Peter van der Veer, a distinguished scholar at both the Max Planck Institute in Germany and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has written a fascinating and challenging examination of the emergence of the “modern spirit” of China and India from the nineteenth century down to today. Van der Veer's use of the expression “modern spirit” refers primarily to his understanding of traditional China and India's confrontation with Euro-American imperialism and the emergence and meaning of “modernity” in these Asian countries. These are, moreover, developments that have a direct bearing on China and India's increasingly competitive participation in the interconnected global economic and cultural situation of the twenty-first century.
Most dramatic and seemingly counterintuitive is that van der Veer sees these developments in relation to how China and India creatively appropriated in different ways the Western missionary and imperialistic imposition of a certain Protestant construct of “religion” (text bound, originary, salvationist, moralistic, and essentalistic) as set out in such universalistic spiritual and ethical terms as “world religions” by the so-called “father of comparative religion” Max Müller (in his Sacred Books of the East, 1879–1902). Indeed, van der Veer sweepingly (sometimes too much so) shows us that China and India's assertive role today can only be understood in relation to how they productively and distinctively made use of a “syntagmatic chain” (a [Ferdinand de] Saussurean linguistic expression meaning here only interconnected terms that in many ways define “nationalist imaginings of modernity”) especially made up of the sliding interaction of religion, spirituality, magic, secularity, and nationality. But China and India appropriated this imaginary of religion and nationality in significantly different ways so that China “witnessed a continuous secularist attack against religion for a century but has not been secularized, while India has made religion a core element of its national culture and, at the same time, has created a secular state that attempts to take a neutral stance toward religion” (p. 29).
This is a work that is in keeping with the current post-postmodernist climate of scholarship that challenges many commonplace assumptions of recent internationalist cultural theory, such as overly monolithic Saidian ideas about a rigidly hegemonic Orientalist knowledge about Asia; simplistic dichotomies between the “West” and the “East”; various one-dimensional forms of secularization theory and Weberian notions of disenchantment; hyperbole about the inevitability of Euro-American forms of capitalism; the essentialistic and intrinsically antagonistic relation of religion, secularity, and modernity; and Samuel Huntington's tendentious “clash of civilizations.” Among other fashionable academic and political beliefs questioned is the still prevalent faith in an Internet and social media world that represents the ultimate “end of history” triumph of the “cognitive globalization” emerging out of the European enlightenment. Peter van der Veer, on the contrary, shows us quite persuasively that the fuller truth about these and related matters is much more interestingly complex, reciprocal, and “interactionist” in nature than we had previously thought.
Van der Veer's findings and his overall approach have far-reaching implications for many fields of humanistic and social scientific study, most particularly our understanding of the cultural history and sociology of Chinese and Indian religions as related to the emerging “Pacific Rim” prowess of these Asian nations. Van der Veer's book is also a thought-provoking plea for a reconstituted comparative approach to cross-cultural studies—one that will insist on a multivalent approach that tempers any overarching generalizations with a more micro-analytical and comparative consideration of China and India's regional interaction and ongoing creative appropriations of a Euro-American “imperialistic modernity.” In this post-9/11 era, the dark and terrible side of religious resistance to the Western project of a global modernity has forced most academic disciplines (so comfortable for most of the twentieth century in ignoring the significance of religion within the context of what was believed to be a fundamentally irreligious secular modernity) to reconsider the multivalent negative and positive roles of religion (elite organized and popular spontaneous, revivalist-fundamentalist, liberal-progressive, secular-spiritual, and so on) in all aspects of the contemporary world.
This is a work, then, that is valuable for showing us how religions or religiosity (broadly conceived as cultural practices imputing some spiritual dimension to material reality and the human ability to productively access those dimensions in the interest of individual and social change) has been, and continues to be, a fundamental aspect of the overall historical enterprise of human culture. I am, for example, struck by van der Veer's understanding of how the authoritarian and secularist Chinese state (whether of the Qing dynasty, nationalistic, Maoist, or post-Maoist communist) has always had to deal with reformist populist forces associated with syncretistic Chinese forms of revivalist-Pentecostal Christianity running from the Taiping rebellion to the Tiananmen protests. And we may extend this now to the student protest movements in Hong Kong in the fall of 2014. Let it only be noted that the majority of the leaders of the Hong Kong movement are motivated by values of social justice and political freedom associated with Chinese Evangelical Christian churches.
Van der Veer's book deals with too many topics from the nineteenth-century missionary movement and colonialism in Asia down to the economic and digital connectivity of today's world to summarize adequately in this short review. I have already alluded to his discussion of how appropriated ideas of religion play a special role in the history of national identity and reform in both China and India. Equally insightful is his analysis of a universalized idea of “spirituality” (incorporating “modern art” and music) as distinct from organized religions and the way Enlightenment ideas of “magic” or “superstition” in both India and China help to validate an elitist Chinese secularity (sometimes tempered with an appeal to “Confucianism” as a nationalistic tradition of moral and spiritual values) and an Indian fundamentalist ideal of Hinduism as the spiritual “essence” of Indian national identity. Similarly intriguing is van der Veer's examination of how certain spiritual movements associated with the body and science (yoga in India and Taiji/qigong in China) are examples of the creative way these traditions have adapted politically in modern India and China and are now significant importations in many Euro-American countries.
Other critical topics touched upon include the different roles of Islam and the “minoritization” of certain ethnic and religious groups in both countries, but enough has been said to document my view that this is an important book that deserves to find a broad audience interested in a more nuanced approach to the crucial role religion plays in the modern history of China and India. It is a work that effectively pushes forward, as a counterpoint to American ideas of “exceptionalism,” the increasing “decentering” of the twenty-first-century world in relation to Euro-American traditions. Van der Veer displays an impressive erudition and cultural breadth while also mercifully and concisely writing an academic prose that is largely jargon free. Perhaps most notable is his interpretive ability to span vast amounts of time, space, and theory, which leads to unexpected and sometimes quite brilliant interpretive connections. There are moments, of course, where such interpretive bravado may be questioned or will require some qualification. One small example of this is his skewed treatment of the synergistic but unequal relationship between the great British translator of the Chinese classics James Legge and the philological Sanskritist Max Müller concerning their respective indebtedness to native informants and commentarial sources (that is, their different pilgrim-empathetic and martial-conquering appropriations of each tradition's traditional oral and written commentary). But van der Veer generally sees both the forest and the trees when contemplating the ambiguously perverse relationship between Euro-American and Asian traditions. Van der Veer's judgments concerning the creation and meaning of the modern spirit of Asia will resonate provocatively for many disciplinary fields.
