Reading Notes W9: Crossroads of Empire, Part A

At the Crossroads of Empire: Vietnam, China, India (537-546)

  • Emperors need to persuade their own subjects to value the mission of empire
  • Rulers depend in part on on the use of words, on rousing rhetoric to gain broad support in order to conquest (537)
  • Because of the need of persuasion, writes play a crucial part in the making and keeping of empires
  • New imperial administrators disrupt long-standing ways of life with imported rules
  • They exploit local resources including the people and they assert the superiority of the conquering state (insisting on wiping away values and traditions they see as backward or primitive in favor of their own ways of life) (538)
  • The occupied people felt outraged where violence and rebellion rose against the foreign invaders
  • This support is easy enough to rouse at the beginning, but it can get difficult if the conquered people begin to believe that the conquering power is too strong or too advanced to unseat
  • Writers in South and East Asia in the 19th century faced challenges - they struggled to define their own linguistic/literary roles in relation to long-standing local/imperial traditions (538)
  • They also got caught up in new collisions between vast empires
  • Vietnam's Nguyen Du, cherished a deep love and respect for the intellectual traditions of imperial China (which had ruled Vietnam for many centuries and remained a menacing neighbor
  • Du chose to write in vernacular Vietnamese, crafting a new heroic epic for his nation in the language of the people (539)
  • A generation later in India, the poet Ghalib, belonged to the Muslim ruling elite and wrote in 2 different imperial languages - Persian and Urdu
  • Persian is the official court language imported from afar
  • Urdu is an Indian idiom that reflected his particular hybrid Indo-Muslim culture
  • Born half a century later after Chalib, Pandita Ramabai followed another kind of path: an Indian writer who came from an orthodox Hindu family, she converted to Christianity and became a missionary (539)
  • Ramabai wrote in 2 languages as well: Marathi and English
  • Liu E came of age at a moment when European ideas, products, and technologies had begun to transform traditional Chinese ways of life and were producing a violent backlash (539)
  • He supported industrialization and was willing to borrow ideas from the West, but he opposed foreign power over China (539)
  • He was forced into exile because of the accusation of betraying the nation to foreign invaders
  • "All of these writers remained torn between loyalty to local traditions and respect or even admiration from a conquering imperial power" (541)

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