to the 10th century AD, it was one of the major facts of the worlds cultural history. Its importance in shaping the mind (sic) of East Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Mongolia, is something which cannot be overrated (Pannikar, 1957: 65). Pannikar went on to envision a new period that will no doubt produce results as glorious and as enduring as the previous confrontation of our two civilizations now that, with colonialism repulsed, a new period of mutual influence has begun (Panniker, 1957: 656). Such views fed fantasies such as Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai in Indian usage, which misread both the geopolitical stakes and the nature of the Maoist regime. It was wishful thinking that exaggerated the strength of past ties and did so without envisioning something fresh, attuned to the way we are now. Today, in the vastly changed economic, social and political circumstances of 2010, this to my way of thinking is the true challenge of the Chindia relationship. Side-stepping instrumentalism In terms of the above wager, and since China and India are far more likely to compete with each other than to cooperate, I would plead the case for relations of a different nature, cultural pathways towards the building of distinct public spheres and counter-publics, to use Nancy Frasers term (1992). Significantly, the nations that have built some form of common market the Europeans first, then countries in South America or Southeast Asia after them have yet to forge a coherent media and communication community, or a cultural community based on a developed sense of shared belonging. Indeed, a common European trope even suggests that the cultural dimension should have been used as a tool of integration from the outset, with the apocryphal story that Jean Monnet, a founding figure of the European Communities, once declared that if given the chance to start over, he would start with culture. More recently, the creativity discourse has marshaled different sorts of arguments for greater investments in the cultural cooperation. I would argue here, however, against such instrumentalizing arguments. For the purposes of a cultural Chindia we can circumvent, I believe, the soft power paradigm in order to develop cultural relations as ends in

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themselves, not for the sake of some other ends. There appears to be a significant degree of social demand for such an independent crosscultural conversation among the newly affluent and mobile intelligentsias of both countries. Both ethically and ontologically, more and more Chindians are interested in forging new kinds of intercultural relations, in fostering the sorts of competencies needed to respond to the dual claims of cultures to retain their variety, and to meet and intermingle within the context of a new global civilization through risky dialogues with other cultures that can lead to estrangement and contestation as well as comprehension and mutual learning (Benhabib, 2002: xiiixiv). It seems clear that neither government is going to accord priority to such tasks. For both, the more important objective is to secure a better profile and brand image in the marketplaces of the West as well as the global South. In the case of China, a recent Op-Ed piece in the International Herald Tribune leaves the reader in no doubt as to where the priorities lie. As David Shambaugh writes, a new Office of Public Diplomacy has been established in the Chinese Foreign Ministry, while the State Council Information Office is coordinating Chinas media and exchange organizations to go out (zou chuqu) and establish a foothold in the international media environment and think-tank world. India hardly figures in these plans; the focus is on the West and Africa. And the messages transmitted abroad still often have a wooden and propagandistic flavor to them Chinas government continues to muzzle many of its most creative and diverse elements (Shambaugh, 2010). Although Indias society is much less state-controlled, conformism also reigns in its media and cultural establishments and there is little to suggest that innovative reaching out its their northern neighbor is high on the cultural diplomacy agenda. To tell the truth, the benign neglect is mutual. Is this necessarily such a bad thing? Does it not offer an opportunity for cultural activists in both countries to side-step the instrumental aims of the soft power discourse? Cultural actors are among the first to grasp and act upon the implications of a multi-polar world, or at least one in which cultural flows ought to be more mutual and omni-directional than they are today. The routes of cultural exchange are still largely preordained, the zones of interaction fixed mainly on the North/South axis, which is so difficult to circumvent. There are very few alternative routes or structures of representation. Indeed, the crossroads of cultural exchange are often substituted by the inroads of institutionalized interculturalism, whereby the SouthSouth exchange is still mediated by the North. While these mediations are overwhelmingly well meant and are

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not necessarily harmful, they are still highly constraining. They work against the basic premises of voluntarism on which true inter-culturalism is based and which is distinct from cultural diplomacy of the sort carried out by state actors (Bharucha, 2000).2 Indeed a central concern for artists and cultural workers today, as the curator and critic Simon Sheikh has observed (2004), is to situate themselves in relation to the apparatus surrounding and enabling cultural production, that is the parameters for reception (institutions, audiences, communities, constituencies, etc.) and the potentials and limitations for communication in different spheres (the art world, the media, public spaces, the political field etc.); in other words, the challenge of helping Chinese and Indian artists and cultural operators construct counterpublics based on alternative subjectivities, spaces and networks. New modes of artistic, cultural and mediated collaboration need to be elaborated on the basis of both some deep commonalities and many deeply contrastive differences. Governmental agents and envoys must perforce practice what Raymond Williams called cultural policy as display, by which he meant a vision of cultural relations that has long been privileged in, for and by the arts patronage of princes, merchants and bishops. The new public diplomacy of governments seeks to build alliances with non-state actors in order to engage with much larger publics (Cull, 2009), yet the motivations of the cultural actors themselves privilege purposes such as mutual learning; pooling of resources; co-financing; technical assistance; joint reflection, debate, research and experimentation; and in its most complex forms, cooperation in the creative processes, the creation of new artistic works (Klaic, 2007: 46). To be sure, cultural operators will be obliged to pay lip-service to statist cultural narratives. Indeed, a case can be made for such strategic opportunism, given that the ends pursued are going to be artistic, deontological, ethical or axiological rather than interest-driven. Such a stance can be justified as long as its protagonists stay aware of what they are doing and why, in other words deploy a heightened reflexivity about the discourses they adopt. This would be the appropriate point of departure too for Chindia artists and cultural operators together to seek greater involvement with both their own and, with the other public and also to forge multiple publics or counter-publics and these are bound to be often opposed to existing cultural scales of value and relevance. Where the classic bourgeois notion of the public sphere claimed universality and rationality, counter-publics often claim the opposite, and in concrete terms often entail a reversal of existing spaces into other identities and practices. Sheikh cites Michael Warners view that counter-publics have

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many of the same characteristics as normative or dominant publics existing as an imaginary address, a specific discourse and/or location, and involving circularity and reflexivity and are therefore always already as much relational as they are oppositional. They consciously mirror the modalities and institutions of the normative public, but in an effort to address other subjects and indeed other imaginaries. What I am advocating, then, is a cultural conversation foregrounding critical practices that artists and cultural operators in both countries forge for themselves, working on two fronts at the same time. First, to paraphrase Sheikh, in a movement outwards towards the political and cultural diplomacy mainstream and second, inwards in order to develop new forms of cultural negotiation and translation. Notes
1 On issues of collective memory see my forthcoming co-edited volume (Anheier and Isar, 2011) in the Cultures and Globalization Series entitled Heritage, Memory, Identity (Sage). 2 The use of the term cultural diplomacy has been extended from state to non-state actors and conflated with the broader notion of international cultural relations. Some propose a broader vision of cultural diplomacy that refers to the exchange of ideas, information, art and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples in order to foster mutual understanding (Cummings, 2003: 1). In the process, the claims made on its behalf appear overstated, but that is another story I have explored elsewhere (Isar, 2010).

References
Anheier, H.K. and Isar, Y.R. (eds) (2011) Heritage, Memory, Identity. The Cultures and Globalization Series, 4. London: Sage (forthcoming). Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bharucha, R. (2000) The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Athlone Press. Bharucha, R. (2006) Another Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cull, N.J. (2009) Public Diplomacy: Lessons from the Past, CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy. Los Angeles:Figeroa Press. Cummings, M. (2003) Cultural Diplomacy and the United States Government: A Survey. Washington: Center for Arts and Culture. URL: http://www.culturalpolicy.org/ issuepages/culturaldiplomacy.cfm Fraser, N. (1992) Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in D. Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Isar, Y.R. (2010) Cultural Diplomacy: An Overplayed Hand?, Public Diplomacy (magazine of the Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars at the University of Southern California) 3, Winter.

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Jahanbegloo, R. (2010) The Problem, Seminar, 610, June (Living Together: A Symposium on Intercultural Dialogue), pp. 1213. Klaic, D. (2007) Mobility of Imagination. Budapest: Center for Arts and Culture, Central European University. McGuigan, J. (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere. London: Routledge. Pannikar, K.M. (1957) India and China: A Study of Cultural Relations. Bombay: India Publishing House. Ramesh, J. (2006) Making Sense of Chindia: Reflections on China and India. New Delhi: Indian Research Press. Shambaugh, D. (2010) China Flexes its Soft Power, International Herald Tribune, 7 June. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08iht-edshambaugh. html Sheikh, S. (2004) Representation, Contestation and Power: The Artist as Public Intellectual. URL (consulted 10 June 2010): http://www.republicart.net/disc/aap/ sheikh02_en.htm

Biographical note
Yudhishthir Raj Isar is an independent cultural advisor and public speaker, Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at The American University of Paris (where he was a Jean Monnet Professor, 20032008), Matre de Confrence at the Institut dEtudes Politiques (SciencesPo) and visiting professor at other universities in Europe and the United States. Founding co-editor of the Cultures and Globalization Series published by Sage, he was President of the European platform Culture Action Europe, 20042008. He has been a board member of the Institute of International Visual Arts, London since 1994 and Acting Chair, 200910, and board member of or advisor to several other cultural organizations in Europe, North America and Asia. Earlier, at UNESCO, he was Director of Cultural Policies and of the International Fund for the Promotion of Culture as well as Executive Secretary of the World Commission on Culture and Development. In 198687, he was Executive Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and MIT. Address: Department of Global Communications, The American University of Paris, 6 rue du Colonel Combes, 75007 Paris, France. [email: risar@aup.fr]

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