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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.
Gvili’s brilliant study unearths the archives of modern China’s India and their stakes for the present. Imagining India in Modern China showcases the importance of Indian literature to Chinese anticolonial thought. More startlingly, it has us revisit the British Empire’s role in India-China relations as a literary—and not just a historical—mediation.
— Tamara T. Chin, author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination
This book frees us from the usual story of China and the West and points to new horizons for scholarship and teaching. Imagining India in Modern China will astonish readers with its rich array of sources and its stories of writers and thinkers who traveled—and read, wrote, and translated—across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
— Michael Gibbs Hill, author of Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture
Rich in historical detail, Imagining India in Modern China offers a fascinating look at the development of comparative anticolonial thinking and its imagination of a shared precolonial Asian past. Gvili shows how this attempt to get past the colonial world struggled with the dominance of its knowledge practices, especially those codified in English. An invaluable work for scholars of world literature and Global South literature and thought.
— Aamir R. Mufti, author of Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures
Imagining India in Modern China offers an outstanding and much-needed analysis of the Chinese engagement with Indian literature during the twentieth century. Through detailed case studies and by demonstrating the possibilities and limitations of the “south-south” paradigm, Gvili makes significant contributions to the fields of postcolonial studies, Asian literature, and China-India studies.
— Tansen Sen, author of India, China, and the World: A Connected History
Gal Gvili's remarkable Imagining India in Modern China is a fascinating and pathbreaking exploration of the importance of India to modern Chinese literature and culture, and in particular the anticolonial dynamics of the Chinese Indian imagination. Contributing significantly to the decolonization of both comparative literature and Asian studies and reconfiguring China-India engagement, this book charts much-needed scholarly pathways.
— Karen Thornber, author of Global Healing: Literature, Advocacy, Care
Imagining India will offer provocative reading for all those working on China and the Global South, as well as on issues of realism and religion in modern Chinese literature.
The book is a must-read for scholars and students interested in the history, literature, and cultural interactions between India and China, as well as anyone interested in the broader themes of decolonization and identity.
An insightful and important study that contributes to the expanding field of India-China studies.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: South-North-South
1. Unsettling the Violence of Comparison
2. What Is Rising There in the East?
3. Folklore, (Il)literacy, and Cyclical Realism
4. Śakuntalā in China
Epilogue: After 1962: The Ongoing Literary Work of Mourning
Notes
Bibliography
Index