Introduction: The Rising Sun beyond the British Empire

From the Ottoman Empire through Qajar Iran, Russian Central Asia, British India, and the Dutch East Indies, the rapid modernization of Japan was watched with a fascination that was magnified by distance and unfamiliarity (Andaya Reference Andaya1977; Aydin Reference Aydin2007; Esenbel Reference Esenbel2004, Reference Esenbel2011; Georgeon Reference Georgeon1991; Haag-Higuchi Reference Haag-Higuchi1996; Laffan Reference Laffan1996; Worringer Reference Worringer2004, Reference Worringer2007a). The isolationist policies of the Tokugawa era (1603–1868) meant that, aside from Chinese merchants and the handful of Dutch traders allowed onto the islet of Dejima, Japan was as little known to the peoples of Asia as it was to Europeans. After the forced “opening” of Japan following the arrival in 1853 of Commodore Perry's kuro fune or “black ships,” the rapid industrial development and political transformation of Japan puzzled contemporaries as much as it would later vex historians (Auslin Reference Auslin2004; Wittner Reference Wittner2008). No event signaled Japan's new status on the world stage more than the defeat of imperial Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. From Istanbul to Tehran, from Kabul to Singapore, Japan's victory was greeted by Muslim anti-imperialists as proof of the vulnerability of Europe's empires (Kreiser Reference Kreiser1981; Laffan Reference Laffan and Kowner2006). Under pressure from European expansion, intellectuals in the last independent Muslim-ruled states became eager to learn the secret of Japan's rapid transformation from a country that, having been pressured into unfavorable treaties by Perry's steamships in 1853, had within half a century entered an equal partnership with Britain in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 and then defeated Russia at war. Central to this inquiring into the secret of Japan's empowerment was direct observation of Japanese institutions and behaviors through travel and its documentation through travel writing. It was a method common to mobile intellectuals who wrote in Urdu no less than Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Malay (Georgeon Reference Georgeon1991; Laffan Reference Laffan2001; Sugita Reference Sugita and Worringer2007).

This essay uses the most detailed and wide-ranging of the several Urdu travel accounts of Japan written by Indian Muslims in the first three decades of the twentieth century to cast light on the “trans-Islamic” and “alter-national” dimensions of Asian intellectuals' turn towards Japan. The momentum towards South Asian independence has traditionally been understood in terms of a dialectic between national and imperial frameworks in which acts of travel and comparison took place mainly within imperial spaces (Mohandas Gandhi in Durban, Choudhry Rahmat Ali in Cambridge) or moved beyond the boundaries of empire in the name of “national” liberation (Subhas Chandra Bose in Japan, Muhammad Iqbal in Germany). Reflecting other attempts to destabilize this empire-to-nation trajectory and its teleological drive towards Indo-Pakistani independence (Duara Reference Duara1997), this essay uncovers a set of alternative aspirations, actors, and spaces of comparison by which some Indian Muslims participated in a larger “trans-Islamic” gaze at Japan.

The term “trans-Islamic” is used to distinguish a set of parallel and contemporaneous aspirations and activities by Muslims in various regions of the world that, in contrast to “pan-Islamist” ideologies, were neither unified as a single movement nor aimed at common or collective goals. Indeed, while “trans-Islamic” activities and aspirations were often uniform in content and character, they were usually aimed at the achievement of discrete and geographically localized agendas. This concept of the “trans-Islamic” is useful in capturing the higher-order category of parallel but usually discrete global developments. It is used here in tandem with the lower-order category of the “alter-national,” which is employed as a label for aspirations and activities promoting either communitarian interests (particularly the Muslims of India) or the interests of small, short-lived, or otherwise forgotten states that are usually subsumed in discussions of nationalism (particularly the Indian princely states). The term “alter-national” in this way draws attention to the “alternative” and largely forgotten nationalisms that spread between the two World Wars in the name of such never-realized independent nations as Tatarstan and such vanquished nations as Hyderabad, as well as other princely or would-be states in South, Southeast, and Central Asia. In lying between the more familiar higher-order categories of the “global,” “imperial,” and “national,” the terms “trans-Islamic” and “alter-national” help bring to light a range of alternative agendas that, while positively enabled by globalization and negatively nurtured by imperialism, sought alternative futures than their better-known pan-Islamist or nationalist contemporaries. As we will see in this specific case study, the fact that princely Hyderabad was one of the key sponsors of the Indian Muslim turn to Japan helps us decenter the teleology of the Indian nation-state from the alternative but forgotten futures imagined by Muslim travelers to Japan.

Bringing into view India's participation in a larger Muslim turn towards Japan, the following pages argue that Japan appeared on India's intellectual horizons as a consequence of the globalization of communications that from the early 1900s allowed Indian intellectuals to travel beyond imperial geographies and networks to reach such alternative sites of comparison and activism as the United States and Japan. Conceived through the category of the national, Indo-Japanese connections usually bring to mind the contributions to the Indian independence movement made by the artistic collaborations of Rabindranath Tagore (cultural nationalism) and the armed allegiances of Subhas Chandra Bose (militant nationalism) (Anantharamaiah and Murthy Reference Anantharamaiah and Murthy1986; S. C. Bose Reference Bose, Bose and Bose1997; Hay Reference Hay1970). The stories of these familiarly national heroes continue to demand much attention (S. Bose Reference Bose2011; Mishra Reference Mishra2012, chap. 5).

In contrast, the Indian Muslim encounter with Japan has scarcely been studied, despite the close resemblance between the Urdu accounts of Japan and the trans-Islamic sequence of travelogues written by Ottoman, Egyptian, Iranian, Central Asian, and Malay Muslims. For each of their writers, the study of Japan presented a model of how to industrialize a society to the point of keeping at bay or even defeating European power, while at the same time maintaining and indeed re-empowering religious and cultural tradition. Japan, then, provided a model of conservatism as much as progress and one that was all the more attractive for religious Muslims facing the secular nationalisms spreading in Turkey, India, and Iran by the 1900s. If the basic question of balancing modernity and tradition, science and religion, had preoccupied Indian Muslim reformists from Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) in the 1860s onwards, then after 1905 for Muslims in India and worldwide, Japan provided an object lesson in how this might practically be accomplished for the good of either a Muslim minority community or a Muslim-ruled polity. India, in fact, fitted both cases, with a Muslim minority community in British India and Muslim-ruled polities in Hyderabad and such other princely states as Rampur. Focusing on the Japanophilia of Muslims associated with Hyderabad State, and in passing with other princely polities, allows us to unsettle the familiar notion that Japan functioned mainly as an inspiration for India's national independence, so directing our gaze towards other, forgotten futures.

By locating Indian Muslim texts, aspirations, and actors in a larger trans-Islamic framing of the encounter with Japan, this essay not only seeks to geographically widen discussions of the intellectual resources of the “Indo-Pakistani” independence movement. It also seeks to grasp the novelty of a situation created by the transportational globalization of intellectuals that allowed the non-Muslim nation of Japan to provide a template for Muslim empowerment (Green Reference Green2013). As Renée Worringer (Reference Worringer2004, 221) has written of Ottoman Japanophiles, they saw “connecting themselves to heroic Japan as an escape route from their own ominous future.” Yet in pointing culturally and geographically outwards, Japan was all the more significant an “escape route” for gaining momentum in the same decades that gave rise to the inward-looking Islamist ideologies of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and the Jama‘at-e Islami in South Asia. The focus here is therefore on what was a peculiar and distinctive global moment, framed as it was between a high colonial period in which many Muslim intellectuals expressed admiration for the European powers and a postcolonial era in which oil wealth laid the foundations for newly confident Muslim model states. If the slogan of the ultimately more successful Islamists was “Islam is the answer,” then for a couple of decades before the Second World War, for many Muslim intellectuals across the globe, the message was “Japan is the answer.” The following pages trace how this came to be for so many Muslims across the world.

Both the act and the writing of travel were of central importance to this engagement with Japan and it is tempting to contrast the mobility of its proponents with the sedentarism of their pioneering Islamist contemporaries such as Hasan al-Bana (1906–49) and Abu ‘Ala Mawdudi (1903–79). For as they developed through the nineteenth century, the older genres of the Arabic, Turkish, and Persian travelogue, and their younger siblings in Urdu and Malay, were transformed into more deliberately “scientific” documents that sought to accurately describe industrial techniques, educational institutions, and constitutional systems, and to objectify cultural and religious practices (Green Reference Green2009). These new travelogues were more typically practical than literary texts, aimed as they were at comparison with and transformation of the travelers’ home society. This expressly comparative agenda rendered such writings quite distinct from the early modern Muslim travelogue which, though in some cases emphasizing geographical and ethnographical accuracy, rarely if ever presented foreign (and particularly non-Muslim) regions as models of emulation. The new form of travelogue, then, was a practical and instrumental text and as such an ideal genre for activists and reformists affiliated either with the bureaucracies of Muslim-ruled politics or with Muslim communitarian organizations.

This instrumentalizing of individual travel for collective benefit was by no means unique to Indian or Muslim intellectuals. Japan's own productive discovery of the outside world was conducted through the journeys of diplomats and students and the publications that ensued from their voyages of enquiry (Nish Reference Nish1998). The same period also saw Chinese migrants create new ideas of their homeland through the comparative perspective afforded by travel (Conrad and Mühlhahn Reference Conrad, Mühlhahn, Conrad and Sachsenmaier2007). Nor is it the aim of this essay to suggest that India and the Middle East were solely at the receiving end of these travel lessons. For in the years on either side of 1900, these regions served as places of inspiration for Japanese religious and cultural reformers, with Indian forms imported into Japanese Buddhist architecture, though it has to be said that India was envisioned as the locus of tradition rather than progress, which Japanese travelers instead sought in America and Europe (Esenbel Reference Esenbel1996; Jaffe Reference Jaffe2004, Reference Jaffe2006). Imperial Japan, then, had its own orientalism. Yet if the motivations of travelers from different regions of Asia were based on distinct agendas and imaginaries, their travels themselves were based on a more uniform set of developments by way of the industrialized expansion of passenger sea travel that for the first time in history allowed considerable numbers of Asian intellectuals to travel relatively affordably (and comfortably) between the far sides of the planet. This expansion did not occur immediately, and it is important to locate the circuits of Indian and other Muslim intellectuals into the gradually widening sea-routes of the steamship business. For if the initial phase of passenger steamship expansion saw India and the Middle East linked into an imperial geography that connected Asians chiefly to France and Britain, then with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, steamship itineraries routinely included ports-of-call in Arabia, Egypt, Italy, and France en route to Britain, while easterly routes were expanded towards Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and ultimately California (Green Reference Green2013, Ramnath Reference Ramnath2011).

What the expansion of passenger shipping routes made possible was a shift in the scope of comparison from imperial to global geographies, presenting Indian no less than Ottoman, Iranian, and even Afghan travelers with non-European models of development (Gabaccia and Hoerder Reference Gabaccia and Hoerder2011; Hidayat n.d.). This trans-Islamic engagement with Japan was in turn directed towards a variety of counter-national agendas, whether aimed at a global pan-Islamist brotherhood, a Muslim-ruled state, or a Muslim minority community. Using what was by the early twentieth century the widely disseminated technology of the printing press to publish their travelogues, these industrially mobilized authors turned chiefly to Japan rather than the United States as the embodiment of political independence, economic progress, and “Eastern civilization” (mashriqi tamaddun, mashrikki medeniyet). As part of a wider trans-Islamic gaze at Japan's “rising sun” (al-shams al-mashriqa), the Urdu travel accounts discussed in the following sections show how India's Muslim intelligentsia shared in a wider discourse on Japan with similarly globalizing Muslims from other regions. Yet in Urdu at least, the lessons from Japan were deployed towards alter-national concerns rather than the higher-order categories of either Indian nationalist or global pan-Islamist concerns. “Glocal” rather than narrowly “local,” these Urdu agendas reflected the widening horizons of a global rather than an imperial consciousness that was so crucial to the evolution of Asian anti-imperial movements in all of their forms.

Among these “glocal” concerns was the since-forgotten and never-to-be-realized future imagined for an independent state of Hyderabad that had mastered the secrets of Japan. As we will see below in the discussion of the Urdu Haqīqat-e Jāpān (The truth about Japan), the traveling author of the text presented Japan in the same framework as other Muslims who had visited Japan since the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Underlying almost four hundred pages of description in the Haqīqat-e Jāpān was the same dynamic sought by these other travelers in which Japan was seen as able to balance economic and political progress with the upholding of tradition: modernization without Westernization. This was no mere fancy, for such visitors were responding to the very deliberate Meiji policy of wakon yosai, of using Euro-American technology to preserve Japanese cultural traditions. What is important to grasp, then, is that for these text-producing intellectuals, Japan was first and foremost an idea. Whether published in Delhi, Istanbul, or Tehran, their texts did not present Japan in the practical terms of the diplomatic ally or trading partner. The Ottoman and Iranian governments had in any case received Japanese embassies as early as 1880, and both Indian and Iranian merchants were already operating in Japan by that decade (Markovits Reference Markovits2000, 141–47; Oishi Reference Oishi2004; Sahhafbashi Reference Sahhafbashi and Mushīrī1985). While the data that appeared in these trans-Islamic travelogues was in most cases factually accurate, it was nonetheless selective. For what was important to their writers was not so much direct practical interaction with Japan as distant emulation of it; or rather, of its ideal as the dawning light of a resurrected “East” (mashriq), a term more pregnant in many Islamic languages for being cognate with the word for sunrise.

This is not to say that the travelogues did not encourage further interactions with Japan. For through enrollments in Japanese educational institutions or engagements with Japan's Muslim-outreach organizations, Japan was at times presented as a place of practical engagements. But such interactions involved mainly individual students and activists rather than representatives of states or community organizations. In Urdu, as in Turkish and Persian, Japan was therefore mainly an ideal, albeit one distinct from other Muslim reformist ideals of the period, firstly, in being substantiated in concrete fact rather than extrapolated from discursive tradition and, secondly, in presenting a non-Muslim model of emulation. While the Indian Muslim turn towards Japan never had the impact of the Ottoman turn of the Khilafat movement that galvanized Indian Muslims in the wake of the First World War, after the Khilafat movement's collapse around 1920, Japan partly filled its gap in the anti-imperial Muslim imagination. This lack of concrete role models was felt all the more keenly in the 1920s when neither early Kemalist Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, nor Saudi Arabia were proven successes, leaving very few independent Muslim nations left to admire. (Hard as it is to imagine now, Afghanistan was briefly the most admired [Green Reference Green2011].) In this way, the Indian turn to Japan in the 1920s and 1930s was part of a wider trans-Islamic gaze beyond imperial geographies that sought inspiration from the disparate models of Japan, Afghanistan, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Japan, then, was on a list of several rapidly modernizing nations outside the British Empire to which Indian intellectuals turned to imagine an alternative future. By the early 1930s, it was also a list that was starkly anti-democratic. As we will see below, the irony was that in the case of the author of the Haqīqat-e Jāpān at least, this gaze beyond the British Empire meant working in the service of a Japanese empire with its own Asian ambitions.

The Indian Turn to Japan

As we have already seen, the Urdu accounts of Japan emerged as part of a trans-Islamic series of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and even Malay panegyrics and travelogues that followed the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1905. Fed by global news telegraphy, it was a sudden awakening of interest: in 1904 two detailed Urdu accounts of the Russo-Japanese War were printed while the war was still in progress, namely Muhammad Fazl Husayn's Mukammil mukhabarāt-e Rūs ū Jāpān (Comprehensive news on Russia and Japan) and Muhammad Ibrahim's Jang-e Rūs ū Jāpān (The war of Russia and Japan), (Husayn Reference Husayn1904; Ibrahim Reference Ibrahim1904). The same year also saw the publication of a hasty translation from English of an Urdu history of Japan (Gauriprasada 1904). Unlike the otherwise similar Muslim encounters with industrializing Europe, the Indian Muslim self-comparison with the Japanese was made productive through conceptualizing Japan as a fellow “Eastern” (mashriqi) nation. This concept in itself helped feed the pan-Asianism that was one of the outcomes of interaction with Japan (Aydin Reference Aydin2007); its influence may also help explain why the “Western” (maghribi) United States never became a similar source of inspiration.Footnote ² Indeed, it was as the preeminent “Eastern” embodiment of development (abadi) and progress (taraqqi) that Muslim travelers created from Japan an apt comparison to their home countries.

Prior to Japan's entry to the Second World War, the Muslim accounts of Japan can be classified into three circulatory phases of travel interaction. In structural terms, all three phases were aided by the expansion of Japan's maritime networks beyond European shipping companies. As early as 1885 the Nippon Yusen Kaisha line began a regular service between Yokohama and Bombay, while the 1884-founded Osaka Shosen Kaisha line inaugurated its Kobe-Bombay service in 1911, putting Japan within still easier reach of the passenger intellectuals from the Middle East as well as India who wrote most of the travelogues (Chida and Davies Reference Chida and Davies1990; Shimizu and Hirakawa Reference Shimizu and Hirakawa1999, 16). Between its outposts in Singapore, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Vancouver, the trans-national Indian anti-imperial Ghadar movement also substantially depended on Japanese shipping. This was witnessed most vividly in the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which the Indian “revolutionaries” aboard the eponymous Japanese ship were refused landing at Vancouver (Johnston Reference Johnston1989).

The first phase of travel interaction, from around 1870 to 1905, was triggered by the Meiji outreach to the Middle East. These decades saw the reformist Meiji government dispatch representatives to the Ottoman Empire and Iran as part of a diplomatic and trading policy that saw parallel missions to Europe and the United States, most famously the globetrotting Iwakura Mission of 1871–73 (Nish Reference Nish1998). Muslim travelogues were relatively scarce during this early phase and those that were written were largely the result of happenstance, as in the case of the short account of Japan written by the Iranian merchant Ibrahim Sahhafbashi in 1897 (Green Reference Green2013).

The second phase lasted from around 1905 to 1920. Initiated by the Japanese defeat of Russia, this phase saw widespread Muslim curiosity about Japan's success that set in motion a series of panegyrics, factual descriptions, and investigative missions to Japan. These trans-Islamic texts and travels were as varied as those of the anti-Russian Tatar ‘Abd al-Rashid Ibrahim (1857–1944) from 1909 to 1910 and, from 1909 to 1913, those of the anti-British Muhammad Barakatullah (1854–1927), the Indian Muslim revolutionary who resided in Tokyo and co-edited from there the journal Islamic Fraternity (Aydin Reference Aydin2007, 113–14; Georgeon Reference Georgeon1991). The wider travels of Barakatullah—in Japan, the United States, Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union—are particularly significant in connecting each of the new global stages of Indian Muslim activity. However, more numerous than Indian Muslims in this second phase were Ottoman reformists, who appear to have been the more productive Japanophiles of this phase (Worringer Reference Worringer2004).

Lasting from around 1920 to 1940, the third phase was initiated by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which left Japan as the sole surviving Asian empire to which Muslims from colonized or underdeveloped regions could turn for inspiration. This third phase was also one in which travel to Japan was politically safe as well as practically straightforward, a period in which (arguably aside from Manchuria) Japan's own imperial aggression had not yet turned towards any significant Muslim population region, such as the Dutch and British colonies of Asia. It was in this third phase that the most important accounts of Japan by Indian Muslims were written, principally the writings of Sayyid Ross Mas‘ud (1889–1937) and Muhammad Badr al-Islam Fazli, the author of the Haqīqat-e Jāpān.

By the 1920s, Ross Mas‘ud and Badr al-Islam Fazli were by no means pioneer Indian Muslim travelers to Japan. Published as early as 1896, the Urdu Mu'sir-e Hamidi depicted the Japanese travels of Nawwab Hamid ‘Ali Khan (1875–1930), the modernizing ruler of the princely state of Rampur (Aqeel Reference Aqeel1996). Several Indians also crop up in Mahdi Quli Hidayat's 1904 Persian account of his travels in Japan. In Tokyo, for example, the Iranians were visited by a group of twelve Indian students, who could all speak Persian and presented the Iranians with a copy of the Calcutta-printed Persian newspaper Habl al-Matin; they then begged the influential Iranians for help in India's freedom struggle (Hidayat, n.d., 107). Later, in their hotel in Kyoto, the Iranian party was invited to dinner by an Indian prince they called “Raja Kapur Talo” (the rice he served was apparently excellent, but the “pepper and spices burned the tongue and mouth”) (98). The prince in question was Maharaja Jagatjit Singh (1872–1949), the ruler of the princely state of Kapurthala in Punjab, who in 1906 went on to publish his own Urdu memoir of the journey that between 1903 and 1904 had taken him to Japan as well as China and Java (J. Singh Reference Singh1906). Sailing from his Indian exile a few years later in 1907, the former Afghan king Ayyub Khan (1857–1914) had also spent a month in Japan, while during the same year an article in the Japan Weekly Mail reported that there were by then some fifty Indian students enrolled in Japanese colleges (Amin Reference Amin2007, 12–13; Japan Weekly Mail 1907, 195). On his visit in 1922, Ross Mas‘ud, one of the travelers on whom this essay focuses, was to meet some of these students. They included Mr. Bhagwat, a Punjabi graduate of Waseda University who had settled in Yokohama as a trader in Japanese electronic goods and was a classmate at Waseda of an Indian Muslim called ‘Umar, who Mas‘ud knew was by then working as an electrical engineer in the princely state of Bhopal (Masood [1922] Reference Masood and Kidwai1968, 28).

Naturally enough, several decades before the arrival of intellectuals such as Mas‘ud, the commercial development of Japan's main port at Yokohama had seen the arrival of various Indian merchants, including such famous companies as the Bombay Jewish and Parsi trading houses of Sassoon, Sons & Co. and Messrs. Tata & Co.Footnote ³ Merchants from Bombay had been the first to press for the opening of a regular shipping service between the two ports. For Japanese traveling on business or cultural matters to India or Europe, Bombay and Colombo served in return as their main transit cities; in 1894 the Yokohama Specie Bank thus opened its main Indian branch in Bombay.Footnote ⁴ By 1930, there were over thirty Indian businesses operating in Yokohama.Footnote ⁵ Judging by their trading and owner names, none of these companies were run by Muslim merchants, though in his travel diary Ross Mas‘ud did mention the presence of one Muslim trading house, ‘Abdul Karim Bros. (Masood [1922] Reference Masood and Kidwai1968, 63) and we know that Kobe was home to a good number of Indian Muslim merchants by this period (Oishi Reference Oishi2004).

These growing trade links even led to the conversion of the Japanese merchant Bunhachiro Aruga, who embraced Islam in Bombay through the influence of the city's Muslims and subsequently went by the name Ahmad Aruga (Isozaki Reference Isozaki1997, 199).Footnote ⁶ But in spite of the important links between Japan and the great Muslim emporium of Bombay, it is through the activities and writings of Bengali intellectuals that India's links with Japan have usually been traced. As a cosmopolitan port city with its own links to Japan, it is natural that Calcutta, along with Bombay, should have been the main conduit for Indian knowledge of Japan. In Calcutta, the Russo-Japanese War had also spurred the initial wave of interest among Bengali intellectuals. As part of the new physical culture that attended the nationalist awakening in the early 1900s, Sarala Devi Ghoshal (1872–1945) established a Jujitsu school in Calcutta in 1904, while underground Swadeshi (home-rule) pamphlets invited comparisons between Japanese and Indian economic development (Ray Reference Ray, Sisson and Wolpert1988, 66–67). At the same time, Bengali travel accounts of Japan, such as the 1912 travelogue of Hariprabha Takeda, the Indian wife of a Japanese merchant, lent revealing glimpses into the domestic world of Japan (Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay2002). However, in the decades before the Second World War, it was the travels and writings on Japan of Rabindranath Tagore that were most influential on Indian nationalist engagement with Japan, especially in Bengal. Tagore first visited Japan in 1916 as part of a lecture tour that, in following shipping routes eastwards from Calcutta, led him there en route to San Francisco. As with other itinerant Asian intellectuals of the period, the experience inspired Tagore to publish a series of lectures comparing India and Japan, while the travels themselves resulted in his 1919 Bengali travelogue, Japanyatri (Journey to Japan). Other Indian nationalists, such as the Punjabi neo-Vedantin Swami Rama Tirtha (1873–1906), also visited Tokyo on the way to San Francisco in the wake of the Chicago World Parliament of Religions, while Tirtha's disciple Puran Singh (1881–1931) actually settled in Japan (P. Singh Reference Singh1924). Like Tagore, they garnered support through the construction of a specifically Indo-Japanese mode of pan-Asianism in which a common spiritual heritage was paramount. This was an alternative but sibling formulation then to the trans-Islamic conceptualization of Japan as part of the “East.” While Indian intellectuals writing in Urdu were a part of this wider Indian interest in Japan, there appears to have been no direct influence: neither Tagore nor the other Hindu Japanophiles were cited in the long bibliography provided in the Haqīqat-e Jāpān. Rather, what we appear to be witnessing among intellectuals writing in Bengali and Urdu is the common impact on a generation of the confluence of événements et structure, of events (principally the Japanese defeat of Russia) and infrastructure (principally the fixed routes of passenger liners).

If it was not the Bengali accounts of Japan, then the most significant forerunner to the 1934 Urdu Haqīqat-e Jāpān of Badr al-Islam Fazli was the lengthy study of Japan's educational institutions written by Sayyid Ross Mas‘ud, the grandson of the pioneer of the Urdu travelogue, the great reformist and educator Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Mas‘ud traveled to Japan in 1922 in his capacity as director of public instruction for the princely state of Hyderabad, where a few years earlier he had played a leading role in the foundation of the Urdu-medium Osmania University (Datla Reference Datla2009). Keen to learn how a modern and technical education could be successfully taught in an Asian language, Mas‘ud committed himself to a thoroughgoing inspection of Japan's high schools, universities, and polytechnics. Though originally published in 1923 in English, his account of Japan was quickly translated into Urdu by Muhammad ‘Inayatullah as Japān aur uskā ta‘līmī nazm ū nasq (Japan and its educational order and administration); at almost five hundred pages, in 1925 it was published by the Anjuman-e Taraqqī-e Urdū, India's leading Urdu publisher of learned books (Masood Reference Masood1923; Mas‘ud Reference Mas‘ud1925). While Mas‘ud was principally concerned with Japan's educational development, his book actually comprised a survey of the entirety of Japan's history and sociopolitical development, with education not appearing until page 262 of the Urdu edition (Mas‘ud Reference Mas‘ud1925). This concern with historical progress echoed such early twentieth-century Arabic and Malay accounts of Japan as Mustafa Kamil's al-Shams al-mushriqa (Rising sun) and ‘Abdullah ‘Abd al-Rahman's Matahari memancar (Radiant sun) (Laffan Reference Laffan1996). Opening with an overview of the geography and people of Japan (Mas‘ud Reference Mas‘ud1925, 1–22), Mas‘ud's text showed the same trans-Islamic pattern by moving next to the question of Japanese religion, thus framing the issue of Japanese development in religious terms (23–34).Footnote ⁷ Echoing from princely Hyderabad the concerns of Ottomans and Iranians regarding European encroachment, Mas‘ud's account of Japanese history began with Japan's first encounter with Europe through the Portuguese missions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, dealing in detail with the strategies of the early modern state-unifiers Hideyoshi Toyotomi and Tokugawa Ieyasu in confronting the Christian expansion (35–78). This primary historical issue of the encounter with Europe again formed the main topic of Mas‘ud's summary of Japan's modern history, which he framed with the arrival of Commodore Perry's “black ships” and its consequences for Japan (119–29). In fact, only a third of the book was devoted to education. Nonetheless, the coverage was thorough, with chapters on the early Meiji educational reforms, the training of teachers and the first schools for girls, the opening of Japan's universities, and the provision of industrial education (262–432). In 1925, Mas‘ud's book thus provided Urdu readers with the most detailed account of Japan available in the main language of Indian Muslim debate.

Even so, Japān aur uskā ta‘līmī nazm ū nasq was not Mas‘ud's only work on Japan. Like the more famous Tagore, he also lectured and wrote pamphlets on other aspects of Japanese society. These writings included such Urdu works as his 1926 Rūh-e Japan (Spirit of Japan) and a travelogue of his voyage (Mas‘ud Reference Mas‘ud1926; Masood [1922] Reference Masood and Kidwai1968). Mas‘ud subsequently began traveling elsewhere within that curious club of Japan, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Afghanistan, reaching Hyderabad's parallel independent state of Afghanistan in 1933 and discussing there what he had learned in Japan with the Afghan prime minister, Muhammad Hashim Khan, and members of the reformist Afghan intelligentsia (Green Reference Green2011; Nadwi [1944] Reference Nadwi2008, 22). In view of the dispatch of the first Afghan students to Japan just a year earlier, it was a timely intervention (Amin Reference Amin2007, 27).

If the obvious comparison with Mas‘ud's writings appears to be those of the Bengali Indian nationalists of the period, then it is important to point out an important distinction of purpose. For Mas‘ud's mission to Japan was carried out in the service of the Nizam's government in Hyderabad and his report was first published by Hyderabad's official government press. What Mas‘ud was seeking in Japan was therefore not a comparative model for an independent India. Rather, in a mirror of Turkish, Egyptian, Iranian, and Afghan interest in Japan, Mas‘ud was seeking a means of modernization that would preserve and empower a Muslim-ruled state on the fringes of European expansion and long subjected to economic imperialism (Amin Reference Amin2007; Laffan Reference Laffan1999; Worringer Reference Worringer and Worringer2007b). Hyderabadi rather than Indian nationalist, this alter-national agenda had earlier roots in the princely state of the Nizams. For as early as 1905, the editor of the leading Hyderabadi periodical, Dakan rivyu (Deccan review), had published an Urdu play that celebrated the Japanese defeat of Russia (Khan Reference Khan1905). Published in November 1905, only two months after the ending of hostilities, the Jang-e Rūs ū Jāpān (The war of Russia and Japan) was written by Maulvi Zafar ‘Ali Khan (1873–1956), who, like Mas‘ud, was also a graduate of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (later Aligarh Muslim University) working in Hyderabad's education service. It was similarly in another of India's Muslim-ruled princely states—in this case Rampur—that apparently the earliest Urdu travelogue of Japan was written, the aforementioned Mu'sir-e Hamidi of 1896, by Mawlana Farrukhi (1847/49–1931). Strikingly similar in its agenda to Mas‘ud's journey to Japan, the travels described in this text saw Nawwab Hamid ‘Ali Khan, the Muslim ruler of Rampur, seeking Japanese inspiration for his modernizing of Rampur (Aqeel Reference Aqeel1996). Indeed, in the years after his return, Hamid ‘Ali Khan invested a good deal of his state's revenue in founding new educational institutions, echoing the agenda of Mas‘ud as Hyderabad's education minister. These early Urdu accounts of Japan, then, were aimed at the strengthening of existing princely polities rather than at throwing off colonial rule in favor of a unified Indian nation. As such, they begin to point us towards alter-national visions of forgotten futures that have been long subsumed in the teleology of Indian nationalism.

By the 1920s, an increasingly accessible Japan in this way offered both Hyderabad and Rampur an alternative “Asian” pathway to development that preserved “Eastern” values in the manner sought by Ross Mas‘ud and other Muslim modernists in Hyderabadi service who had been educated at Aligarh. Writing with his Hyderabadi rather than Indian nationalist agenda, Mas‘ud envisaged not so much an independent India as the continued and educationally empowered independence of a Muslim-ruled Hyderabad. His Japanese interests in this way closely echoed the concerns of not only Muslim notables in princely India, but also in such Southeast Asian princely states as Riau, Serdang, Johor, Aceh, and Deli, who also turned towards Japan for help against their Dutch and British overlords (Andaya Reference Andaya1977, 134, 139 footnote 82). Distinct from the Indian nationalist framework of the familiar Bengali Japanophiles, this agenda was also seen in India's non-Muslim princely states. In 1898, for example, Mokshyagundam Visvesvaraya (1860–1962), an engineer and subsequent chief minister of the state of Mysore, had traveled to Japan to inspect its educational and industrial development; he published an account of his observations in 1920 (Visvesvaraya Reference Visvesvaraya1920). As in the case of Mas‘ud, for Visvesvaraya Japan was a model for an independent princely India rather than a collective Indian nation. Pointing still more clearly to the Japanophile connections between India's princely states, Visvesvaraya actually met with Mas‘ud in Bombay on the eve of the latter's departure for Japan; he advised Mas‘ud on his visit and provided him with contacts in Tokyo (Masood [1922] Reference Masood and Kidwai1968, 4). These networks linking Japan to princely rather than imperial India were useful when Mas‘ud actually arrived. For after landing at Yokohama he turned to Mirza ‘Ali Raza, another citizen of princely Mysore who was a relative of Mysore's prime minister, Mirza Muhammad Ismail (1883–1959) (28). It was Raza who found Mas‘ud his lodgings and introduced him to the Indian Club in Tokyo, though aside from Raza and a silk exporter from Junagadh, Mas‘ud found the club to be dominated by Hindu silk traders from Sindh (31). If such Hindu merchants from Sindh and Bombay formed one Indo-Japanese network, what Mas‘ud's travel diary makes clear is the small but closely connected network of Indian Muslims who connected Japan with the princely states of India and their specific, alter-national concerns.

Badr al-Islam Fazli and His Haqīqat-e Jāpān

Written a decade after Mas‘ud's Japān aur uskā ta‘līmī nazm ū nasq, the Urdu study of Japan written by Shaykh Muhammad Badr al-Islam Fazli (Badr al-Islam Reference Badr al-Islam1934) bore many similarities to its Hyderabad-sponsored forerunners. Like Mas‘ud and the playwright Zafar ‘Ali Khan, Badr al-Islam was a graduate of Aligarh, holding both BA and BT degrees; and like the Urdu edition of Mas‘ud's text, his book on Japan was likewise published by the Hyderabad-based Anjuman-e Taraqqī-e Urdū (Society for the Progress of Urdu). Having been founded in Aligarh in 1903, much of the Anjuman's activity moved to Hyderabad State after the ruling Nizam, Mir ‘Usman Ali Khan, became its chief patron in 1913. The Hyderabad link was sealed by Mas‘ud's presidency of the Anjuman in Hyderabad and the move to that city of the Anjuman's original founder, Mawlvi ‘Abd al-Haqq, in 1917. Since Mas‘ud was president of the Anjuman between 1926 and 1937, he would have been in office in 1934 when Badr al-Islam's successor to his own Japan book was published by the Anjuman. The latter was in fact India's most prestigious Urdu publisher by the time the Haqīqat-e Jāpān was issued through two simultaneous editions from the Anjuman's presses in Delhi and Hyderabad State's second city of Aurangabad.

Although little is known about Badr al-Islam personally beside what he revealed in his Haqīqat-e Jāpān, his account did fit the conception of that distant country as a mirror for the Hyderabadi (rather than independent Indian) development that we have seen in the writings of Mas‘ud. We can glean some sense of the impact of the Haqīqat-e Jāpān by the fact that each of its two 1934 editions comprised a thousand copies distributed through the Anjuman's famous bookshops in Delhi in the north and Aurangabad in the south, as well as through the Anjuman's extensive subscription and mailing services. While even the Delhi edition stated on its cover that Hyderabad's General Book House was its principal distribution point, given its dual printing in Delhi and Aurangabad, it seems likely that the book was also read outside Hyderabad and that such readers would have also applied its lessons to the imagined future of an Indian or, by 1934, even a Pakistani nation-state. Badr al-Islam certainly made no secret of his despair at India's colonial status (Badr al-Islam Reference Badr al-Islam1934, 1:164–66). But the fact remains that like the Urdu writings on Japan of Mas‘ud, Khan, and Farrukhi, the primary political context of the Haqīqat-e Jāpān was princely India.

As recorded in the travelogue section of his book, Badr al-Islam's journey to Japan began in November 1930, when he boarded the P&O passenger liner Ranchi in Bombay for a twenty-five day itinerary that took him to Colombo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai before calling at the Japanese ports of Moji, Kobe, and finally Yokohama (Badr al-Islam Reference Badr al-Islam1934, 1:1–13). The practical purpose of the journey was for Badr al-Islam to take up the post of lecturer in Urdu and Persian at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages (Tokyo Gaikokugo Gakko). It was a position he would hold for fifteen months before a decision was made not to renew his contract, whence he boarded the Japanese ship Arizona Maru (Mas‘ud had earlier sailed on the Wakasa Maru) to return to India in March 1932 (Badr al-Islam Reference Badr al-Islam1934, 1:1, 26–27, 166; Masood [1922] Reference Masood and Kidwai1968, 4). It is not clear why his contract was not renewed, and it may simply have been a question of not sufficiently impressing his employers during a probationary period; other foreign staff at the School of Foreign Languages certainly worked there for many years. But what is most striking about his employment is that he occupied exactly the same post that the Indian Muslim revolutionary Muhammad Barakatullah had held twenty years earlier between 1909 and 1913 (Aydin Reference Aydin2007, 114). Given Badr al-Islam's own anti-imperialist views, and what appear to have been several welcoming but presumably observational meetings at the British Embassy in Tokyo (Badr al-Islam Reference Badr al-Islam1934, 1:28–29, 89–90), it is feasible that larger forces were at play in his dismissal. Whatever the fact of the matter, comprising the opportunity to work closely with Japanese nationals in a state institution and to tour the main cities outside Tokyo, Badr al-Islam's fifteen-month residence afforded him ample material for the book that he published on his return home.